“Beneath low hills, in the broad interval
Through which at will our Indian rivulet
Winds mindful still of sannup and of squaw,
Whose pipe and arrow oft the plough unburies,
Here, in pine houses, built of new-fallen trees,
Supplanters of the tribe, the farmers dwell.”
—EMERSON.
The Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River, though probably as old as the
Nile or Euphrates, did not begin to have a place in civilized history,
until the fame of its grassy meadows and its fish attracted settlers
out of England in 1635, when it received the other but kindred name of
CONCORD from the first plantation on its banks, which appears to have
been commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony. It will be
Grass-ground River as long as grass grows and water runs here; it will
be Concord River only while men lead peaceable lives on its banks. To
an extinct race it was grass-ground, where they hunted and fished, and
it is still perennial grass-ground to Concord farmers, who own the
Great Meadows, and get the hay from year to year. “One branch of it,”
according to the historian of Concord, for I love to quote so good
authority, “rises in the south part of Hopkinton, and another from a
pond and a large cedar-swamp in Westborough,” and flowing between
Hopkinton and Southborough, through Framingham, and between Sudbury and
Wayland, where it is sometimes called Sudbury River, it enters Concord
at the south part of the town, and after receiving the North or
Assabeth River, which has its source a little farther to the north and
west, goes out at the northeast angle, and flowing between Bedford and
Carlisle, and through Billerica, empties into the Merrimack at Lowell.
In Concord it is, in summer, from four to fifteen feet deep, and from
one hundred to three hundred feet wide, but in the spring freshets,
when it overflows its banks, it is in some places nearly a mile wide.
Between Sudbury and Wayland the meadows acquire their greatest breadth,
and when covered with water, they form a handsome chain of shallow
vernal lakes, resorted to by numerous gulls and ducks. Just above
Sherman’s Bridge, between these towns, is the largest expanse, and when
the wind blows freshly in a raw March day, heaving up the surface into
dark and sober billows or regular swells, skirted as it is in the
distance with alder-swamps and smoke-like maples, it looks like a
smaller Lake Huron, and is very pleasant and exciting for a landsman to
row or sail over. The farm-houses along the Sudbury shore, which rises
gently to a considerable height, command fine water prospects at this
season. The shore is more flat on the Wayland side, and this town is
the greatest loser by the flood. Its farmers tell me that thousands of
acres are flooded now, since the dams have been erected, where they
remember to have seen the white honeysuckle or clover growing once, and
they could go dry with shoes only in summer. Now there is nothing but
blue-joint and sedge and cut-grass there, standing in water all the
year round. For a long time, they made the most of the driest season to
get their hay, working sometimes till nine o’clock at night, sedulously
paring with their scythes in the twilight round the hummocks left by
the ice; but now it is not worth the getting when they can come at it,
and they look sadly round to their wood-lots and upland as a last
resource.
It is worth the while to make a voyage up this stream, if you go no
farther than Sudbury, only to see how much country there is in the rear
of us; great hills, and a hundred brooks, and farm-houses, and barns,
and haystacks, you never saw before, and men everywhere, Sudbury, that
is Southborough men, and Wayland, and Nine-Acre-Corner men, and Bound
Rock, where four towns bound on a rock in the river, Lincoln, Wayland,
Sudbury, Concord. Many waves are there agitated by the wind, keeping
nature fresh, the spray blowing in your face, reeds and rushes waving;
ducks by the hundred, all uneasy in the surf, in the raw wind, just
ready to rise, and now going off with a clatter and a whistling like
riggers straight for Labrador, flying against the stiff gale with
reefed wings, or else circling round first, with all their paddles
briskly moving, just over the surf, to reconnoitre you before they
leave these parts; gulls wheeling overhead, muskrats swimming for dear
life, wet and cold, with no fire to warm them by that you know of;
their labored homes rising here and there like haystacks; and countless
mice and moles and winged titmice along the sunny windy shore;
cranberries tossed on the waves and heaving up on the beach, their
little red skiffs beating about among the alders;—such healthy natural
tumult as proves the last day is not yet at hand. And there stand all
around the alders, and birches, and oaks, and maples full of glee and
sap, holding in their buds until the waters subside. You shall perhaps
run aground on Cranberry Island, only some spires of last year’s
pipe-grass above water, to show where the danger is, and get as good a
freezing there as anywhere on the Northwest Coast. I never voyaged so
far in all my life. You shall see men you never heard of before, whose
names you don’t know, going away down through the meadows with long
ducking-guns, with water-tight boots wading through the fowl-meadow
grass, on bleak, wintry, distant shores, with guns at half-cock, and
they shall see teal, blue-winged, green-winged, shelldrakes, whistlers,
black ducks, ospreys, and many other wild and noble sights before
night, such as they who sit in parlors never dream of. You shall see
rude and sturdy, experienced and wise men, keeping their castles, or
teaming up their summer’s wood, or chopping alone in the woods, men
fuller of talk and rare adventure in the sun and wind and rain, than a
chestnut is of meat; who were out not only in ’75 and 1812, but have
been out every day of their lives; greater men than Homer, or Chaucer,
or Shakespeare, only they never got time to say so; they never took to
the way of writing. Look at their fields, and imagine what they might
write, if ever they should put pen to paper. Or what have they not
written on the face of the earth already, clearing, and burning, and
scratching, and harrowing, and ploughing, and subsoiling, in and in,
and out and out, and over and over, again and again, erasing what they
had already written for want of parchment.
As yesterday and the historical ages are past, as the work of to-day is
present, so some flitting perspectives, and demi-experiences of the
life that is in nature are in time veritably future, or rather outside
to time, perennial, young, divine, in the wind and rain which never
die.
The respectable folks,—
Where dwell they?
They whisper in the oaks,
And they sigh in the hay;
Summer and winter, night and day,
Out on the meadow, there dwell they.
They never die,
Nor snivel, nor cry,
Nor ask our pity
With a wet eye.
A sound estate they ever mend
To every asker readily lend;
To the ocean wealth,
To the meadow health,
To Time his length,
To the rocks strength,
To the stars light,
To the weary night,
To the busy day,
To the idle play;
And so their good cheer never ends,
For all are their debtors, and all their friends.
Concord River is remarkable for the gentleness of its current, which is
scarcely perceptible, and some have referred to its influence the
proverbial moderation of the inhabitants of Concord, as exhibited in
the Revolution, and on later occasions. It has been proposed, that the
town should adopt for its coat of arms a field verdant, with the
Concord circling nine times round. I have read that a descent of an
eighth of an inch in a mile is sufficient to produce a flow. Our river
has, probably, very near the smallest allowance. The story is current,
at any rate, though I believe that strict history will not bear it out,
that the only bridge ever carried away on the main branch, within the
limits of the town, was driven up stream by the wind. But wherever it
makes a sudden bend it is shallower and swifter, and asserts its title
to be called a river. Compared with the other tributaries of the
Merrimack, it appears to have been properly named Musketaquid, or
Meadow River, by the Indians. For the most part, it creeps through
broad meadows, adorned with scattered oaks, where the cranberry is
found in abundance, covering the ground like a moss-bed. A row of
sunken dwarf willows borders the stream on one or both sides, while at
a greater distance the meadow is skirted with maples, alders, and other
fluviatile trees, overrun with the grape-vine, which bears fruit in its
season, purple, red, white, and other grapes. Still farther from the
stream, on the edge of the firm land, are seen the gray and white
dwellings of the inhabitants. According to the valuation of 1831, there
were in Concord two thousand one hundred and eleven acres, or about one
seventh of the whole territory in meadow; this standing next in the
list after pasturage and unimproved lands, and, judging from the
returns of previous years, the meadow is not reclaimed so fast as the
woods are cleared.
Let us here read what old Johnson says of these meadows in his
“Wonder-working Providence,” which gives the account of New England
from 1628 to 1652, and see how matters looked to him. He says of the
Twelfth Church of Christ gathered at Concord: “This town is seated upon
a fair fresh river, whose rivulets are filled with fresh marsh, and her
streams with fish, it being a branch of that large river of Merrimack.
Allwifes and shad in their season come up to this town, but salmon and
dace cannot come up, by reason of the rocky falls, which causeth their
meadows to lie much covered with water, the which these people,
together with their neighbor town, have several times essayed to cut
through but cannot, yet it may be turned another way with an hundred
pound charge as it appeared.” As to their farming he says: “Having laid
out their estate upon cattle at 5 to 20 pound a cow, when they came to
winter them with inland hay, and feed upon such wild fother as was
never cut before, they could not hold out the winter, but, ordinarily
the first or second year after their coming up to a new plantation,
many of their cattle died.” And this from the same author “Of the
Planting of the 19th Church in the Mattachusets’ Government, called
Sudbury”: “This year [does he mean 1654] the town and church of Christ
at Sudbury began to have the first foundation stones laid, taking up
her station in the inland country, as her elder sister Concord had
formerly done, lying further up the same river, being furnished with
great plenty of fresh marsh, but, it lying very low is much indamaged
with land floods, insomuch that when the summer proves wet they lose
part of their hay; yet are they so sufficiently provided that they take
in cattle of other towns to winter.”
The sluggish artery of the Concord meadows steals thus unobserved
through the town, without a murmur or a pulse-beat, its general course
from southwest to northeast, and its length about fifty miles; a huge
volume of matter, ceaselessly rolling through the plains and valleys of
the substantial earth with the moccasoned tread of an Indian warrior,
making haste from the high places of the earth to its ancient
reservoir. The murmurs of many a famous river on the other side of the
globe reach even to us here, as to more distant dwellers on its banks;
many a poet’s stream floating the helms and shields of heroes on its
bosom. The Xanthus or Scamander is not a mere dry channel and bed of a
mountain torrent, but fed by the everflowing springs of fame;—
“And thou Simois, that as an arrowe, clere
Through Troy rennest, aie downward to the sea”;—
and I trust that I may be allowed to associate our muddy but much
abused Concord River with the most famous in history.
“Sure there are poets which did never dream
Upon Parnassus, nor did taste the stream
Of Helicon; we therefore may suppose
Those made not poets, but the poets those.”
The Mississippi, the Ganges, and the Nile, those journeying atoms from
the Rocky Mountains, the Himmaleh, and Mountains of the Moon, have a
kind of personal importance in the annals of the world. The heavens are
not yet drained over their sources, but the Mountains of the Moon still
send their annual tribute to the Pasha without fail, as they did to the
Pharaohs, though he must collect the rest of his revenue at the point
of the sword. Rivers must have been the guides which conducted the
footsteps of the first travellers. They are the constant lure, when
they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise and adventure, and, by a
natural impulse, the dwellers on their banks will at length accompany
their currents to the lowlands of the globe, or explore at their
invitation the interior of continents. They are the natural highways of
all nations, not only levelling the ground and removing obstacles from
the path of the traveller, quenching his thirst and bearing him on
their bosoms, but conducting him through the most interesting scenery,
the most populous portions of the globe, and where the animal and
vegetable kingdoms attain their greatest perfection.
I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of
the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the
system, with time, and all that is made; the weeds at the bottom gently
bending down the stream, shaken by the watery wind, still planted where
their seeds had sunk, but erelong to die and go down likewise; the
shining pebbles, not yet anxious to better their condition, the chips
and weeds, and occasional logs and stems of trees that floated past,
fulfilling their fate, were objects of singular interest to me, and at
last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it
would bear me.