Concord's amazing support for its local history

If you check in to a hotel and find a free glossy magazine in your room, you probably don't expect much - just pages of ads for local businesses separated by a few flimsy articles hyping those same advertisers.

Not so in Concord, Massachusetts.

Discover Concord magazine is more like an academic journal - although it's also very readable. It's full of interesting, original articles about the history of the town, especially its literary history. Some of the articles even have footnotes!

So, there's an interview with an ornithology professor about connections between Henry David Thoreau, nature conservancy and human rights; a local author writes about Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody's honeymoon at the Old Manse, on the outskirts of Concord; there's a piece about Louisa May Alcott enthusiasts; and there's the story behind a new statue of Elizabeth Freeman, who won her liberation from slavery in court in Sheffield, Massachusetts in 1781.

There's even more than that in fact. But the one that intrigued me most explored the links between the story of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and some real seventeenth century characters who had many similarities with those in Hawthorne's plot - in particular, an old Puritan minister and a young wife who was punished for her infidelity to him.

What's more, it found that a descendant of one of the young wife's lovers was killed in an air crash about 20 miles from Concord in 1941. And that in his memory, an airforce base only about 6 miles from the Old Manse where Hawthorne and his wife lived, was renamed in his memory - and is now Hanscom Airforce Base, part of which is technically in Concord.

It's just the kind of story that Hawthorne could have made use of. Was it just a coincidence or were there mysterious powers at work? Of course, he'd leave that for his readers to decide for themselves.

I'd come to Concord to find out about Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott. It seems that the town's inhabitants have never stopped making their own enquiries. Good luck to them, and to the estimable Discover Concord magazine.

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