Concord’s Land of Dragons & Transcendentalists
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BY JAIMEE LEIGH JOROFF
In the wild places of Concord linger old Puritan superstitions and Transcendental possibilities. We begin in the year 1620 when, bearing sea-weary Puritan separatists, the Mayflower arrived off Cape Cod’s coast revealing what Pilgrim leader William Bradford noted as “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts.” To the Puritans, the Wilderness was the devil’s territory. Satan would not linger in the exposed coastal regions where the Puritans first settled and kept him at bay with devout prayer, but he was always there, in the wild forests, the swamps, the unexplored places, tempting them to leave the seaside settlements of early Massachusetts and stray from righteousness.
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In Wilderness dwelt the “feared other”: Native Americans, cougars, bears, wolves, owls, and birds that made noises unfamiliar to the new settlers, and old characters of folklore and superstitions— witches and the devil’s agents. But the woods also offered a freedom from constraints and expectations of daily life. Set in the 1600s town of Salem, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 The Scarlet Letter conveys this temptation of Wilderness when adulterous Puritan Hester Prynne, seeking to escape from her husband and society’s judgement, appeals to her lover, the Reverend Dimmesdale, to flee with her and their infant child and live in the forest. “Whither leads yonder forest track? Backwards to the settlement, thou sayest!
Yes; but onward too! Deeper it goes, and deeper, into the wilderness, less plainly to be seen at every step! …There thou art free!” In real life, freedom in Wilderness did hold appeal. In 1634, fur trader Simon Willard, a Puritan recently arrived from Kent, England, explored the unknown places beyond Boston. Twenty miles to the west, he came across Musketaquid, a Native American settlement of cleared fields and riverways. With Puritan Minister Peter Bulkeley, Willard arranged for Musketaquid’s purchase from the Algonquin tribe. Renamed Concord, the town was officially founded in 1635 as America’s first inland settlement. Generations passed; more inland towns were established in once-wild places, their Continued on p. 46
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The Temptation of Wilderness:
