AFTERWORD

Nashoba is an invented town, its Old West Church an imaginary institution. A gusset was inserted in the map of Massachusetts on the northern border of Concord, stretching the towns of Bedford and Acton to east and west, and outraging the history of Carlisle to the north. The name Nashoba harks back to an actual community of Nipmuck Indians who lived somewhere between the Concord and Nashua rivers.

Most of the illustrations in this book are drawings of real buildings in the towns of Concord, Acton, Bedford, Harvard, Carlisle, Lincoln, Mattapoisett, and Cambridge, picked’ up by some sort of literary tornado and set down again around Nashoba’s town common and along her streets and roads.

Many of the epigraphs at the beginnings of chapters are taken from sermons by ministers in Concord’s First Parish and by pastors in the related churches of Lincoln and Carlisle. They were collected by Homer Kelly for his book Hen and Chicks, his history of the Concord church and its daughter parishes in other towns. Other epigraphs are chosen from Homer’s notes on the journal of young James Lorin Chapin. Chapin was a farmer rather than a minister, but he attended Lincoln’s Congregational church and commented in his journal on the sermons he heard there every Sunday in the years 1848, 1849, and 1850 (except for those Sundays when he stayed home in bed).