Sleepy Hollow, Concord's largest cemetery with some 10,000 gravesites, is located one block east of Monument Square, on Bedford Street. One of the first "pastoral" cemeteries in the United States, Sleepy Hollow is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Two of the most visited areas are "Authors Ridge" and the Melvin Memorial.
"Mourning Victory," commonly known as the Melvin Memorial was and commissioned by James Melvin in memory of his three brothers who died during the Civil War, was created by his boyhood friend, Daniel Chester French. Mr. French who also designed the Minuteman Statue at Concord's North Bridge and the Lincoln Statue in Washington's D.C.'s Lincoln Memorial. French is himself buried nearby, on the ridge directly behind the monument.
To the right of the Melvin Memorial, up a short stretch of road lies a hollow, on the far side of which is "Authors Ridge." Here you will find the graves of Henry Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Louisa May Alcott and her father, Bronson Alcott. Each is buried in a family plot and marked with modest stones. Hawthorne's marker, in keeping with his personal reserve, bears only his last name, while Emerson created his own epitaph: "The passive master lent his hand to the vast soul which o'er him planned." (from his poem, The Problem).
Emerson's stone faces a large boulder at the base of the hill, which covers the resting place of Ephraim Wales Bull, the originator of the celebrated Concord Grape. At the Alcott plot, Ms. Alcott is surrounded by her father, mother and sisters, whom she made famous in Little Women. Except for Louisa May, the Alcott stones bear only the occupants’ initials. Tragedy hovers here. Bronson Alcott died on March 4, 1888, and Louisa May, gravely ill with pneumonia and shaken by his passage, died two days later. Both were buried on the same day later in the spring when the ground had thawed sufficiently.
Visit the cemetery website:
http://www.concordma.gov/Pages/ConcordMA_Cemetery/sleepy
