Six months after British troops marched on Concord in 1775, the Massachusetts town braced for another invasion—this time by an army of scholars brandishing quills and ink instead of muskets and bayonets. Harvard College, left homeless when the tide of war lapped up to its gates, departed Cambridge for a year and took up residence in the town 14 miles away.
Enduring spartan lodgings, grueling treks to class, and a scarcity of books and equipment, Harvard students demonstrated remarkable resilience during a year of revolutionary change that tested them far more than any examination could—even if they weren’t always the most gracious guests.
The move to Concord was born of necessity. Weeks after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, with the British besieged in Boston, and Cambridge thrust onto the front lines, the Massachusetts provincial government shuttered the College and took over the campus—then comprised of six main buildings—for the war effort. Patriot militias, and later the fledgling Continental Army, transformed Harvard’s dorms and classrooms into makeshift hospitals and crude barracks for 1,680 Patriot troops. Wadsworth House served as the officers’ headquarters, and for a few nights, George Washington slept there.
With Harvard Yard turned into an armed encampment, the College packed up its scientific instruments and some 2,000 books, dispersed them across the countryside for safekeeping, and searched for temporary quarters. After house-hunting in more distant Massachusetts towns, including Andover and Worcester, Harvard’s Overseers chose to relocate its 100 students to the nearby village of Concord, thanks partly to lobbying by the town minister, Reverend William Emerson Sr., A.B. 1761.
Concord at that time was an agricultural community of some 1,500 people and 200 farms, radiating from a busy crossroads flanked by civic buildings and a hillside burial ground. The town already harbored British prisoners and colonial refugees from Boston and Charlestown, making student housing hard to come by. “There were still lots of military supplies and provisions stored in Concord, and soldiers were moving through constantly,” says David Wood, the curator of the Concord Museum. In an era before couch-crashing (or couches, really), students rented bare, unheated rooms on Concord’s outskirts and paid extra for necessities such as firewood and candles. (Some students found beds above local taverns, but the faculty quickly ordered them to vacate such morally dubious premises where potential trouble brewed downstairs.)
Samuel Lee, A.B. 1776, had a better option: along with 11 classmates, he moved into Concord’s largest house, owned by his father, Dr. Joseph Lee. But the lodging came with some particular inconveniences. The elder Lee was a locally detested Loyalist under house arrest for betraying Patriot secrets. Concord’s Committee of Correspondence warned the traitorous doctor he could be killed if he left his farm—and meant it. From time to time, passersby peppered Lee’s property with lead shot.
Harvard’s “Concord Year” commenced on October 4. Classes met in Concord’s meeting house, courthouse, and grammar school, and went on through an especially harsh winter. Squirming on the meeting house’s hard pine pews, the students—ranging in age from 12 to 27—shivered through sermons and surely prayed for some actual fire to accompany the rhetorical brimstone.
One Harvard tutor was noticeably absent: Isaac Smith Jr., A.B. 1767, a Loyalist, had sailed to England, understanding that he wasn’t welcome. On the first day of the war, when British reinforcements were bewildered by New England’s maze of roads, Smith had shown them the correct route from Cambridge Common to Lexington.
The Harvard faculty members who moved to Concord found teaching a challenge. Hollis professor of mathematics and natural philosophy John Winthrop was unable to perform his experimental lectures without his telescope, microscope, and state-of-the-art scientific equipment. With its library still scattered and access to Boston severed, Harvard asked citizens to loan or sell their books. The fading daylight and lengthy student commutes—for some, it was an arduous five-mile hike to the town center—forced the reduction of class meetings to twice daily.
Crate by crate, though, the library slowly arrived, and the College hired carpenters to build shelves in a local home for storage. Harvard’s fire engine journeyed from Cambridge, as did the world-famous Ellicott Astronomical Regulator, which Winthrop had used to time the transit of Venus and calculate the Earth’s distance to the sun.
Town-gown relations, by all accounts, appeared civil—and sometimes more than that. Local histories tell us that Harvard boys courted Concord girls on strolls down a wooded “lovers’ lane” now known as College Road. Jonathan Fay, A.B. 1778, wed Lucy Prescott—the sister of Dr. Samuel Prescott, who had alerted Concord of the approaching British troops after Paul Revere’s capture—months after their first meeting.
The British evacuated Boston on March 17, 1776, but Harvard students languished in Concord for weeks after the Continental Army vacated Harvard Yard, awaiting the provincial government’s authorization to return. “It is impossible they can reap the advantages in this scattered, unsettled state that they may within the walls of Harvard,” wrote Winthrop’s wife, Hannah, in a letter to her friend Mercy Otis Warren. It also irked students that the College’s scientific instruments remained in unopened boxes. “They just never got around to it—and it was a requirement for graduation,” Wood says.
Finally, in June, Harvard received permission to go back. Harvard President Samuel Langdon penned a thank-you letter to Concord’s citizens: “We hope the scholars while here have not dishonored themselves and the society by any incivilities or indecencies of behavior, or that you will readily forgive any errors which may be attributed to the inadvertence of youth.” The students left broken hearts and windows in their wake; the town installed new glass in the meeting house and other buildings damaged by errant snowballs.
The College reassembled on June 21 at its denuded, disfigured Cambridge campus. Patriot forces had stripped buildings of brass doorknobs and woodwork and harvested a half-ton of lead from Harvard Hall’s roof to melt into musket balls. Massachusetts eventually compensated Harvard 417 pounds for the damage.
Although there was no public Commencement, the 43 members of Harvard’s class of 1776 received their diplomas on August 14. Their ranks included a future U.S. senator, a pair of state supreme court chief justices, and two men who would go on to plant deep roots in Harvard’s transitory home. Isaac Hurd, A.B. 1776, spent 55 years as a Concord village doctor. And Ezra Ripley, A.B. 1776, returned to the town and married a widow (who years later would become the grandmother of Ralph Waldo Emerson, A.B. 1821, A.M. ’27, LL.D. ’66). Ripley served as Concord’s minister for 63 years.
