Lofty tales

As Old Manse opens its attic, guests get a rare view of history

Old Manse site manager Tom Beardsley and site assistant Michelle Caruso in Edward Emerson Simmons's room. (Globe Staff Photo / Steve Haines)

CONCORD - On a chilly March afternoon, Tom Beardsley unlocked a narrow door on the upstairs landing of the Old Manse and headed up a steep staircase that leads into a warren of small rooms built into the cavernous attic space where the high gambrel roof arches darkly above the rough lath-and-plaster walls.

For the first time in decades, said Beardsley, who manages the National Historic Landmark site for The Trustees of Reservations, the attics of the Old Manse are being opened to the public. This preview visit was researcher Faith Ferguson's chance to try out her presentation for the new tours that are to start Sunday.

"The Manse is like an onion: You can never stop peeling away the layers," said Beardsley, a genial, heavyset English historian who keeps the accent of his native Yorkshire, although he has lived in the United States since 1988.

Even by Concord standards, the house is dense with historical and literary associations. Since 1770, the gray parsonage has stood proudly on the banks of the Concord River, within 200 yards of the Old North Bridge. Its inhabitants smelled the smoke from the first battle of the Revolutionary War in April 1775. Ralph Waldo Emerson drafted his first book, "Nature," there in 1834 and 1835. Nathaniel Hawthorne rented the place for his honeymoon in 1842 after his marriage to Sophia Peabody, and immortalized it in his book of short stories, "Mosses from an Old Manse" (1846).

In the book's opening essay, "The Old Manse," Hawthorne noted how the "wild and uncivilized" 980-square-foot attic was when contrasted with the rest of the "quiet and decorous" old house. In his time, the garret was one open, dimly-lit space, apart from the "little whitewashed apartment" known as the Saint's Chamber, where visiting ministers often stayed. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson before him, Hawthorne left his mark in this room, in a penciled inscription on the wood paneling next to the fireplace.

For the attic tour, Ferguson's task has been to compress 12 months of research and 238 years of history into a 45-minute presentation.

"It's all about storytelling, and about imagination," said Ferguson, a sociologist by training and a historian by passion. "Most people who come to the house hear about these people that they've already heard about because that's the most accessible layer."

A large part of her work has been to excavate the experience of the "generations of people who've worked in this house and not been acknowledged because they're not famous writers, but whose work has been essential to the lives and the maintenance of this place," she said.

Records show that the builder of the Old Manse, the Rev. William Emerson, owned three enslaved African-Americans, Ferguson said. They were Frank Benson, who went with his master to join the Continental Army in 1776, and two women, Cate and Phylis, who were shared between the Old Manse and the neighboring house belonging to Emerson's mother-in-law. It is likely that they would have slept or worked in the attic, Ferguson said, as there was no space in the main house identified as "slave quarters."

Tracking the lives of illiterate domestic workers through ship manifests, immigration records, and census data is "tremendously challenging," said Ferguson, but she has identified at least one of the Irish servants who worked at the Old Manse in the mid-1800s. Brigid Dolan, 25, arrived at the house in 1860, and probably slept in one of the small chambers that had by that time been built into the attic space.

At the other end of the social scale was a shifting cast of delinquent Harvard University students who visited the Old Manse to be tutored by Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley (1793-1867). Ripley, mother of nine children and self-taught mistress of seven languages, was a renowned botanist and tutor. She took in failing students, "caught them up in their Greek and Latin, and sent them back to Harvard," Ferguson said.

In his autobiography, "From Seven to Seventy" (1922), Edward Emerson Simmons (1852-1931) recalls that a visitor found Ripley, his grandmother, in one of the attic rooms, rocking a cradle with her foot, a text in one hand, and a Sanskrit dictionary in the other. "I cannot think in Sanskrit," she said ruefully to the visitor.

Simmons, who was known as Eddie, moved into the Old Manse with his mother after his father's early death in 1855. As one of the older children in the household, he had a room on the north side of the attic, said Ferguson, and he decorated its walls with detailed pencil drawings of animals and birds, including a rat, a catfish, a hummingbird, and a 12-inch-high bee. Tutored by his grandmother, Simmons went on to Harvard, then studied painting in Paris, and enjoyed a successful career as a muralist.

"This is one of the most significant houses in American history," Beardsley said.

The Old Manse, at 269 Monument St. in Concord, surely will acquire new meaning as members of the public hear stories of the slaves, servants, and students who lived cheek by jowl with ministers, authors, and budding artists in the hidden spaces above its formal furnished rooms.

Attic tours will take place Sunday and April 20. Admission is $20 at the door, $15 in advance, $12 for members of the Trustees. Reservations may be made by calling 978-369-3909, or by e-mailing tbeardsley@ttor.org.