The landscape around Concord’s North Bridge has changed greatly since the fight there in 1775, as farms were abandoned, the old bridge was dismantled, and old roads disappeared. Other changes came through deliberate efforts by reverent townspeople to celebrate and understand the revolutionary past, creating a nineteenth-century commemorative landscape in which two grand rows of trees form a ceremonial entrance from the east and the bridge and monuments embody the ideals and self-government embraced by the Patriots in 1775. In 1837, the first monument at the site was dedicated on the side closest to town, identified as the British side because no bridge stood there at the time. During that ceremony, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” was sung, permanently linking the phrase “the shot heard round the world” with the North Bridge fight.
