100 Franklin Street

Arlington, MA

In the old New England town of Arlington, just northwest of Boston, a public playing field was set aside and formally dedicated on August 7, 1970, to the memory of Walter Hurd, whose life spanned the years 1915 to 1944. His death in 1944 fell within the years of the Second World War, an era when communities across the United States absorbed the loss of young men in the prime of life. Rather than mark such a loss with a solemn stone alone, towns like Arlington often answered it by naming a field, a park, or a square, folding a neighbor's memory into the everyday life of the place.

Salem, MA

In the last decades of the 18th century, Salem was one of the busiest and wealthiest seaports in the new United States, its wharves thick with vessels bound for the West Indies, Europe, and the fabled ports of the East. A resident like Ichabod Glover — remembered here as both a chairmaker and a mariner — embodied the town's double life, plying a skilled craft on land while the sea offered the real fortunes. This plaque marks the house built for him by 1799, one of the many surviving Federal-era homes that give Salem its historic character.

Concord, MA

In 1935, as Concord marked three centuries since its 1635 founding, the town dedicated a woodland given in the name of Hapgood Wright — a man born in Concord in 1814 who spent his later life in the booming mill city of Lowell, where he died in 1896. His bequest became part of a wider New England movement in which communities set aside "town forests," public woodlands held in common for recreation, watershed protection, and timber. Unveiled amid the Tercentenary celebrations, the monument binds one benefactor's gift to the town's long tradition of stewardship over its own land.

Billerica, MA

Along the falls of the Concord River in North Billerica, the Faulkner Mills turned water power into cloth, part of the great wave of textile manufacturing that reshaped New England in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Generations of workers — many of them immigrants and neighbors from the surrounding village — spent their days at the looms and machinery that made the mills the beating heart of the local economy. This memorial honors those employees, the ordinary hands whose labor kept the wheels turning.