Hapgood Wright Town Forest

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.

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.

Lowell, MA · est. 1978

Lowell harnessed the Merrimack's drop through a network of power canals to run the nation's first integrated cotton mills. Its young women workers — the 'Lowell mill girls' — wrote the first chapters of American labor history.

Boston, MA

In the heart of Boston's financial district stands a stately 1909 building raised for the Boston Safe Deposit & Trust Company, an era when grand banking houses announced the permanence and prosperity of American finance. The building earned a second distinction as the final home of the Boston Stock Exchange, an institution that had traded since 1834 and helped fund New England's mills, railroads, and mines through the industrial age. When the exchange closed its doors in 2007, more than 170 years of regional capital markets came to a quiet end on Franklin Street.