WALTER C. HURD MEMORIAL

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.

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.

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.