Photo of the Day: Brister Freeman Honored with 'Bench by the Road'

The Drinking Gourd Project, Save Our Heritage and the Walden Woods Project on Wednesday hosted a ceremony with the Toni Morrison Society, to dedicate a Bench by the Road for Brister Freeman.

According to the Society's website, the Bench by the Road project extends the society's mission of remembering "not only slavery but also many of the forgotten moments in African American history."

Here's an excerpt from the remarks Kathi Anderson, executive director of the Walden Woods Project, during the dedication ceremony:

As we gather here today to recall the life of Brister Freeman, we also pay tribute to the often forgotten men and women of African descent who lived in and contributed to this vibrant community in the 18th and 19th centuries or who journeyed through Concord on their way to freedom.

The layers of Concord's history are the fabric of our collective history as Americans. Brister's Hill is named for Brister Freeman - a man, a freed slave, who lived just down the hill from here and who fought in the American Revolution, which began just down the road from here. Henry David Thoreau spent many hours studying and writing about this site, he was an Abolitionist; a progenitor of civil disobedience, whose family home was a stop on the Underground Railroad. And while the lives of Brister Freeman and Henry Thoreau overlapped for just a few years, their legacies are indelibly intertwined here on this land - and so we have honored both Brister Freeman and Henry David Thoreau by preserving this place - and we honor ourselves and future generations by celebrating and protecting our historic resources. And today, we place a tangible reminder to all that Brister Freeman once lived here with his family and cared for the apple trees that Thoreau wrote about in Walden, and fought for liberty -- his own and America's -- alongside his friends and neighbors in Concord.

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