The Old Manse stands at the edge of the North Bridge battlefield, built in 1770 by the grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The minister William Emerson watched the battle from its upstairs window; his grandson Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote his first book, Nature (1836), in the garden summerhouse. Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife Sophia honeymooned here and lived in the house for three years, during which Hawthorne wrote the stories collected in Mosses from an Old Manse.
The house is operated by the Trustees of Reservations and is open for guided tours from May through October. Tours pass through the house's simply furnished rooms — the Hawthornes lived here without staff and on very little money — and include the upstairs windows with their diamond-scratched inscriptions. The setting, overlooking the North Bridge meadows and the Concord River, is quietly beautiful. The combination of the battlefield visible from the windows and the literary history within the house makes the Old Manse one of the most layered historical sites in New England.