By Ken McGagh — Photographer
Call it a marquis event.
As Concord gears up for next year’s 250th commemoration of the shot heard round the world, the town recognized another milestone on Monday: Two hundred years to the day after the Marquis de Lafayette visited Concord in triumph as a hero of the American Revolution, his re-enactor got the royal treatment in the center of town.
Photo: Ken McGagh/The Concord Bridge
Lafayette was in his early twenties when George Washington named him a general in the Continental Army. Fifty years after the founding of the nation, President James Monroe invited the French nobleman back for a farewell tour of all 24 states. Lafayette was the last living Revolutionary War general.
Photo: Ken McGagh/The Concord Bridge
Two hundred years later, the Lafayette Bicentennial Celebration Tour is using multiple Lafayette re-enactors to retrace the tour.
Following an appearance in Lexington, Lafayette took a horse-and-buggy ride from the Concord Museum to the First Parish in Concord, one of the sites of his original 1824 visit.
Photo: Ken McGagh/The Concord Bridge
On September 2, 1824, Squire Samuel Hoar welcomed Lafayette to Concord; on Monday, a descendant, Judge Samuel Hoar, did the same in front of a large crowd on the First Parish in Concord lawn.
After the laying of a wreath by the Old Concord chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, Tom Wilson, chair of the Wright Tavern Legacy Trust, read President Monroe’s letter inviting Lafayette to America.
Inside First Parish, more than 250 people heard from Robert A. Gross, a former professor of early American history at the University of Connecticut; Jen Turner of the Robbins House, who spoke about Lafayette and the abolitionist cause; and Sam Williams, a poet and executive director of Concord Prison Outreach, who delivered his “Ode to Contemporary Times” in homage to Lafayette’s farewell.
The American Friends of Lafayette bicentennial tour of 24 states is just getting started and will continue into 2025. On Monday, re-enactor Ben Goldman also visited Arlington, Lexington, and Bolton.
Photo: Ken McGagh/The Concord Bridge
