It was sitting on a chair at the back of a long, narrow room. My wife, Kathleen, and I had just moved in. The house was built in 1742, on the banks of the Concord River, just downstream from Old North Bridge, where Massachusetts minutemen began the American Revolution in the spring of 1775. We had purchased the old farmhouse for its proximity not only to the Old North Bridge but also to the homes of my intellectual heroes, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
The house offered the chance to find historic tidbits, such as the one sitting on a chair at the back of that narrow room, tucked next to a fireplace. It was a stack of loosely bound xeroxed paper, and on the front was written: “The Story of the Bloods.”
