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Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862

"A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"

It will be Grass-ground River as long as grass
grows and water runs here; it will be Concord River only while
men lead peaceable lives on its banks. To an extinct race it was
grass-ground, where they hunted and fished, and it is still
perennial grass-ground to Concord farmers, who own the Great
Meadows, and get the hay from year to year. "One branch of it,"
according to the historian of Concord, for I love to quote so
good authority, "rises in the south part of Hopkinton, and
another from a pond and a large cedar-swamp in Westborough," and
flowing between Hopkinton and Southborough, through Framingham,
and between Sudbury and Wayland, where it is sometimes called
Sudbury River, it enters Concord at the south part of the town,
and after receiving the North or Assabeth River, which has its
source a little farther to the north and west, goes out at the
northeast angle, and flowing between Bedford and Carlisle, and
through Billerica, empties into the Merrimack at Lowell. In
Concord it is, in summer, from four to fifteen feet deep, and
from one hundred to three hundred feet wide, but in the spring
freshets, when it overflows its banks, it is in some places
nearly a mile wide.


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