Oil on board,  on reverse titled The Hosmer House / Concord Mass and presumably signed upper right CP Hosmer, over a snowy landscape sketch.  8 3/4" x 11 1/8", framed to 10" x 12 3/4".

This house is now called the Hunt-Hosmer House owing to its historic designation in the 1930s. It had belonged to the early settler families the Hosmers and the Hunts. Jonathan Hosmer married Submit Hunt in the mid 1700s, and various members of their families participated in the Revolutionary War. Portions of the house are from the 1670s, categorizing it as “First Period” American architecture, while the primary structure was built around 1700 and added to around 1800. It remains on Lowell Road in Concord, Massachusetts. 

Edmund Hosmer (1798-1881) was a Concord, Mass., farmer, a neighbor of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a friend of Emerson and of Henry David Thoreau, and a respected associate of others in the Transcendental circle. (Hosmer helped Thoreau build his cabin at Walden in 1845, and Thoreau was a frequent guest at Hosmer’s table.) Hosmer attended Westford Academy but did not continue on to college. He married Sally Pierce in 1823. The Hosmers had ten children: John (b. 1824); Dolly (1826); Edmund (1827); Andrew (1829); Sarah (1831); Mary (1832); Eliza (1833); Jane (1835); Henry (1837); and Abby P. (1839). The Hosmer family lived in the present 82 Sandy Pond Road. In the early 1850s, Edmund sold the Sandy Pond farm and bought Hunt property on Lowell Road (now 320 Lowell Road).

Several Hosmer daughters—including Sarah and Jane, both of whose papers are represented in this collection—were public school teachers in Concord. In 1856, Sarah married Charles Lunt, with whom she had two children (Philip Henry Lunt in 1857, Eliza Hosmer Lunt in 1860), both born in Bedford. Widowed early, Sarah Hosmer Lunt remained in Bedford, died in Somerville in 1915. After their father’s death, spinster Jane Hosmer lived on with her sister Abby in the Lowell Road house. She died in Concord in 1922.

Concordian Alfred Winslow Hosmer (1851-1903) shared a common great-great-grandfather (Stephen Hosmer) with the children of Edmund Hosmer. A clerk, storekeeper, and photographer, A.W. Hosmer was also an early Thoreauvian. To promote greater appreciation of Thoreau’s life and work, he photographed many locations associated with the author and shared information with fellow Thoreau devotees, including Samuel Arthur Jones, Henry S. Salt, and H.G.O. Blake.

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