Homelessness and grapes in ConcordC

“She4She” (shadowboxes made of reclaimed wood, metal and plexiglass, acrylic paint), by Pauline Curtiss and Rose Leitner, in the show “She4She’’ in the Umbrella Arts Center, Concord, Mass., through Jan. 2

This installation was inspired by Heading Home, a homeless-serving agency that serves individuals and families. The gallery says the artists used the contrasting dark and bright colors of the installation to reflect the struggles and triumphs experienced of the women at Heading Home.

Since Concord is a rich Boston suburb you don’t often think of homelessness in connection with it.

Besides its fame as site of a battle that helped launch the Revolutionary War and a center of intellectual life in the mid-19th Century, Concord is also where In 1849 Ephraim Bull developed the  Concord grape (beloved of grape-juice fans) at his home on Lexington Road, where the original vine still grows. Welch's, the first company to sell juice made from Concord grapes,, is headquartered in the town. 

The Boston-born Bull developed the grape by experimenting with seeds from some of the local native species. On his farm, down the road from the the literary households of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Alcott (as in Louisa May Alcott and the new movie version of Little Women), he planted some 22,000 seedlings before producing the ideal grape. But he never made much money from them.

In 1853, his grape won first place at a Boston Horticultural Society exhibition. It was introduced to the market in 1854.  The Rev. Thomas Bramwell Welch developed the first Concord grape juice in 1869. Through pasteurization, the juice did not ferment into wine. That was important to him because he opposed drinking alcoholic beverages, including at the Holy Communion table.

Concord grapes