We Thrive Through
Education & Access
DECORDOVA SCULPTURE PARK & MUSEUM, LINCOLN, MA
Our Work
Working in partnership with the National Park Service to foster a renewed commitment to the stewardship of the nation’s stories and treasured places for the enjoyment of future generations.
Through communication and collaboration, we connect people to the natural, cultural, and historical resources of the region. Through education and interpretation, we engage residents and visitors in the region’s stories and provide opportunities that inspire life-long experiential learning. Through community planning and resource conservation, we promote landscape conservation to support healthy ecosystems, preserve community character, and enhance a sense of place.
Annual Thematic Focus: Conservation & Land Stewardship
Humankind’s relationship to nature and the legacy of resource conservation and stewardship is a theme that runs deeply throughout the history of the Freedom’s Way National Heritage Area. It is one we continue to explore as we celebrate the region’s leadership role in preserving and protecting open space.
NORTH BRIDGE, MINUTE MAN NATIONAL HISTORIC PARK
Programs & Initiatives
Program
Partnership Grant Program
Program
Hidden Treasures Festival of Nature, Culture & History
Program
Revolutionary Stories: The Enduring Legacies of the American Revolution
Program
Connecting Communities: Walks & Talks
Initiative
Heritage Stories: Visionaries & Experimenters
Program
Declaring Independence: Then & Now
Program
Patriots’ Paths
initiative
19th Amendment Centennial Commemoration
Interpretive Themes
A Mosaic of Subtle Beauty
An intricate network of rivers, wetlands, lakes, kettle ponds, meadows, forests, drumlins, eskers, and monadnocks combined with climate to determine how land was used, inspiring conservation of natural and scenic resources and providing economic and recreational opportunities.
While the land has changed with the imprint of settlement, it is the region’s natural features, including the landforms and rivers, that most clearly define how and where it was settled and how and why it has both inspired and been preserved by consecutive generations.
WOOD PARK, HUDSON, MA
WORCESTER ROAD, HOLLIS, NH
Inventing the New England Community
Early settlers established regionally interdependent inland communities distinct from Boston with democratic governments, institutions, town centers, transportation networks, industries and agricultural practices reinforcing the region’s identity and sense of place.
The interplay of nature and settlement within the heritage area led to the creation of the New England landscape which was shaped by concepts of the common good, man’s triumph over and eventual reliance upon nature and the manner through which land was managed to support communal enterprise.
Revolutionary Ideas: Visionaries & Experimenters
Since before the founding of the nation, people within Freedom’s Way National Heritage Area have been at the forefront of social, intellectual and cultural innovation; inspired by religious and philosophical convictions, democratic principles, a drive for self-improvement and rapid industrialization they created new ideas about relationships to both society and the natural world.
Social, intellectual and cultural ideas within the heritage shaped new ways of thinking about the rights of individuals as well as their role within society and relationship to the natural world.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON HOUSE, CONCORD, MA