Around Concord: Steps to nowhere – but it used to be somewhere

Concord doesn’t have a bridge to nowhere, much to the disappointment of urban explorers, but we do have something sort of like that: Steps to nowhere.

The double-decker stone steps lead up from the sidewalk on South Main Street to a grassy site next door to Waters Funeral Home, which owns it. There’s no building on the site and no plans for one. “We just keep it open. It’s our lawn,” said Joanna Clougherty, owner of Waters.

Her father, the late Jack Clougherty, bought the parcel in 1979. Back then it held a three-story house, twin to the funeral home, that had been unoccupied since 1941.

That house was built in 1856 and was on the National Register of Historic Places because our only president, Franklin Pierce, rented it from 1857, after he left the presidency, until his death in 1869. “I do remember playing in it. I have vague memories of that. There were presidential pictures on the wall,” Clougherty said.

The house burned down in 1981 – nobody was hurt and no cause was ever determined – and the lot has been a lawn ever since. A small granite marker notes Pierce’s time there.

Most of Pierce’s historical papers and furniture are located in the Pierce Manse, where Pierce lived before his election as the nation’s 14th president.