Find the kid with the grape popsicle.

I Thought Concord Was Just a Kind of Grape

How a Massachusetts town ended up tasting purple

Author’s oiginal concept imaged by AI

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Names We Swallow

I had eaten Concord grape jelly for most of my life without once wondering who Concord was.

Then I learned Concord was not a who. It was a where.

Concord, Massachusetts.

Well, I’ll be hornswoggled!

All these years, I thought Concord was some special type of grapeness. Maybe a bigger grape. A purpler grape. A grape with a college education.

By the time I was six or so, grape had already become a color in my mind.

Purple.

A bunch of kids could stand around on a hot summer day in 1950, eating popsicles. One kid had red. Another had orange. Somebody had something pale enough to be lemon.

Then there was the kid with the purple one.

Grape.

No discussion required.

Nobody bit into a green grape and said, “Yep. Tastes just like a purple popsicle.”

The popsicle had its own authority.

So did grape soda. Grape candy. Grape gum. Grape jelly. I grew up accepting an entire purple kingdom without asking how the king got his name.

Then I bumped into Ephraim Wales Bull.

Bull lived in Concord, Massachusetts, where he worked for years trying to develop a grape suited to New England. In 1849, after raising and studying thousands of seedlings, he came up with the grape we now call the Concord. He named it for the town where he lived. The grape reached the market a few years later.

So the trail runs backward.

Concord grape jelly came from the Concord grape.

The Concord grape came from Concord, Massachusetts.

And Concord, Massachusetts, somehow ended up in my childhood lunch, spread between two pieces of bread.

A town got eaten.

I like knowing stuff like this.

The familiar smell and taste we Americans associate with purple grape products also has a chemical helper. Methyl anthranilate has a strong Concord-grape-like aroma and has long been used to produce grape scent and flavor.

Of course it does.

We could not leave the grape alone. We found the part announcing, “WHERE’S THE GRAPE?” and turned up the volume.

Maybe our grape candy does not taste like a grape because we are comparing it to the wrong grape. Most grocery-store grapes are mild little things. Concord grapes come charging through the door.

Purple popsicles did not lie to us.

They exaggerated.

I started wondering how many other names I have swallowed without tasting the story.

Graham crackers.

Boysenberries.

Sandwiches.

Caesar salad.

Words get used so long that their histories wear off. A person becomes a cookie. A town becomes jelly. A place disappears into a flavor.

We stop hearing the name.

I probably heard “Concord grape” thousands of times. Never once did I picture a Massachusetts farmer studying vines and wondering if one of them might finally be the grape he had been looking for.

I pictured jelly.

Maybe half the world is like this. We use the name and forget the story. We eat the thing and never ask where the word came from.

I am not sure life becomes better when you know a little fact like this.

But breakfast does.

Now I can look at a jar of Concord grape jelly and see more than purple stuff to put on toast.

Somewhere along the way, Concord, Massachusetts, got planted, picked, crushed, bottled, sugared, spread on bread, frozen onto a stick, and handed to a six-year-old child on a hot summer day.

And the child never once asked why grape tasted like Concord.

She was busy trying to keep it from trickling down her arm.

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Retired now, with more than four decades of experience as an addiction counselor walking alongside men and women in recovery, I like to write about faith, human dignity, aging, and the fact that every struggle hides a longing for meaning.

I am a member of the Baha’i Faith and believe that unity and compassion are essential to healing. I write about addiction to substances, recovery, and the thistles of the soul. Human rights are God-given rights.

If you’ve worked with addiction or lived through it, I’d be glad to hear what you’ve learned.

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