Concord Announces 2020 Honored Citizen

CONCORD, MA — Concord's 2020 Honored Citizen is Jonathan M. Keyes. The celebration ceremony will be held at 2 p.m. on March 22 in the Harvey Wheeler Center.

A proud Concord resident for his entire 85 years, Keyes has served the town and many of its
organizations/institutions since leaving his three years of active duty in the Navy as a Lieutenant
in 1961. In 1961 he immediately became and continues to be a member of the Independent
Battery. In 1972 he began serving on town committees, first on the Future School Sites
Committee and the Deferred Tax Plan Study Committee, and then the Local Option Income Tax
Committee, the NRC’s Trails Committee, and most recently as the chairman of the Tax Fairness
Committee (2016-19).

organizations/institutions: the Land Conservation Trust, the Concord Museum, the Old Manse,
the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association, and the Fenn School.

His service to and support of the Concord Museum has spanned five decades – specifically
serving on the Red House Committee in 1977, the Board of Governors (1986-93), the Investment
Committee (1988-98), and the 1979 and 1995 Capital Campaign Committees.

From 1983 to 1991 Jonathan was the chair of the Old Manse Committee and helped establish the
Friends of the Old Manse. Since 2000 he has served on the Board of the Emerson Memorial
Association, the board that oversees the operations and maintenance of the Emerson House on
Lexington Rd. and events at Harvard University.

he served as its Secretary for 26 years. Since 1992 he has been involved in every aspect of the
Land Trust’s efforts to preserve the woods and fields of this community and thereby help

preserve Concord’s rural look and feel as a traditional New England town. Among the hundreds
of acres he has helped to preserve are Soutter’s Field and Hubbard Brook Land, Estabrook
Woods, the Hallenbeck Land, Saw Mill Brook, the Garth Land, the Poutasse fields, the Gifford
Land, the Corey-Bourquin Land, the Thornton and Ferguson Lands, the Tyler Land, the Rogers
Land, the Balls Hill Rd. Land, and most recently the Emerson House Land. In 2002 he gave a
13-acre woodlot near Spencer Brook to the Land Trust to support the preservation efforts of the
Spencer Brook valley.