THE ALCOTTS’S HILLSIDE, THE HAWTHORNES’S WAYSIDE
“There ain’t anything that is so interesting to look at as a place that a book has talked about.” — Mark Twain, TOM SAWYER ABROAD
NOTE: Orchard House (commonly referred to as “The Alcott House”) is the brown one with parking area in front, on the left side of Alcott Road as you face the house. Its address is 399 Lexington Road. Here it is as a doll house, and in a dilapidated condition:
The Wayside is at 455 Lexington Road a bit farther down the road, on the left, the beautiful house with the large porch. That's the home of the Alcotts and then the Hawthornes and later Margaret Sidney. Here it is in the 1860 survey, and as boarded up in 1890:
(It’s confusing due to the fact that the Alcott family lived in both houses.)
“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Hillside/Wayside HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1666
In Concord, Timothy Wheeler was again deputy and representative to the General Court.
The bridge across the Concord River at Concord that had washed away in the previous year, the one below Joseph Barrett’s, Esq. that went to Lee’s hill, was replaced by another where the South Bridge would later stand.
In Concord, Nathaniel Ball, Sr. recorded ownership of a “house lott” of 13 acres. (This property eventually would become the Alcott family’s “Hillside” and the Hawthorne family’s “The Wayside.”) OLD HOUSES
NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT
Hillside/Wayside “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1686
The Red-Horse Tavern was opened in Sudbury, on the main road west from Boston. This would become the locale of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Tales of a Wayside Inn.” Just take the 128 freeway to near Waltham, get off at the Route 20 exit heading West, drive something like ten miles past Weston and through Wayland and through South Sudbury, and start looking on the right. If you get to Marlborough, you’ve passed it. You can’t miss the place. Although it’s not the same building now, they’ve changed the name from Red- Horse Tavern to Wayside Inn in order to make certain that the tourists get the drift. Ask for a Harvey Wallbanger and mention that it was Hank Longfellow’s favorite libation.
(BEFORE)
First deed to the Hillside/Wayside property in Concord; a houselot granted to Nathaniel Ball on his upcoming marriage. The original farmhouse was most likely built shortly after that date.1 OLD HOUSES
1. Other than a similarity in names there is no connection between the Wayside Inn in Sudbury and The Wayside in Concord. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1688
In Concord, John Flint continued to be the Town Clerk.
In Concord, Nathaniel Ball, Sr. deeded to his son, Nathaniel Ball, Jr., the unimproved half of a “house lott,” the other half to go to Nathaniel, Jr. on the death of the father. (This property eventually would become the Alcott family’s “Hillside” and the Hawthorne family’s “The Wayside.”)
NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Hillside/Wayside HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1716
In Concord, Joseph Dakin, William Wilson, Benjamin Whittemore, John Flint, and Daniel Brooks were Selectmen. Ordinarily, Concord’s five selectmen acted as Overseers of the Poor and as Assessors, but in this period there was in addition a board of five Overseers of the Poor.
In Concord, William Wilson continued as Town Clerk.
In Concord, Samuel Jones continued as Town Treasurer.
Boston Light, the 1st lighthouse built in the US and the last to remain currently staffed, was built on Little Brewster Island in Boston HarborBOSTON HARBOR . This 1st stone lighthouse was financed by a tax of a
penny a ton on all vessels entering and leaving the harbor. The first keeper, George Worthylake, was paid £50 a year. He made additional money by acting as a harbor pilot for incoming vessels, and kept a flock of sheep on Great Brewster Island. In a 1717 storm his sheep would be out on the long sand spit off Great Brewster when the tide came in, and would be drowned. In 1718 Worthylake and his family would be out in a boat when an accident would happen and they would drown.2
Boston Light in 1789
Captain James Minot deeded the home that eventually would become the east wing of Concord’s Colonial Inn HDT WHAT? INDEX
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to his son James Minot, Jr.
During this year and the following one, what we know as “The Wayside” was being constructed on a granite foundation as a two-story side gable Georgian house. It is also known as the “Samuel Whitney” house because during the fighting in 1775 it would be the home of the Reverend Samuel Whitney. The present front bay would be added, by the Alcotts, during the 1845-1887 alterations. The East and West additions have romantic detailing while the west porch, which would be tacked on circa 1900, has late Victorian details. This would be the home not only of the Alcott family but also of the Hawthorne family, and finally of Daniel and Harriet 1 Lothrop (Harriet was known by her pen name “Margaret Sidney”). Between 1716 and 1778 a 1 /2-story side gable barn with a shed attached to its north wall would be associated with this structure, but the barn would be moving around. It would be moved to the west side of the house by Bronson Alcott, by 1845, and then finally Nathaniel Hawthorne would have it moved to the east side of the house, in 1860. OLD HOUSES
2. Boston having been during the colonial era the maritime center of America, there had been other beacons before this Boston Light. There had been, for instance, a beacon on nearby Point Allerton in Hull as early as 1673, and the town of Hull had already built a lighthouse on the northern bluff as of 1681. So what is meant when people say that this is our 1st lighthouse is merely that the structure on Little Brewster, rebuilt after the Brits destroyed it during the revolution, happens to be the most antique still in existence. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Concord had in the previous year kept a grammar school for but one quarter, in different parts of the town, and the total expense for education had been £40. In this year, however, it raised £50 for its schools, £35 for the grammar school at the town center and £5 for each of the grammar schools of the other three divisions of the town.
LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Hillside/Wayside HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1717
In Concord, Caleb Ball, son of Nathaniel Ball, Jr., sold his house and barn with 3 3/4 acres, plus other farming land, to Samuel Fletcher, a “glazer.” (This property would be owned and occupied by Samuel Fletcher, Jr., Nathaniel Colburn, and John Breede until 1769, but eventually it would become first the Alcott family’s “Hillside” and then the Hawthorne family’s “The Wayside.”) OLD HOUSES
THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Hillside/Wayside HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1769
Since 1717, the house that eventually would become the Alcott family’s “Hillside” and the Hawthorne family’s “The Wayside” in Concord had been owned and occupied by Samuel Fletcher, Jr., Nathaniel Colburn, and John Breede. From this year into 1776, it would be owned and occupied by Samuel Whitney (who would be the Muster Master for the Concord Minutemen at the start of the American Revolution). OLD HOUSES
THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Hillside/Wayside HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1775
April 19, Wednesday: What would eventually be known as “The Wayside” was at this point a 4-room colonial farmhouse dating to the late 17th Century. It was home not only to the Muster Master of the Concord Minutemen, Samuel Whitney, and his wife and their dozen children, but also to at least two black slaves.
During the nine months that Concord hosted Harvard College, this house would be occupied by the eminent natural philosopher John Winthrop.
WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF
Hillside/Wayside “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1776
Samuel Whitney was no longer occupying the house that eventually would become the Alcott family’s “Hillside” and the Hawthorne family’s “The Wayside.” During the nine months that Concord hosted Harvard College, it was occupied by the eminent natural philosopher John Winthrop. The house would in 1778 be purchased as their residence by Daniel Hoar, Sr. and his son, Daniel, Jr. OLD HOUSES
CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT
Hillside/Wayside “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1778
The Concord house that eventually would become the Alcott family’s “Hillside” and the Hawthorne family’s “The Wayside” would be owned and occupied by Daniel Hoar, Sr. and by his son, Daniel, Jr., until the latter’s death in 1823. Daniel, Jr.’s heirs, some of them occupying the house between 1823 and 1827, would then sell it to Darius Merriam. OLD HOUSES
DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.
Hillside/Wayside “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1827
The Concord house that eventually would become the Alcott family’s “Hillside” and the Hawthorne family’s “The Wayside” was purchased by Darius Merriam, who would live in it most of the time until 1832 and then sell it to Horatio Cogswell. OLD HOUSES
The house on Monument Street built by early settler Humphrey Barrett in the 17th Century was left by a childless descendant to Abel Barrett Heywood. A.B. Heywood would successfully farm the land but eventually succumb to drink. The farm would then be sold to S.A. Hartshorn, and later auctioned to D.G. Lang. Lang would in 1885 build a new house on the property and demolish the old structure in 1886. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1832
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Roger Malvin’s Burial” relied on tales of a famous, or infamous, interracial dustup that had occurred in what would become Maine on May 9, 1725. THE BATTLE OF PEQUAKET
The house that eventually would become the Alcott family’s “Hillside” and the Hawthorne family’s “The Wayside” was purchased by Horatio Cogswell, who would make it his home during some of the time until 1845. (In 1836, however, the house would be occupied by Albert Lawrence Bull, brother of Ephraim Wales Bull.) OLD HOUSES [Anonymous, by Bronson Alcott], “Principles and Methods of Intellectual Instruction Exhibited in the Exercises of Young Children,” Annals of Education, II (January, 1832), 52-56; II (November, 1832), 565-570; III (May 1833), 219-223. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1836
Albert Lawrence Bull, brother of Ephraim Wales Bull, would for this year be the occupant of the house in Concord that would become the Alcott family’s “Hillside” and then the Hawthornes’ “The Wayside.” OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1844
Fall: After suggesting that the Alcott family build themselves a home on one of the tracts of land which he owned on Walden Pond, and after giving up on that idea as entirely impractical, Waldo Emerson, along with Abba Alcott’s brother the Reverend Samuel Joseph May, agreed to purchase the Horatio Cogswell place on
Lexington Road from the wheelwright of Concord, for $850.00, for the use of the Alcott family. The house and plot were to be held in the name of the May family in order that creditors of Bronson Alcott would not be able to attach it. Emerson agreed to the purchase of eight acres of the Concord meadow, across the road from this house, for an additional $500.00, so the Alcott family would be able to raise vegetables to feed themselves. The Alcotts would rename the place “Hillside” in honor of the grand estate of Benjamin Marston Watson, one of Alcott’s benefactors, in Plymouth MA, and would be living in this home for three years.
The basic house was one of those sound old structures built around a huge central chimney, with hand-hewn beams and wide floorboards.3 HILLSIDE THE WAYSIDE OLD HOUSES
3. This house had been erected in 1775 by one of the few families in Concord who had been rich enough to be able to afford slaves, but had fallen into considerable disrepair and may have been a real mess — a previous owner had been penning pigs in the ten-foot strip between house and road that passed for a front yard. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1845
Early January: After suggesting that the Bronson Alcott / Abba Alcott family build a home on a tract of land which he owned on Walden Pond, and giving up that idea as impractical, Waldo Emerson and the Reverend Samuel Joseph May completed, early in January, their purchase in the name of the May family of the Cogswell place
on Lexington Road. This house would be renamed the Hillside in honor of Benjamin Marston Watson, one of Alcott’s benefactors, who had a much grander estate of that name in Plymouth MA, and would be for the use of the Alcott family. They paid $850.00.4 Emerson purchased eight acres of meadow across the road from this house for an additional $500.00 so the family could raise their own vegetables. The house and plot were registered in such manner that Alcott’s creditors would not be able to attach it. Bronson immediately added wings to the structure, and the family would live in this home for three years. Bronson would draw the sketch below after he had added wings. This is the home which the Alcotts would eventually be selling to the
4. The place was in considerable disrepair and may have been a real mess for a previous owner had kept pigs in the 10-foot strip between house and road that passed for a front yard — although the man from whom the house had been purchased, Horatio Cogswell, was a wheelwright by trade. However, the basic house was one of those sound old structures built around a huge central chimney, with hand-hewn beams and wide floorboards. (It had been erected in 1775 by one of the few families in Concord who had been rich enough to be able to afford slaves.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Hawthornes, who would rename it again, as “Wayside,” and add porches and a writerly tower:
THE WAYSIDE NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The Association of Masters of the Boston Public Schools released their counter-counter-counterpublication to Horace Mann, Sr.’s counter-counterpublication, titled REJOINDER TO THE “REPLY” OF THE HON. HORACE MAN; SECRETARY OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BOARD OF EDUCATION, TO THE “REMARKS” OF THE ASSOCIATION OF BOSTON MASTERS, UPON HIS SEVENTH ANNUAL REPORT, in more than 200 pages. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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April 1, Tuesday: The Alcott family’s “Hillside” that eventually would become the Hawthorne family’s “The Wayside” had in January come to be owned by trustees for Mrs. Amos Bronson Alcott (until 1852). At this point the family moved in, and the house would provide a home for Mr. and Mrs. Alcott and their four daughters until, on November 17, 1848, they would relocate by train to a basement apartment on Dedham Street in the South End of Boston. OLD HOUSES
Bronson Alcott immediately proceeded to cut Horatio Cogswell’s wheelwright shop into two halves and tack these onto the main house as wings. He also combined several small rooms into a larger kitchen, built new stairs, cleaned out the well and installed a new pump, and constructed a shower stall apparatus in which buckets of water were raised overhead with pulleys and counterweights and dumped mechanically over the bather.
It rained and melted the remaining ice on Walden Pond, which had been dark-colored and saturated with water.
WALDEN: In 1845 Walden was first completely open on the 1st of April; in ’46, the 25th of March; in ’47, the 8th of April; in ’51, the 28th of March; in ’52, the 18th of April; in ’53, the 23rd of March; in ’54, about the 7th of April. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Early in the day it was very foggy, and as Henry Thoreau chopped young pines into studs for his shanty, using his borrowed axe, he heard a stray goose groping about over the pond and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog. (In the famous 1962 John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance advertisement illustration by Tom Covell, however, he is listening to the distant drumming of a Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus in the forest.) TIMELINE OF WALDEN
Incidentally, in case one wonders why Thoreau was not utilizing the construction technique known as balloon framing in the construction of his shanty, Professor Walter Roy Harding has asserted that the reason was that actually balloon framing is used only for houses of more than one story. This is inaccurate, and one wonders who might have told Harding such a fabulation. Houses of one story, and split-levels, equally with houses of multiple stories, get conventionally framed and braced in the balloon manner. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Summer: Charles Lane visited Hillside for several weeks in an attempt to restore the influence he had had over the
Alcott family at Fruitlands, but Abba Alcott had won and knew she had won and she was both intractable and
intransigent. If she had seen this first usage of the phrase “manifest destiny” in regard to our nation’s future, she might have applied it quite readily to that fact that the future was going to be a future of Abba and not Charles having influence over Bronson Alcott. Lane went away to visit with the Shakers muttering about how it was Bronson’s job in the family to keep the garden “free of weeds” and Abba’s job in the family to keep the house “clear of all intruders.” He left his son William Lane with the Shakers and went down to the socialist community of the North American Phalanx near Raritan, New Jersey, and then on to New-York, floating “on the placid bosom of the Stream of Love.” THE ALCOTT FAMILY MOTHER ANN LEE AND THE “SHAKERS” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1848
November 17, Friday: William Jackman and Jenett Nelson Scott Jackman produced a son William Thomas Jackman in Yates, New York.
That morning the Alcotts departed “Hillside” and Concord on the train, with their household articles to follow on the same day — by evening they would be in their new quarters, a three-rooms-and-a-kitchen basement apartment on Dedham Street in the South End of Boston, where Bronson Alcott would hopefully be able to offer his “conversations” for pay (you shouldn’t hold your breath). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1852
April 7, Wednesday: Since Henry Thoreau checked out the Canadian Geological Survey’s REPORT OF PROGRESS FOR 1849-50 (Montreal, Toronto) from the Boston Society of Natural History, my guess is that after his lecture on PERUSE THIS REPORT
“Reality” during the snowstorm of the previous evening he had not attempted a return trip to Concord, but had instead perhaps stayed over at the Alcott home. Of course, it is possible that he was taken into the parsonage of the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, his sponsor, for this month of April was the month in which the Alcotts were making a large transition. The Hawthorne family, Nathaniel, Sophia, and their three young children Una, Julian, and Rose, desiring to return to Concord, agreed to purchase the rundown Hillside property from the Alcotts and Waldo Emerson for a total of $1,500.00, a down payment of $250.00 of which was to be made to Samuel Eliot Sewall as executor of the Alcott interest and placed in a trust fund for Abba and a payment of $500.00 of which was to be made to the Emersons, who would set it up as a trust fund for Bronson Alcott. (The balance of $750.00 was to be paid into Sam Sewall’s trust fund for Abba within one year.) On this basis the Alcotts were in the process of moving from their slum place on High Street into a rundown 4-story brick house in a good neighborhood on Beacon Hill, 20 Pinkney Street, agreeing to pay a rent of $350.00 per year. By this point in her trajectory, Abba Alcott had had quite had her fill of being a do-gooder and being treated like one,5 and was determined to run this home on Beacon Hill as a private boardinghouse. THE WAYSIDE OLD HOUSES
End of May(??): The Hawthornes moved into the former home of the Bronson Alcotts on Lexington Road in Concord, renaming it from Hillside to “The Wayside.” At some date this year he would tell George William Curtis “I know nothing of the history of the house, except Thoreau’s telling me that it was inhabited a generation or two ago by a man who believed he should never die.”6 OLD HOUSES
When the author would have difficulties with a manuscript he was working on –“The Ancestral Footprint” which morphed into “Etherege” and then into “Grimshawe”– he would recall this story that had been related to him by Thoreau years before, take up the theme of a magic elixir which he had previously used in “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” shift the scene of the action to Concord, take as his protagonist a halfbreed Indian seminary student who was undergoing a crisis of faith, and name this student Septimius Norton. His protagonist kills a British soldier and upon searching his corpse, discovers a formula for eternal life. (He wouldn’t be able to get anywhere with this, and eventually the Indian character would morph into a white man named Septimius Felton, and then the manuscript would lie around until recent years, unpublished.)
SEPTIMIUS FELTON; OR, THE ELIXIR OF LIFE 5. “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.” —C.S. Lewis 6. We may well wonder: had Thoreau made up this stuff about a previous resident of Wayside who believed he should never die, or had there been some such actual person, with a name and a date? HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Winter: With the Alcott family moving to a basement apartment in Boston, the Hawthornes transferred to Samuel Eliot Sewall as trustee the agreed $1,500.00 purchase price for the frame home, painted a rusty olive, that the Alcotts had purchased in 1845 after the Consociate Family at Fruitlands near Harvard, Massachusetts had fallen apart, and paid $500.00 to Waldo Emerson, in addition, for eight acres of Concord meadow he had obtained to go with that house, across the road. The Alcotts had named their refuge Hillside because of its being situated at the foot of a glacial sand hill (esker??),7 and the Hawthornes would be renaming it “The Wayside” because, like the “Wayside Inn” tavern of renown, it was directly alongside a main post road, in this case the route through to Lexington. Nathaniel’s pacing back and forth along the top of this hill would soon be creating a distinct path in the thin soil. The family would be living in this house until going abroad in 1853, and then the house would be occupied by the family of Mrs. Hawthorne’s brother, Dr. Nathaniel Peabody. OLD HOUSES
7. As the geologist Jeff Unruh would comment in 1993, “Topography doesn’t happen for nothing.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1853
George William Curtis published an essay about William Makepeace Thackeray. (This would be reprinted in 1895 in Curtis’s LITERARY AND SOCIAL ESSAYS.) During this year and the following one he would author articles on Emerson and on Hawthorne. He became co-editor with Parke Goodwin and Charles F. Brigs of Putnam’s Weekly. Also during this year he issued his THE POTIPHAR PAPERS (a satire on fashionable society) and his HOMES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS; COMPRISING ANECDOTICAL, PERSONAL, AND DESCRIPTIVE SKETCHES, BY VARIOUS WRITERS. ILLUSTRATED WITH VIEWS OF THEIR RESIDENCES FROM ORIGINAL DRAWINGS, AND A FAC-SIMILE OF THE MANUSCRIPT OF EACH AUTHOR (New-York: G.P. Putnam and Co., HDT WHAT? INDEX
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10 Park Place. London: Sampson Low, Son & Co.): Once Emerson and Thoreau arrived to pay a call on Hawthorne at the Old Manse. They were shown into the little parlor upon the avenue, and Hawthorne presently entered. Each of the guests sat upright in his chair like a Roman Senator. “To them,” Hawthorne, like a Dacian King. The call went on, but in a most melancholy manner. The host sat perfectly still, or occasionally propounded a question which Thoreau answered accurately, and there the thread broke short off. Emerson delivered sentences that only needed the setting of an essay, to charm the world; but the whole visit was a vague ghost of the Monday evening club at Mr. Emerson’s, — it was a great failure. Had they all been lying idly upon the river bank, or strolling in Thoreau’s blackberry pastures, the result would have been utterly different. But imprisoned in the proprieties of a parlor, each a wild man in his way, with a necessity of talking inherent in the nature of the occasion, there was only a waste of treasure. This was the only “call” in which I ever knew Hawthorne to be involved.
HOMES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS
This “coffee table book” bound in brown cloth, with its gilt top edge and its color illustrations on proof paper glued to the text pages, included a presentation of the summerhouse that a couple of local artisans, named Bronson Alcott and Henry Thoreau, had built for the famous American essayist and lecturer who lived in Concord, Waldo Emerson. Here is the manner in which an image of that summerhouse would appear, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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in a publication by Alcott:
THE ALCOTT FAMILY Incidentally, the above 1853 coffee table book” bound in brown cloth, with its gilt top edge and its color illustrations on proof paper glued to the text pages, was present for Thoreau’s inspection in the personal library of Alcott (he would copy from it into his Indian Notebook #7) — and stands as the 1st book to make mention of Thoreau’s Walden Pond experiment in voluntary simplicity! HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1859
Henry Thoreau recorded in his journal that the water level in Walden Pond was recovering from its low during the previous year.
William Henry Hunt married with Elizabeth Baker, nine years older than himself. As the story has been told by Leslie Perrin Wilson: William Henry Hunt’s successful transformation into a progressive farmer was made possible by his marriage to a somewhat older woman of means — a life-changing opportunity which he had the good sense to seize. He fell in love with, and in 1859 –at the age of twenty– married Elizabeth Baker, a cultured woman some ten years his senior, who brought a son of about eight to the union. ...In marrying William Henry Hunt, Elizabeth Baker probably sought acceptance for herself and her son. ...They raised Theodore, who used the last name Hunt while in his stepfather’s household. Did the young people of Concord treat Theodore more respectfully after his mother’s marriage became an accepted local fact? It is not known, and possibly not knowable. But the fact that he grew up, left Concord, and achieved considerable success without leaving an impress on local memory indicates that whatever bonds to community he formed while living in the town were easily loosened once he left to pursue his own life.... [There is a] thin thread of evidence linking Theodore Hunt of Concord to the well-known music scholar and lexicographer Theodore Baker, author of a dictionary of musical terms (published in 1895) and of a biographical dictionary of music (1900) that is still, in much expanded and revised form, a standard resource today.
As the story would be told by Edward Emerson Simmons: A woman had come to Concord, with no husband, and given birth to a child. This, for New England at that time, was a terrible scandal. The boy was my age and went to school. All the other boys whispered behind his back as if he had been in jail, although by this time his mother was properly married to a young farmer up on Barret’s Hill. No one ever spoke to her in church or bowed. My mother, very quietly, every summer, put on her best clothes and walked the mile or more up the hill to call. VIEW THE PAGE IMAGES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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In Concord, after the death of Mr. Horace Mann, Sr., and during the continued absence of the family of the Hawthorne family in Europe, the family of Mrs. Hawthorne’s brother, Dr. Nathaniel Peabody, would move out of “The Wayside” so it could be occupied instead for a couple of years by Mrs. Hawthorne’s sister, Mrs. Horace Mann, and her three sons. OLD HOUSES
The 17th-Century Humphrey Hunt House next to the later Hunt/Hosmer House on Lowell Road, that was described in detail by Thoreau in his journal, had presumably been built by Samuel Hunt, and had passed out of Hunt family ownership from 1692-1701, being then owned by Adam Winthrop (for that reason the house HDT WHAT? INDEX
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has sometimes been referred to as the “Winthrop House”). In 1701 it had come back into the Hunt family. After the death of Humphrey Hunt in 1852, it was purchased by Edmund Hosmer, who at this point tore it down. This painting of the Humphrey Hunt House is part of the Art Collection of the Concord Free Public Library: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1860
By this year the Ingraham/Vose House on Walden Street, built prior to the American Revolution by the wealthy Duncan Ingraham and known also as the “Tea House,” had been torn down. This house had been purchased in 1783 by the John Vose who in 1826 was involved in the formation of the Trinitarian Congregational Church. The first meetings of the church were held in that house. Mrs. Abigail Garfield Saunders was a later owner.
The widowed Mrs. Mary Peabody Mann and her four sons moved out of “The Wayside” so it could be reoccupied by Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family as they returned from their extended stay in Europe. They would be living again in this Concord home until the widowed Mrs. Hawthorne would take her two daughters and son abroad again in October 1868. The Hawthornes’ neighbors were the Alcotts, since they had purchased HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the Orchard House (previously referred to as the Moore house) next door.
During this year Henry Thoreau surveyed the property:
OLD HOUSES
Rose Hawthorne would allegedly inform her husband George Parsons Lathrop that in about this year, while she was age 9, Henry Thoreau “used to flit in and out of the house with long, ungainly, Indian-like stride, and his piercing large orbs, staring, as it were in vacancy” (we are not aware that Thoreau visited “The Wayside” during this period other than for purposes of this survey of the plot of ground).
View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm
(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be HDT WHAT? INDEX
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recovered.)
View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_surveys/51a.htm
June 29, Friday: As soon as the Hawthornes were ensconced in their “The Wayside” again, the Emersons hosted an evening strawberries-and-cream reception which the Alcotts and Thoreaus attended (Bronson Alcott, in his journal, would continue to refer to the place as “Hillside”). Also present were Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, John Master Cheney, the painter William Morris Hunt, and John Shepard Keyes.
(Hawthorne was at this time renovating his home, adding a three-story tower from the top floor of which he imagined, beyond his stand-up desk, he would be able to obtain a desired “Paul Pry” view of Concord. – Unfortunately, such an unshaded writer’s garrett would prove not only to be much too hot for the finicky author in the summer, but also much too stuffy in the winter.)
Soon after the Hawthornes had returned to their home in Concord from overseas, Una Hawthorne had to be tied down and subjected to electric shocks, something which in that period was being termed “electrotherapy.” Her father Nathaniel was so impressed by the result of these shock treatments that, in an effort to overcome his bouts of depression, he had them repeated upon himself. However, as usual, he refused to consult a medical doctor. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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At about this point in time (perhaps it was early in the next month), when Nathaniel made a call at the Emerson home specifically to speak with his daughter Una’s friend Ellen Emerson, she was already in bed. So he stayed awhile to chat with the other Emerson children. Edward Emerson reported later that “to cover his shyness” he began to look through a stereoscope at stereo photographs of Concord Court and Concord Common, the Mill- dam, and various houses of the town, and expressed surprise at these photographs. Edward assumed that the interest he showed indicated either that he had never been through the center of the town or that he had always been so preoccupied with his own thoughts that he had never noticed what he was passing. Robert H. Byer has suggested, however, that what Hawthorne had been struck by was simply how this apparatus alone, quite distinct from his length of time away from home, had succeeded in making unfamiliar what had been for many years the familiar context of his life.8
Having been oriented for so long in his imagination to creating defamiliarizing perspectives of the real in juxtaposition to its more self-evident appearances, Hawthorne may well have felt a bemused, perhaps wearied shock of recognition at the effects of the stereoscope on his immediate, intimate world: for the moment, anyway, this apparatus may have seemed to actualize his deepest, most private inward eye (and need). Or it may have struck him as an uncanny reenactment of his often tiring, abrasive, estranging experience as a European traveler. The affinity and analogy suggested by this anecdote between the effects of stereoscopic viewing and the kind of reader responsiveness produced by THE MARBLE FAUN are worth exploring further.
June 29. Dogdayish and showery, with thunder. At 6 P. M. 91°, the hottest yet, though a thunder shower has passed northeast and grazed us, and, in consequence, at 6.30 or 7, another thunder-shower comes up from the southwest and there is a sudden burst from it with a remarkably strong, gusty wind, and the rain for fifteen minutes falls in a blinding deluge. I think I never saw it rain so hard. The roof of the depot shed is taken off, many trees torn to pieces, the garden flooded at once, corn and potatoes, etc., beaten flat. [There was the same sudden and remarkably violent storm about two hours earlier all up and down the Hudson, and it struck the Great Eastern at her moorings in New York and caused some damage.] You could not see distinctly many rods through the rain. It was the very strong gusts added to the weight of the rain that did the mischief. There was little or no wind before the shower; it belonged wholly to it. Thus our most violent thunder-shower followed the hottest hour of the month.
8. Nathaniel’s comments on photography are to be found in Chapter 6 of THE HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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August 20, Monday: British and French land and naval forces pushed back the Taiping Chinese Christian Army at Shanghai.
During this night, 1,500 of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s men crossed in rowboats from Faro in Sicily to Favazzina on the Italian mainland.
Henry Thoreau surveyed, for Nathaniel Hawthorne, his estate on Lexington Road known as “The Wayside.” Julian Hawthorne, then 14 years of age, watched him, and on three occasions in his later life he would write about his having watched Thoreau during this survey. This survey shows two pieces of land and measures about 20 acres in all. Thoreau made a note that there was a hedge of osage orange. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm
(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)
View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/51a.htm [THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR AUGUST 20]
On three successive confabulations in later life, Julian Hawthorne would report about his having watched Thoreau survey on this day. We can see how utterly fabulistic these progressive confabulations were, by noticing that Julian backdates a survey made on August 20, 1860, after his return to Concord from Liverpool when he was at the age of 14 and about to enter Harvard College as a student of civil engineering, to the year 1852, while he was at the tender age of 8, prior to his sailing for Liverpool: Pasadena Star-News, December 12, 1923: “My first distinct recollection of him was when he surveyed our little estate at Concord, some twenty acres of hill, meadow and woodland. I saw the rather undersized, queer man coming along the road with his long steps carrying on his shoulder a queer instrument and looking very serious. I got down from the mulberry tree in which I was perched and watched his doing in silent absorption. Wherever he went I followed; neither of us spoke a word from first to last. Up the terraces with their apple trees, over the brow of the hill, into the wood and out again, down into the meadow to the brook, and so back to the house again. Finally my father came out and they talked a little, and my father paid him ten dollars, and Thoreau strode away, after remarking, with a glance at me, ‘That boy has more eyes than tongue.’”9
Dearborn Independent, August 20, 1927: “‘Good boy! sharp eyes, and no tongue!’ On that basis I was admitted to his friendship.”
THE MEMOIRS OF JULIAN HAWTHORNE (as reprocessed by his widow Edith Garrigues Hawthorne for Macmillan in 1938): “Once, when I was nearly seven years old, Thoreau came to the Wayside to make a survey of our land, bringing his surveying apparatus on his shoulder. I watched the short, dark, unbeautiful man with interest and followed him about, all over the place, never losing sight of a movement and never asking a question or uttering a word. The thing must have lasted a couple of hours; when we got back, Thoreau remarked to my father: ‘Good boy! Sharp eyes, and no tongue!’ On that basis I was admitted to his 9. It is extremely unlikely that Thoreau actually said anything at all like “That boy has more eyes than tongue,” because although one might imagine such a comment being made about one or another tongue-tied 8-year-old, this is not the sort of remark that anyone would ever make about any teener — no matter how sullen and comatose. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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friendship; a friendship or comradeship which began in 1852 and was to last until his death in 1862.10 In our walks about the country, Thoreau saw everything, and would indicate the invisible to me with a silent nod of the head. The brook that skirted the foot of our meadow was another treasure-house which he discovered to me, though he was too shy to companion me there; when he had given me a glimpse of Nature in her privacy, he left me alone with her ... on a hot August day, I would often sit, hidden from the world, thinking boy thoughts. I learned how to snare chub, and even pickerel, with a loop made of a long-stemmed grass; dragon-flies poised like humming-birds, and insects skated zigzag on the surface, casting odd shadows on the bottom.... Yes, Thoreau showed me things, and though it didn’t aid me in the Harvard curriculum,11 it helped me through life. Truly, Nature absorbed his attention, but I don’t think he cared much for what is called the beauties of nature; it was her way of working, her mystery, her economy in extravagance; he delighted to trace her footsteps toward their source.... He liked to feel that the pursuit was endless, with mystery at both ends of it....
10. Actually we do not know of a single other occasion on which Julian came within eyesight of Thoreau. 11. Julian became a student of civil engineering, but the college asked him to leave and there would be no diploma. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1863
September 27, Sunday: Bronson Alcott noted: “Abby walks with me to Walden. We find the old paths by which I used to visit [Henry Thoreau] from ‘Hillside,’ but the grounds are much overgrown with shrubbery, and the site of the hermitage is almost obliterated.” ALCOTT FAMILY HILLSIDE HERMITS
(It is clear that at this point no cairn had yet been begun at the site on the shore of Walden Pond, where Emerson’s (Thoreau’s) shanty had once stood.) THOREAU’S CAIRN HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1864
May 24, Tuesday: People were continuing to kill each other at North Anna / Jericho Mill / Hanover Junction. In addition, on this day, people were killing each other at Wilson’s Wharf / Fort Pocahontas.
In Concord on this day, however, people were burying each other. Waldo Emerson recorded in his journal that:
Yesterday, May 23, we buried Hawthorne in Sleepy Hollow, in a pomp of HAWTHORNE sunshine and verdure, and gentle winds. James Freeman Clarke read the service in the church and at the grave. Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Agassiz, Hoar, Dwight, Whipple, Norton, Alcott, Hillard, Fields, Judge LONGFELLOW Thomas, and I attended the hearse as pallbearers. Franklin Pierce was J.R. LOWELL with the family. The church was copiously decorated with white flowers delicately arranged. The corpse was unwillingly shown, — only a few PROF. AGASSIZ moments to this company of his friends. But it was noble and serene in its aspect, — nothing amiss, — a calm and powerful head. A large company JUDGE E.R. HOAR filled the church and the grounds of the cemetery. All was so bright and J.S. DWIGHT quiet that pain or mourning was hardly suggested, and Holmes said to me C.K. WHIPPLE that it looked like a happy meeting. C.E. NORTON Clarke in the church said that Hawthorne had done more justice than any other to the shades of life, shown a sympathy with the crime in our BRONSON ALCOTT nature, and, like Jesus, was the friend of sinners. HILLARD I thought there was a tragic element in the event, that might be more JAMES T. FIELDS fully rendered, — in the painful solitude of the man, which, I suppose, JUDGE THOMAS could not longer be endured, and he died of it. I have found in his death a surprise and a disappointment. I thought him a greater man than any of his works betray, that there was still a great deal of work in him, and that he might one day show a purer power. Moreover, I have felt sure of him in his neighbourhood, and in his necessities of sympathy and intelligence, — that I could well wait his time, — his unwillingness and caprice, — and might one day conquer a friendship. It would have been a happiness, doubtless to both of us, to have come into habits of unreserved intercourse. It was easy to talk with him, — there were no barriers, — only, he said so little, that I talked too much, and stopped only because, as he gave no indications, I feared to exceed. He showed no egotism or self-assertion, rather a humility, and, at one time, a fear that he had written himself out. One day, when I found him on top of his hill, in the woods, he paced back the path to his house, and said, “This path is the only remembrance of me that will remain.” Now it appears that I waited too long. Lately he had removed himself the more by the indignation his perverse politics and unfortunate friendship for that paltry Franklin Pierce awakened, though it rather moved pity for Hawthorne, and the assured belief that he would outlive FRANKLIN PIERCE it, and come right at last. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“The Wayside” would be occupied by the widowed Mrs. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, with her two daughters Una Hawthorne and Rose Hawthorne and her son Julian Hawthorne, until, while again living in Europe, in October 1868 they would vend the place to George and Abby Gray. OLD HOUSES HAWTHORNE MAY 23, 1864 How beautiful it was, that one bright day In the long week of rain! Though all its splendor could not chase away The omnipresent pain. The lovely town was white with apple-blooms, And the great elms o’erhead Dark shadows wove on their aerial looms Shot through with golden thread. Across the meadows, by the gray old manse, The historic river flowed: I was as one who wanders in a trance, Unconscious of his road. The faces of familiar friends seemed strange; Their voices I could hear, And yet the words they uttered seemed to change Their meaning to my ear. For the one face I looked for was not there, The one low voice was mute; Only an unseen presence filled the air, And baffled my pursuit. Now I look back, and meadow, manse, and stream Dimly my thought defines; I only see — a dream within a dream — The hill-top hearsed with pines. I only hear above his place of rest Their tender undertone, The infinite longings of a troubled breast, The voice so like his own. There in seclusion and remote from men The wizard hand lies cold, Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen, And left the tale half told. Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic power, And the lost clew regain? The unfinished window in Aladdin’s tower Unfinished must remain! HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1870
“The Wayside” would be being owned by Abby Gray, and Mr. and Mrs. George Gray, with a son and a daughter,12 would for a couple of years be residing in the house, until in 1872 they would rent to Miss Mary C. Pratt so that she could there begin a boarding school. OLD HOUSES
Sophia Peabody Hawthorne published her travel writings as NOTES IN ENGLAND AND ITALY. She was occupying her last years in transcribing more of her deceased husband Nathaniel’s journals, which would be published in 1878, seven years after her death, as PASSAGES FROM THE FRENCH AND ITALIAN NOTEBOOKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
12. In memory of Hawthorne, Mrs. Abby Gray’s son George Arthur painted murals on the ceiling of the Tower Study. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1873
In Concord, Abby Gray sold “The Wayside” to her renter, Miss Mary C. Pratt, who was using the place as a successful boarding school known as The Wayside Family School for Girls. OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Louisa May Alcott’s WORK, with a character alleged by some to have been based on Thoreau. THE ALCOTT FAMILY
Mark Twain patented a self-pasting scrapbook, to be manufactured by Slote, Woodman & Company and sold by J.B. Lippincott & Company.
The freestyle swim stroke was invented (which means that Thoreau hadn’t swum freestyle).
Harriet Beecher Stowe had been born in Litchfield CT, and so after her Florida sojourn she purchased a classic 19th-Century gray wood and brick home at 77 Forest Avenue in Hartford. At this “Nook Farm” she would entertain fellow literary lights, paint watercolors and oils, work in her garden, and, in the small sitting room near her 10-sided bedroom, write several more novels, until she would die simpleminded in 1896. Mark Twain would record that when he visited, she was wandering around, popping up behind visitors and going “boo.” This home is now open to the public and houses the drop-leaf mahogany table at which in her heyday she had written portions of UNCLE TOM’S CABIN. While you are in Hartford, you might also stop by Gallaudet Square at Farmington and Asylum avenues to see the statue to Alice Cogswell, first pupil of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (the deaf school has removed, as of 1921, to West Hartford). Also, you might visit Christ Church at 45 Church Street, on the north wall of which is a tablet in honor of Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney, one of the first American “scribbling women” to make a substantial sum of money by writing. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1879
In Concord, “The Wayside” was owned by Mr. and Mrs. George Parsons Lathrop (Mrs. Lathrop was Rose Hawthorne), who would make it their home until their redheaded little son, Francis Hawthorne Lathrop, would die in 1881. OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1881
In Concord, after the death of Francis Hawthorne Lathrop, “The Wayside” would be occupied for a couple of years by Mrs. Julian Hawthorne and her six children. (When Julian would return from abroad in Spring 1882, he would rejoin his family there.) OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1883
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s SKETCHES AND STUDIES.
Julian Hawthorne prepared DR. GRIMSHAWE’S SECRET, published in Boston by James R. Osgood in gray cloth pictorially stamped in black and gilt with the monogram “J.R. Osgood” on the binding).
Mr. and Mrs. Daniel and Harriett Lothrop (he was a Boston publisher, she, under the pen name Margaret Sidney, the author of THE FIVE LITTLE PEPPERS) purchased “The Wayside” from Mr. and Mrs. George Parsons Lathrop (Rose Hawthorne). They acquired some pieces of Hawthorne furniture from Rose and George. They and their daughter, Miss Margaret Mulford Lothrop, would have control of the property until 1940. As can be seen in the photograph below with its windows boarded up, which was taken at about the turn of the century, during this period of its ownership the house would neither always have someone living in it, nor would it always be in an appropriate condition of maintenance.
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1892
March 18, Friday: Daniel Lothrop, the publisher who had in 1883 purchased “The Wayside” in Concord as the family’s summer home, died in Boston. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1894
December 12, Wednesday: George Parsons Lathrop quoted his wife Mrs. George Parsons Lathrop, in a “Lecture” printed in the Brooklyn Citizen, as having alleged of Henry Thoreau that beginning when she was about 9 years of age in 1860 in “The Wayside” in Concord, “He used to flit in and out of the house with long, ungainly, Indian-like stride, and his piercing large orbs, staring, as it were in vacancy”: I was about 9 years old and coming sternly to realize that I had been transferred from English homelikeness to American sandbanks, when, a little above the garden path, I beheld two enormous eyes not far from each other. They moved toward me. I melted away. Thoreau had come to call at the house. The horrible effect of the great eyes, grey as autumn pools lit by a rift in the clouds, upon a mind pining for luxurious verdure and gem-like blue heavens, created a thirst in me for the dreadful thing. I hung about the garden (it was a grim failure of a garden) until the strange being, native to harsh America, should again emerge for the departure. Stationed in a more retired spot I watched for him, and by and by he came. I noticed with transfixed pulse that he strode, clothed in exaggerated dignity, with long steps, placing one foot exactly before the other according to the Indian fashion, which in Thoreau’s was a downright marvel, since his feet seemed interminable. I next became conscious of a vaguely large nose that finally curved to his chin, and then I realized that this being was looking at me — the huge eyes at a slight oblique angle; and he passed so close to me, in consequence of a roguish turn of the path, that I found his grey-brown irises were bordered by heavy dark lines, like a wild animal’s. For years this vision really distressed me in remembrance, and appeared to have a harmonious connection with my bitter lot in being an exile from British daisies and robins. And yet the time came when both Thoreau and America were revealed to me! The first thing which Thoreau did to soften my heart toward him was to fall desperately ill. My mother sent him our sweet old music box, which softly dreamed forth its tunes, and he enjoyed its gentle strains as he lay perishing. I had heard a great deal of his poetic nature and instructive genius, and when he died it seemed as if an anemone, more lovely than any other, had been carried from the borders of a wood, and dropped, fading, in its depths. I never crossed a hill or a field in Concord, or gathered a cardinal-flower or any other rare bloom without thinking of Thoreau as a companion of delicacy, though also a brother of the Indian. However, I never quite forgave him the steady stare of those unhuman eyes when I was a disheartened child. And I think I was right, for I do not doubt that his peculiar step, the stride adopted, was a sign of affectation; and that his intense gaze was the result of an abnormal self-consciousness.... He had an uncanny, subordinate resemblance to Emerson. There were deep HDT WHAT? INDEX
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fissures from the nostrils along the cheeks, which were similar to those marking Emerson’s smile. But his countenance had an April pensiveness about it, and the slight peculiar kinship of physiognomy between the two friends merely emphasized their essential difference. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1923
December 12, Wednesday: Although Julian Hawthorne had acknowledged in 1900 that “Thoreau died two years after I returned to Concord, so that my personal knowledge of him was not great,” when stimulated to create an article for the Pasadena Star-News he suddenly recalled that as a child he had indeed had significant personal encounters with the famous Henry Thoreau! My first distinct recollection of him was when he surveyed our little estate at Concord, some twenty acres of hill, meadow and woodland. I saw the rather undersized, queer man coming along the road with his long steps carrying on his shoulder a queer instrument and looking very serious. I got down from the mulberry tree in which I was perched and watched his doing in silent absorption. Wherever he went I followed; neither of us spoke a word from first to last. Up the terraces with their apple trees, over the brow of the hill, into the wood and out again, down into the meadow to the brook, and so back to the house again. Finally my father came out and they talked a little, and my father paid him ten dollars, and Thoreau strode away, after remarking, with a glance at me, “That boy has more eyes than tongue.”13 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
In fact, Julian now confessed, he had had such a close personal intimacy with Thoreau that Horace Mann, Jr. became jealous. While walking across a plowed field he had picked up a sharp-pointed and unbroken Indian arrowhead, one that cousin Horace had merely trodden upon! “Oh, Mr. Thoreau. Look!” He turned and examined it. “Good!” he said. “Sharp eyes.” He took me into favor thenceforward, and I don’t think Horace ever quite forgave me.
13. Although we can acknowledge that it is more than likely that Henry and Julian sighted each other on the occasion of the survey of the “The Wayside” plot (which Julian misdates to his age of eight, although in the year of this survey he had been sixteen), it is extremely unlikely that Thoreau would have made any comment similar to “That boy has more eyes than tongue” because, although one might imagine such a comment being made about one or another tongue-tied 8-year-old, it is simply not the sort of remark that anyone would ever make about any teener — no matter how sullen and comatose that teener. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1924
Roland Wells Robbins dropped out of high school.
After the death of her mother in California, Miss Margaret Milford Lothrop became the last private owner of “The Wayside.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1963
In Concord, “The Wayside” was declared a National Historic Landmark. OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1965
“The Wayside” became the first home of a writer to be acquired by the National Park Service, and was made a part of Minute Man National Historical park. Restoration would continue with the help of Margaret Lothrop until her death in 1970. OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1971
In Concord, “The Wayside” opened to the public. OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1975
Celebration of self continued with MEMOIRS OF MEMBERS OF THE SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD: SIXTH SERIES, FROM 1939 TO 1974 (Clinton, Massachusetts: The Colonial Press).
The barn at “The Wayside” was restored as a visitor center. OLD HOUSES
“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Hillside/Wayside HDT WHAT? INDEX
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2015. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: February 3, 2015 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with
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