MR. MINOT PRATT AND MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
Henry lived in a lofty way. I loved to hear him talk, but I did not like his books so well, though I often read them and took what I liked. They do not do him justice. I liked to see Thoreau rather in his life. Yes, he was religious; he was more like the ministers than others; that is, like what they would wish and try to be. I loved him, but ... always felt a little in awe of him. He loved to talk, like all his family, but not to gossip: he kept the talk on a high plane. He was cheerful and pleasant. — Mrs. Maria Jones Bridge Pratt
The farmer and printer Minot Pratt was the “other grandfather” of the little men in Louisa May Alcott’s LITTLE MEN. Later in life his hobby would become the inosculation of foreign plants into the Concord ecosystem, which is not nowadays an innocent activity, nor was it then benign activity. (It was he who introduced what he referred to as the “Chinese chestnut,” the water caltrop or water chestnut Trapa natans, which now seriously endangers many other species; Thoreau had no opportunity to correct him in this hobby, for Pratt would not begin it until 1869).1 DISAMBIGUATION: This Mr. Minot Pratt and Mrs. Maria Jones Bridge Pratt are evidently a very different couple from the Mr. and Mrs. Minot Pratt who contemporaneously were living, all of their lives, in Cohasset, Massachusetts: February 5, 1808: That Minot Pratt was born in Cohasset MA. (But our Mr. Minot Pratt was already born in 1805 in Weymouth.) September 19, 1820: Lillis Joy (Pratt) was born in Cohasset MA. April 3, 1842: Lillis Joy and Minot Pratt, the son of John Pratt, were wed in Cohasset, Massachusetts. June 1, 1872: Minot Pratt died in Cohasset, Massachusetts. (But our Minot Pratt did not die until 1878.) November 25, 1879: Lillis Joy Pratt died in Cohasset, Massachusetts.
1. On the grateful side, it wasn’t Minot Pratt who unleashed gypsy moths into this continent in 1866 — that was another misguided soul living in the vicinity of Concord. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
1805
January 8, Tuesday: Eraldo ed Emma, a dramma eroico per musica by Simon Mayr to words of Rossi, was performed for the initial time, in the Teatro alla Scala, Milan.
Minot Pratt was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts to Bela Pratt and Sophia Pratt. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
1806
March 27, Thursday: Maria Jones Bridge was born in Boston to John Bridge and Rebecca Beal Bridge. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
1822
At about the age of 17 Minot Pratt, who had put to learn stone-cutting, went to New Bedford, Massachusetts to become a printer’s apprentice at the Mercury. Although there is no known image of him, he would be described in Lindsay Swift’s 1900 BROOK FARM as “one of the most conspicuously attractive inhabitants [of Brook Farm] … large and of fine physique, with strong features, and a modest but dignified mien.”
The recorded Quaker minister Mary Newhall, and friends Elizabeth Redman and Mary Rotch, were in the process of being disowned by the New Bedford Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, for their espousal of what were termed “advanced doctrines.”
Read about this “New Light” controversy: THE “NEW LIGHTS”
Read about the impact this controversy would have on Waldo Emerson (according to his own evaluation): FREDERICK B. TOLLES
About 35 of these “New Lights” were being disowned in Lynn,2 and almost that many in nearby Salem. Micah Ruggles and Lydia Dean were involved in this set of beliefs.
ELIAS HICKS
“Our hearts are filled with many guests — many beloveds.”
2. Lynn (maybe it was yet called Lynnfield) was less than an hour’s travel from Boston. From Burrill’s Hill there you can see the golden dome of the Massachusetts State House. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
Quaker Meeting for Worship Note that Thoreau and Emerson scholars, to date, have taken a simplistic attitude toward this history, presuming for one thing that in the Friendly struggle between Hicksites and Evangelicals, it was always the Hicksites who were disowned and the Evangelicals who stayed in possession of the Quaker logo when that is utterly inaccurate, and presuming, for another thing, that whenever there was a struggle with the Evangelicals in the Friends groups, those who were in opposition were Hicksites or Hicksite sympathizers when that is utterly simplistic. For instance, the “New Light” movement of Mary Newhall that began in about 1815 had not more sympathy for Hicksites than for Evangelicals, was affiliated with the “Irish Liberals,” and was a parallel within Quakerism of the group within the Congregational Church which had eventually split off as Unitarians. (The payoff for these simplistic attitudes is that the scholars get to pretend that the Hicksites were merely Unitarian-symps within Quaker groups, and thus dismiss the fundamental difference between the sort of “reformer” who goes for religious closure, like the Reverend Ralph Waldo Emerson or the Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge or Martin Luther, but merely for closure of a different stamp, and the sort of religious reformer, like Henry Thoreau or Elias Hicks or George Fox, who seeks to forestall any religious closure.) Mary Newhall, Elizabeth Redman, and Mary Rotch, reformers of the “closure-seeking” variety and deadly opponents of the Hicksites (of whom they had no comprehension, because they did not know what it was to seek “non-closure” in matters of the spirit) as well as of the Evangelicals (in opposition to whom they defined themselves), became Unitarians and became friends (small f) of Ralph Waldo Emerson. To characterize their belief system, the historian has to explain that these “New Lights” opposed the Evangelicals within Quakerism who were tending to oversimplify the spiritual life by an escapism in which the old was automatically better than the new, the past better than the present, their model of religious doctrine being one of gradual deterioration with time, and has also to explain that what they had to offer in the place of these simplicitudes was merely an equal but opposite oversimplicitism according to which the new is automatically better than the old, because bright and new, and the future better than the present because after the present. Their simplistic model of religious doctrine was one of progressive revelation with time — a doctrine of evolutionary progress in religious attitudes similar to the sophomoronic attitude that a few deities are obviously better than a confused pagan mess of them, and one monotheistic deity obviously superior to a few (and no deity superior to one). What these people had to offer reduced to the message “Oh, that’s old- fashioned now,” if one allows that they did deliver this doctrine with some wit and subtlety. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
Friend Elias was responsive to the tribulation of these disowned Friends, but his basic attitude had already been expressed in a letter to Martha Aldrich on May 29, 1801: neither memories of the past nor anticipations of the future should be allowed to distract us from the seriousness of our task of using “our own experience and judgment” in “living our daily experience in that injunction of our dear Lord.”
ELIAS HICKS
“The candle could not be often put out, unless it was also often lighted, which shows the mercy of God.” Is it any wonder that this was the year in which Friend Elias had his first heart attack? HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
1829
March 22, Sunday: By this point Minot Pratt was at work as a printer in Boston. He and Maria Jones were married by Ralph Waldo Emerson at his 2d Unitarian Church on Hanover Street in the North End (and quite possibly this was the 1st couple the young Reverend Emerson united in matrimony).3
According to an almanac of the period, “Protocol agreed on between the plenipotentiaries of Great Britain, France, and Russia; fixing the government, boundaries, &c. of Greece.” CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS
By this “London Protocol” setting the borders of Greece under a Christian ruler subject to the control of the Ottoman Empire, Greece, Romania, and Serbia achieved a measure of independence from Turkey.
3. They would have 4 sons one of whom, John Bridge Pratt, would become an insurance man and marry an Alcott daughter, Anna “Meg” Bronson Alcott (the other sons would be Henry Minot Pratt, Frederick Grey Pratt, and Theodore Parker Pratt; this couple would also produce a daughter, Caroline Hayden Pratt). Their two grandsons by John and Anna, Frederick Alcott Pratt and John Sewall Pratt, would be the “little men” of Louisa May Alcott’s LITTLE MEN, designated in the book as “John Brooke” and “Thomas Bangs” [need to verify this]. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
1841
September: This was the Brook Farm experiment’s membership roster as it has been derived from their Articles of Association documents dated September 29, 1841 and February 17, 1842, from their Constitution dated February 11, 1844, and from various minutes of their meetings preserved by the Massachusetts Historical Society. We instantly notice that it is not a particularly accurate record of what had been going on, as witness the fact that Nathaniel Hawthorne is being shown as being admitted to membership in the association a month after his attorney has filed the necessary legal papers to disassociate him:
Date of Name Birthplace Birthdate Occupation Admission
September 1841 Reverend George Ripley Greenfield MA 1802 minister
September 1841 Mrs. Sophia Dana Ripley Cambridge MA 1803 wife of minister
September 1841 Marianne Ripley Greenfield MA 1797 teacher
September 1841 Charles A. Dana Hinsdale NH 1819 student
September 1841 Minot Pratt Weymouth MA 1805 printer
September 1841 Maria T. Pratt Boston MA 1806 wife of printer
September 1841 Nathaniel Hawthorne Salem MA 1804 writer
September 1841 Sarah F. Stearns Massachusetts circa 1820 student
September 1841 William Allen Vermont 1815 schoolteacher at Concord
September 1841 Charles O. Whitmore ? ? ?
September 29, Wednesday: The Articles of Association of the Subscribers to the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education:
ARTICLES OF ASSOCIATION OF THE SUBSCRIBERS TO THE BROOK FARM INSTITUTE OF AGRICULTURE AND EDUCATION. Articles of Association made and executed this twenty-ninth day of September, one thousand eight-hundred and forty-one, by and between the several persons and their assigns, who have given their signatures to this instrument and by it associated themselves together for the purpose and objects hereinafter set forth: — Art. I. The name and style of this Association shall be The Subscribers to the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education; and all persons who shall hold one or more shares of the Association shall be members; and every member shall be entitled to one vote on all matters relating to the funds of the Association. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
Art. II. The object of the Association is to purchase such estates as may be required for the establishment and continuance of an agricultural, literary, and scientific school or college, to provide such lands and houses, animals, libraries and apparatus, as may be found expedient or advantageous to the main purpose of the Association. Art. III. The whole property of the Association, real and personal, shall be vested in and held by Four Trustees to be elected annually by the Association. Art. IV. No shareholder shall be liable to any assessment whatever on the shares held by him, nor shall he be held responsible individually in his private property on account of this Association; nor shall the Trustees, or any officer or agent of the Association, have any authority to do anything which shall impose personal responsibility on any shareholder by making any contracts or incurring any debts for which the shareholders shall be individually or personally responsible. Art. V. All conveyances to be taken for lands or other real estate purchased by the Association in pursuance of these articles shall be made to the Trustees, their successors in office or survivors as joint tenants, and not as tenants in common. Art. VI. The Association guarantees to each shareholder the interest of five per cent annually on the amount of stock held by him in the Association, and this interest may be paid in certificates of stock and credited on the books of the Association; provided, however, that each shareholder may, at the time of the annual settlement, draw on the funds of the Association, not otherwise appropriated, to an amount not exceeding that of the interest credited in his favor. Art. VII. The shareholders on their part, for themselves, their heirs and assigns, do renounce all claim on any profits accruing to the Association for the use of their capital invested in the stock of the Association, except five per cent interest on the amount of stock held by them, payable in the manner described in the preceding article. Art. VIII. Every subscriber may receive the tuition of one pupil for every share held by him, instead of five per cent interest, as stated above, or tuition to an amount not exceeding twenty percent interest on his investment. Art. IX. No share shall be transferred from one person to another without consent of the Trustees, nor shall any such transfer be valid without their signature. Art. X. Every shareholder may withdraw his amount of stock and whatever interest is due thereon, by giving twelve months’ notice to the Trustees of the Association. Art. XI. The capital stock of the Association, now consisting of Twelve Thousand Dollars, shall be divided into shares of Five Hundred Dollars each, and may be increased to any amount at the pleasure of the Association. Art. XII. These articles, it is understood and agreed on, are intended for the safe, legal, and orderly holding and management of such property real and personal as shall further the purposes of the “Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education,” to which Institute this Association of subscribers is subordinate and auxiliary.
SUBSCRIPTION. We, the undersigned, do hereby agree to pay the sum attached to our names, to be invested in the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education, according to the conditions described in the foregoing Articles of Association. Date, 1841. Names. Shares. Sums. Geo. Ripley...... No. 1, 2, and 3...... $ 1,500 Nath. Hawthorne...... ” 18 and 19...... 1,000 HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
Minot Pratt...... ” 4, 5, and 6...... 1,500 Charles A. Dana...... ” 10, 11, and 12...... 1,500 William B. Allen...... ” 7, 8, and 9...... 1,500 Sophia W. Ripley...... ” 16 and 17...... 1,000 Maria T. Pratt...... ” 20 and 21...... 1,000 Sarah F. Stearns...... ” 22 and 23...... 1,000 Marianne Ripley...... ” 13, 14, and 15...... 1,500 Charles O. Whitmore...... ” 24...... 500
OFFICERS. At a meeting of the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education, held on Wednesday, September 29, 1841, the following persons were appointed to office as follows:— General Direction. Geo. Ripley, Minot Pratt, Wm. B. Allen. Direction of Finance. Nath. Hawthorne, Charles A. Dana, Wm. B. Allen. Direction of Agriculture. Wm. B. Allen, Minot Pratt, Geo. Ripley. Direction of Education. Sophia W. Ripley, Charles A. Dana, Marianne Ripley. Charles A. Dana was appointed Recording Secretary, and Minot Pratt, Treasurer; and the meeting adjourned. Chas. Anderson Dana, Secretary.
October 30, Saturday: Richard Wagner completed the score and lyrics of Der fliegende Holländer.
Here is the preserved Brook Farm record: At a meeting of the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education on Saturday last, October 30, 1841, the following votes were passed:— Voted, 1. To transfer the Institution recently carried on by George Ripley to the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education from and after November 1, 1841, according to the conditions stated in the instrument of this date, and signed by George Ripley, William B. Allen, and Charles A. Dana. 2. To transfer the establishment recently carried on by Marianne Ripley to the Brook Farm Institute, from and after November 1, 1841, according to the conditions stated in the instrument referred to in the above vote (this was merely a formal ratification of earlier business transactions: she had been offering a school in Boston but had instead brought several of her young students with her). 3. That, in the annual settlement with individual members, each member shall be allowed board in proportion to the time employed for the Association: that is, one year’s board for one year’s labor; and if no labor is done, the whole board shall be charged. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
4. That the price of board charged to the Associates shall be $4.00 per week, until otherwise ordered, including house-rent, fuel, light, and washing. 5. That three hundred days’ labor shall be considered equal to one year’s labor, and shall entitle a person to one share of the annual dividend, and no allowance shall be made for a greater amount of labor.4 6. That sixty hours shall be considered equal to six days’ labor for the months of May, June, July, August, September, and October, inclusive; forty-eight hours, from November to April, inclusive. 7. That for children of the associates, over ten years of age, board shall be charged at half the established rate. 8. That the price of board and tuition shall be $4.00 a week for boys, and $5.00 a week for girls over twelve years of age; and $3.50 a week for children under that age, exclusive of washing and separate fire.
Chas. A Dana, Secretary
4. Bear in mind that not all the labor of the farm would be performed by these members. The farm did have a subordinate staff of hired help and servants to perform a significant amount of the needed labor. This socialist experiment was not egalitarian. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
1843
This was the year of the minstrel song “Old Dan Tucker.” MINSTRELRY
The Hutchinson Family Singers, a group inspired by Frederick Douglass to take up antislavery agitation, paid a visit to Brook Farm — and a good time was had by all. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
During this year, trustees Reverend George Ripley, Charles A. Dana, Minot Pratt, and John Brown (a farmer, not the John Brown of Harpers Ferry, Virginia or the John Brown of Providence, Rhode Island or the John Brown of Newburyport, Massachusetts or the John Brown who was imprisoned) would obtain yet another 2d mortgage for $1,000 on the estate, thus increasing Brook Farm’s total mortgage debts to $12,000. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
1844
Warren Burton, one of the former communitarians of Brook Farm, ventured the opinion in his textbook THE SCENERY-SHOWER on the picturesque in this year that “No scenery probably tends more to awaken and ennoble the sentiment of patriotism than mountains.”
Minot Pratt was a director of Brook Farm, along with the Reverend George Ripley and Charles A. Dana. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
1845
John Otis Wattles asked his brother Augustus Wattles to join a utopian community.
It was during this year that Minot Pratt left Brook Farm in disagreement with these Fourierist doctrines then prevalent, and went to George William Curtis’s farm in Concord. It was during this year that Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal that “Henry Thoreau said that the Fourierists had a sense of duty which led them to devote themselves to their second best.” One of the debates of the 18th Century was what human nature might be, under its crust of civilization, under the varnish of culture and manners. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had an answer. Thomas Jefferson had an answer. One of the most intriguing answers was that of Charles Fourier, who was born in Besançon two years before the Shakers arrived in New York. He grew up to write twelve sturdy volumes designing a New Harmony for mankind, an experiment in radical sociology that began to run parallel to that of the Shakers. Fourierism (Horace Greeley founded the New- York Tribune to promote Fourier’s ideas) was Shakerism for intellectuals. Brook Farm was Fourierist, and such place-names as Phalanx, New Jersey, and New Harmony, Indiana, attest to the movement’s history. Except for one detail, Fourier and Mother Ann Lee were of the same mind; they both saw that humankind must return to the tribe or extended family and that it was to exist on a farm. Everyone lived in one enormous dormitory. Everyone shared all work; everyone agreed, although with constant revisions and refinements, to a disciplined way of life that would be most harmonious for them, and lead to the greatest happiness. But when, of an evening, the Shakers danced or had “a union” (a conversational party), Fourier’s Harmonians had an orgy of eating, dancing, and sexual high jinks, all planned by a Philosopher of the Passions. There is a strange sense in which the Shakers’ total abstinence from the flesh and Fourier’s total indulgence serve the same purpose. Each creates a psychological medium in which frictionless cooperation reaches a maximum possibility. It is also wonderfully telling that the modern world has no place for either. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
WALDEN: In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.
It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.
THE TASK OF THE HISTORIAN IS TO CREATE HINDSIGHT WHILE INTERCEPTING ANY ILLUSION OF FORESIGHT. NOTHING A HUMAN CAN SEE CAN EVER BE SEEN AS IF THROUGH THE EYE OF GOD. THE UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO’S CENTER OF THE AMERICAN WEST HAS AS ITS OFFICIAL MOTTO “TURNING HINDSIGHT INTO FORESIGHT” — WHICH INDICATES THAT ONLY PANDERERS ARE WELCOME THERE. IN A BOOK THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT HISTORY, ISSUED BY HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
RANDOM HOUSE IN 2016, I FIND THE PHRASE “LOOKED UPON FROM THE BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF HISTORY, ....” ONLY A MERE STORYTELLER, NEVER A HISTORIAN, COULD HAVE PENNED SUCH A PHRASE — BECAUSE NO BIRD HAS EVER FLOWN OVER HISTORY.
May 3, Saturday: Brook Farm trustees George Ripley, Charles A. Dana, Minot Pratt, and Lewis Ryckman (the farmer John Brown had turned over his interest to the shoemaker Ryckman on October 7, 1844) deeded the Farm to a “certain joint stock company... incorporated by the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts by the name of the Brook Farm Phalanx....” This Brook Farm Phalanx claimed the obligations and debts of the Farm. FOURIERISM
MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
July 9, Wednesday: Theophilus Brown and Sarah Ann Knowlton were wed in Worcester, Massachusetts. Their children would be William Theophilus Brown, born December 15, 1846, Alice Brown, born 1852, and Fanny Brown, who would die a year after her birth.
On the night of July 9th, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ellery Channing used the Pond Lily to help others search for the body of a suicide, a Miss Martha Emmeline Hunt about 19 years of age who had been superintendent of one of the district schools, with 60 pupils.5 She had left her bonnet and shoes and handkerchief at a spot on
Not far from this spot, lay an old, leaky punt, drawn up on the oozy river- side, and generally half-full of water. It served the angler to go in quest of pickerel, or the sportsman to pick up his wild-ducks. Setting this crazy barque afloat, I seated myself in the stern, with the paddle, while Hollingsworth sat in the bows, with the hooked pole, and Silas Foster amidships, with a hay- rake. “It puts me in mind of my young days,” remarked Silas, “when I used to steal out of bed to go bobbing for horn-pouts and eels. Heigh-ho! — well! — life and death together make sad work for us all. Then, I was a boy, bobbing for fish; and now I am getting to be an old fellow, and here I be, groping for a dead body! I tell you what, lads, if I thought anything had really happened to Zenobia, I should feel kind o’ sorrowful.”
the bank of the river some ways below the bridge, a half a mile across a pasture from her parents’ home, early
5. During his summer vacation in Concord in 1853, the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway was boarding with some Misses Hunt at a pleasant cottage on Ponkawtasset Hill and they informed him that they had been Martha’s cousins, and were concerned that George William Curtis, in his HOMES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS, “had suggested that Martha’s suicide was due to the contrast between her transcendental ideals and the coarseness of her home.” Conway continued, in his late-life autobiography, that “They described the family of their cousin as educated people. One of these sisters walked with me to the river and pointed out all the places connected with the tragedy, and some years later another cousin drowned herself there.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
that morning, and to have walked to and fro on the bank for several hours.
This was a sexual opportunity not to be missed, and every male in Concord who had heard of the matter had thronged to the river bank (but apparently Henry Thoreau was out in his cabin on the pond, behaving himself). HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
In the Pond Lily, the young man with the long pole
drew her towards the boat, grasped her arm or hand; and I steered the boat to the bank, all the while looking at this dead girl, whose limbs were swaying in the water, close at the boat’s side. The fellow evidently had the same sort of feeling in his success as if he had caught a particularly fine fish; though mingled, no doubt, with horror. For my own part, I felt my voice tremble a little, when I spoke, at the shock of the discovery; and at seeing the body come to the surface, dimly in the starlight. When close to the bank, some of the men stepped into the water and drew out the body; and then, by their lanterns, I could see how rigid it was. There was nothing flexible about it; she did not droop over the arms of those who supported her, with her hair hanging down, as a painter would have represented her, but was all as stiff as marble. And it was evident that her wet garments covered limbs perfectly inflexible. They took her out of the water, and deposited her under an oak-tree; and by the time we had got ashore, they were examining her by the light of two or three lanterns.... As soon as she was taken out of the water, the blood began to stream from her nose. Something seemed to have injured her eye, too; perhaps it was the pole, when it first struck the body. The complexion was a dark red, almost purple; the hands were white, with the same rigidity in their clench as in all the rest of the body.... If she could have foreseen, while she stood, at 5 oclock that morning, on the bank of the river, how her maiden corpse would have looked, eighteen hours afterwards, and how coarse men would strive with hand and foot to reduce it to a decent aspect, and all in vain — it would surely have saved her from this deed.
My personal interpretation of what these eager male hookers were up to, on the river that night, is that, when their pole finally hooked the corpse in an eye socket, and it was hauled to the surface, what Nathaniel got a good look at, and perhaps a feel of, was his ideal of the perfectly passive female body. The realization of this sexual ideal of True Womanhood proved to be much too much for him:
I never saw or imagined a spectacle of such perfect horror.
David Buttrick fainted, but an old carpenter commented that he would as lief handle dead bodies as living ones, and the men gathered around and twisted and stomped on the girl’s limbs locked in rigor mortis in a prolonged pretense that they were forcing her to assume a proper posture for the dead. The family told the hookers who had just been thus pawing the body that the poor girl had attempted to drown herself before, by walking into the river up to her chin, but that a sister had gotten her to come back out of the water. Hawthorne would use HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
10 paragraphs of his journal of this day in THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE, as an account of the recovery of the body of the suicide “Zenobia”6 who had drowned as an “Arcadian affectation,” omitting the unromantic description of the continuous flow of blood from the nose (a description which I also omitted, above). Hawthorne also changed the grapple wound from the eye socket to the “breast.”7
Since a “young brother of the deceased, apparently about twelve or fourteen years old” was on the bank watching this, we may presume that the hooking party was being witnessed by Daniel Otis Hunt, who had been born in 1831.
When they got the makeshift bier back to the Hunt farmhouses on Punkatasset Hill, Mrs. Maria T. Pratt and others laid the body out for its interment.
6. Margaret Fuller was held by authorities in the 19th Century to have evinced a death wish, for, staring across the gap of raging surf at the dead bodies of her husband and her baby stretched upon the beach, drowned one after the other in the attempt to get to shore, she could not force herself to leap into the ocean, and was still on the ship clutching the mast when it broke up in the waves. And, she had been a school superintendent, just like this Concord River suicide Martha Hunt! 7. Were Margaret’s breasts that fascinating, in spite of her twisted spine? HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
Here is a puzzle. Where is the body of Martha Emmeline Hunt buried? Was there a burial service? (If this event had occurred in England, we know from the act of July 4, 1823 what would have needed to have happened to such a corpse: the body of the suicide could be interred in a churchyard or public burial place only if such interment occurred within 24 hours of the coroner’s inquest and certificate, took place after 9PM and before midnight, and was bereft of any accompanying Christian religious observance. We know, further, that in the case of an English suicide, any goods and chattels of the deceased would be forfeit to the Crown. We need to research and discover how American law bore on this circumstance, and what happened specifically in Concord.)
Here then is Hawthorne’s entry in his AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS, as rendered into poetry by Robert Peters: HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
The Drowned Girl I We caused the boat to float once or twice past the spot where the bonnet was found. The poles or the rake caught in bunches of water-weed, which in the star-light, looked like garments. All this time persons on the bank were anxiously waiting. II ‘What’s this?’ cried he. I suppose the same electric shock went through everybody in the boat. ‘Yes, I’ve got her!’ III I felt my voice tremble at the first shock of seeing the body come to the surface, dimly in the star-light. IV I could see how rigid she was. She did not droop over the arms of those who supported her, with her hair hanging down, but was all stiff, as marble. They examined her by the light of two or three lanterns. Her arms had stiffened and were bent before her. She was the very image of death-agony. V They deposited her under an oak-tree. When the men tried to compose her figure, her arms would return to that same position. One of the men put his foot upon her arm, for the purpose of reducing it by her side; but, in a moment, it rose again. Blood began to stream from her nose. Something had injured her eye, too. Perhaps it was the pole, when it first struck the body. The complexion was a dark red, almost purple. The hands were white, with the same rigidity in their clench as in all the rest of the body. Two of the men got water and washed away the blood from her face. But it flowed and flowed and continued to flow.
Peters, Robert Louis. HAWTHORNE: POEMS ADAPTED FROM THE AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS. Fairfax CA: Poet-Skin / Red Hill Press, 1977. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
Hawthorne also had a few choice words to say about his rowing companion on this expedition, Ellery: “What a gump!...On the whole, he is but little better than an idiot. He should have been whipt often and soundly in his boyhood; and as he escaped such wholesome discipline then, it might be well to bestow it now.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne, about Ellery Channing HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
1852
December 16, Thursday: Brigham Young “got married with” Mary Oldfield, his 2d bride for the year.
Henry Thoreau surveyed, for Virgil Fuller, the farm of Henry L. Shattuck in the north part of Concord on Monument Street near Liberty Street, showing N. Munroe’s and Minot Pratt’s land. Perez Blood had previously surveyed this land and Thoreau noted that he should have followed Blood’s marks as they were correct. General Joshua Buttrick once lived on this land.
December 16. Observed the reflection of the snow on Pine Hill from Walden, extending far beyond the true limits of a reflection, quite across the pond; also, less obviously, of pines. The sky overcast with thick scud, which, in the reflection, the snow ran into. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
1854
September 3, Sunday: The 16th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s freedom, which we may well elect to celebrate in lieu of an unknown slave birthday.
“It has been a source of great annoyance to me, never to have a birthday.”
Sunday or not, when Chief Little Thunder, the successor to Brave Bear as headman of the Brulé band of approximately 250, gathered his tribespeople together as part of a surrender process, the troops under General William S. Harney were ordered to open fire on them and many of the band were slaughtered.
“...the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” — Declaration of Independence
“To my great surprise I find this morning that the little unhatched turtle, which I thought was sickly and dying, and left out on the grass in the rain yesterday morn, thinking it would be quite dead in a few minutes — I find the shell alone and the turtle a foot or two off vigorously crawling, with neck outstretched (holding up its head and looking round like an old one) and feet surmounting every obstacle. It climbs up nearly perpendicular side of a basket with yolk attached. They thus not only continue to live after they are dead, but they begin to live before they are alive.” Tortoise Eggs In the afternoon Henry Thoreau and Minot Pratt went into Carlisle.
Sunday Sep. 3d ’54 Fair weather & a clear atmosphere after 2 days of mizzling — cloudy & rainy weather — & some smart showers at daylight & in the night. The street is washed hard & white.
Pm — With Minott Pratt into Carlisle. Woodbine berries purple. X Even at this season I see some fleets of yellow butterflies in the damp road after the rain; as earlier. Pratt showed me a tobacco-flower long & tubular — slightly like a datura. In his yard ap. a new variety of sweet briar which he took out of the woods behind his house — larger bush & leaves — leaves less glandular & sticky beneath — the principal serrations deeper & much sharper — & the whole leaf perhaps less rounded. Saw some winged ants silvering a circular space in the pasture grass about 5 inches in diameter — some a few very large ones among them. Very thick & incessantly moving — one upon another — some without wings — all running about in great excitement — It seemed the object of the winged ones to climb to the top of the grass blades one over another & then take to wing — which they did. In the meadow SW of Hubbards Hill saw white polygala sanguinea, not described. Lambkill again in Hunt pasture. Close to the left hand side of Bridle road — about 100 rods S of the Oak a bay- berry bush without fruit — prob. a male one. It made me realize — that this was only a more distant & elevated sea beech — and that we were within reach of marine influences. My thoughts suffered a sea turn. N. of the oak (4 or 5 rods) on the left of the bridle road in the pasture next to Masons tried to find the white hardhack still out — but it was too late. Found the mt Laurel out again 1 flower close [^sessile] on end of this years shoot — There HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
were numerous blossom buds expanding & they may possibly open this fall. Running over the laurel an amphicarpaea in bloom — some pods nearly an inch long — out prob. a week or 10 days at most. Epilobium molle [^linear] still in flower in the spruce swamp — near my path. A white hardhack out of bloom by a pile of stones on which I put another in Robbins’ field & a little south of it a clump of red huckleberries. THE ACTUAL JOURNAL THE ACTUAL JOURNAL HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
1858
April 7, Wednesday: Anna Bronson Alcott (Meg), age 27, asked her mother Abba Alcott for advice about getting married with John Bridge Pratt, 24-year-old son of the printer Minot Pratt. John was an insurance man. Anna and John had acted together in a number of amateur plays. Her father Bronson confided to his journal that night that
[T]he thought is more than I am ready for at this moment.
THE ALCOTT FAMILY Louis Gerhard de Geer af Finspång replaced Claës Efraim Günther as Prime Minister for Justice of Sweden.
Christine Wilhelmine “Minna” Planer Wagner intercepted a letter written by her husband Richard to Mathilde Wesendonck, married lady, that he had wrapped in the 1st sketch of his Prelude to Tristan und Isolde. She confronted Mathilde with it, thus bringing to its conclusion the silent “arrangement” HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
between the Wagners and the Wesendoncks:
In the morning I regained my senses, and was able to pray to my angel from the very depths of my heart; and this prayer is love! My soul rejoices in this love, which is the well-spring of my redemption.... Be good and forgive me, and forgive my childishness yesterday; you were quite right to call it that! The weather seems quite mild. I shall come into the garden today; as soon as I see you, I hope I may find you alone for a moment! Take my whole soul as a morning salutation! HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
April 7. A cold and gusty, blustering day. We put on greatcoats again.
P.M. — Down the Great Meadows.
“Downriver,” “To Great Meadow,” and “To Hill” signified a northward trip down the Concord River below the triple point of the confluence. After passing through a straight reach aligned by the local bedrock strike, arched by two bridges, and flanked by gravel bars of historic sediment that were repeatedly dredged, he entered the north side of Great Meadow. Bounded by the site of the Old North Bridge to the southwest and Ball’s Hill to the northeast, it was two miles long and half a mile across. When in flood, the meadow was his favorite inland sea to sail upon because the wind was least impeded and the waves were highest. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 11
The river is low, even for summer. The ground about the outmost willow at my boat’s place is high and dry. I cross the meadows and step across the Mill Brook near Mrs. Ripley’s. You hear no stertorous sounds of the Rana halecina this cold and blustering day, unless a few when you go close to their breeding-places and listen attentively. Scarcely one has his head out of water, though I see many at the bottom. I wear india-rubber boots and wade through the shallow water where they were found. In a shallow sheet of water on the meadow, with a grassy bottom, the spawn will commonly all be collected in one or two parcels in the deepest part, if it is generally less than 8 or 10 inches deep, to be prepared for a further fall. You will also find a little here and there in weedy ditches in the meadow. One of the first-named parcels will consist of even a hundred separate deposits about 3 or 4 inches in diameter crowded together. The frogs are most numerous to-day about and beneath the spawn. Each little mass of ova is pretty firmly attached to the stubble, — not accidentally, but designedly and effectually, — and when you pull it off, leaves some of the jelly adhering to the stubble. If the mass is large it will run out of your hand this side or that, like a liquid, or as if it had life, — like “sun-squall.” It is not injured by any ordinary agitation of the water, but the mass adheres well together. It bears being carried any distance in a pail. When dropped into the water again, it falls wrong side up, showing the white sides of the cores or yolks (?). On the Great Meadows, I stand close by two coupled. The male is very much the smallest, an inch, at least, the shortest, and much brighter-colored. The line, or “halo” (?), or margin about its blotches is a distinct yellow or greenish yellow. The female has a distended paunch full of spawn. Snipes rise two or three times as I go over the meadow. The remarkable spawn of the 3d, just below the Holt (?), does not show its cylindrical form so well as before; appears to have been broken up considerably, perhaps by creatures feeding on it. I see the remains of a duck which has died on this meadow, and the southeast edge of the meadow is strewn with the feathers of the water-fowl that plumed themselves here before the water went down. There is no water anywhere on these meadows now — except the one or two permanent pools— which I cannot walk through in my boots. Where they have been digging mud the past winter in Beck Stow’s Swamp, I perceive that the crust, for one HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
foot deep at least, consists chiefly, or perhaps half of it, — the rest mainly sphagnum, — of the dead and fallen stems of water andromeda which have accumulated in course of time. I brought home the above two kinds of spawn in a pail. Putting some of the Rana halecina spawn in a tumbler of water, I cannot see the gelatinous part, but only the dark or white cores, which are kept asunder by it at regular intervals. The other (probably fish) spawn is seen to be arranged in perfect hexagons; i.e., the ova so impinge on each other; but where there is a vent or free side, it is a regular arc of a circle. Is not this the form that spheres pressing on each other equally on all sides assume? I see the embryo, already fish-like (?), curved round the yolk, with a microscope. (The greater part of the fish-spawn, being left out in a firkin, was apparently killed by the cold, the water freezing half an inch thick April 7th.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
1859
October 30, late at night: Minot Pratt wrote to Mrs. Minot Pratt after attending Henry Thoreau’s impassioned lecture about Harpers Ferry and John Brown: I have just returned, (most 10 o’clock,) from hearing a sort of lecture from Henry Thoreau, on the subject of the affair at Harper’s Ferry, or rather on the character of Capt. Brown. Henry spoke of him in terms of the most unqualified eulogy. I never heard him before speak so much in praise of any man, and did not know that his sympathies were so strong in favor of the poor slave. He thinks Capt. Brown has displayed heroic qualities that will cause him to be remembered wherever and whenever true heroism is admired. The lecture was full of Henry’s quaint and strong expressions: hitting the politicians in the hardest manner, and showing but little of that veneration which is due to our beloved President and all the government officials, who are laboring so hard and so disinterestedly for the welfare of the dear people. The church also, as a body, came in for a share of whipping, and it was laid on right earnestly. In the course of his remarks on Capt. Brown’s heroic character, and actions in the service of freedom and the probability of his being killed therefor, he said he had been very strongly impressed with the possibility of a man’s dying — very few men can die — they never lived, how then can they die! The life they lived was not life — that constant endeavor after selfgratification, with no high aspiration and effort for the race, was too mean an existence to be called life. Brown was a man of ideas and action; whatever he saw to be right, that he endeavored to do with energy, without counting the cost to himself. Such a real, live man could die. The lecture was full of noble, manly ideas, though, perhaps, a little extravagant in its eulogy of Capt. Brown. Bronson Alcott was also writing that night about the reception of Thoreau’s lecture (JOURNALS. Boston: Little, Brown, 1938, page 320): Thoreau reads a paper of his on John Brown, his virtues, spirit, and deeds, at the Vestry this evening, and to the delight of his company I am told — the best that could be gathered on short notice, and among them Emerson. I am not informed in season, and have my meeting at the same time. I doubt not of his excellence and eloquence, and wish he may have opportunities of reading it elsewhere.
[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR OCTOBER 30th] HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
1860
March 9, Friday: Thaddeus Hyatt submitted a 20-page document in which his lawyers contended that the Senate investigation constituted a judicial trial; therefore, the legislative body had overstepped its powers under the federal Constitution, as it only had judicial power in the cases of evaluating the qualifications of its members, expelling Senators, and conducting impeachment trials. The document argued that “to compel witnesses to attend before a committee to give information in regard to proposed legislation, is not a power given by the Constitution.” The New-York Times reported that due to its sheer length (it needed to be read aloud on the Senate floor) a couple of Senate clerks had become exhausted. Anyway, most of the Senators made themselves scarce during this required oral reading. Then the Senate voted to confine Hyatt to the Washington DC jail until he agreed to testify. The prisoner would decline to petition the Supreme Court for habeas corpus.
March 9. Snows this forenoon, whitening the ground again.
2 and 3 P.M. — Thermometer 41°. MINOT PRATT I have seen three or four pieces of coral in the fields of Concord, and Mr. Pratt has found three or four on his farm. How shall they be accounted for? Who brought them here? and when? These barns shelter more beasts than oxen and horses. If you stand awhile in one of them now, especially where grain is piled, you will hear ever and anon a rustling in it made by the mice, which take the barn to be their home, as much as the house is yours. As I recall it, February began cold, with some dry and fine driving snow, making those shell-shaped drifts behind walls, and some days after were some wild but low drifts on the meadow ice. I walked admiring the winter sky and clouds. After the first week, methinks, it was much milder, and I noticed that some sounds, like the tinkling of railroad rails, etc., were springlike. Indeed, the rest of the month was earine, river breaking up a part and closing again, and but little snow. About 8th and 12th, the beauty of the ice on the meadows, partly or slightly rotted, was noticeable, with the curious figures in it, and, in the coolest evenings, the green ice and rosy isles of flat drifts. About the 9th, noticed the very black water of some open reaches, in a high wind and cold. About the middle of the month was a moist, lodging snow, and the 18th a fine granular one, making about a foot,—the last. Then sudden warm weather and rain come and dissolve it all at once, and the ruts, flowing with melted snow, shone in the sun, and the little sleighing was all gone. And from the 25th to 27th the river generally broke up. March began warm, and I admired the ripples made by the gusts on the dark-blue meadow flood, and the light- tawny color of the earth, and was on the alert for several days to hear the first birds. For a few days past it has been generally colder and rawer, and the ground has been whitened with snow two or three times, but it has all been windy. You incline to walk now along the south side of hills which will shelter you from the blustering northwest and north winds. The sidewalks are wet in the morning from the frost coming out.
July 14, Saturday: The 1st patient was admitted to Wisconsin’s 1st state mental hospital, in Mendota, three years after the state legislature approved construction of the hospital on March 6, 1857. J. Edwards Lee was the hospital’s 1st superintendent. Although this was a statewide facility, Wisconsin was unique among the states in the nineteenth because of its heavy reliance on a system of small county mental health facilities.8 PSYCHOLOGY
8. Street, W.R. A CHRONOLOGY OF NOTEWORTHY EVENTS IN AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY. Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 1994 HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
July 14, Saturday: 2 P.M. – To Botrychium Swamp. MINOT PRATT Botrychium Virginianum apparently in prime. Alopecurus aristulatus past prime. Pratt’s Pond side. Perceive now the light-colored tops of chestnuts in bloom, and, when I come near them, an offensive, sickening odor, somewhat like that of the barberry blossoms, but worse. Returning, I notice on a large pool of water in A. Heywood’s cow-yard a thick greenish-yellow scum mantling it, an exceedingly rich and remarkable color, as if it were covered with a coating of sulphur. This sort of scum seems to be peculiar to cow-yards, and contrasts with that red one by the Moore’s Swamp road last summer. Out of foulness Nature thus extracts beauty. These phenomena are observed only in summer or warm weather, methinks.
7 P.M. – On river. Water ten and five eighths above summer level; probably about done rising. The spartina grass. I look for dewdrops on the pontederia, but see none at first; but finally, looking in a still and shady place behind some willows, I see many drops fully formed sparkling in the light, at just eight minutes after seven by my watch (the sun sets at thirty-five minutes after seven; say, then, half an hour before sunset). But, it being windy, I did not notice any generally, even long after sunset. Also looked to see if the lilies withdraw under water at night, as stated in Mrs. Lincoln’s Botany. The buds which opened and closed to-day, and other buds, now rest half an inch or more deep in the water, which they would naturally do by their form and weight. When they open in the morning they will probably rest more buoyantly on the surface, but I have never discovered that they withdrew under water. The fowl-meadow grass is now in prime and covering the islands very densely. It has a purplish tinge and a very green culm contrasting with its panicle. The surface of the earth in summer is painted of various shades of green in mowing and pasture and meadow and some waste land by the grasses. The Agrostis vulgaris of pastures and hilltops is a dark green, the Festuca ovina a very light (even whitish) green. How rich some fields of red-top at present! Perfect squares, it may be, like rich carpets spread out, and contrasting with very different tints of green next to them. The true grasses (excepting the grains) which thus at a distance paint the landscape generally at this season or earlier are (1) herd’s-grass, (2) red-top, (3) Agrostis scabra, (4) blue-joint (?), (5) June-grass, (6) Poa compressa, (7) fowl-meadow, (8) sheep’s fescue, (9) piper grass (?), (10) vernal grass, (11) canary grass, especially Nos. 5, 2, 8, 6, 1; but of these only one (8), probably, is indigenous, and Nos. 5, 6, 10, 11 are now generally done. The Cyperaceae which now or earlier color the landscape generally by their mass are (1) Carex Pennsylvanica, (2) C. scoparia, (3) monile, (4) stellulata, (5) lanuginosa, (6) bullata, (7) siccata, (8) crinita, (9) lupulina, (10) Scirpus eriophorum, (11) Eleocharis acicularis, (12) Scirpus lacustris, (13) eriophorums, etc. Nos. 1 and 7 give a yellow hue to upland open wilds or woodlands and dry hollows, where the forest has recently stood,–not pastured. 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10 make the mass of the sedge on the river meadows, of a general yellow hue; 2 and 8 flourish more about their edges; 11 greens the muddy banks at low water; and 12 stands in dark-green patches here and there along the muddy shores of the river. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
July 31, Tuesday: George Partridge Bradford found and brought to Henry Thoreau a plant which was judged to be, from a plate in John Claudius Loudon’s 1838 botanical reference ARBORETUM ET FRUTICETUM BRITANNICUM, the Potentilla recta of southern Europe.
July 31. Foggy morning. MINOT PRATT M. Pratt sends me Trifolium agrarium (a long time out) from a ditch-side on his land, – yellow hop clover. This specimen is two feet high or long. He had not seen it there for some years. Mr. Bradford finds and brings to me what I judge from a plate in Loudon to be Potentilla recta of southern Europe; a long time out. Vide press. I find the base of the plant by the east wall, in the road, about six rods south of John Flint’s house. I copy this account of P. rec ta from Persoon: “Fol. septenatis quinatisque, foliol. lanceolatis grosse dentatis, petalis obcordatis cal. majoribus, caule erecto.… Ad muros et ad agrorum margines. Pet. magna pallida, calyce submajora.” This is under his division with digitate leaves and a naked receptacle (?), if this is his word. [It is.] But in this the outside of the calyx or receptacle is shortly pubescent, and the petals are much longer than the calyx. Vide Persoon’s other division. [Do not find another so much like it.] HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
P.M. – Up Assabet.
“Up Assabet” is probably the most common opening phrase in Thoreau’s two-million-word journal. This was his favorite destination under default conditions, meaning the wind was light and the river stage was neither in flood nor in drought. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 10
Decidedly dog-days, and a strong musty scent, not to be wondered at after the copious rains and the heat of yesterday. At mid-afternoon I am caught in another deluging rain [A great deal fell.] as I stand under a maple by the shore. Looking on a water surface, you can see as well as hear when it rains very hard. At first we had a considerable shower which but slightly dimpled the water, and I saw the differently shaded or lit currents of the river through it all; but anon it began to rain very hard, and there were a myriad white globules dancing or rebounding an inch or two from the surface, where the big drops fell, and I heard a sound as if it rained pebbles or shot. At this season the sound of a gentler rain than this, i.e. the sound of the dripping rain on the leaves, which are now dark and hard, yields a dry sound as if the drops struck on paper, but six weeks ago, when the leaves were so yellowish and tender, methinks it was a softer sound, as was the rustling. Now, in the still moonlight, the dark foliage stands almost stiff and dark against the sky. At 5 P.M. the river is nine and seven eighths inches above summer level. We may expect to see any common small-seeded European plant springing up by our roadsides in course of time. Before it rained hardest I could see in the midst of the dark and smoother water a lighter-colored and rougher surface, generally in oblong patches, which moved steadily down the stream, and this, I think, was the new water from above welling up and making its way downward amid the old. The water or currents of a river are thus not homogeneous, but the surface is seen to be of two shades, the smoother and darker water which already fills its bed [?] and the fresh influx of lighter-colored and rougher, probably more rapid, currents which spot it here and there; i.e., some water seems to occupy it as a lake to some extent, other is passing through it as a stream, – the lacustrine and the fluviatile water. These lighter reaches without reflections (?) are, as it were, water wrong side up. But do I ever see these except when it rains? And are they not the rain-water which has not yet mingled with the water of the river?
August 19, Sunday: Willoughby Boatwright, age 45, and Richard Boatwright, age 53, cousins and local residents, were lynched by a vigilante committee in Texas on this day by hanging, in Robertson County, upon being reportedly accused of “tampering with slaves.”
Also during this week, in Tarrant County in Texas, 2 unidentified white men were also lynched by hanging, and were reported in the newspapers to have been abolitionists.
August 19. Examine now more at length that smooth, turnip-scented brassica which is a pest in some MINOT PRATT grain-fields. Formerly in Stow’s land; this year in Warren’s, on the Walden road. To-day I see it in Minot Pratt’s, with the wild radish, which is a paler yellow and a rougher plant. I thought it before the B. campestris, but Persoon puts that under brassicas with siliquis tetraedris, which this is not, but, for aught that appears, it agrees with his B. Napus, closely allied, i.e. wild rape. Elliot speaks of this as introduced here. Vide Patent Office Report for 1853 and “Vegetable Kingdom,” page 179. The B. campestris also is called rape. [Vide Sept. 8.] Leersia (cut-grass) abundantly out, apparently several days. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
October 11, Thursday: A parade held in New-York for Edward, Prince of Wales drew 200,000 people. A Colonel Michael Corcoran who refused –for obvious reasons– to parade would of course be court-martialed.
MINOT PRATT October (10 and) 11: P.M. – To Sleepy Hollow and north of M. Pratt’s. There is a remarkably abundant crop of white oak acorns this fall, also a fair crop of red oak acorns; but not of scarlet and black, very few of them. Which is as well for the squirrel. The acorns are now in the very midst of their fall. The white oak acorn is about the prettiest of ours. They are a glossy hazel (while the red and black are more or less downy at first) and of various forms, –some nearly spherical but commonly oblong and pointed, some more slender oval or elliptical; and of various shades of brown, –some almost black, but generally a wholesome hazel. Those which have fallen longest, and been exposed to the severe frosts on the ground, are partly bleached there. The white oak acorns are found chiefly on trees growing in the open or on the edge of the wood, and on the most exposed side of these trees. They grow either singly or in twos and threes. This afternoon (11th) the strong wind which arose at noon has strewn the ground with them. I could gather many bushels in a short time. This year is as good for white oak acorns as for apples and pears. What pleasant picking on the firm, green pasture sod which is browned with this glossy fruit! The worms are already at work in them, –sometimes three or four in one,– and some are already decayed and decaying on the tree without a worm. The fibery inner bark of the nut appears to retain moisture and hasten rot, especially when the fruit has once been swollen by the wet. The best time to gather these nuts is now, when a strong wind has arisen suddenly in the day, before the squirrels have preceded you; and so of chestnuts. Of red oak acorns, some are short and broad, others longer. I see some pretty shrub oak acorns longitudinally striped. Chestnuts also are frequently striped, but before they have been exposed to the light, and are completely ripe. The season is as favorable for pears as for apples. R.W.E.’s garden is strewn with them. They are not so handsome as apples, –are of more earthy and homely colors, –yet they are of a wholesome color enough. Many, inclining to a rough russet or even ferruginous, both to touch (rusty) and eye, look as if they were proof against frost. After all, the few varieties of wild pears here have more color and are handsomer than the many celebrated varieties that are cultivated. The cultivated are commonly of so dull a color that it is hard to distinguish them from the leaves, and if there are but two or three left you do not see them revealing themselves distinctly at a distance amid the leaves, as apples do, but I see that the gatherer has overlooked half a dozen large ones on this small tree, which were concealed by their perfect resemblance to the leaves, – a yellowish green, spotted with darker-green rust or fungi (?). Yet some have a fair cheek, and, generally, in their form they are true pendants, as if shaped expressly to hang from the trees. They are a more aristocratic fruit. How much more attention they get from the proprietor! The hired man gathers the apples and barrels them. The proprietor plucks the pears at odd hours for a pastime, and his daughter wraps them each in its paper. They are, perchance, put up in the midst of a barrel of Baldwins as if something more precious than these. They are spread on the floor of the best room. They are a gift to the most distinguished guest. Judges and ex-judges and honorables are connoisseurs of pears, and discourse of them at length between sessions. I hold in my hand a Bonne Louise which is covered with minute brown specks or dots one twelfth to one sixteenth [OF AN INCH] apart, largest and most developed on the sunny side, quite regular and handsome, as if they were the termination or operculum of pores which had burst in the very thin pellicle of the fruit, producing a slight roughness to the touch. Each of these little ruptures, so to call them, is in form a perfect star with five rays; so that, if the apple is higher-colored, reflecting the sun, on the duller surface of this pear the whole firmament with its stars shines forth. They whisper of the happy stars under whose influence they have grown and matured. It is not the case with all of them, but only the more perfect specimens. Pears, it is truly said, are less poetic than apples. They have neither the beauty nor the fragrance of apples, but their excellence is in their flavor, which speaks to a grosser sense. They are glouts-morceaux. Hence, while children dream of apples, ex-judges realize pears. They are named after emperors and kings and queens and dukes and duchesses. I fear I shall have to wait till we get to pears with American names, which a republican can swallow. Looking through a more powerful glass, those little brown dots are stars with from four to six rays, –commonly five,– where a little wart-like prominence (perhaps the end of a pore or a thread) appears to have burst through HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
the very thin pellicle and burst it into so many rays.
THE FALLACY OF MOMENTISM: THIS STARRY UNIVERSE DOES NOT CONSIST OF A SEQUENCE OF MOMENTS. THAT IS A FIGMENT, ONE WE HAVE RECOURSE TO IN ORDER TO PRIVILEGE TIME OVER CHANGE, A PRIVILEGING THAT MAKES CHANGE SEEM UNREAL, DERIVATIVE, A MERE APPEARANCE. IN FACT IT IS CHANGE AND ONLY CHANGE WHICH WE EXPERIENCE AS REALITY, TIME BEING BY WAY OF RADICAL CONTRAST UNEXPERIENCED — A MERE INTELLECTUAL CONSTRUCT. THERE EXISTS NO SUCH THING AS A MOMENT. NO “INSTANT” HAS EVER FOR AN INSTANT EXISTED.
November 17, Saturday: Isaac Wellington, the head of the Elmira, New York “Free Academy,” wrote to Henry Thoreau asking about getting a copy of “SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES”. Elmira, N.Y. Nov. 17, 1860. Mr.Thoreau Dear Sir The subject of the Succession of Forest Trees is greatly interesting me. If I am rightly informed you not long since read a Paper on this subject before the Middlesex Agr. Soc. Would you be so kind as to inform me if your Address has been published & if so, where I may obtain? Before trespassing further on your kindness, permit me briefly to state what we are doing. Being a native of Waltham, Mass, this pres- ent year, Elmira Free Academy is given to my charge. In carrying out a novel plan of Composition & Thinking Class Exercises, my seventy five pupils —aged from twelve to twenty— and myself are come to the above
Page 2 subject. Judging from past experience, I shall so enthusuize them that their letters to me, after laying the matter before them, will abound in questions & facts. I anticipate one question of the follow- ing sort.
MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
“Does not Nature sow her forests —waiving the agencies for sowing for the moment— by putting in her seed at some period long anterior to the growing? Such a question will involve research as regards the long lived vitality of seeds. I know of but little written upon this latter subject, & this letter is not based upon any presented facts touchng the vitality of seeds. Your greater research & experience might di- rect me to books & facts where throwing light upon this subject. Could you take this trouble you would largly aid one toiling to lead the young from some many of the frivolous, to some of the useful, ways of living & confer a great favor [in] Isaac M. Wellington To Mr H.D. Thoreau. Prin. Elmira Free Academy
November 17: P.M. – To Blood’s woods. Sawed off a branch of creeping juniper two inches [IN] diameter with fifteen rings. On one square of nine rods in Blood’s wood, which seemed more dense than the average, are thirteen sizable trees. This would give about two hundred and thirty to an acre, but probably there are not more than one hundred and eighty to an acre, take the wood through. This is but little more than one to a square rod. Yet this is a quite dense wood. That very solid white oak stump recently sawed in this wood was evidently a seedling, the growth was so extremely slow at first. If I found the case to be the same with the other oaks here, I should feel sure that these were all seedlings and therefore had been preceded by pines or at least some dense evergreens, or possibly birches. When I find a dense oak wood, whether sprouts or seedlings, I affirm that evergreens once stood [THERE] and, if man does not prevent, will grow again. This I must believe until I find a dense oak wood planted under itself or in open land. MINOT PRATT Minot Pratt’s elm is sixteen and a quarter feet [IN] circumference at three feet.
These tawny-white oaks are thus by their color and character the lions among trees, or rather, not to compare them with a foreign animal, they are the cougars or panthers–the American lions–among the trees, for nearly such is that of the cougar which walks beneath and amid or springs upon them. There is plainly this harmony CAT between the color of our chief wild beast of the cat kind and our chief tree. How they do things in West Acton. As we were walking through West Acton the other afternoon, a few rods only west of the centre, on the main road, the Harvard turnpike, we saw a rock larger than a man could lift, lying in the road, exactly in the wheel-track, and were puzzled to tell how it came there, but supposed it had slipped off a drag, – yet we noticed that it was peculiarly black. Returning the same way in the twilight, when we had got within four or five rods of this very spot, looking up, we saw a man in the field, three or four rods on one HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
side of that spot, running off as fast as he could. By the time he had got out of sight over the hill it occurred to us that he was blasting rocks and had just touched one off; so, at the eleventh hour, we turned about and ran the other way, and when we had gone a few rods, off went two blasts, but fortunately none of the rocks struck us. Some time after we had passed we saw the men returning. They looked out for themselves, but for nobody else. This is the way they do things in West Acton. We now understood that the big stone was blackened by powder. Silas Hosmer tells me how [ ] and [ ] sold the Heywood lot between the railroad and Fair Haven. They lotted it off in this wise:
i. e. in triangles, and, carrying plenty of liquor, they first treated all round, and then proceeded to sell at auction, but the purchasers, excited with liquor, were not aware when the stakes were pointed out that the lots were not as broad in the rear as in front, and the wood standing cost them as much as it should have done delivered at the door. I frequently see the heads of teasel, called fuller’s thistle, floating on our river, having come from factories above, and thus the factories which use it may distribute its seeds by means of the streams which turn their machinery, from one to another. The one who first cultivated the teasel extensively in this town is said to have obtained the seed when it was not to be purchased–the culture being monopolized–by sweeping a wagon which he had loaned to a teasel-raiser. The growth of very old trees, as appears by calculating the bulk of wood formed, is feebler at last than when in middle age, or say in pitch pine at one hundred and sixty than at forty or fifty, especially when you consider the increased number of leaves, and this, together with the fact that old stumps send up no shoots, shows that trees are not indefinitely long-lived. I have a section of a chestnut sprout–and not at all a rank one–which has 6 rings in the first inch, or 4 rings in five eighths of an inch, but a section of a chestnut seedling has 10 rings in five eighths of an inch. A section of a white oak sprout, far from rank, has 4 rings in first five eighths of an inch; of a seedling ditto, 16 or 17 in first five eighths of an inch; of a seedling ditto, 8–in first five eighths of an inch; of a very slow-grown sprout, 6–in first five eighths of an inch. Or in the white oaks the proportion is as five to twelve. The first seedling oak has the rough and tawny light-brown bark of an old tree, while the first sprout is quite smooth-barked. A seedling white birch has 10 rings in first seven eighths of an inch. A sprout white birch has 5 rings in first seven eighths of an inch. The first has the white bark of an old tree; the second, a smooth and reddish bark. When a stump is sound to the pith I can commonly tell whether it was a seedling or a sprout by the rapidity of the growth at first. A seedling, it is true, may have died down many times till it is fifteen or twenty years old, and so at last send up a more vigorous shoot than at first, but generally the difference is very marked. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
1878
March 29, Friday: Minot Pratt died at the age of 73 in Concord, Massachusetts. He had donated his copy of ON THE PHENOMENA OF MODERN SPIRITUALISM. BY WILLIAM B. HAYDEN ... (Boston: Otis Clapp, 1855) to the about- to-open Concord Free Public Library during July 1873. Frederick Gray Pratt would soon present his father’s flora of Concord, PLANTS OF CONCORD. NATURAL AND INTRODUCED. ARRANGED BY MINOT PRATT, in manuscript form, to the Concord Free Public Library. His copy of the “School and College Edition” of MANUAL OF THE BOTANY OF THE NORTHERN UNITED STATES. REVISED EDITION; INCLUDING VIRGINIA, KENTUCKY, AND ALL EAST OF THE MISSISSIPPI; ARRANGED ACCORDING TO THE NATURAL SYSTEM. BY ASA GRAY ... WITH SIX PLATES, ILLUSTRATING THE GENERA OF FERNS, ETC. ... (New York: Ivison, Phinney & Co.; Chicago: S.C. Griggs & Co., 1860) is also now held by the Concord Free Public Library.
The New York Times ran a fascinating article on “the penalty for murder,” extrapolating from Nashville, Tennessee gazettes of the previous day about a double hanging that had transacted at Cookeville in Putnam County before an assembly of some 10,000 citizens. George Andrew Brassell, age 21, and Joseph Lewis Brassell, age 23, had been guests of honor on the rude platform, on account of their murder of Russell Allison and Claude Allison. Sheriff Bohannon had started with the prisoners from the jail at 10 o’clock, with them seated upon their coffins in a wagon, although some of this assembly of citizens had already been eagerly waiting in the field and guarding their relative positions in the assembly since before dawn. The prisoners were surrounded by an honor guard of 200 heavily armed deputies. The sister of the condemned brothers, Miss Brassell, had followed along behind. The procession arrived at the platform at about 11:30AM. The brothers asked their sister to go away and not witness the event, whereupon she complied. When the prisoners had seated themselves in chairs on the platform, the Reverend T.S. McFerran read the 3d chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, and the Reverend T.S. McFerran prayed and delivered an address to all young men present in the assembly (while in prison the convicted men had been baptized and received into the Methodist Church). Remarks were made by Sheriff Bohannon and the prisoners were asked whether they were ready to die. They briefly addressed the crowd, bidding them to beware of evil association and of whiskey, and asked to be executed at 1 o’clock. However, subsequent to the reading of the death warrant, and after they had kissed each other several times, they changed their minds and asked to be allowed to live until the last possible moment. Upon this their hoods were removed and Joseph Lewis Brassell confessed that he had murdered Russell Allison, implicating a Johnson, a Bates, and another whose name he declined to divulge. After this, George Andrew Brassell asserted his innocence. They requested that the Sheriff announce the arrival of each minute, and then the last half minute, which he did after their hoods were replaced, cutting the rope at 1:30PM, thus allowing the Brassells to drop 3 feet, which snapped their necks. They were pronounced dead after 11 minutes and were cut down at 1:45PM. The bodies were placed in the coffins and released to their friends. HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
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 2018. 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: June 3, 2018 HDT WHAT? INDEX
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
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
MINOT PRATT MRS. MARIA JONES BRIDGE PRATT
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