THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD:HORACE RICE HOSMER HORACE RICE HOSMER

Horace Rice Hosmer, store clerk, inventor, pencil maker and salesman, painter, handyman, farmer, son of Joseph Hosmer (1735- 1821) and brother of Joseph Hosmer, Jr., the abolitionist, a schoolmate of the Thoreau brothers, whose farm a mile and a half north of Concord was used in the Underground Railroad. Young Horace himself attended the Concord Academy, where he was tutored by John Thoreau, Jr. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

1635

According to a still-extant fragment from the earliest Concord records, it was “Ordered that the meeting-house stande on the hill near the brook on the easte of Goodman Judgson’s lott.” Public Buildings — Meeting-houses. — To provide suitable accommodations for public religious worship, was one of the first acts of the town after its incorporation. And hence we find it recorded in a fragment of the proceedings of the town in 1635 — “Ordered that the meeting-house stande on the hill near the brook on the easte of Goodman Judgson’s lott.” Tradition informs us, that this was on the hill some distance easterly from the common. This house served as a place of worship about 30 years. ... A town bell was procured very early, but at what time does not appear. At first it was hung on a tree, and its tones are said to have been terrible to the neighboring Indians. About 1696 it was broken, and sent to England to be recast. In 1700 it was “hanged on the meeting-house in the turret,” where it remained till the court-house was built, on which it was placed til 1791, when it was removed to the meeting- house. A new bell was procured, in 1784, from Hanover, weighing 500 lbs., but being broken, another was ordered from England in 1789, which continued till 1826, when the present one, weighing 1572 lbs., was obtained.1

1. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry Thoreau would indicate a familiarity  with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

 The Hosmer family, originating in Kent County, England, acquired one square mile of land in Concord.

The Hosmer Home  James Hosmer (1) of Concord, born 1605, came in the Elizabeth from London during 1635 with his wife Ann, 27 year of age, and their daughters Mary, 2, and Ann, 3 months, and 2 maidservants. He had been of Hawkhurst, in County Kent; he had here James Hosmer (2), born during 1637; John Hosmer, born during 1639; another daughter Mary, born on January 10th, 1641, who died August 18th, 1642, and the wife, another wife named Mary, had died on May 11th, 1641. Soon he had yet another wife, in the record called Alice, by whom was born Stephen Hosmer (1), born on November 27th, 1642; Hannah Hosmer, born during 1644, and Mary Hosmer, born during 1646; and then another wife named Mary, although in another place this wife is said to be named Ellen. She died on March 3d, 1665. He was a freeman on May 17th, 1657, and died on February 7th, 1685. His daughter Mary Hosmer got married with Thomas Smith of Concord; and Hannah Hosmer got married on October 26th, 1665 with Joseph Hayward.

Hosmer Houses in Concord • 41 Lowell Road: The Nathan Hosmer House built in 1828 when he married Sophia Wheeler. Deeded to his son, Herbert whose brother, Alfred (Fred) Hosmer took numerous pictures of Concord at the turn of the 19th century. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

• 320 Lowell Road: The Hunt--Hosmer house — In 1852, Edmund Hosmer, the “poetical farmer” friend of Emerson and Thoreau, moved here from his farm on Sandy Pond Road. There is a story about Edmund’s 2 daughters and their successful efforts to stop the town from chopping down 2 trees in front of the property. • 572 Main Street: The Joseph Hosmer House (Joseph was the cabinetmaker and was at the North Bridge on April 19, 1775). • 1361 Sudbury Road: The Nathanial Hosmer house was built approximately at the time of his marriage to Lucy Meriam. • 25 Old Marlboro Road: John Hosmer built this around 1789, adjacent to his large farm. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

1787

In this year, at the age of 40, Thomas Dugan ran away from a white man named either “Whittaker Ward” or “Solomon Ward,” on the James River, a man who evidently was still supposing that human beings could own other human beings. Here is a “PRAYER for a Negroe”:  SLAVERY O Thou great God, the Maker and Lord of all creatures, I, a poor sinner, black in body, and still blacker in sin, would humbly try to worship thee, and glorify thy name, that I am allowed to pray to thee.... Lord give me grace to love thee, and thy dear Son, and thy blessed ways, and thy holy law, and to love all that love God, and make the land of my slavery, the place of my true freedom. Lord, pity poor Negroes, that are living without God in the world, and turn and convert them to thee. Bless my master, and all that are his. Make me a faithful servant; and teach me to remember, that what good thing soever any man doth; the same shall he receive of the lord, whether he be bound or free.... Amen.

This fugitive from Virginia human possessiveness would eventually wind up in the vicinity of Walden Pond, where in this year John Wyman or Wayman was building a home and pottery manufactory just where there is now the regraded entrance to the State Reservation parking lot. This land at the northeast end of the pond was at the time owned by Dr. Abel Prescott, so very clearly he would have been “squatting with permission.” Henry Thoreau eventually would be talking to John Wyman or Wayman’s son Tommy the potter (Thomas Wyman, see journal entry for June 16, 1853)  WALDEN: An old man, a potter, who lived by the pond before the PEOPLE OF Revolution, told him once that there was an iron chest at the WALDEN bottom, and that he had seen it. Sometimes it would come floating up to the shore; but when you went toward it, it would go back into deep water and disappear. I was pleased to hear of the old log canoe, which took the place of an Indian one of the same material but more graceful construction, which perchance had first been a tree on the bank, and then, as it were, fell into the water, to float there for a generation, the most proper vessel for the lake. I remember that when I first looked into these depths there were many large trunks to be seen indistinctly lying on the bottom, which had either been blown over formerly, or left on the ice at the last cutting, when wood was cheaper; but now they have mostly disappeared.

JOHN WYMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

Horace Rice Hosmer would report that Dugan, who was known sometimes in Concord as “Ward” after his owner in Virginia, indicated that he had been riding behind his slavemaster father to cut grass on a meadow of the James or Jameses River, carrying a scythe, and had been attempting to get this scythe to catch on a limb of a tree or a bush so he would be able to jerk it and kill Whittaker with an apparently accidental blow (the only Solomon Ward we have been able to identify in Virginia was but 12 years old at this time, and thus could not have been the 40-year-old mulatto slave’s father, and there had been no Solomon Ward in the previous generation of that family; we have not been able to locate anyone at all of the name “Whittaker”). But this did not come off so Thomas waited for an opportunity that day around noon and swam the river and headed for the North, assuming the name Thomas Dugan. (Horace’s father Joseph Hosmer was another of these field workers for Cyrus Hosmer, working alongside Dugan, so perhaps Horace had heard this story secondhand, by way of his father Joseph.) Dugan would make, according to himself, the 1st grain cradle in Concord. Dugan did, according to himself, some of the 1st fruit-tree grafting in Concord. Dugan worked for his board plus $0.25 a day, or more, at day work. He had a long-term basic understanding with Cyrus Hosmer, worked for him by preference in return for some security during slack periods. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

1814

September 28, Wednesday: In Concord, Massachusetts, “[30] Joseph Hosmer, son of Joseph Hosmer, 2d & Lydia his wife was born Sept. 28, 1814” CONCORD TOWN RECORDS

He would be the elder brother of Horace Rice Hosmer and a schoolmate of the Thoreau brothers.  He would become a cordwainer (shoemaker). “Thoreau was an enigma to all of us.  No one could place him.” — Joseph Hosmer HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

1816

April 3, Wednesday: In Concord, Massachusetts, “Benjamin-Gardner Hosmer, son of Joseph Hosmer, 2d & Lydia his wife was born April 3d, 1816.”  CONCORD TOWN RECORDS

This was the 2d Hosmer son, “Benj.” He, as well as his older brother Joseph Hosmer, Jr., would be a schoolmate of the Thoreau brothers. Like his brother he would become a cordwainer (shoemaker). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

1818

Horace Rice Hosmer’s sister, Martha Putnam Hosmer, was born. She would grow up to go to work in a tailor’s shop in another town. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

1830

June 7, Monday: Horace Rice Hosmer was born in a house on the road to Boston, to a father Joseph Hosmer who was 48 years of age and a mother Lydia Davis (or Davys) Hosmer who must already have passed the usual age of menopause (since this infant was considered “the titman of the family. I was generally considered to be my parents’ great mistake”). The family of the mother, Davis or Davys, was from Wales. CONCORD TOWN RECORDS

Through the mediation of Arthur Tappan, William Lloyd Garrison was released from jail in Baltimore.  Dr. James M’Naughton, Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at the University of the State of New-York, presented to the Albany Institute of physicians the strange case of a young man, Reuben Kelsey of Fairfield, Vermont, apparently healthy and apparently sane, who had been studying to become a physician, but who had recently starved himself to death while reading his Bible, over a period of 53 days ingesting only small amounts of water. Was this the case that Henry Thoreau would mention in WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS?  WALDEN: I learned from my two years’ experience that it would cost PEOPLE OF incredibly little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food, even in WALDEN this latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength. I have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory on several accounts, simply off a dish of purslane (Portulaca oleracea) which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled, and salted. I give the Latin on account of the savoriness of the trivial name. And pray what more can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of ears of green sweet-corn boiled, with the addition of salt? Even the little variety which I used was a yielding to the demands of appetite, and not of health. Yet men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries; and I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drinking water only.

REUBEN KELSEY? HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

———————————————————————————————— TRANSACTIONS OF THE ALBANY INSTITUTE VOL. 1. ALBANY: PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY WEBSTER AND SKINNERS. SOLD ALSO BY LITTLE AND CUMMINGS, ALBANY; G.C. AND H. CARVILL, NEW YORK; AND JUDAH DOBSON, PHILADELPHIA. 1830. ———————————————————————————————— ———————————————————————————————— OFFICERS OF THE ALBANY INSTITUTE, FOR 1828. President. STEPHEN VAN RENSSELAER. Vice-Presidents. SIMEON DE WITT, T. ROMEYN BECK. Treasurer. WILLIAM MAYELL. Corresponding Secretaries. PETER GANSEVOORT, M. HENRY WEBSTER~ Recording Secretaries. HENRY W. SNYDER, RICHARD V. DE WITT. Librarian. JOSEPH HENRY. Curators. LEWIS C. BECK, M. HENRY WEBSTER, GEORGE W. CLINTON, RICHARD V. DE WITT, WILLIAM COOPER. ———————————————————————————————— TRANSACTIONS OF THE ALBANY INSTITUTE. JUNE, 1828. Advertisement The ALBANY INSTITUTE is composed of two Societies, which for various periods of time have existed in this city — the Society for the Promotion of Useful Arts in the State of New-York, and the Albany Lyceum of Natural History. Circumstances not necessary to be explained, led to an union of effort and property between their members and other citizens, and as a necessary consequence, to an enlargement of the objects of investigation. The present title of the association was adopted, under the idea that it would comprise the pursuit, both of science and literature, in their most extensive sense. It has been deemed advisable to commence the publication of some of the papers read before the Society. The members do not flatter themselves that they will greatly add to the general stock of knowledge — they may hope, however, that their efforts will tend to disseminate a taste for it. ———————————————————————————————— HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

ART. XII. AN ACCOUNT OF A MAN WHO LIVED ON WATER FOR FIFTY-THREE DAYS. BY JAMES M’NAUGHTON, M.D. PROFESSOR OF ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW-YORK. Read June 7, 1830. The subject of the following narrative lived in the town of Fairfield, Herkimer county, in this state. His father is a respectable farmer, to whom, and to his wife and daughter, I am indebted for the particulars I am about to relate. Reuben Kelsey, the individual referred to, was, until three years ago, considered a young man of great promise — remarkable for the correctness of his conduct, and his diligence in the prosecution of his studies. After having received the ordinary advantages at the academy at Fairfield, he entered on the study of medicine, and read in the office of Dr. Johnson. In the year 1825 he attended the lectures at the College or Physicians and Surgeons of the Western District. Although among so many, it is not always possible to know what proficiency each makes; yet, from all I can gather. he must have at least equalled his companions in the progress he made in his studies. His health seemed good, and there was nothing very peculiar in the operations of his mind. But in the course of the summer, after the close of the session or the college, his health began to decline, and his mind seemed to have undergone a change. His spirits, which were never very buoyant, became more sedate, and his thoughts seemed habitually to dwell on the subject of religion. He quitted Dr. Johnson’s office and went home. From that time until his death, he never left his father’s house, even for a day. For the three years immediately preceding his death, he almost constantly kept his room, apparently engaged in meditation. His only companion was his bible. He read nothing else, and his whole thoughts seemed to be fixed upon another world. He shunned society, even that of the pious; but he seemed happy and full of hopes. To his family be was kind and attached; and, with the exception of the deep cast of his devotional feelings the equilibrium of his intellect did not seem, to his friends at least, to be materially disturbed. Considering the little exercise he took, his general health, during the period, was as good as could have been expected. He came to the table at every meal, when called-and seemed not deficient in appetite. The only sickness of any consequence he experienced during his seclusion was an attack of cholera morbus, in the summer of 1828, from which he soon recovered, and seemed to enjoy his wonted health, until the latter end of May, 1829. At this time, his friends began to notice that his appetite was failing. It continued to decline more and more, until about the beginning of July, when it seemed entirely to have disappeared. For some weeks he had eaten very little; but on the 2d of July, he declined eating altogether-assigning as a reason, that when it was the will of the Almighty that he should eat, he would be furnished with an appetite. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

It is not correct as has been stated in the newspapers, that he refrained from eating, in consequence of a vision warning him to do so, nor that he commenced his fast, in imitation of our Savior in the wilderness. It does not appear that he had set any definite time for his fast, nor very distinctly assigned his motive for fasting at all. Indeed, it is more than probable, that the great motive in the first instance, was, that he felt no inclination to eat, and that after all desire for food had left him, he became convinced that there was more merit in abstinence than in eating. Towards the close of his life, he told his sister that he had not experienced the least hunger except on the second day of his fast. For the first six weeks he went regularly to the well, in the morning, and washed his head and face, and took a bowlful of water with him into the house. With this he used occasionally to wash his mouth-he also used it for drink. His parents think, that the quantity of water he took in 24 hours, did not exceed, if it equalled, a pint. When he had fasted about a week, his parents became alarmed, and sent for medical aid. The physicians, fearing that death would speedily ensue if nothing were done, advised his friends to insist on his taking food, and if necessary, to make use of compulsory measures, to induce him to comply with their wishes. Attempts were accordingly made, to force him to take nourishment, and about a table spoonful of water gruel, was, in consequence, swallowed. But it was found in vain to struggle with him, as neither fear nor entreaty would avail. From that time until his dissolution, he was allowed to follow his inclination, without control or constraint. On one occasion he went three days without taking even water; but this was probably more than he could persist in, as observed to go to the well, and to drink copiously and greedily. On the 11th day of his fast, he replied to the expostulations of his friends, that he had not felt so well, nor so strong, in two years, as at that moment, and consequently denied the necessity of taking food. For the first six weeks he walked out every day, and sometimes spent a great part of the day in the woods. His walk was steady and firm, and his friends even remarked that his step had an unusual elasticity. He shaved himself until about a week before his death, and was able to sit up in bed to the last day. His mental faculties did not seem to become impaired as his general strength declined; but on the contrary, his mind was calm and collected to the end. His voice, as might have been expected, towards the last, became feeble and low, but continued, nevertheless distinct. Towards the close of his life, he did not go into the fields, nor during the last week even to the well; but still, he was able to sit up and go about his room. During the first three weeks of his abstinence, he fell away very fast, but afterwards he did not seem to waste so sensibly. His colour was blue, and towards the last, blackish. His skin was cold and he complained of chilliness. His general appearance HDT WHAT? INDEX

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was so ghastly that children were frightened at the sight of him. Of this he seemed himself to be aware; for it was not uncommon to observe him covering his face when strangers were passing by. Professor Willoughby visited him a few days before he died. He found his skin very cold, the respiration feeble and slow, but otherwise natural; but the effluvia from the breath, and perhaps the skin, were extremely offensive. During the greater part of the latter weeks of his life, the parents say, that there was a considerable discharge of a foul, reddish matter, from the lungs. To this, perhaps, the offensive smell referred to, may be chiefly attributed. The pulse was regular, but slow, and feeble, and what struck Professor Willoughby as most remarkable, was, the diminished size of the radial artery. Owing to the emaciation, it could be very distinctly felt. It seemed to be as small as a stout thread, and much firmer than natural. The artery had contracted to accommodate itself to the diminished quantity of blood it had to convey, and its greater hardness may be attributed partly to this contraction, and partly to the absorption of some of its elements, and the almost total suspension of nutrition. Alvine evacuations were rare. His mother thinks he passed several weeks without any-but the secretion of urine seemed more regular. The voiding of this secretion was one of the last acts of his life. After a lapse of fifty-three days, or nearly eight weeks, nature became exhausted, and his spirit fled. His hopes continued bright to the last, and he departed this life in the full expectation of a glorious immortality. And it is not unreasonable to suppose, from his unblemished life, and ardent piety, while in the possession of his faculties, however erroneous some of his later opinions may be considered, that, in his last hope, he has not been disappointed. The body was examined by Dr. Johnson, the day after death. The viscera did not exhibit any very striking mark of disease. The stomach was not contracted as might have been expected-but was loose and flabby. The gall bladder was distended with a dark, muddy looking bile. The mesentery, stomach, and intestines, were excessively thin and transparent-and there was no fat in the omentum. It looked somewhat like the arachnoid membrane of the brain. At the time of death Mr. Kelsey was 27 years of age. Such are the principal facts I have been able to gather respecting the case of this excellent young man. I may however observe, in conclusion, that, from a consideration of all the circumstances of the case, from the known honesty of all the parties particularly mentioned, and the concurring testimony of friends and neighbours, there is not the smallest reason to suspect, that, in the case, the least deception has been attempted, either by the unfortunate individual himself, or by any one connected with him. A very interesting question presents itself in regard to this case. How could life have been so long protracted under such HDT WHAT? INDEX

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circumstances? It is not perhaps possible in the present state of our knowledge to answer this question in a satisfactory manner. It is not usually supposed that water alone affords any nourishment, at least to the higher animals; but this opinion is incorrect. Water is an ingredient in almost every one of the animal tissues, and a supply of it is as essentially necessary for the preservation of life as that of solid aliment. Plants, it is well known, require little more than air and water to live and grow, to a large size; the same is the case with many kinds of fish. It is therefore likely that air and water contribute materially towards nutrition, even in the human species. But these are not sufficient of themselves, to support life for any great length of time, when all the functions are vigorously performed. But when they are feebly performed, the wheels of life are not so much worn out, consequently they require less repair. In such cases, water and air, together with what can be absorbed from the system itself, may be sufficient to preserve life for a considerable period. In the case above related, life must have been supported by means of water and air, together with what was furnished by one part of his own system, to repair other parts more essential to his being. It is well known that in the most perfect health, many fluids after having been secreted by the arteries, are again resumed by the absorbents, and carried into the venous system to be again, in all probability, used for the nutrition of some particular organs for which from their nature, they may be well adapted. This is true not only in respect to lymph, serum, mucus, saliva, &c. which are considered recrementitious, but also in respect to the urine, and the alimentary mass, after the separation of the chyle. The urine, if long retained in the bladder, becomes darker in its colour, and more highly charged with saline matter, than when it is early expelled. This arises from the absorption of its more watery parts. The faeces also become indurated in consequence of the absorption of the fluid parts, and the breath and cutaneous transpiration become tainted with the effluvia. It is not improbable that the general mass of fluids is much more frequently contaminated in that manner than in the present age is usually allowed. With a knowledge of these facts, it ought not to be considered unreasonable, were we to conclude, that the system may, for a time, be sustained by its own resources-that is, that some of its less essential constituents may be absorbed and used for the nourishment of organs concerned in the nobler functions, upon which the continuance of life depends. I am inclined to the opinion that such is the ordinary course in the most perfect health-namely, that a portion of matter which is no longer fit for sustaining one organ, may yet be fit for the nutrition of some others; and that in this manner it may serve to nourish several tissues before it becomes utterly effete, and is absolutely required to be expelled from the system. It is also probable that in some extraordinary states of the system, such as in the case mentioned, matter is longer retained than in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ordinary condition of the body, when the functions are all well performed, and an adequate supply of food regularly taken;-just as happens in ordinary repairs, when good materials are wanting, such as can be procured — are made use of. Fat is one of the least essential constituants of the body-it is only secreted when the several functions are sluggishly performed — and deposited in different situations, until the exigencies of the system require it to repair the waste of parts, in which decomposition is going on faster than the supplies from without can be elaborated to preserve the due balance between the actions of nutrition and decomposition. We find in accordance with these views, that the secretion of fat ceases whenever the muscular or vascular systems are much excited. We all know that a hard working man is hardly ever fat, even when well fed — we also know how soon the fat already secreted is absorbed in consumption and fevers. Fat is therefore one of the first constituents of the body taken up whenever the animal or vital functions are much excited — It is also soon absorbed, even when the vascular and muscular systems are but little exerted if the supply of food be too scanty. Man and beast soon grow lean on spare diet, no matter how little they may be exercised. Granting that fat may be absorbed and converted into nourishment, it will be asked, whether even with its aid, life could have been so long protracted as in the above, case without any other assistance than what water and air afford. Fat is known to consist of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, the ordinary elements of vegetables, and air contains nitrogen; fat and air, then, contain the elements of our ordinary food, whether animal or vegetable; consequently, with the addition of water, they possess the elements of what is found adequate to support the system in the most perfect vigour. That fat is abundantly nourishing, is well known: The most perfect chyle has been observed to be formed from fat. A Russian sailor could live on water and oil alone for weeks. But it will be objected that in such case, the oil is first reduced to the state of chyle; the objection, however, is not so formidable as it may at first appear. When fat is absorbed from the system, it is not found in the blood in its entire state. It is probable that in the act of absorption it is decomposed, and that its elements form new combinations with the venous blood. It has already been in the state of chyle, in which state it was incorporated with the venous blood, changed by respiration, and separated from the blood by the secreting arteries. It is more than probable that the absorbents, when taking it back again into the circulation, have the power of reducing it into the same elements of which it consisted originally, when in the state of chyle it was introduced into the blood. When fat is absorbed, as it does not exist in the blood in its entire state, its elements necessarily form new combinations with that fluid. When the venous blood reaches the lungs, and is exposed to the influence of the air, it parts with its superfluous carbon. By the combination of the carbon with the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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oxygen of the air, carbonic acid is generated, caloric is evolved, and the venous blood converted into arterial, and consequently again rendered fit for the nutrition of the system. Besides the caloric extricated by the generation of carbonic acid in the lungs, there is, more or less, doubtless, evolved in the several new combinations formed in the act of nutrition. When life becomes feeble, and the system is no longer capable of furnishing matter fit for generating carbonic acid in sufficient quantity, or for nourishing the body properly, animal heat becomes diminished, nutrition is suspended, and life at last departs from the worn out frame. Applying this reasoning to the case under consideration, the following is the sum of our explanation: The water drunk preserved the blood from acrimony — the fat and other less essential parts of the body, were absorbed, carried into the venous system, and thence into the lungs — in the lungs the superfluous carbon of the fat, &c. was discharged, and carbonic acid generated-by the formation of carbonic acid, heat was evolved, and the venous blood converted into arterial. The arterial blood thus renovated, conveyed, nutrition and heat to all parts of the body; life was for a long time supported, in a great measure, at the expense of the system itself; and in proportion as materials fit for nutrition became scanty, all the functions became more and more feeble, until nature became exhausted, and life departed. The case was very analogous to those of hybernating animals. These, when merely torpid during the winter, and possessing some animal heat, are observed to be much leaner in the spring than at the beginning of winter, when they first become torpid. Bears, for example, in northern regions, are torpid during the cold season, and though fat at the commencement of the winter, are observed to be lean at the approach of warm weather. The fat is probably absorbed for the purpose of furnishing the carbon necessary for generating animal heat, and also for the nutrition of the more important organs worn out even by this feeble life. In many other hybernating animals, all the functions are suspended — even life itself is frozen up. These, of course, undergo no change. This every body knows happens to insects. It is also well known that many kinds of fish may be frozen, and that upon being cautiously thawed, they leap, as it were, into life again, when the vital principle is released from its icy fetters. If the explanation above offered be admissible, we can readily account for the prolongation of life in the case referred to. The principal channels of waste in the human body are, the pulmonary and cutaneous exhalations, and the alvine and urinary excretions. In the above mentioned case, the discharges from the bowels were so few and so small, as scarcely to deserve to be taken into consideration; and we may safely say, that the quantity of water taken was at least equal to the quantity of urine discharged. The cutaneous and pulmonary exhalations, therefore, are almost the only sources of waste to be accounted HDT WHAT? INDEX

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for. The quantity of carbon discharged in respiration does not much exceed half a pound in twenty-four hours, even in a state of vigorous health; and in a feeble condition of the system, doubtless falls much short of that quantity. The pulmonary exhalation, and the cutaneous transpiration, owing to the diminished temperature of the system, must also have been smaller than in health. It is therefore probable that the system lost no more than six or eight ounces of its weight in a day. But even if we allow that it lost a pound every day, which must exceed the actual loss, we can still find no difficulty in believing that life could have been prolonged to the period of fifty-three days by its own resources, without any foreign aliment beyond air and water. There are many remarkable cases on record in which life has been protracted much longer than in the case of Mr. Kelsey without any nourishment; but in all these, so far as I can recollect, life was much more feeble than in him. All the more destructive functions were in a great measure suspended while in his case the muscular and vascular systems were comparatively active, consequently the body wasted faster, and life was sooner extinguished.

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 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.

Horace Rice Hosmer “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

1832

Beginning of publication in America of a version of the Knight’s Penny Magazine produced in London. This was the Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, much loved by the young Horace Rice Hosmer. It would be produced in Boston into 1846. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

1833

At 3 years of age, little Horace Rice Hosmer was still sleeping in a cradle (and the memory of this cradle would remain with him as an adult). At this age, a rug-rat crawling on the floor, he got himself a chew of tobacco. This would prove to have permanently removed any later temptation to indulgence: I can remember many things which occurred when I was three years old, I can well remember creeping on the kitchen floor and searching the cracks for hidden treasures. I secured a quid of tobacco, second hand, and swallowed it, and it lasted me 61 years, for I cannot chew if I would, even today. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

1834

At 4 years of age, little Horace Rice Hosmer was being taught the alphabet by his 12-year-old sister Martha Putnam Hosmer, out of their mother Lydia Davis Hosmer’s NEW TESTAMENT. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

1835

At the age of 5, Horace Rice Hosmer went off to elementary school in the vicinity of Derby’s Bridge. Elijah Wood, who farmed during the summers, taught school in winters and would be the Concord elementary school teacher of the young Horace.  Nehemiah Ball became a deacon of Concord’s First Parish Church. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

1837

At age 7, Horace Rice Hosmer was given “a quaint little edition of Pilgrims Progress” by the mother of Governor Robinson. “[I]t filled my boyish brain and soul with about all they could hold.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

1840

To this point only black and vermilion printer’s inks had been being manufactured in the USA. Printers who needed other colors would mix their own by grinding dry pigments in boiled linseed oil, or would procure supplies from Germany or England. At this point, however, manufacture of various colored printing ink began in New-York.  According to a short essay which Horace Rice Hosmer would prepare, in about 1880, on the early making of pencils, for Leffel’s Illustrated News of New-York, during this year at ten years of age he was helping create pencils of sorts in Concord out of plumbago and English red chalk:

[T]here was a school for young ladies ... in Medford, and one of the pupils ... from Concord ... learned to utilize the bits and ends of Borrowdale lead used in drawing, by pounding them fine and mixing a solution of gum arabic or glue. The cases were made from twigs of elder, the pith being removed with a knitting needle.... [T]he writer [Horace Rice Hosmer], then [circa 1840] a boy of ten years, helped the same lady to make similar pencils from plumbago and English red chalk.... H. David Hubbard, living in the north part of Concord, made the first cedar wood pencils for the New England trade; but they were of little value, and but few of them were manufactured. In 1812 William Monroe, a cabinet maker by trade, pounded some plumbago with a hammer, mixed it in a spoon with some adhesive substance, and filled the compound into some cedar wood cases. Some of these pencils were shown to Benjamin Andrews of Boston, who was ready to buy, and encouraged Munroe to make more of them. Twelve days after he carried five gross, which were readily taken and paid for, and a new industry was fairly started. Munroe ... made the “water cement” or paste lead which was filled into the grooves in a soft state, and after remaining a week or more the surface of the pencil slab was planed to remove the composition which adhered to it, and to leave a clean surface for gluing on a veneer of cedar. The pencil slab was about 1/4 inch thick, and the veneer 1/8 inch and of varying widths from 4 to 10 pencils wide.... Eben Wood of Acton worked with Munroe in Concord, when all the work was done by hand. The logs of cedar were cut into slabs and veneers with a “two-handed saw,” by two men; planed by hand to a thickness, grooved with the spur plane or plough, one groove at a time, and so on through all the different processes.... Eben Wood ... saw a tool for cutting the points of shoe pegs, and by applying the principle of the circular saw soon had a grooving machine which would cut six grooves at a time.... A moulding and trimming machine soon followed; then a wedge glue press, holding 12 gross pencils took the place of the hand screws which Munroe used.... His machine for trimming the ends of pencils ... is in use at the time of writing this article [circa 1880].... He made the hexagon and octagon shape cases, halving them together, with similar HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

shaped grooves for the dame.

April 1, Wednesday: For the first time the Alcott girls began to attend a school not taught by their own father. Anna Alcott was a student, probably a scholarship student, of John Thoreau, Jr. and Henry David Thoreau at Concord Academy, while Elizabeth Sewall Alcott and Louisa May Alcott were at the kinder-school run by Mary Russell in the Emerson home. We have a record of this period from a 10-year-old new student that summer who was John Junior’s student rather than Henry’s, Horace Rice Hosmer. Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson described Horace as a child who “craved affection.” As a grown-up, Horace would inform Dr. Emerson that  Henry was not loved in the school. He had his scholars upstairs. I was with John only. John was the more human, loving; understood and thought of others. Henry thought more about himself. He was a conscientious teacher, but rigid. He would not take a man’s money for nothing: if a boy were sent to him, he could make him do all he could. No, he was not disagreeable. I learned to understand him later. I think that he was then in the green-apple stage.

Another pupil was Thomas Hosmer of Bedford, who would grow up to be a dentist in Boston, but who at the time was walking to Concord for classes with another Bedford boy, B.W. Lee, who would later relocate to Newport, Vermont. Thomas Hosmer wrote Dr. Emerson to relate of Thoreau that:  I have seen children catch him by the hand, as he was going home from school, to walk with him and hear more.

One of the outings the class had this spring was a walk to Fairhaven Hill, where they did a survey of the hill and the adjacent shoreline of the river. A student’s comment on this field-work with surveying instruments was that of the brothers, Henry was the more active during the surveying. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

Summer: Samuel Bemis made a series of 21 unremarkable exposures in the vicinity of his Crawford Notch Inn. These photographs are among the first landscape daguerreotypes made in the USA.   After having attended Elijah Wood’s infant school, at 10 years of age, Horace Rice Hosmer went off to the Concord Academy of the Thoreau brothers, to become their youngest and smallest boy. As part of the deal he would get his meals at the Thoreau boardinghouse. Although he did not interact with Henry Thoreau, later on he would warn us not to make too much of this: “Do not misunderstand my saying that Henry did not speak to me. There was no reason he should, simply a fact, and so on to other things.” “As a teacher Henry was “merciless” i.e. the thing to be done must be done correctly. He was rigidly exacting—a faithful teacher to the parent whose child he had & to the child. He never mixed with the schoolboys; he was hated. The bell tolled instead of rang, when he taught alone during John’s illness. Did not answer the boys[’] questions by the River. “He had no enemies.” He did not have the “love-idea” in him: i.e. he did not appear to feel the sex- attraction.”   Bear in mind that it was not at all unusual during this period for people to rely upon boardinghouses. Indeed, per T.C. Grattan’s CIVILIZED AMERICA, a large proportion of the American urban population of this century resided at boardinghouses or at boarding hotels: When we penetrate a little deeper into the domestic arrangements of the natives, we find that the most prominent feature of their private lives is its publicity. The vast majority of the town inhabitants of the United States live in boarding houses or hotels; and it would be difficult indeed to calculate the small proportion of those who live alone.  Little Horace was John Thoreau, Jr.’s pupil at the Concord Academy rather than Henry’s, and flourished under John’s attention: Henry was not loved. He was a conscientious teacher, but rigid. He would not take a man’s money for nothing: if a boy were sent to him, he could make him do all he could. No, he was not disagreeable. I learned to understand him later. I think that he was then in the green-apple stage.  Recollecting about this school, Horace would comment: It was a peculiar school, there was never a boy flogged or threatened, yet I never saw so absolutely military discipline. How it was done I scarcely know. Even the incorrigible were brought into line.  Taking a trip down memory lane with Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson, Horace would have tears spring to his eyes as he recollected: When I hear of Henry Thoreau’s growing fame the lines in Byron’s “Isles of Greece” from our old Reading Book rise in my mind,— “Ye have the Pyrrhic dance as yet,— Where is the Pyrrhic phalanx gone? Of two such lessons why forget The nobler and the manlier one?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

 In sum: I do not pretend to understand Henry D. I looked upon him as a growing man. 

Several more advertisements would appear this year for the Concord Academy under Preceptor John Thoreau, Jr., until the academy closed its doors.

Our national birthday, Saturday the 4th of July: This was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 36th birthday.   William Johnson of Natchez, a free black man who was himself a slavemaster (!) as well as being a barber and a successful businessman, kept a diary of short entries, hardly missing a day between 1836 and 1851. This diary has seen publication as William Johnson’s NATCHEZ, THE ANTE-BELLUM DIARY OF A FREE NEGRO, ed. William Ransom Hogan and Edwin Adams Davis (1951, 1979, and a Louisiana State UP paperback in 1993). Here is one of a series of Johnson’s 4th-of-July entries: “Business was Quite Dull, this being the 4th of July. I did not Keep open more than half of the Day but walked out into the Pasture to see How the Citizens were Engaging themselves and I found them all in find Humor and in good order.”  At Cherry Valley, New York, on the centennial anniversary of that town’s settlement, William H. Seward delivered an oration.  In the US House of Representatives, Congressman Levi Lincoln of Massachusetts presented a proposal that the House decide on claims by Revolutionary soldiers for their relief.  In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where a large amphitheater-shaped pavilion collapsed, nearly 1,000 people were thrown down but God allowed no fatalities.  In Providence (Moshasuck), Rhode Island, a “Clam Bake” was held at which 220 bushes of clams were consumed as evidence of patriotic citizenry. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY

Orestes Augustus Brownson’s provocative essay “The Laboring Classes” was in the current issue of the Boston Quarterly Review to promote the re-election of President Martin Van Buren and to aid the cause of the Democrats against the Whigs and their candidate, William Henry Harrison. The author rang in memories of the economic crisis of 1837, declaring that “No one can observe the signs of the times with much care without perceiving that a crisis as to the relation of wealth and labor is approaching.” The struggle between wealth and labor was inherent in all of America’s social structures, particularly the wage system, and could not be resolved except by a revolutionary alteration of such structures. First among the institutions to be reformed would have to be the Christian church, as symbolized by the attitudes of its clergy. Contrary to Christ’s gospel, which called us to establish justice and God’s kingdom on earth, preaching was turning people’s eyes toward heaven with an elusive promise of eternal happiness. Government needed to limit its own powers, and to virtually eliminate the banking system, in order to protect the workers from the wealthy. Finally, the author called for the abolition of all monopoly and of all privilege, especially the inheritance of property: “as we have abolished HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

hereditary monarchy and hereditary nobility, we must complete the work by abolishing hereditary property.” What the Reverend was responding to, in this manner, was the essay “Self-Culture, “published by the Reverend William Ellery Channing in 1838, in which it had been presumed that the primary focus of our energies should be upon our own rectification rather than on the rectification of society in general — which was an end in itself rather than merely a means to a greater end. Brownson declared that “Self-culture is a good thing, but it cannot abolish inequality, nor restore men to their rights.”2  To Brownson’s dismay, in this balloting the voters went with the Whigs. With the loss of power by the Democrats, he would suddenly be deprived of his politically sponsored stewardship of the United States Marine Hospital in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Deeply disappointed, he would begin to sift through the socio- political fragments of his shattered religious vision. The election had demonstrated that individual and social reform, he would decide, could not spring from imperfect human nature and inadequate human effort, but only from a power higher than the electorate and the vote. Politically, this would necessitate a constitutional republic rooted in the divine will, but one which in order to protect the rights of minorities would favor states’ rights. Philosophically, this would necessitate his adoption of Plato’s doctrine of ideas and his adjustment of Pierre Leroux’s “doctrine of communion,” which held that humans lived by communion through the medium of institutions with a reality other than their individual selves, “the Not-Me”: individuals communed with nature by way of the institution of property, individuals communed with other individuals by way of the institutions of the family and of government, and individuals communed with God through the institution of the church. Theologically, Brownson would come to believe, as Christ’s organic extension in space and time, the institution of the church constituted the sole medium of God’s saving grace. Human nature could institute nothing higher than itself; hence only a divine power mediated through Christ’s church would be capable of effecting the progress of humankind.  1,200 people came into Concord from Lowell for the big day of the national political campaign. The other two roads into Concord were also jammed with visitors from the surrounding towns of Middlesex County. A log cabin on wheels was drawn into town by a team of 23 horses, while 150 celebrants sat in this rolling cabin chugging hard cider. The delegates from Boston and the eastern vicinity formed a queue that was all of two miles long, with “bands by the dozen.” The main spectacle of the day, however, was an enormous wooden ball, 12 to 13 feet in diameter and painted red, white, and blue, that was being rolled out to Concord from Cambridge on this leg of its journey toward Washington DC. The Tippecanoe Club was sponsoring this ball and the slogans painted on it had to do with the Whig candidates, nominee William Henry Harrison for the President and John Tyler for the Vice-President. On the Lexington Road, Waldo Emerson and his group watched this ball roll past, and some of the group helped to push the ball along.3 The main speeches took place, of course, near the Battle Monument on the south bank of the Concord River. The speeches began only after arrival of a barge from Billerica which, loaded with ladies, had encountered some difficulties in getting over a mud bank below Ball’s Hill. Then there was free barbecue and cider in the largest tent ever set up in Middlesex County, seating 6,000, with 4,000 more being forced to wait outside the tent.4  Horace Rice Hosmer would recollect much later that “The political campaign of 1840 Harrison & Tyler was

2.Refer to Robinson, David. APOSTLE OF CULTURE: EMERSON AS PREACHER AND LECTURER. Philadelphia PA: U of Pennsylvania P, 1982. 3. In 1844, in his essay “The Poet,” published in ESSAYS, 2D SERIES, Emerson would use an allusion to this political gimmick used by the campaign supporters of William Henry Harrison, “Keep the ball a-rolling!”

 See the great ball which they roll from Baltimore to Bunker hill! HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

a drunken one, because all drank rum from habit and custom and they drank hard cider to emphasize their political principles, and the result was terrific.” He was “the only Loco Foco” among the students and staff (that is, the only Democrat, everyone else having Whig sympathies). He remembered John Thoreau as “an ardent Whig and his political war-cry was Tippecanoe and Tyler too.”   At that time the great wooden red, white, and blue ball that was the symbol of the party, some 12 feet high, was being kept in the front yard of David Loring’s house on Main Street just to the north of the Concord Academy. When Emerson first delivered his “The Poet” lecture, in Boston in 1841, the Whigs had just used this as a political stunt of the 1840 campaign to demonstrate growing support for their candidate. Little Horace later remembered some of the graffiti on this ball, which must have been most fascinating: O’er ever ridge we’ll roll the Ball, From Concord Bridge to Faneuil Hall. Farewell poor Van, To guide our Ship, We’ll try Old Tip. This Ball must roll, it cannot halt, Benton can’t save himself with salt. By another account, the graffiti included: Farewell poor Van, You’r [sic] not the man To guide our Ship. We’ll try Old Tip. In his “autobiography,” John Shepard Keyes would later reminisce about the events of the celebration in Concord this year, and would mention having been present at a wedding reception for Reuben Nathan “R.N.” Rice and his bride Mary Harriet Hurd (daughter of Colonel Isaac Hurd, Jr. and granddaughter of Dr. Isaac Hurd), who had gotten married on July 1st:

Interestingly, this reception had been hosted at the Thoreau house (we may well note how characteristic it is, that Henry made no mention of such matters as the hosting of a wedding reception, in his journal): 4. This was the election year in which people began singing campaign songs, and in which politics became popular entertainment. For an extended period in the 19th Century in the USA, in fact until the campaign of 1888, voter turnouts of 85% to 95% were not at all unusual. At a political rally, one could count on thousands of people being willing to stand and listen to hour-long political speech after hour-long political speech, in the rain. Voters supported the political association of their choice exactly as sports fans now support the team of their choice. Were we, today, to go back from our present 50% turnout for presidential elections to that sort of political involvement, the result would be a rebirth of our democracy, or its death. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

This excitement was soon followed by the celebration of the Fourth of July by the greatest political gathering ever held in Concord, of the Harrison and Tyler campaign The tippecanoe clubs from every town came with banners and flags with log cabins and hard cider, and in teams on horseback in canal boats and on foot filled the streets to overflowing. The preparations were on a grand scale, a speakers stand, and booth of immense proportions was set up on the lot southwest of the present Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and a procession formed in the square that extended to the monument at the battleground, around which they marched with bands and escort flags and devices including the big ball, a huge affair a dozen feet in diameter made of a frame covered with cloth and inscribed with mottoes of all the political bye words songs and phrazes in letters that could be read as it rolled on drawn by ropes in the hands of earnest sturdy yeomen. The charm of such an occasion drew me home days before, and I was busier in its work than in my studies, cutting for it recitations and exercises, and even such examinations as we had then which amounted to next to nothing — The great day came and fine weather and entire success greeted it. The Democrats got up a rival affair at Lexington but it was so tame and poor that it only added zest to ours, and it went off with a wild hurrah. I witnessed the gathering and march of the four or five thousand men from the cupola of the Court House, where with a bevy of girls of my own selection, we enjoyed the grand pageant to the utmost. Then escorting them to the booth we listened to the stirring speeches partook of the crackers and hard cider so liberally provided for the multitude and saw many of the great leaders of the old Wig party and heard their eloquence for the first time. Especially I recall that several of the speakers were guests at our house and that one of then Hon Myron Lawrence of Belchertown whose great size and powerful voice made him a prominent figure in that campaign had the night before a terrible attack of asthma, that frightened me out of my sleep by his horrible breathing and who I expected would certainly die of choking before morning, but who rallied, recovered his voice, and filled the whole audience and the entire valley with his stertorous tones at the dinner tables. Henry Wilson made his first appearance then, and excited much interest as the Natick cobbler The day ended with R.N. Rices wedding and reception at the Thoreau house on the square opposite my fathers, where we had a jolly time winding up the festivities with a champagne super— J.S. KEYES AUTOBIOGRAPHY

July 4, 1840: 4 o’clock A.M. The Townsend Light Infantry encamped last night in my neighbor’s inclosure. The night still breathes slumberously over field and wood, when a few soldiers gather about one tent in the twilight, and their band plays an old Scotch air, with bugle and drum and fife attempered to the season. It seems like the morning hymn of creation. The first sounds of the awakening camp, mingled with the chastened strains which so sweetly salute the dawn, impress me as the morning prayer of an army.5 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

And now the morning gun fires. The soldier awakening to creation and awakening it. I am sure none are cowards now. These strains are the roving dreams which steal from tent to tent, and break forth into distinct melody. They are the soldier’s morning thought. Each man awakes himself with lofty emotions, and would do some heroic deed. You need preach no homily to him; he is the stuff they are made of. The whole course of our lives should be analogous to one day of the soldier’s. His Genius seems to whisper in his ear what demeanor is befitting, and in his bravery and his march he yields a blind and partial obedience.  The fresher breeze which accompanies the dawn rustles the oaks and birches, and the earth respires calmly with the creaking of crickets. Some hazel leaf stirs gently, as if anxious not to awake the day too abruptly, while the time is hastening to the distinct line between darkness and light. And soldiers issue from their dewy tents, and as if in answer to expectant nature, sing a sweet and far-echoing hymn.  We may well neglect many things, provided we overlook them.  When to-day I saw the “Great Ball” rolled majestically along, it seemed a shame that man could not move like it. All dignity and grandeur has something of the undulatoriness of the sphere. It is the secret of majesty in the rolling gait of the elephant, and of all grace in action and in art. The line of beauty is a curve. Each man seems striving to imitate its gait, and keep pace with it, but it moves on regardless and conquers the multitude with its majesty. What shame that our lives, which should be the source of planetary motion and sanction the order of the spheres, are full of abruptness and angularity, so as not to roll, nor move majestically.

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 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.

Horace Rice Hosmer “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

5. Also, written in pencil on a fly-leaf of the journal, we find “I have heard a strain of music issuing from a soldiers’ camp in the dawn, which sounded like the morning hymn of creation. The birches rustling in the breeze and the slumberous breathing of the crickets seemed to hush their murmuring to attend to it.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

1841

In Concord, the family of Horace Rice Hosmer was in debt some $60.00 and was unable to return him to the Concord Academy. He languished and “kept my soul and body together with Bunyans Pilgrim’s Progress.... Blessed be Bunyan and his book.”  John Stacy became postmaster at Concord, Massachusetts (until 1845).  According to Dr. Edward Jarvis’s TRADITIONS AND REMINISCENCES OF CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS 1779- 1878, page 143: Concord has her representatives in most of the states of the union. When I was in New Orleans in 1841, there were seven Concord men there. Five were settled and doing business there. Two were officers of Merchant ships there on business. I was a visitor to two of my brothers [Stephen (1806-1855) and Nathan (1808-1851), who was blown up in a boating accident] in the wholesale drug trade. I have met our Concord emigrants in New York, Baltimore, Washington, Louisville, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Rutland, Burlington, and manifold other places. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

1842

May 7, Saturday: Frederick Douglass spoke in Dudley, Massachusetts.  In Concord, Massachusetts, “Rufus Henry Hosmer son of Rufus Hosmer & Sophia, aged 7 yrs Died May 7, 1842.” CONCORD TOWN RECORDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

1843

Horace Rice Hosmer would later related that in his adolescence he “used to go to the old Minot House and have my clothes cut and made by Mary Minot, presumably the person intended being the maiden sister of George Minott. She was a rather stern, business like woman who ruled the household alone. There was a sunny faced, loving old maid who was often there, named Betsy Potter, and another nervous, whining, complaining one, named Mary Adams. This woman had a lover who was drowned a week before the time set for their marriage, and although a great worker, she was partialy [sic ] insane on the subject of her great loss, as well she might be.” According to what Franklin Benjamin Sanborn would allege that he had learned much later,6 Miss Minot was tailor-making clothing not only for Thoreau’s student Horace but for Henry Thoreau himself, and thus would have been the “tailoress” he would mention in WALDEN:  WALDEN: When I ask for a garment of a particular form, PEOPLE OF my tailoress tells me gravely, “They do not make them so now,” WALDEN not emphasizing the “They” at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis on the “they,” –“It is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now.” Of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to hang the coat on? We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcæ, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. I sometimes despair of getting any thing quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again, and then there would be some one in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your labor. Nevertheless, we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat is said to have been handed down to us by a mummy.

EGYPT MARY MINOT

6. In this year 1843 Sanborn was a mere 11-year-old visiting Boston, on one of the few outings of his childhood. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

1844

The Thoreaus were winding up their affairs in the Parkman house near (but not on) the site of the present Concord Free Public Library building, and getting ready to make other arrangements. “Made pencils in 1844.”  CONCORD ZOOM MAP

According to Horace Rice Hosmer’s later memory, “there was a great growth of Chestnut trees in bearing condition around Walden, and the schoolboys used to make up parties and go for nuts, staying all day.” Then “this Chestnut timber was used for ties” while “the country swarmed with wood choppers and teamsters” in this year during the construction of the railroad.  Thoreau was preparing to go to Walden Pond to work on his 1st book, revising and copying the scrappy remains of his 1837-1844 volumes into the Long Book, drafting original passages of narration and description, and incorporating journal entries not originally related to the trip taken by the brothers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

1845

Nahum Ball Onthank painted a portrait of Annie Hosmer of Concord, Massachusetts, at the age of 3.

The only personage I am able to identify in the Concord Town Records Book that more or less matches this “Annie” would be “Adelaide Ophelia Hosmer, daughter of John & Mary E.H., Feb’y. 17, 1841.” CONCORD TOWN RECORDS

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 Horace Rice Hosmer HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

A Sunday in early September: Joseph Hosmer, Jr. related, long afterward, that “Early in September, 1845, (can it be so long,) on his [Henry Thoreau’s] invitation I spent a Sunday at his lake side retreat, as pure and delightful as with my mother. The building was not then finished, the chimney had no beginning — the sides were not battened, or the walls plastered. EMERSON’S SHANTY TIMELINE OF WALDEN 

A 19th-Century Irish shanty in the Merrimack Valley It stood in the open field, some thirty rods from the lake, and the “Devil’s Bar,” and in full view of it.... The entrance to the cellar was thro’ a trap door in the center of the room. The king- post was an entire tree, extending from the bottom of the cellar to the ridge-pole, upon which we descended, as the sailors do into the hold of a vessel.... The cooking apparatus was primitive and consisted of a hole made in the earth and inlaid with stones, upon which the fire was made, after the manner at the sea-shore, when they have a clam-bake. When sufficiently hot remove the smoking embers and place on the fish, frog, etc. Our bill of fare included roasted horn pout, corn, beans, bread, salt, etc. Our viands were nature’s own, “sparkling and bright.” ... The beans had been previously cooked. The meal for our bread was mixed with lake water only, and when prepared it was spread upon the surface of a thin stone used for the purpose and baked, — (as illustrated.) ... When the bread had been sufficiently baked the stone was removed, then the fish placed over the hot stones and roasted — some in wet paper and some without– and when seasoned with salt, were delicious.

George William Curtis and James Burrill Curtis were brothers who lived for a time on the Hosmer farm on HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Lincoln Road. They had helped Henry Thoreau build his shanty on Walden Pond and Thomas Blanding suggests that they are likely candidates for the following tale from “The Village” in WALDEN:

 WALDEN: Several times, when a visitor chanced to stay into the PEOPLE OF evening, and it proved a dark night, I was obliged to conduct him WALDEN to the cart-path in the rear of the house, and then point out to him the direction he was to pursue, and in keeping which he was to be guided rather by his feet than his eyes. One very dark night I directed thus on their way two young men who had been fishing in the pond. They lived about a mile off through the woods, and were quite used to the route. A day or two after one of them told me that they wandered about the greater part of the night, close by their own premises, and did not get home till toward morning, by which time, as there had been several heavy showers in the mean while, and the leaves were very wet, they were drenched to their skins. I have heard of many going astray even in the village streets, when the darkness was so thick that you could cut it with a knife, as the saying is. Some who live in the outskirts, having come to town a-shopping in their wagons, have been obliged to put up for the night; and gentlemen and ladies making a call have gone half a mile out of their way, feeling the sidewalk only with their feet, and not knowing when they turned. It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time.

JAMES BURRILL CURTIS GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS Since George William Curtis has related a similar incident, it seems likely that he was the companion mentioned in “The Ponds”:  WALDEN: In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing the flute, and saw the perch, which I seemed to have charmed, hovering around me, and the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with the wrecks of the forest. Formerly I had come to this pond adventurously, from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a companion, and making a fire close to the water’s edge, which we thought attracted the fishes, we caught pouts with a bunch of worms strung on a thread; and when we had done, far in the night, threw the burning brands high into the air like skyrockets, which, coming down into the pond, were quenched with a loud hissing, and we were suddenly groping in total darkness. Through this, whistling a tune, we took our way to the haunts of men again. But now I had made my home by the shore. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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 However, Thoreau’s friend George would later remember this as having happened, not at the pond, but on the Concord River.  During a heavy thundershower either of the spring or of the fall (Thoreau does not specify which),  WALDEN: In one heavy thunder shower the lightning struck a large pitch-pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago.

August 13, Wednesday: In Bonn, Festkantate zur Enthüllung des Beethovens-Denkmals in Bonn by Franz Liszt to words of Wolff was performed for the initial time. Then in the evening, during dinner, a small concert directed by Meyerbeer featured Jenny Lind and Franz Liszt.  The family of Felix Mendelssohn moved into 3 Königstrasse in Leipzig, his final residence.  Frederick Douglass lectured at the Town Hall of New Bedford. This was, perhaps, the occasion about which Horace Rice Hosmer would relate, many years later, obviously with a certain degree of exaggeration and substitution of wish-fulfilment fantasy for historical record (this is one of those stories that necessarily improve upon the retelling), that: ... my brother Joseph [Hosmer, Jr.] ... whose wife and all her family were red hot Garrison Abolitionists - Fred Douglass visited them in Bedford and two of the girls walked round the Common with him and the towns people talked of mobbing Fred. One young lout threw a stone which hurt Joseph, and Joe tied him to a tree on the Common and horse whipped him. There was no more Mob after that when Joe was round.... I, and others of the family, felt disgraced by his connection with the despised and hated “Abolitionists.” We got over it in time. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1846

Andrew Jackson Downing began as editor of the magazine The Horticulurist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste. Devoted to Horticulture, Landscape Gardening, Rural Architecture, Botany, Pomology, Entomology, Rural Economy, &c.  Demise of the Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge that had been being published in Boston since 1832. Horace Rice Hosmer recollected that “the wonderful pictures and stories ... brightened and cheered my child life from four years old up to Peter Parley.... There were two well worn Vols of the Penny Magazine of 1832 on my book shelf, and these in their day were to the common people what Harper’s and the Atlantic were later.”

ESSENCES ARE FUZZY, GENERIC, CONCEPTUAL; ARISTOTLE WAS RIGHT WHEN HE INSISTED THAT ALL TRUTH IS SPECIFIC AND PARTICULAR (AND WRONG WHEN HE CHARACTERIZED TRUTH AS A GENERALIZATION).

Horace Rice Hosmer “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Waldo Emerson asked Henry Thoreau to add a chimney to the Emerson barn, as part of creating a schoolroom and sleeping chamber for Sophia Foord while she was tutoring the Emerson and Alcott children.

Thoreau surveyed Walden Pond, indicating Bare Peak, Wooded Peak, Sandbar, and the site of his shanty. The area of the pond is listed as 61 acres and 3 rods, its circumference as 1.7 miles, its greatest length as 175½ rods, and its greatest depth as 102 feet. The Concord Free Public Library now has 3 copies of this. It is the plot which he would have tipped into his bound volume of his lyceum lectures, WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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between pages 285 and 287 (per the current Princeton numbering).

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

There’s an interesting little factoid about this survey being tipped into the WALDEN volume. It wasn’t all that usual, in this time period, for books to be illustrated in such a manner! Such an inclusion, in the period, amounted to “multimedia high tech”! –Take a moment and think about that!7 Most of the works published by Ticknor and Fields during the 1840s and 1850s were not illustrated in any way, but illustrations did play an important role in some. Two groups of publications from the 1850s are especially notable for their illustrations — juvenile works and literary works by the firm’s most respected authors. The more lavishly illustrated were juvenile works, which might contain as many as twelve relief wood engravings, while many literary works were regularly issued with an expensive intaglio steel-engraved frontispiece portrait. The illustrations in juveniles were usually based on the text and made the work more vivid and appealing to a young audience, whereas the portrait frontispieces in the second group 7. Winship, Michael. AMERICAN LITERARY PUBLISHING IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY: THE BUSINESS OF TICKNOR AND FIELDS. Cambridge, England; NY: Cambridge UP, 1995. (Take a moment and reflect, however, that in 1789 the Reverend Gilbert White had used a pond survey as an illustration in his THE NATURAL HISTORY AND ANTIQUITIES OF SELBORNE.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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served to dignify and assert the literary merit of the works they produced. Other works published by the firm during these decades were also illustrated or decorated in some way. These included textbooks: the two primary school readers by Josiah F. Bumstead each had an inserted woodcut frontispiece; and the first part of Thomas H. Palmer’s THE MORAL INSTRUCTOR had small vignettes and type ornaments printed throughout the text. Several scientific and medical works —such as Wendell Phillips’s AN ELEMENTARY TREATISE ON MINERALOGY and J. Mason Warren’s edition of Walter H. Walshe’s THE ANATOMY, PHYSIOLOGY, PATHOLOGY, AND TREATMENT OF CANCER— depended on the illustrations to transmit information. In addition, a number of the firm’s literary works, especially poetry, were pleasantly decorated with small vignettes or type ornaments. Longfellow’s THE GOLDEN LEGEND had a single small vignette of a cross, designed by Hammatt Billings, on the title page; Oliver W. Holmes’s POEMS and Richard H. Stoddard’s SONGS OF SUMMER have numerous decorative vignettes and ornamental head- or tailpieces throughout the text. The illustrations and decorations in the publications of Ticknor and Fields were reproduced by three methods. The most common used blocks produced in relief. Small vignettes and ornaments produced by this method were printed with the text, as occasionally were full-page illustrations, but more commonly relief wood engravings were printed on separate leaves and inserted during binding. The portrait frontispieces in the firm’s literary works were produced by a second method, using intaglio metal plates. Intaglio printing is done on a rolling press, separately from the text, and these frontispieces were always printed on inserted leaves. Illustrations reproduced by a third method, lithography, appeared only rarely in works published by Ticknor and Fields before 1860. In the 1840s lithography was used for the technical illustrations in a few medical and scientific works published by the firm, and in the 1850s only the engraved map in Henry D. Thoreau’s WALDEN and the illuminated paper wrapper used on some copies of William H.C. Hosmer’s THE MONTHS —a commission work— were lithographed. Again, lithographic illustrations were printed separately from the text on a special press and inserted during binding. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER HDT WHAT? INDEX

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That is worth repeating. In the 1850s only the engraved map in WALDEN and the illuminated paper wrapper used on some copies of one other book were lithographed! Such lithography was at that point the very high-tech cutting edge of publication technology. It was, in that period, everything that multimedia amounted to. We might miss such a fact nowadays, if it were not forcefully brought to our attention, but what a novel thing that survey map of Walden Pond tipped into the volume actually was! 

 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.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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 View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/133a.htm

 WALDEN: One afternoon I amused myself by watching a barred owl (Strix nebulosa) sitting on one of the lower dead limbs of a white- OWL pine, close to the trunk, in broad daylight, I standing within a rod of him. He could hear me when I moved and cronched the snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me. When I made most noise he would stretch out his neck, and erect his neck feathers, and open his eyes wide; but their lids soon fell again, and he began to nod. I too felt a slumberous influence after watching him half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged brother of the cat. There was only a narrow slit left between CAT their lids, by which he preserved a peninsular relation to me; thus, with half-shut eyes, looking out from the land of dreams, and endeavoring to realize me, vague object or mote that interrupted his visions. At length, on some louder noise or my nearer approach, he would grow uneasy and sluggishly turn about on his perch, as if impatient at having his dreams disturbed; and when he launched himself off and flapped through the pines, spreading his wings to unexpected breadth, I could not hear the slightest sound from them. Thus, guided amid the pine boughs rather by a delicate sense of their neighborhood than by sight, feeling his twilight way as it were with his sensitive pinions, he found a new perch, where he might in peace await the dawning of his day. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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 Publication of a new collection of William Cullen Bryant’s poems, illustrated. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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(Here is an illustration of the poet, weary of trying to find another rhyme for “moon” and “June.”)

Horace Rice Hosmer would recollect much later, of this period while Henry Thoreau was taking up residence at the pond, to “Dr.” Samuel Arthur Jones, that Thoreau had been for certain sure no recluse: “He was visited by all sorts of people, at all hours — I put up many a luncheon to go there, as I worked in a Restaurant at the time. I did this for Geo Ripley of the N.Y. Tribune who did not like Henry’s Bill of Fare. I was where all the news and gossip of the town centered at night, and my ears were open.” Upon being challenged on this by Jones, Hosmer would add: “The place where I worked was part restaurant, part Grocery. There was fruit, confectionery, pies, cake, gingerbread &c. One man came a number of times for fried turnovers and cheese, cake &c, which he took away in a basket. He said he could not stand Thoreau’s living, or food. I was told that it was a man who wrote for the N.Y. Tribune, and his name was Ripley.” However that may have been, “When Benj [his older brother Benjamin Gardner “Benj” Hosmer, born in 1816, who had attended school with the Thoreau boys and was “a nervous, wiry fellow, with jet black hair and eyes,” who was “loving and quick tempered”] visited Henry at Walden in 1846 he walked from Bedford (some 7 miles distant) and was coolly received. Henry said that ‘he had not time for friendship,’ and closed the volume. I remembered it, and only met him in the woods and fields with a pride equal to his own. I never hesitated to pass him without speaking unless I had something to ask about, or to show. There was never a word of introduction or ceremony when we met, or parted.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1850

November 20, Wednesday: In order to obtain urgently needed money, Belgian count Hippolyte Visart de Bocarmé invited his one-legged young brother-in-law Gustave Fougnies to dinner at his château of Bury, Belgium and, with the help of his wife Lydie Victoire Josèphe Fougnies, countess of Bocarmé, poisoned him (previously, using a false name, he had consulted a professor of chemistry and had conducted experiments on cats and ducks to verify that the sort of alkaloids present in Nicotiana tabacum would indeed induce death, and had prepared two wine bottles containing concentrated nicotine). The husband would be guillotined but the wife would be spared because evidently under duress from her husband.

 Henry Thoreau was written to again by Josiah Pierce, Jr. of the Portland Lyceum, to confirm change of the date of his lecture from December 11th to January 15th per Thoreau’s request. Portland. Nov. 20th 1850.  Dear Sir,  You may perhaps believe that I am writing  to you from Ireland and not from Portland, making [a] blunder even in the date of the letter, when you read that  this is for the purpose of apologizing for and correcting another error— I [intended] and ought to have designated the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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evening of January. 15th and not of January 8th or 10th, as that on which we hoped to hear a lecture from you[.] With the wish that this newly appointed time, the fifteenth  of January next, may be equally acceptable to you,  I am  with great respect[,] Yours truly J. Pierce[.] Jr

Here occurs the only mention we have in Thoreau’s JOURNAL of the fellow who would make so many comments about him and his dealings in Concord after his death, Horace Rice Hosmer. Hosmer had picked “a different and better kind of cranberry.” Thoreau explores this without mentioning any relationship with this former pupil of the Thoreau brothers at the Concord Lyceum and former meal-mate at the Thoreau boardinghouse, as one “of those instances in which the farmer detects a new species and makes use of the knowledge from year to year in his profession, while the botanist devoted to such investigation has failed to observe it.” This well bears out what Hosmer himself said about their relationship, that “Henry never spoke to me out of school till I was nearly 20 [which would indeed have been in about this year of 1850, so it is very likely that this is the precise conversation to which Hosmer was referring], that I remember.” Other instances of such a cultivation phenomenon within Thoreau’s cultural context might include the Baldwin apple discovered and developed by John Ball of Woburn, Massachusetts and publicized by Loammi Baldwin, and the Concord fox grape discovered and developed by Ephraim Wales Bull. I do not know that the Hosmer cranberry ever became a select variety: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November 20: It is a common saying among country people that if you eat much fried hasty pudding it will make your hair curl –my experience which was considerable did not confirm this assertion. Horace Hosmer was picking out today half a bushel or more of a different & better kind of cranbery as he thought, separating them from the rest– They are very dark red shaded with lighter –harder & more oblong somewhat like the fruit of the sweetbriar, or a canada red plum though I have no common cranbery to compare with them. He says that they grow apart from the others. I must see him about it. It may prove to be one more of those instances in which the farmer detects a new species –and makes use of the knowledge from year to year in his profession while the botanist expressly devoted to such investigations has failed to observe it. The farmer in picking over many bushels of cranberries year after year finds at length or has forced upon his observation a new species of that berry, and avails himself thereafter of his discovery for many years before the naturalist is aware of the fact. Desor who has been among the Indians at Lake Superior this summer told me the other day that they had a particular name for each species of tree, as of the maple –but they had but one word for flowers– They did not distinguish the species of the last. It is often the unscientific man who discovers the new species– It would be strange if it were not so. But we are accustomed properly to call that only a scientific discovery which knows the relative value of the thing discovered –uncovers a fact to mankind. PIERRE JEAN ÉDOUARD DESOR HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1851

Squire Samuel Hoar represented Harvard College before the Massachusetts Legislature, and was credited by President James Walker with having “saved it.”  When the Reverend Professor Francis Bowen resigned as professor of history at Harvard, Richard Hildreth applied for that post (his attacks on the “Cambridge party” probably had rendered this a hopeless pursuit; Harvard simply has never ever functioned, and presumably will never ever function, in any mode other than that of self-congratulation).  Late in this year, William Elliott’s son William Elliott, Jr. left Harvard.  Alfred Winslow Hosmer was born in Concord to Nathan S. Hosmer and Sophia Hosmer. He would have a younger brother Herbert W. Hosmer.  At this point Horace Rice Hosmer gave up on the Democratic Party: “I voted for freedom every time until Hayes made me tired.”  James Kendall Hosmer matriculated at Harvard.

NEW “HARVARD MEN”

February 15, Saturday: Evelina E. Vannevar Slack wrote concerning family matters from Chelsea, Massachusetts to Charles Wesley Slack in St. Johnsburg, Vermont. Slack’s father added a note to this letter.  Frederick Jenkins (or Wilkins or Minkins, depending on what source you accept) known generally as “Shadrach,” a Boston waiter who was a fugitive from Georgia, had been detained by slave-catchers. Henry Williams, who had escaped from Virginia and whom Henry Thoreau assisted, was a friend of Jenkins. Richard Henry Dana, Jr. represented Shadrach in court. Chief Justice Shaw ruled for the rights of the slave catchers but a group of Boston’s indignant black citizens then swept into the hearing room through one door and out through another, taking him along within the press of their crowd. Daniel Webster of course fulminated that such a rescue from the US criminal system was “strictly speaking, a case of treason.” 

UNDERGROUND RAILROAD HDT WHAT? INDEX

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After Jenkins was thus rescued, Francis Edwin Bigelow, the Concord blacksmith who according to Horace Rice Hosmer “had strong negro features for a white man,” and his wife Ann Bigelow, concealed him for one night until he could be escorted to the home of Jonathan Drake and Frances Drake in Leominster (for a few days) and then Fitchburg and into Vermont and on up across the Canada border (in this they were assisted by the Brooks family next door, and there is a story that Nathan Brooks helped outfit the fugitive with one of his hats). This offense against property and legitimate ownership, and New England’s guilty complicity in it, caused conservatives in Boston to become concerned about social unrest and determined to use brutality to prevent it. A well-known abolitionist, Elizur Wright, Jr., would be charged with this crime, and would be defended by lawyer Dana. When Wright saw the blacksmith Bigelow sitting in the jury box, he immediately intuited that his trial was going to go all right — for on Shadrach’s way toward safety he had been put up overnight at the Bigelow home! Dana‘s work in these “Rescue Trials” would continue into 1852.

February 15, Saturday: Fatal is the discovery that our friend is fallible –that he has prejudices. He is then only prejudiced in our favor. What is the value of his esteem who does not justly esteem another? Alas! Alas! When my friend begins to deal in confessions –breaks silence –makes a theme of friendship – (which then is always something past) and descends to merely human relations As long as there is a spark of love remaining cherish that alone –only that can be kindled into a flame. I thought that friendship –that love was still possible between –I thought that we had not withdrawn very far asunder– But now that my friend rashly thoughtlessly –prophanely speaks recognizing the distance between us –that distance seems infinitely increased. Of our friends we do not incline to speak to complain to others –we would not disturb the foundations of confidence that may still be. Why should we not still continue to live with the intensity & rapidity of infants. Is not the world –are not the heavens as unfathomed as ever? Have we exhausted any joy –any sentiment? The author of Festus well exclaims

“Could we but think with the intensity We love with, we might do great things, I think.” FESTUS; A POEM PHILIP JAMES BAILEY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December 6, Saturday: The group of about 100 armed white men under the leadership of Lieutenant Thomas Sweeny, who had been besieged in their Camp Independence since November 12th, at this point made their move out of the native American controlled territory and back to the white settlements.  In Concord, Henry Thoreau was surveying a 6-acre woodlot near Annursnack Hill for Samuel Barrett, the sawmill and gristmill owner at Barrett’s Pond (Gleason D5), and did not make an entry in his journal. This woodlot had belonged to the Lorings and was being sold to George Brooks. The bill for the survey was $3.00. Neighbors mentioned on the survey papers are Prescott, Barrett, Billings,8 and Easterbrook.

According to an undated letter from Horace Rice Hosmer to Alfred Winslow Hosmer, at the Concord Free Public Library: It was Mr. Samuel Barrett of Barrett’s Mill Road who used to experiment with the frogs. We would be at work in the hay field raking hay by hand rake ... when he would show me how Thoreau made the frogs jump. He would take the rake and run it along in the grass t[o]ward a frog who would think a snake was after it and jump near twenty feet sometimes and yet neither Mr. Barrett or Thoreau would kill a snake, frog, or mouse.  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/5.htm

8. I imagine this is not Boston’s illustrator and architect Hammatt Billings, but perhaps the home of Nathaniel and John Billings on Old Concord Road? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Meanwhile, in New-York, Walt Whitman was witnessing the landing of Lajos Kossuth, with cannon salutes, a grand parade down Broadway, a banquet for 400 at the Irving House, and a torchlit procession. This great white advocate of liberty was here in our great whitman land of liberty at last! Whitman wished courage “To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire.”

Incidentally, note the “Kossuth hat.” Although it doesn’t show in this particular illustration, such a hat sported an ostrich plume. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

This is what Broadway Avenue would look like, nine years later:

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, a ceremony of an entirely different order was being transacted. William Parker’s 3 white neighbors, as well as all black men that armed posses could hunt “like partridges upon the mountain” (as one person described the event), that is, culprits who had been singled out merely by their availability and the color of their pelt regardless of whether they were anywhere near that home on that night in September, were being arraigned for treason against the United States of America, on the allegation that refusal to assist Gorsuch and his marshall, equally with resisting the marshall, amounted to making war. It seems that the no- nos the nation derived from this incident were not “what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world” but “something has gone seriously awry when white men refuse to side with their own race,” and not “resist not evil” but “we can’t let niggers know how to use guns.” Friend Lucretia Mott and her associates were in the courtroom “knitting furiously.” Each man wore a red, white, and blue knitted scarf around his neck.  This charge of conspiring to make war could of course not be sustained, but Judge John Kane made a remark about “itinerant female agitators” that indicated he would have found the defendants guilty if there had been HDT WHAT? INDEX

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any way to do so. This case became central in the ongoing debate within the antislavery movement over resort to violence in the face of injustice. Friend Lucretia Mott summed up her position with the thought that we all know, of course, that good is of God, and therefore we must be mistaken if we ever suppose it can come from our doing evil. I am bringing this incident to your attention because it bears on the issue of whether Thoreau was a nonviolenter. Mott holds unimpeached credentials as a nonviolenter, and Thoreau’s credentials as a nonviolenter have been attacked by his biographer Richardson on the basis of his reaction to the Harper’s Ferry raid of 1859, and yet it is clear that had the black activist William Parker been captured and put on trial for the murder of this white master, Mott would have reacted in exactly the same way Thoreau reacted to John Brown’s conduct. In fact Mott’s deportment and words in the case of this charge of treason in the “Christiana riot” in 1851 exactly parallel Thoreau’s deportment and words in the case of John Brown. We note especially the words that Thoreau would have read about John Brown as a moral hero in the presence of the widow Brown, over the grave at North Elba on July 4, 1860: John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history. If any person, in a lecture or conversation at that time, cited any ancient example of heroism, such as Cato or Tell or Winkelried, passing over the recent deeds and words of Brown, it was felt by any intelligent audience of Northern men to be tame and inexcusably far-fetched. For my own part, I commonly attend more to nature than to man, but any affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects. I was so absorbed in him as to be surprised whenever I detected the routine of the natural world surviving still, or met persons going about their affairs indifferent. It appeared strange to me that the “little dipper” should be still diving quietly in the river, as of yore; and it suggested that this bird might continue to dive here when Concord should be no more. I felt that he, a prisoner in the midst of his enemies and under sentence of death, if consulted as to his next step or resource, could answer more wisely than all his countrymen beside. He best understood his position; he contemplated it most calmly. Comparatively, all other men, North and South, were beside themselves. Our thoughts could not revert to any greater or wiser or better man with whom to contrast him, for he, then and there, was above them all. The man this country was about to hang appeared the greatest and best in it. Years were not required for a revolution of public opinion; days, nay hours, produced marked changes in this case. Fifty who were ready to say, on going into our meeting in honor of him in Concord, that he ought to be hung, would not say it when they came out. They heard his words read; they saw the earnest faces of the congregation; and perhaps they joined at last in singing the hymn in his praise. The order of instructors was reversed. I heard that one preacher, who at first was shocked and stood aloof, felt obliged at last, after he was hung, to make him the subject of a sermon, in which, to some extent, he eulogized the man, but said that HDT WHAT? INDEX

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his act was a failure. An influential class-teacher thought it necessary, after the services, to tell his grown-up pupils that at first he thought as the preacher did then, but now he thought that John Brown was right. But it was understood that his pupils were as much ahead of the teacher as he was ahead of the priest; and I know for a certainty that very little boys at home had already asked their parents, in a tone of surprise, why God did not interfere to save him. In each case, the constituted teachers were only half conscious that they were not leading, but being dragged, with some loss of time and power. The more conscientious preachers, the Bible men, they who talk about principle, and doing to others as you would that they should do unto you — how could they fail to recognize him, by far the greatest preacher of them all, with the Bible in his life and in his acts, the embodiment of principle, who actually carried out the golden rule? All whose moral sense had been aroused, who had a calling from on high to preach, sided with him. What confessions he extracted from the cold and conservative! It is remarkable, but on the whole it is well, that it did not prove the occasion for a new sect of Brownites being formed in our midst. They, whether within the Church or out of it, who adhere to the spirit and let go the letter, and are accordingly called infidel, were as usual foremost to recognize him. Men have been hung in the South before for attempting to rescue slaves, and the North was not much stirred by it. Whence, then, this wonderful difference? We were not so sure of their devotion to principle. We made a subtle distinction, forgot human laws, and did homage to an idea. The North, I mean the living North, was suddenly all transcendental. It went behind the human law, it went behind the apparent failure, and recognized eternal justice and glory. Commonly, men live according to a formula, and are satisfied if the order of law is observed, but in this instance they, to some extent, returned to original perceptions, and there was a slight revival of old religion. They saw that what was called order was confusion, what was called justice, injustice, and that the best was deemed the worst. This attitude suggested a more intelligent and generous spirit than that which actuated our forefathers, and the possibility, in the course of ages, of a revolution in behalf of another and an oppressed people. Most Northern men, and a few Southern ones, were wonderfully stirred by Brown’s behavior and words. They saw and felt that they were heroic and noble, and that there had been nothing quite equal to them in their kind in this country, or in the recent history of the world. But the minority were unmoved by them. They were only surprised and provoked by the attitude of their neighbors. They saw that Brown was brave, and that he believed that he had done right, but they did not detect any further peculiarity in him. Not being accustomed to make fine distinctions, or to appreciate magnanimity, they read his HDT WHAT? INDEX

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letters and speeches as if they read them not. They were not aware when they approached a heroic statement, — they did not know when they burned. They did not feel that he spoke with authority, and hence they only remembered that the law must be executed. They remembered the old formula, but did not hear the new revelation. The man who does not recognize in Brown’s words a wisdom and nobleness, and therefore an authority, superior to our laws, is a modern Democrat. This is the test by which to discover him. He is not willfully but constitutionally blind on this side, and he is consistent with himself. Such has been his past life; no doubt of it. In like manner he has read history and his Bible, and he accepts, or seems to accept, the last only as an established formula, and not because he has been convicted by it. You will not find kindred sentiments in his commonplace book, if he has one. When a noble deed is done, who is likely to appreciate it? They who are noble themselves. I was not surprised that certain of my neighbors spoke of John Brown as an ordinary felon, for who are they? They have either much flesh, or much office, or much coarseness of some kind. They are not ethereal natures in any sense. The dark qualities predominate in them. Several of them are decidedly pachydermatous. I say it in sorrow, not in anger. How can a man behold the light who has no answering inward light? They are true to their right, but when they look this way they see nothing, they are blind. For the children of the light to contend with them is as if there should be a contest between eagles and owls. Show me a man who feels bitterly toward John Brown, and let me hear what noble verse he can repeat. He’ll be as dumb as if his lips were stone. It is not every man who can be a Christian, even in a very moderate sense, whatever education you give him. It is a matter of constitution and temperament, after all. He may have to be born again many times. I have known many a man who pretended to be a Christian, in whom it was ridiculous, for he had no genius for it. It is not every man who can be a freeman, even. Editors persevered for a good while in saying that Brown was crazy; but at last they said only that it was “a crazy scheme,” and the only evidence brought to prove it was that it cost him his life. I have no doubt that if he had gone with five thousand men, liberated a thousand slaves, killed a hundred or two slaveholders, and had as many more killed on his own side, but not lost his own life, these same editors would have called it by a more respectable name. Yet he has been far more successful than that. He has liberated many thousands of slaves, both North and-South. They seem to have known nothing about living or dying for a principle. They all called him crazy then; who calls him crazy now? All through the excitement occasioned by his remarkable attempt and subsequent behavior the Massachusetts Legislature, not taking any steps for the defense of her citizens who were likely HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to be carried to Virginia as witnesses and exposed to the violence of a slaveholding mob, was wholly absorbed in a liquor- agency question, and indulging in poor jokes on the word “extension.” Bad spirits occupied their thoughts. I am sure that no statesman up to the occasion could have attended to that question at all at that time — a very vulgar question to attend to at any time! When I looked into a liturgy of the Church of England, printed near the end of the last century, in order to find a service applicable to the case of Brown, I found that the only martyr recognized and provided for by it was King Charles the First, an eminent scamp. Of all the inhabitants of England and of the world, he was the only one, according to this authority, whom that church had made a martyr and saint of; and for more than a century it had celebrated his martyrdom, so called, by an annual service. What a satire on the Church is that! Look not to legislatures and churches for your guidance, nor to any soulless incorporated bodies, but to inspirited or inspired ones. What avail all your scholarly accomplishments and learning, compared with wisdom and manhood? To omit his other behavior, see what a work this comparatively unread and unlettered man wrote within six weeks. Where is our professor of belles- lettres, or of logic and rhetoric, who can write so well? He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like Raleigh, but an American book which I think will live longer than that. I do not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously withal, in Roman or English or any history. What a variety of themes he touched on in that short space! There are words in that letter to his wife, respecting the education of his daughters, which deserve to be framed and hung over every mantelpiece in the land. Compare this earnest wisdom with that of Poor Richard. The death of [Washington] Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors. Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are egregiously mistaken. The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them. This unlettered man’s speaking and writing are standard English. Some words and phrases deemed vulgarisms and Americanisms before, he has made standard American; such as “It will pay.” It suggests that the one great rule of composition –and if I were a professor of rhetoric I should insist on this– is, to speak the truth. This first, this second, this third; pebbles in your mouth or not. This demands earnestness and manhood chiefly. We seem to have forgotten that the expression, a liberal HDT WHAT? INDEX

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education, originally meant among the Romans one worthy of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely was considered worthy of slaves only. But taking a hint from the word, I would go a step further, and say that it is not the man of wealth and leisure simply, though devoted to art, or science, or literature, who, in a true sense, is liberally educated, but only the earnest and free man. In a slaveholding country like this, there can be no such thing as a liberal education tolerated by the State; and those scholars of Austria and France who, however learned they may be, are contented under their tyrannies have received only a servile education. Nothing could his enemies do but it redounded to his infinite advantage — that is, to the advantage of his cause. They did not hang him at once, but reserved him to preach to them. And then there was another great blunder. They did not hang his four followers with him; that scene was still postponed; and so his victory was prolonged and completed. No theatrical manager could have arranged things so wisely to give effect to his behavior and words. And who, think you, was the manager? Who placed the slave-woman and her child, whom he stooped to kiss for a symbol, between his prison and the gallows? We soon saw, as he saw, that he was not to be pardoned or rescued by men. That would have been to disarm him, to restore to him a material weapon, a Sharps’ rifle, when he had taken up the sword of the spirit — the sword with which he has really won his greatest and most memorable victories. Now he has not laid aside the sword of the spirit, for he is pure spirit himself, and his sword is pure spirit also. “He nothing common did or mean Upon that memorable scene, Nor called the gods with vulgar spite, To vindicate his helpless right; But bowed his comely head Down as upon a bed.” What a transit was that of his horizontal body alone, but just cut down from the gallows-tree! We read, that at such a time it passed through Philadelphia, and by Saturday night had reached New York. Thus like a meteor it shot through the Union from the Southern regions toward the North! No such freight had the cars borne since they carried him Southward alive. On the day of his translation, I heard, to be sure, that he was hung, but I did not know what that meant; I felt no sorrow on that account; but not for a day or two did I even hear that he was dead, and not after any number of days shall I believe it. Of all the men who were said to be my contemporaries, it seemed to me that John Brown was the only one who had not died. I never hear of a man named Brown now –and I hear of them pretty often– I never hear of any particularly brave and earnest man, but my first thought is of John Brown, and what relation he may be to him. I meet him at every turn. He is more alive than ever he HDT WHAT? INDEX

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was. He has earned immortality. He is not confined to North Elba nor to Kansas. He is no longer working in secret. He works in public, and in the clearest light that shines on this land.

And it is also worthy of note that on October 25-26, 1860 (published November 3) Friend Lucretia Mott, the foremost spokesperson for nonviolence in the abolitionist movement in America, brought forward the position she had originally taken in regard to the “Christiana riot” near Philadelphia in 1851 by declaring  It is not John Brown the soldier we praise, it is John Brown the moral hero.

We might be tempted to declare that Thoreau was the most belligerent nonresistor of evil the world had yet seen, but in fact that description had already been awarded to someone. It was awarded by Robert Purvis to Friend Lucretia, and (despite what was said in the heat of the Civil War by Horace Greeley’s newspaper in New-York, in mockery of her) there is no shadow of a doubt that Friend Lucretia was for the totality of her life a convinced disbeliever in all violence. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1853

Sam Turner of Brooklyn obtained a patent for the substitution of colophonic tar for linseed oil in the manufacture of printing ink.  The family business of the Thoreaus had shifted from pencils into the grinding of the exceedingly fine graphite powders that state-of-the-art high-speed rotary printing presses had begun to use in place of fluid ink. They were selling these powders in bulk by confidential contract and relying on industrial secrecy and on the highest standards of quality and customer service to maintain high wholesale prices (instead of trusting to patents, which in effect would merely have spread the word about his new manufacturing techniques and mix ingredients). At first they were able to get $10.00 per pound for their fine electrotyping powders, and they was selling 600 pounds a year. By this point the Thoreaus were no longer bothering to fabricate their pencils in the sheds behind their home. Instead, Horace Rice Hosmer was finishing the family’s pencils for John Thoreau at Hayward & Mile’s Pencil Shop.  Before this year Edmund Hosmer had lived and farmed at location Gleason G9, bottom right green arrow, afterward, he would be at location Gleason E6, top left blue arrow.

Spring/Summer: Horace Rice Hosmer would recollect, later, that during the spring and summer of 1853 he had been “a foot-peddler” and that during that period he had been experimenting with Bronson Alcott’s and Sylvester Graham’s and Henry Thoreau’s food notions. He “found by repeated experiments” that he “could walk farther, carry more weight, and feel better every way by eating whole wheat bread and butter and cheese, pilot or ship bread, rather than meat. These food theories were being tested by hundreds of young men besides Thoreau — —” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November: A 1st child was born to the Reverend Issachar J. Roberts and Mrs. Virginia Young Roberts.  Ellen Fuller Channing took the Channing children and left the home of her husband Ellery Channing in Concord. Horace Rice Hosmer was serving as a clerk in Walcott’s Grocery Store in Concord. After Ellen left, the Reverend Barzillai Frost arranged for her personal effects to be shipped to her in Worcester, Massachusetts. Hosmer saw the personal effects in transit out of the Channing home on Main Street, and felt very angry with Ellery Channing for a number of reasons, including the fact that he considered Ellen to be “refined and ladylike” — and would have liked to have been married to her himself: One day three rough cases or boxes were brought to the store containing her books, thrown in like so much rubbish. I looked them over when I had a chance, and ... [t]here were books in Spanish, German and Italian. French of course was well represented, and I think many of them had Margaret Fuller’s name in them. They remained in the upper room of the store some days till directions were received where to send them. A store keeper like a Doctor has to hold his tongue, but I should have enjoyed lynching Channing at that time.

SPLITSVILLE

1851 Edwin Forrest Catherine Sinclair

1852 Ellery Channing Ellen Kilshaw Fuller Channing

1853 Lola Montez Patrick Purdy Hull HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1856

Horace Rice Hosmer would recollect much later that “A gentleman residing in Woburn sent a copy of LEAVES OF GRASS to [me. I] was living at that time in Burlington.... The book was among the people, passing from hand to hand till one sad day it fell into the hands of a maiden lady who was old enough to know better, was wealthy and charitable and claimed to know something about books, and she with a pencil erased or blackened all the objectionable words and phrases.... When the new edition by Thayer and Eldridge 1860 came out, I bought at Stacey’s bookstore the only copy sold in Concord.”9 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1857

Joseph Hosmer sold the Hosmer family farm in Concord, which had been in the family’s possession for 220

9. If this was truly the only copy of Walt Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS sold in Concord, then Henry Thoreau did not acquire his own copy in Concord, but elsewhere or as a gift or in another edition than the 1855 edition. What purports to be Thoreau’s copy has been on sale on EBay with the beginning bid set at $15,000, and eventually was sold at auction by Sotheby’s, evidently to a Whitman collector, for US$119,500:

The EBay offering was thusly described: Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn, New York: 1855 ? With: F.B. Sanborn. Autograph note, n.p. n.d. ? With: Good- speed, Charles E. Typed letter signed, Boston, 10 May 1902. Small folio (11? x 7Ê in.; 286 x 200 mm). Fron- tispiece portrait on heavy paper; one small spot of ink at top edge of frontispiece, very minor foxing, lacking the final blank leaf. Publisher’s dark green cloth, title in rustic style stamped in gilt and with three gilt rules on both covers, spine stamped in gilt floral ornaments; recased in the latter nineteenth century, marble end- papers added, original front free endpaper repaired and tipped-in (containing signatures of Thoreau and San- born), extremities lightly rubbed. Dark green half-morocco case, cloth chemise. First edition, first issue; Henry David Thoreau’s copy. America’s most famous philosopher of individualism signed his name with a flourish in this copy of Whitman’s poetic tribute to American democracy. Acquired from Thoreau’s sister by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. ... Also from the libraries of Stephen Wakeman and Robert W. Martin. “Perhaps the best example of those exceptional few who were passionate collectors of American literature in this period is Stephen H. Wakeman. Wakeman collected from 1900 to 1920, and his sale catalogue in 1924 contains an extraordinary wealth of material by the authors he chose to pursue” (William S. Reese, “Collecting Herman Melville,” The Gazette of the Grolier Club, 1993). Wakeman’s note included here documented his purchase of the Leaves of Grass: “This copy ? came to me from Mr. Sanborn through Mr. Goodspeed, as did most of my Thoreau treasures.” Goodspeed’s typed letter signed, dated 1902, explained to Wakeman: “Some years ago the binding of this book becoming loose Mr. Sanborn had it resewed. The vandal of a bookbinder inserted new end papers. Mr. Sanborn was just able to save that part of one of them which had Thoreau’s autograph.” Robert W. Martin, a member of the Grolier Club for more than thirty years, began collecting in the 1920s. His interests ranged from illuminated manuscripts to first editions of English and American literature. To- gether, three items and ephemera (clippings, etc.) References: Wells & Goldsmith, p. 3-4; Myerson A2.1.a1; PMM 340; BAL 21395 Provenance: Henry David Thoreau (signature) ? Sophia Thoreau ? Francis Benjamin Sanborn (signature and inscription: “F.B. Sanborn / From Miss Thoreau / March 1873”) ? Stephen H. Wake- man (bookplate, one-page autograph note) ? Robert Walsingham Martin (armorial bookplate) ? (Sotheby’s New York, sale of 22 May 1985, lot 379) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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years, and moved to Chicago. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1858

Horace Rice Hosmer borrowed some of John Thoreau, Senior’s pencil-making machinery “to make Red Crayons.”  It was in this year that Hiram L. Lipman began to manufacture and market a pencil with “a rubber” attached to one end (he had patented this device on March 30, 1853). Only later would this come to be termed “an eraser” and only after other uses for such “rubber” material had become common. But for now both ends of the pencil would be business ends and Lipman would make his fortune.10

JOHN EBERHARD

10. In 1875 in Reckendorfer v. Faber (92 U.S. 347) his patent would be invalidated on the perfectly reasonable, if sniffy, legal grounds that all this guy had actually accomplished was the attachment of an object to another object. READ ABOUT THIS CASE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1860

Horace Rice Hosmer purchased the only copy of the 2d edition of LEAVES OF GRASS that would be sold in Concord.11

11. According to Jonathan Ned Katz’s THE INVENTION OF HETEROSEXUALITY (NY: Dutton, 1995), it was during this decade, in Germany, that we began our current preoccupation with sorting our sexual behavior out into the categories “heterosexual” versus “homosexual.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1862

At this point a photograph was made of Mary Moody Emerson. This has probably perished in the fire of the night of July 24, 1872 at the Emerson home, for no portrait other than the youthful silhouette made probably before returning to Malden, Massachusetts has ever been recovered.  At the age of 32 Joseph Aitteon (or Atteon) was selected as tribal governor (the 1st of a total of 7 times). This photograph in the Fannie Hardy Eckstorm Collection at the Folger Library of the University of Maine at Orono has been described by Mrs. Eckstorm as “copied from the only known likeness extant, a tintype taken … most likely in 1862....”

Horace Rice Hosmer would later remember that “There was a great demand for pencils in 1862 and the stock of Florida Cedar in Northern hands was nearly exhausted, and the price was enormously high. I endeavored to find a substitute in the Red Cedar of Maine.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

1869

Betsy Farrar Melvin died. THE MELVINS OF CONCORD

Lydia Davis (or Davys) Hosmer, age 80, suffered “A broken vein, a clot of blood,” and was taken to be cared for at the Concord poor farm (this same thing would happen to one of her sons at the age of 67, although we do not know whether it was Joseph Hosmer born in 1814 who was taken in during the year 1881 or Benjamin Gardner Hosmer born in 1816 who was taken in during the year 1883). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1876

June 16, Friday: The Republican National Convention in Cincinnati nominated Ohio’s governor Rutherford B. Hayes for President of the United States of America, and New York’s William A. Wheeler for Vice President.  James Russell Lowell threw his support to Hayes and would be paid off by being appointed as minister to Spain (1877-1880) and ambassador to Great Britain (1880-1885). Lowell would achieve ample popularity in the literary and political circles of England and be anointed as president of the Wordsworth Society, succeeding Matthew Arnold.  Horace Rice Hosmer of Concord would comment that “I voted for freedom every time until Hayes made me tired,” and to understand this comment you will need to know something about the political climate of those times. Explanation follows.  Founded in 1854, for its first couple of decades the Republican Party had promoted African-American parity. Abraham Lincoln and the “Radical Republicans” in Congress had striven to end slavery and to give black men full citizenship. As early as this year, however –not 1960, as the Philadelphia conventioneers suggested in the year 2000– the leaders of the GOP began to abandon black Americans. In this year’s presidential election, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Ohio Republican Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South in exchange for southern Democratic support, and thus secured the presidency for himself over his rival Samuel J. Tilden.12 Democrats would seize power in the South and ushered in legalized “Jim Crow” segregation.13 

When the Bush family touts its party’s history, they do not seem to be aware that Republican advocacy of black equality was already waning by the early 20th century. Not even on the scourge of lynching would Republicans muster enough enthusiasm to take federal action. Although House Republicans would enact an anti-lynching bill in January 1922, their Senate counterparts wouldn’t agree to this.  COLDBLOODED MURDER

Heartland Republicans such as William Borah of Idaho would ally with Southern Democrats to defeat the bill, arguing that it licensed federal interference with states’ autonomy — that is, that it was unacceptable because

12. At some point prior to this corrupt “Hayes-Tilden” bargain, the plantation masters of the American South had toyed with the idea of replacing their blacks with Chinese. The main difficulty with that fantasy was the numbers: Coolie laborers could be earning somewhere between $0.90 and $1.50 per day out west, building railroad tracks, and the Southern planters certainly were not entertaining the idea of paying anyone that kind of money — they were not in the habit of paying their labor more than about $0.75 to $1.00 per day. Although a few coolies had been obtained, they had of course soon voted with their feet, disappearing from the Louisiana plantations and beginning their own enterprises as fishermen and as truck farmers in the vicinity of New Orleans. (Bravo!) 13. “Lincoln freed the slaves.” Sure, you believe that! Why don’t I also believe that? –The general impact of the Emancipation Proclamation and the XIIIth Amendment to the US Constitution was seen not so much in the leveling upward of the condition of the “liberated” black slaves to match the previous condition of the small Southern free black population, as in the leveling downward of the condition of these former freemen, under the “Jim Crow” Black Code of segregation, to the condition of “sharecropper” — someone who would always be, as depicted in the movie “The Color Purple,” merely a disposable slave of the white society as a while, toward whom no particular white person needed to display any affect other than hostility or any behavior other than persecution. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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it would prevent the Southern states from torturing and murdering their own citizens.

Well, but in writing the above, I seem to have made it seem that what happened was all the fault of the Republicans.  The fact is, after our Civil War and our supposed “abolition of slavery,” the situation had gone back to very much business as usual. Few, if any, former American slaves had received the “40 acres and a mule” which had been promised, because the Confiscation Bill, which would have carved up plantations of rebel leaders to create these lands for redistribution, would never be enacted by the federal Congress. What happened was that the southern white representatives were accepted back into the federal legislature too early, and once they got back in, the existing provisions of the Electoral College, which had always favored southern states over northern ones and rural states over urban states, operated to grant them a great deal of national influence. Basically, whereas before the Civil War the southern influence in the Electoral College amounted to one vote for each white adult, plus only three-fifths of a vote for each adult of color (cast by the southern white adult for the benefit of the southern white adult), under the new system the southern influence in the Electoral HDT WHAT? INDEX

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college amounted to one vote for each white adult, plus one vote for each adult of color (still cast by the southern white adult for the benefit of the southern white adult). That is to say, in this specific sense, in the sense of federal political influence, actually the Southern whites had won the Civil War, effectively garnering even greater national political power for themselves. Under these new circumstances, it is not hard to see why it was that black emancipation was never to be pursued with any great rigor or attention. By and large, those American black families that owned land in the South often were the families of veterans of the Union army who had purchased that land with their wages. Faced with continual assaults by the Ku Klux Klan and by unfair

treatment in the marketplace, it would have been a miracle if any of these freedmen managed to maintain such landholdings. Indeed, many freed Southern black families, known as “Exodusters,” elected to move on to Kansas and to Oklahoma. Those who became “sharecroppers” quickly lost all capability of movement, for this freedom was abrogated by the creation of a system of debt peonage, tied to the crop lien, which reinstituted slavery in all but name, or, to put this another way, instituted a serfdom, as found for instance in Russia or in medieval Europe, in all but name. Since the tenants always had to mortgage their portion of the crop in order to purchase needed daily food and supplies, they almost always remained in debt to the landowner and thus needed to work another season to pay it of, and on and on. When sharecroppers did move, usually this was after the owner, for whatever reason, had elected no longer “to rent to them.” Some ex-slaves may have seen HDT WHAT? INDEX

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a distinction between slavery before the civil strife and slavery after the civil strive but the preponderance of evidence, especially from blues and folk songs, suggests that they knew things weren’t all that different in a practical sense. White sharecroppers probably held on to the belief that they possessed mobility and freedom longer than did black sharecroppers, but the collapse of the “agricultural ladder” (the idea that one might move up from hired hand to renter to landowner) would by the 1890s render this virtually impossible. The number of sharecroppers and small farmers engaged in nightriding against the large land owners and one open revolt, Oklahoma’s Green Corn Rebellion, signaled an awareness that sharecropper was a snare and once trapped, escape was unlikely.

Human insolence knowing no limits, after Reconstruction any number of former white slavemasters attempted to obtain compensation for their freed slaves, from the federal government. Here is one of their petitions: State of Mississippi, County of Claiborne (“Claiborne” is written in a blank left on the form) Personally came before the undersigned, a Justice of the peace in and for the County and State aforesaid, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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______who being duly sworn according to law, deposes and states on oath, that on the first day of January, 1863, the date on which the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln, dated September 22d, 1862, went into effect, ______was the lawful owner in ______own right, under the Constitution and Laws of the United States, and of the State of Mississippi, of each and all the slaves numbering ______that the value of each was the amount set opposite to each name, in lawful money of the United States, as set forth in the list embraced in this affidavit, and the whole value as there set forth was ______Dollars, that the legal title in and to the said named slaves was vested in ______on the first day of January, 1863, the day on which said Emancipation Proclamation liberated said slaves and divested ______of all right and title thereto, and the loss of each and all of said slaves was incurred in consequence of said Emancipation Proclamation, and ______do hereby appoint and constitute Joshua and Thomas Green, trading under the firm of J. & T. Green, _____ legal attorneys to represent in ______interest the said claim for the value of the said slaves, against the Government of the United States, or in the Congress of the United States, in the Court of Claims of the United States, or in any United States District Courts, or in any of the State Courts in States constituting the United States, to maintain actions for, recover and receipt for all or such payment or remuneration as may be obtainable for the said slaves, and their receipts for such amount shall be in law as if made by   Sworn to and subscribed before me, this ______187 J.P. (SEAL)  The claim is based on a supposed right of compensation for slaves liberated by the Emancipation Proclamation, on the basis of the US Constitution. (Mississippi’s having rejected the Constitution would have been quite irrelevant, the point being that the federal government had not rejected it.) It appears as if this Green law firm was collecting such suppositious claims sometime in the 1870s, perhaps after the end of Congressional Reconstruction, perhaps for a class action lawsuit, in hopes that the Hayes administration might create some scheme for compensation of slave owners, even if they were in rebellion at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. We note in passing that these folks would have had an inordinately difficult time attempting to establish at law that their slaves had actually been lost in consequence of the Emancipation Proclamation, since that proclamation hadn’t actually resulted in anyone obtaining any emancipation documentation! In the national legislature, however, given a certain degree of good will, a certain measure of good ol’ white boy winking and nodding, the Green law firm might have been persuasive. It appears to me that whether they would have obtained the remuneration themselves, or this Green law firm would have been able to retain the remuneration, would have depended upon some separate document of agreement, which we do not have before us. Perhaps there would have been some sort of “retainer” document, which stipulated that x% of the proceeds would constitute a commission for the law firm. Bear in mind that after the southern states had HDT WHAT? INDEX

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been allowed back into the union, they had a somewhat greater degree of control over the federal government than they had had heretofore, because their numbers of representatives in the US House of Representatives had swollen from a number that counted each black slave as 3/5ths of a person for electoral purposes, to a number that counted each former black slave as a whole person for electoral purposes. With the end of the Reconstruction, these black Southerners could no longer represent themselves, and were again being “represented” for their own good by Southern white politicians! On that basis, I can imagine that various persons must have been having hot fantasies, of being able to vote remuneration for themselves. After all, prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, the slaveowning members of the House of Representatives had been allowed to dip into the federal coffers and fill their pockets, to the tune of $200 for each slave they owned in the District of Columbia. What they had managed to accomplish once, they might be able to accomplish again! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1880

Prior to the turn of the century a young Concord woman was making pencils by hand, out of elder twigs, by poking out the pith with a knitting needle and then ramming a mixture of ground graphite and gum arabic or glue into the hollow tube. We may learn somewhat about such early pencil-making from a short essay which Horace Rice Hosmer would prepare, in about 1880, for Leffel’s Illustrated News of New-York:

[T]here was a school for young ladies ... in Medford, and one of the pupils ... from Concord ... learned to utilize the bits and ends of Borrowdale lead used in drawing, by pounding them fine and mixing a solution of gum arabic or glue. The cases were made from twigs of elder, the pith being removed with a knitting needle.... [T]he writer [Horace Rice Hosmer], then [circa 1840] a boy of ten years, helped the same lady to make similar pencils from plumbago and English red chalk.... H. David Hubbard, living in the north part of Concord, made the first cedar wood pencils for the New England trade; but they were of little value, and but few of them were manufactured. In 1812 William Monroe, a cabinet maker by trade, pounded some plumbago with a hammer, mixed it in a spoon with some adhesive substance, and filled the compound into some cedar wood cases. Some of these pencils were shown to Benjamin Andrews of Boston, who was ready to buy, and encouraged Munroe to make more of them. Twelve days after he carried five gross, which were readily taken and paid for, and a new industry was fairly started. Munroe ... made the “water cement” or paste lead which was filled into the grooves in a soft state, and after remaining a week or more the surface of the pencil slab was planed to remove the composition which adhered to it, and to leave a clean surface for gluing on a veneer of cedar. The pencil slab was about 1/4 inch thick, and the veneer 1/8 inch and of varying widths from 4 to 10 pencils wide.... Eben Wood of Acton worked with Munroe in Concord, when all the work was done by hand. The logs of cedar were cut into slabs and veneers with a “two-handed saw,” by two men; planed by hand to a thickness, grooved with the spur plane or plough, one groove at a time, and so on through all the different processes.... Eben Wood ... saw a tool for cutting the points of shoe pegs, and by applying the principle of the circular saw soon had a grooving machine which would cut six grooves at a time.... A moulding and trimming machine soon followed; then a wedge glue press, holding 12 gross pencils took the place of the hand screws which Munroe used.... His machine for trimming the ends of pencils ... is in use at the time of writing this article [circa 1880].... He made the hexagon and octagon shape cases, halving them together, with similar shaped grooves for the dame. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1882

14 Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, in his HENRY D. THOREAU, pretended to be offering a solution to the parable of the hound, the bay horse, and the turtle-dove as it had been written into WALDEN, to wit, that this parable was “his version of the primitive legend of the Golden Age” (when in actuality Sanborn continued to be as utterly clueless as he always had been and always would be): His mind tended naturally to the ideal side.... In youth, too, he said, “The other world is all my art, my pencils will draw no other, my jack-knife will cut nothing else; I do not use it as a means.” It was in this spirit that he afterwards uttered the quaint parable, which was his version of the primitive legend of the Golden Age:

14. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s treatment of the fable of the hound, the bay horse, and the turtle-dove would remain unamplified in the 1884 and the 1910 reprints of this study.  Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. HENRY D. THOREAU. American Men of Letters Series, ed. C.D. Warner; Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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 The following listing is Horace Rice Hosmer’s questioning reaction to a piece of eugenic engineering that Sanborn had included in this volume, to wit, “Perpetuity, indeed, and hereditary transmission of everything that by nature and good sense can be inherited, are among the characteristics of Concord”:

The Harvard Apples that do or do not fall far from the Tree

NAME CLASS FATHER SON

George Moore 1834 Abel Moore, the county sheriff in Concord, “Mason by trade and rich” “came from Sudbury a rich farmer”

Hiram B. Dennis 1835 “came from Boston because he was a drunkard” “died a drunkard’s death when about 30"

Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar ???? Judge Samuel Hoar “came from Lincoln a rich lawyer”

Henry D. Thoreau 1837 “little, deaf pencil maker” “never free from pecuniary difficulties  the greater part of his life”

John Shephard Keyes 1841 John Keyes, founder of The Republican during “Lawyer” [State Senator, District Judge] the 1840 election, “came from Westford”

George M. Brooks 1844 “came from Lincoln” “Lawyer” [Judge]

Edward Sherman Hoar 1844 “came from Lincoln a rich lawyer” “brother of Ebenezer R. Hoar”

Gorham Bartlett 1845 Dr. Josiah Bartlett, the Thoreau physician, [a pupil in the Thoreau school  “came from Chelmsford” who became a] “Doctor”

Geo Frisbie Hoar 1846 “came from Lincoln a rich lawyer” “brother of Ebenezer R. Hoar”

Geo Haywood 1847 Dr. Abiel Heywood, long term town clerk  “was a Doctor, and wealthy, and chairman of the Concord Board of Selectmen of Concord”

Joseph B Keyes ???? “brother of Thomas L. Keyes” ????

Nathan H. Barrett 1851 Captain Nathan Barrett  ???? “was a rich farmer of Concord” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1890

August: By this point there was no more plumbago, or “wad,” to be extracted from the hillsides of Keswick in England.  “Dr.” Samuel Arthur Jones visited Concord to study Henry Thoreau materials. Here are some notes about pencil manufacture he made during a conversation he had with Horace Rice Hosmer, with whom he would enter upon an extended correspondence:

• “The pencil secret” • “The plumbago was mixed with German clay (fuller’s earth) into a paste, rolled into sheets, cut into leads, and burnt, so as to use up the clay. The father Thoreau very secretive as to his process.” • “Monroe used glue instead of clay.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1891

March 9, Monday: Horace Rice Hosmer, in Acton, Massachusetts, received a “very fine Photo of Thoreau,” showing him “at meridian,” from “Dr.” Samuel Arthur Jones. Probably this would have been the B.W. Maxham daguerreotype taken in 1856.  On this date Hosmer wrote to “Dr.” Jones that: “Elisha Dugan was a Mulatto, the son of a runaway slave from Va. Dugan owned a good house and some land, with good fruit trees. He was unmarried, and lived alone for many years. At the present time he is in the Almshouse, Concord.” This was the last survivor of the Dugan family of Concord. This material is available, for whatever it is worth, in REMEMBRANCES OF CONCORD AND THE THOREAUS: LETTERS OF HORACE HOSMER TO DR. S.A. JONES, BY HORACE HOSMER, edited by George Hendrick (Urbana, Chicago, London: U of Illinois P, 1977); a download available for a fee on the internet at http://docigy.ru/xyxanez.pdf or https://archive.org/details/remembrancesofco00hora). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1893

April 15, Saturday: An anonymous article “Reminiscences of Thoreau,” by Horace Rice Hosmer, appeared in the Concord Enterprise: More than forty years ago half a dozen boys were on the east bank of the Assabet river taking a sun bath after their swimming in the stream. They were talking about the conical heaps of stone in the river, and wishing that that [sic] they knew what built them. There were about as many theories as there were boys, and no conclusion had been arrived at, when one of the boys said, “Here comes Henry Thoreau, let us ask him.” So when he came near, one of the boys asked him ‘What made those heaps of stones in the river?’ “I asked a Penobscot Indian that question,” said Thoreau, “and he said, ‘The musquash did,’ but I told him that I was a better Indian than he, for I knew and he did not,” and with that reply he walked off. John _____ said, “That is just like him, he never will tell a fellow anything unless it is in his lectures, darn his old lectures about chipmunks and Injuns, I won’t go to hear him,” and the unanimous conclusion of the boys was, that when they got left again, another man would do it. The boys could not understand Thoreau, and he did not understand boys, and both were losers by it. While looking over Thoreau’s “Autumn” lately, the writer was reminded of the time when Thoreau and the writer’s father spent some two or three weeks running anew the boundary lines in Sudbury woods. I think it was in 1851, and there were grave disputes and law suits seemed probable but after a while these two men were selected to fix the bounds. The real trouble was owing to the variations of the compass, the old lines having been run some 200 years before; but Thoreau understood his business thoroughly and settled the boundary question so that peace was declared. [Actually, Henry Thoreau’s remeasuring did not resolve this boundary issue, and the debate would continue.] Thoreau’s companion was an old lumberman and woodchopper and a close observer of natural objects, but he said that Thoreau was the best man he had ever known in the woods. He would climb a tree like a squirrel, knew every plant and shrub and really seemed to have been born in the forest. Thoreau asked many questions; one of them was, “Do you know where there is a white grape, which grows on high land, which bears every year and is of superior quality?” “Yes,” was the reply. “It is a little north of Deacon Dakins’ rye field and when the grapes are ripe if you are not on the windward side your nose will tell you where they are.” Thoreau laughed and appeared satisfied. About this time Thoreau went to a party in Concord, and he says in his journal or diary, that he would rather eat crackers and cheese with his old companion in the woods. It is a great mistake to suppose that Thoreau was a solitary student of natural history in Concord and vicinity at that time. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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He was better equipped for his work, and could record his observations and discoveries better than his fellow students and this was enough to make him famous in later years.... There was a great intermediate class between Emerson and the Canadian wood chopper who would have gladly aided Thoreau if he had been a little more human in his dealings with them.

December: Long afterward, with nobody around to go “Takes One To Know One,” Horace Rice Hosmer summed up Bronson Alcott uncharitably as “an old bundle of false pretenses” and a relative chimed in by characterizing him as having been a “Pewter Plato.” This would provide the title for “Dr.” Samuel Arthur Jones’s review, which appeared in The Inlander, of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s and William T. Harris’s A. BRONSON ALCOTT, HIS LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY: [Bronson Alcott’s] deflection began when the glamour about those Virginia plantations bewitched the boy peddler’s admiring eyes. He soared from peddling to Philosophy ... and he found those who confirmed him in his delusion.... To reform the human family he neglected his own family, and by that token the race will recognize a pewter Plato. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1894

Horace Rice Hosmer died. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

1977

George Hendrick edited a trove of letters found in an attic in Urbana, Illinois, an extended correspondence between Horace Rice Hosmer and “Dr.” Samuel Arthur Jones, who was writing on Thoreauvian topics.15 According to page 131, Hosmer related that:16 As a teacher Henry was “merciless” i.e. the thing to be done must be done correctly. He was rigidly exacting — a faithful teacher to the parent whose child he had & to the child. He never mixed with the schoolboys; he was hated. The bell tolled instead of rang, when he taught alone during John’s illness. Did not answer the boys[’] questions by the River. “He had no enemies.” He did not have the “love-idea” in him: i.e. he did not appear to feel the sex-attraction.

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

15. Since his book was fashioned out of a stack of old letters found in an attic, questions as to the life of “Dr.” Jones and his overall reliability may not be relevant — we may be able to authenticate such documents on the basis of forensic examination of their paper, ink, and handwriting. 16. Hendrick, George, ed. REMEMBRANCES OF CONCORD AND THE THOREAUS: LETTERS OF HORACE HOSMER TO DR. S.A. JONES. Urbana IL: U of Illinois P, 1977 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

Prepared: January 19, 2018 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

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

THE PEOPLE OF CONCORD: HORACE RICE HOSMER

    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 . Arrgh.