THE CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
“The free communication of thought and opinion is one of the most precious rights of man; every citizen may therefore speak, write and print freely.” — French National Assembly, 1789 HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1672
In Concord, Captain Timothy Wheeler was again deputy and representative to the General Court.1
A mention of the lending of books, in the town records of Concord, Massachusetts for this year of 1672, would lead Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar to announce at the dedication of the Concord Free Public Library in 1873 that his town had had the very 1st public library (such a claim of course relied on local pride rather than on evidence). In 1672, seventeen articles of instruction were given to the selectmen [of Concord] by a committee, consisting of Nehemiah Hunt, John Flint, John Miles, William Hartwell, Thomas Wheeler, Joshua Brooks, Joseph Haywood, Gershom Brooks, Humphrey Barret, and John Billings, from which the following items are extracted: —
3. “That care be taken of the Books of Marters and other bookes, that belong to the Towne, that they be kept from abusive usage, and not be lent to persons more than one month at one time.”
7. “To take order that all corne fields be sufficiently fenced in season, the crane field and brickil field especially.”
8. “That incorigment be given for the destroying of blackbirds and jaies.”
11. “To make a record of all the habitations that are priviledged with liberty at commons.”
14. “To take care that undesirable persons be not entertained; so as to become inhabitants.”
15. “To take care that persons do not overcharge their commons with cattle.”
16. “That all persons that have taken the oath of fidelity be recorded.”2
THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE HISTORIAN TYPICALLY SUPPOSES NOW TO
1. Representative Timothy WHEELER of Concord, freeman on May 13, 1640, ensign in 1646, was a Captain late in his days, but more often in the record called Lieutenant. He was a Representative during 1663, and very often after; he died on July 10, 1687, aged about 86, as the gravestone tells; had Sarah WHEELER, born on June 22, 1640; had his wife Jane WHEELER who died on February 12, 1643; and by wife Mary Brooks WHEELER, daughter of Captain Thomas Brooks, had Mary WHEELER, born on October 3, 1657, died at 3 years; Elizabeth WHEELER, born on October 6, 1661, who got married during 1678 with Eleazer Prout; Rebecca WHEELER, born during 1666, who got married during 1684 with James Minot; and probably others, perhaps Timothy WHEELER of Concord, freeman 1677, for one, who got married on June 29, 1670 with Ruth Fuller, and died on June 7, 1678. 2. 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
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY BE THE WHY OF THEN. THE REALITY IS VERY MUCH TO THE CONTRARY, FOR NOW IS NOT THE WHY OF THEN: INSTEAD, THEN WAS THE HOW OF NOW. ANOTHER WAY TO SAY THIS IS THAT HISTORIANS WHO ANTICIPATE OFFEND AGAINST REALITY. A HISTORY WRITTEN IN THE LIGHT OF SUBSEQUENT EVENTS AMOUNTS TO SPURIOUS MAKE- BELIEVE. TO DO A GOOD JOB OF RECORDING HISTORY, ONE MUST BECOME IGNORANT (OR FEIGN IGNORANCE) OF EVERYTHING THAT WE NOW KNOW TO HAVE FOLLOWED.
Concord Free Public Library “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1786
February 23: In Concord, the organization of a Library Company: A Library Company was formed February 23, 1786. Whether there had previously been a library in town, and if any, how long it continued, and its number of volumes, is not known. A “Charitable Library Society” was formed May 25, 1795, depending chiefly on the voluntary donations of its members for support. Jonathan Fay, Esq., Jonas Minott, Esq., and the Rev. Ezra Ripley were successively presidents of this society. Its members united with others and composed the “Proprietors of the Concord Social Library,” and were incorporated in 1824. The presiding officers since have been the Rev. Ezra Ripley, the Hon. Samuel Hoar, the Hon. John Keyes, and the Hon. Abiel Heywood. The library, divided into 50 shares, contains about 900 volumes [1835] and constantly increases by the addition of new publications.3 According to Dr. Edward Jarvis’s TRADITIONS AND REMINISCENCES OF CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS 1779- 1878, page 129: The old Library was begun in 1786 and lived in various forms and organizations to the present time with its magnificent collections and its fitting home.
TRALFAMADORIANS EXPERIENCE REALITY IN 4 DIMENSIONS RATHER THAN 3 AND HAVE SIMULTANEOUS ACCESS TO PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. THEY ARE ABLE TO SEE ALONG THE TIMELINE OF THE UNIVERSE TO THE EXACT TIME AND PLACE AT WHICH AS THE RESULT OF A TRALFAMADORIAN EXPERIMENT, THE UNIVERSE IS ANNIHILATED. BILLY PILGRIM, WHILE CAGED IN A TRALFAMADORIAN ZOO, ACQUIRES THEIR ATTITUDE TOWARD TIME, AND SO WHEN HE RETURNS TO EARTH, HE BECOMES A HISTORIAN VERY LIKE ALL OUR OTHER HISTORIANS: ALTHOUGH HE CANNOT HIMSELF SEE INTO THE FUTURE THE WAY THE TRALFAMADORIANS DO, LIKE ALL OUR OTHER HUMAN HISTORIANS DO HE PRETENDS TO BE ABLE TO SEE ALL PERIODS OF OUR PAST TRAJECTORY NOT WITH THE EYES OF THE PEOPLE WHO WERE LIVING DURING THOSE PERIODS, BUT WITH THE OVERARCHING EYE OF GOD. THIS ENABLES HIM TO PRETEND TO BE VERY VERY WISE AND TO SOUND
3. 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. On July 16, 1859 he would correct a date mistake buried in the body of the text.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY VERY VERY IMPRESSIVE!
Concord Free Public Library “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1795
May 25, Monday: Concord founded a Charitable Library, of a few books kept in one of its stores.
In 1821 this would be succeeded by a “Social Library.” A Library Company was formed February 23, 1786. Whether there had previously been a library in town, and if any, how long it continued, and its number of volumes, is not known. A “Charitable Library Society” was formed May 25, 1795, depending chiefly on the voluntary donations of its members for support. Jonathan Fay, Esq., Jonas Minott, Esq., and the Rev. Ezra Ripley were successively presidents of this society. Its members united with others and composed the “Proprietors of the Concord Social Library,” and were incorporated in 1824. The presiding officers since have been the Rev. Ezra Ripley, the Hon. Samuel Hoar, the Hon. John Keyes, and the Hon. Abiel Heywood. The library, divided into 50 shares, contains about 900 volumes [1835] and constantly increases by the addition of new publications.4
THE AGE OF REASON WAS A PIPE DREAM, OR AT BEST A PROJECT. ACTUALLY, HUMANS HAVE ALMOST NO CLUE WHAT THEY ARE DOING, WHILE CREDITING THEIR OWN LIES ABOUT WHY THEY ARE DOING IT.
Concord Free Public Library “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project
4. 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. On July 16, 1859 he would correct a date mistake buried in the body of the text.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1815
In Vermont in about this year, William Allen (Henry Thoreau’s classmate in Harvard College’s Class of 1837 who would take over the teaching duties in Concord’s Centre School when Henry resigned) was born.
The Middlesex Bar commenced the formation of a law library in Concord, to be maintained by the Treasurer of Middlesex County.
Noah Webster, Esq. continued as a member of the Massachusetts General Court (he would serve also in 1817).
Tilly Merrick was Concord’s deputy and representative to the Massachusetts General Court.
In Concord, John Buttrick continued as Town Treasurer.
In Concord, Nathan Barrett was a Selectman.
In Concord, Thomas Wheeler was a Selectman.
These were the appropriations made by the town of Lincoln:5
Date. 1755. 1765. 1775. 1785. 1795. 1805. 1815. 1825.
2 2 Minister £56 £69 /3 £70 /3 £85 £105 $— $600 $460. 1 1 Schools 13 /2 20 13 /2 50 85 — 480 520. Highways 25 50 40 80 80 $450 600 400. 1 Incidental charges 24 /2 19 37 250 125 830 1450 500.
5. 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. On July 16, 1859 he would correct a date mistake buried in the body of the text.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY Representatives of Carlisle to the General court of Massachusetts:
Deacon Ephraim Robbins 1807-1808
Reverend Paul Litchfield 1808-1811
Captain Timothy Heald 1812-1813
Captain Thomas Heald 1815
Jonathan Heald, Jr., Esq. 1816
John Heald, Esq. 1818, 1821, 1823
Dr. John Nelson 1824
John Heald, Esq. 1826-1827, 1830
Representatives of Lincoln6
Chambers Russell ’54-57, ’59, ’62, ’63, ’5. Joshua Brooks 1809-1811.
Samuel Farrer 1766-1768. Leonard Hoar 1812-1814.
Eleazer Brooks ’74-’78, ’80, ’5, ’7, ’90-’2. William Hayden 1815, 1816.
Chambers Russell 1788. Elijah Fiske 1820-1822.
Samuel Hoar ’94, ’95, ’97, ’98, 1801, ’3-’8. Joel Smith 1824.
Samuel Farrar, Jr. 1800. Silas P. Tarbell 1827, 1828.
Not represented 1758, ’60, ’62, ’69-’73, ’79, ’81, ’82, ’86, ’89, ’93, ’96, ’99, 1802, ’17, ’23, ’25, ’26.
Appropriations made by the town of Carlisle
1785 1790 1795 1800 1805 1810 1815 1820 1825 1830
Minister £91 90 85 $285 290 280 320 275 320 500
Schools 36 30 60 360 300 360 360 450 360 360
Roads 60 45 60 300 480 350 400 400 350 400
Town Charges 74 60 50 300 500 550 550 700 600 600 3 County Tax —— 11 /4 22 58 —— 117 72 99 56 22 State Tax 484 48 64 227 —— 210 130 180 —— 65
6. Ibid HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY Town Clerks of Carlisle
Zebulon Spaulding 1780-1784
Asa Parlin 1785-1802; 1806-1808
John Jacobs 1803, 1809-1812, 1826
Jonathan Heald 1804-1805
Jonathan Heald, Jr. 1813-1814, 1818-1820
John Heald 1815-1817, 1821-1825, 1827-1829
Cyrus Heald 1829-——
John Keyes leased a house just to the northeast of the Courthouse that Concord had erected in 1784. (Eventually the family would buy this leased structure; Keyes, working at the nearby Courthouse, would live out his life there. His son Judge John Shepard Keyes would be born in that house and would reside in it until it would burn during the 1849 Courthouse fire.)
CONTINGENCY ALTHOUGH VERY MANY OUTCOMES ARE OVERDETERMINED, WE TRUST THAT SOMETIMES WE ACTUALLY MAKE REAL CHOICES. “THIS IS THE ONLY WAY, WE SAY, BUT THERE ARE AS MANY WAYS AS THERE CAN BE DRAWN RADII FROM ONE CENTRE.”
Concord Free Public Library “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1821
Due to the need to provide some sort of education for boys who would have careers in business rather than vocations in the ministry or in the professions of law and medicine and education, the English High School opened its doors in Boston. America’s first high school.
The first patient was admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
The Concord Social Library was established to house the collection of the earlier Charitable Library Society. John Stacy, Concord bookseller and stationer, would be the librarian, and the library materials would be maintained in his and his son Albert Stacy’s store on the Milldam until in 1851 they would be transferred to the Concord Town Library in the new courthouse, and in 1873 passed along to the Concord Free Public Library.
This is despite what Henry Thoreau would say in the “Reading” chapter:
WALDEN: My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, PEOPLE OF but to serious reading, than a university; and though I was WALDEN beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time on to linen paper. Says the poet Mîr Camar Uddîn Mast, “Being seated to run through the region of the spiritual world; I have had this advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines.” I kept Homer’s Iliad on my table through the summer, though I looked at his page only now and then. Incessant labor with my hands, at first, for I had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same time, made more study impossible. Yet I sustained myself by the prospect of such reading in future. I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived.
MÎR CAMAR UDDÎN MAST JOHN CHARLES FRÉMONT HOMER HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
Going on the basis of this mention, Stacy’s offerings could not have been particularly sophisticated. However, he would, when WALDEN was published in 1854, purchase a copy for $0.75 presumably for this town circulating library.7
IT IS NO COINCIDENCE THAT IT IS MORTALS WHO CONSUME OUR HISTORICAL ACCOUNTS, FOR WHAT WE ARE ATTEMPTING TO DO IS EVADE THE RESTRICTIONS OF THE HUMAN LIFESPAN. (IMMORTALS, WITH NOTHING TO LIVE FOR, TAKE NO HEED OF OUR STORIES.)
Concord Free Public Library “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project
7. By the way, you can make up your own mind whether Henry was being perfectly fair here, in not awarding more weight to the Concord Social Library. Its full records survive, and are now available for your inspection at the Concord Free Public Library. There is even a finding aid for the Social Library records, and it is available on the CFPL website: http:// www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Fin_Aids/ConcordSocialLibrary.htm. The CFPL has, also, the records of the Charitable Library Society, the Concord Town Library, and other pre-public libraries in Concord — although they have not as yet been able to make their finding aids for the other materials available on the internet. (Give them some money: let’s get this work done.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1824
8 James Buchanan, Esq. (British Consul to the State of New York). SKETCHES OF THE HISTORY, MANNERS, AND CUSTOMS, OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS WITH A PLAN FOR THEIR MELIORATION (New York: William Borradaile, two volumes in one). This work confessedly had based itself not upon any direct experience of the native American tribes but instead merely upon a reading of Moravian missionary John Gotlieb Ernestus Heckewelder’s AN ACCOUNT OF THE HISTORY, MANNERS, AND CUSTOMS, OF THE INDIAN NATIONS, WHO ONCE INHABITED PENNSYLVANIA AND THE NEIGHBOURING STATES, which although published in 1819 had never been made extensively available (and Heckewelder had died in 1823). Buchanan had been
assisted in its preparation by Samuel Farmar Jarvis. Its material on Indian languages included a chapter by Peter Stephen DuPonceau. Henry Thoreau would have a copy of this in his personal library. The Concord Free Public Library now has, under accession number 14003, a copy from Bronson Alcott’s library (rebound in green cloth), that was in 1878 presented to the library by Louisa May Alcott (raising a possibility that Thoreau’s volume had been inherited by Alcott in 1862). FOR THEIR MELIORATION
James Buchanan, H.B.M. Consul, was the long-term Elder of the New-York congregation of Scotch Baptists. The young Henry James, Sr., a follower of the thought of Sandeman, Walker, and Buchanan, had enlisted in this sect. To understand his faith, consult James Buchanan’s 1845 THE ORDER TO BE OBSERVED IN A CHURCH OF GOD (London: Jones and Dublin: Carson). Buchanan was a true believer in unrestrained capitalism: market regulation was always mistaken. Here is THE FATHER, by Alfred Habegger: James’s new congregation was headed by James Buchanan — not the future President but rather Her Majesty’s consul in New York. For two decades this man had not only represented the mother country in business and diplomatic affairs but also functioned as the crucial link between radical congregational separatists in Britain and America. If the tiny Anglo-American movement to restore the primitive church had a pope, it must have been Buchanan, who was nearing the end of a remarkable life by the time young James came within his reach. Starting out in northern Ireland thirty years earlier, he had established a pioneering breakaway congregation and a large nonsectarian school for both 8. It is clear that there was no close relation between this James Buchanan, Esq., a British official out of Ireland, and the future American president also named James Buchanan. He had been born on February 1, 1772 at Strathroy, Omagh, in County Tyrone of Ireland, had gotten married on December 24, 1798 with Elizabeth Clarke, served as the British Consul in New York from 1816 into 1844, and would die on October 10, 1851. Most of his children settled in Canada. In his will he would mention a “silver dirk, which it is alleged, has been about four hundred years in the family,” bequeathing this thingie that had been lying around to his son Robert Buchanan (perhaps so that it would be lying around in the family for yet another four hundred years). HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY Protestant and Catholic children. In some respects, his vision was similar to that of the early Reformation Anabaptists and Mennonites: he advocated passive obedience of one’s king, adult baptism, and a believers’ church modeled on the New Testament reports of the earliest Christian gatherings. “I close my labors,” he wrote in old age, “by calling on all to come out from every system of worship in which the authority of Man in any manner, or way, has place.” He opposed all forms of coercion in religion, he favored Catholic emancipation in Britain, and he denounced the “separation of castes” in “the slave-holding states of America.” But Buchanan was no leveler: he aligned himself with big-money interests, extolled New York State’s liberal banking laws, and argued against every kind of restrictive governmental intervention in the economy. He was a free-market missionary who proclaimed “the principle of free agency and self-dependence,” and yet he was a Tory who spoke out against democracy, universal suffrage, education of the lower classes, the weakening of parental authority. Proud of his own virility, he boasted of having fathered seventeen children. He recommended that seduced women be transported to asylums in distant colonies. Self-taught, opinionated, and armed with a remedy for every evil, Her Majesty’s consul now took on the additional task of regulating young Henry James. Meeting at 183 Canal Street, Buchanan’s congregation sanctioned only those practices that were explicitly ordained by New Testament precedent. Every prayer had to be on those “subjects mentioned by the apostles.” Because Christ did not die for those who depend on their own good deeds, there were no rules requiring members “to believe they must abstain from Balls, Theatres, and gross violations of rules of morality” before taking Communion. (The Sandemanians’ tolerant view of the stage helps explain why James, breaking with the custom of his class, took his children to numerous plays in the late 1840s and early 1850s.) Every worship service included a collection designed to transfer money from rich to poor members. Instead of a sermon, there was an “exhortation and teaching.” Any brother who had a gift to speak was encouraged to do so, always remembering to be plain and simple and avoid “the sermonizing, logic, and display of learning, by which so many [clergymen] get their living.” An ordinary municipal guidebook from 1839, NEW-YORK A S I T I S, vividly captures the marginality of James’s new fellowship. In the long section that lists Manhattan’s many churches, the Presbyterians proudly lead off with thirty-four congregation. They are the dominant sect, followed by the Episcopalians, the Methodists, the Baptists, and so forth. Finally, there is a catch-all category, “Miscellaneous,” which includes a New Jerusalem Church and a Floating Bethel. At the absolute end of the list of Gotham’s houses of worship comes James’s church — “Primitive Christians, 183 Canal, Mr. Buchanan.” Other congregations were led by a man with a “Rev.” in front of his name. The son of William and Catherine James had traveled very far from his childhood moorings. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
So, how did this British author recommend that the ascendant white man “meliorate” the lot of the remaining native American tribalists? His grand concept was that the crown should set aside a 4,000,000-acre tract of land in the Lake Huron/Lake Simcoe region as a single massive race-asylum for all redskins regardless of tribal affiliation, and grant to the firm but benign administrators of this Royal Asylum all funding already allocated for all such purposes. The charter of the white men in charge of this asylum was to emphasize that “It is above all things necessary to lead the Indians to a sense of Christianity.” Sarcastically, it would seem to me that if the motto of Auschwitz would be ARBEIT MACH FREI, the motto of this woodland concentration camp might parse as BE A CHRISTIAN BUT DON’T TRY TO LEAVE.
ONE COULD BE ELSEWHERE, AS ELSEWHERE DOES EXIST. ONE CANNOT BE ELSEWHEN SINCE ELSEWHEN DOES NOT. (TO THE WILLING MANY THINGS CAN BE EXPLAINED, THAT FOR THE UNWILLING WILL REMAIN FOREVER MYSTERIOUS.)
In Concord, the incorporation of the Proprietors of the Concord Social Library. Read yourself to death! A Library Company was formed February 23, 1786. Whether there had previously been a library in town, and if any, how long it continued, and its number of volumes, is not known. A “Charitable Library Society” was formed May 25, 1795, depending chiefly on the voluntary donations of its members for support. Jonathan Fay, Esq., Jonas Minott, Esq., and the Rev. Ezra Ripley were successively presidents of this society. Its members united with others and composed the “Proprietors of the Concord Social Library,” and were incorporated in 1824. The presiding officers since have been the Rev. Ezra Ripley, the Hon. Samuel Hoar, the Hon. John Keyes, and the Hon. Abiel Heywood. The library, divided into 50 shares, contains about 900 volumes [1835] and constantly increases by the addition of new publications.9
Concord Free Public Library “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project
9. 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. On July 16, 1859 he would correct a date mistake buried in the body of the text.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY John C. Breed, Concord’s barber and notorious drunkard, was found dead on the road. He had a son who became a day laborer and likewise became a drunkard, with whom Thoreau would describe an encounter in WALDEN. The cellar hole of his habitation is located just into the Walden Woods off the northern end of what is now the Fairyland Woods parking lot on Walden Street:(Contrary to what some have presumed, the Breeds were not persons of color. They derive from an Allen Breed who had arrived in Lynn in 1630, probably bringing children born in England, and in 1656 married there a 2d time with Elizabeth Knight, also of English ancestry.)
In this year the town of Concord combined the function of Treasurer and the function of Collector.
In Concord, Jonathan Hildreth continued as a Selectman.
Nathan Brooks was Concord’s deputy and representative to the General Court.
John Keyes of Concord was a Senator.
The collective maintenance of the town poor at an Alms House and Poor Farm, which had in 1821 cost Concord $1,450, in this year was accomplished at a cost of but $1,200. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
WALDEN: Nearer yet to town, you come to Breed’s location, on the other side PEOPLE OF of the way, just on the edge of the wood; ground famous for the pranks of a demon not distinctly named in old mythology, who has acted a prominent WALDEN and astounding part in our New England life, and deserves, as much as any mythological character, to have his biography written one day; who first comes in the guise of a friend or hired man, and then robs and murders the whole family, –New England Rum. But history must not yet tell the tragedies enacted here; let time intervene in some measure to assuage and lend an azure tint to them. Here the most indistinct and dubious tradition says that once a tavern stood; the well the same, which tempered the traveller’s beverage and refreshed his steed. Here then men saluted one another, and heard and told the news, and went their ways again. Breed’s hut was standing only a dozen years ago, though it had long been unoccupied. It was about the size of mine. It was set on fire by mischievous boys, one Election night, if I do not mistake. I lived on the edge of the village then, and had just lost myself over Davenant’s Gondibert, that winter that I labored with a lethargy, –which, by the way, I never knew whether to regard as a family complaint, having an uncle who goes to sleep shaving himself, and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar Sundays, in order to keep awake and keep the Sabbath, or as the consequence of my attempt to read Chalmers’ collection of English poetry without skipping. It fairly overcame my Nervii. I had just sunk my head on this when the bells rung fire, and in hot haste the engines rolled that way, led by a straggling troop of men and boys, and I among the foremost, for I had leaped the brook. We thought it was far south over the woods, – we who had run to fires before,– barn, shop, or dwelling-house, or all together. “It’s Baker’s barn,” cried one. “It is the Codman Place,” affirmed another. And then fresh sparks went up above the wood, as if the roof fell in, and we all shouted “Concord to the rescue!” Wagons shot past with furious speed and crushing loads, bearing, perchance, among the rest, the agent of the Insurance Company, who was bound to go however far; and ever and anon the engine bell tinkled behind, more slow and sure, and rearmost of all, as it was afterward whispered, came they who set the fire and gave the alarm. Thus we kept on like true idealists, rejecting the evidence of our senses, until at a turn in the road we heard crackling and actually felt the heat of the fire from over the wall, and realized, alas! that we were there. The very nearness of the fire but cooled our ardor. At first we thought to throw a frog-pond on to it; but concluded to let it burn, it was so far gone and so worthless.
JOHN C. BREED JOHN CODMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
WALDEN: So we stood round our engine, jostled one another, expressed our sentiments through speaking trumpets, or in lower tone referred to the great conflagrations which the world has witness, including Bascom’s shop, and, between ourselves we thought that, were we there in season with our “tub”, and a full frog-pond by, we could turn that threatened last and universal one into another flood. We finally retreated without doing any mischief, –returned to sleep and Gondibert. But as for Gondibert, I would except that passage in the preface about wit being the soul’s powder, – “but most of mankind are strangers to wit, as Indians are to powder.” It chanced that I walked that way across the fields the following night, about the same hour, and hearing a low moaning at this spot, I drew near in the dark, and discovered the only survivor of the family that I know, the heir of both its virtues and its vices, who alone was interested in this burning, lying on his stomach and looking over the cellar wall at the still smouldering cinders beneath, muttering to himself, as is his wont. He had been working far off in the river meadows all day, and had improved the first moments that he could call his own to visit the home of his fathers and his youth. He gazed into the cellar from all sides and points of view by turns, always lying down to it, as if there was some treasure, which he remembered, concealed between the stones, where there was absolutely nothing but a heap of bricks and ashes. The house being gone, he looked at what there was left. He was soothed by the sympathy which my mere presence implied, and showed me, as well as the darkness permitted, where the well was covered up; which, thank Heaven, could never be burned; and he groped long about the wall to find the well-sweep which his father had cut and mounted, feeling for the iron hook or staple by which a burden had been fastened to the heavy end, –all that he could now cling to,– to convince me that it was no common “rider.” I felt it, and still remark it almost daily in my walks, for by it hangs the history of a family.
Representatives of Carlisle to the General court of Massachusetts (not represented in 1825):
Deacon Ephraim Robbins 1807-1808
Reverend Paul Litchfield 1808-1811
Captain Timothy Heald 1812-1813
Captain Thomas Heald 1815
Jonathan Heald, Jr., Esq. 1816
John Heald, Esq. 1818, 1821, 1823
Dr. John Nelson 1824
John Heald, Esq. 1826-1827, 1830 HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
Representatives of Lincoln10
Chambers Russell ’54-57, ’59, ’62, ’63, ’5. Joshua Brooks 1809-1811.
Samuel Farrer 1766-1768. Leonard Hoar 1812-1814.
Eleazer Brooks ’74-’78, ’80, ’5, ’7, ’90-’2. William Hayden 1815, 1816.
Chambers Russell 1788. Elijah Fiske 1820-1822.
Samuel Hoar ’94, ’95, ’97, ’98, 1801, ’3-’8. Joel Smith 1824.
Samuel Farrar, Jr. 1800. Silas P. Tarbell 1827, 1828.
Not represented 1758, ’60, ’62, ’69-’73, ’79, ’81, ’82, ’86, ’89, ’93, ’96, ’99, 1802, ’17, ’23, ’25, ’26.
YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT EITHER THE REALITY OF TIME OVER THAT OF CHANGE, OR CHANGE OVER TIME — IT’S PARMENIDES, OR HERACLITUS. I HAVE GONE WITH HERACLITUS.
Concord Free Public Library “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project
10. Ibid HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1826
Heinrich Heine’s DIE HARZREISE (THE HARZ JOURNEY).
The 2d American edition of Edward Everett’s English translation of Professor Philip Karl Buttmann’s GRIECHISCHE SCHUL-GRAMMATIK, titled GREEK GRAMMAR FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS, FROM THE GERMAN OF PHILIP BUTTMANN (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, and Company), prepared by George Bancroft and George Henry Bode at the Round Hill School in Northampton.
Harvard College student Cornelius Conway Felton was at least in part supporting himself during his education by teaching one winter in Bolton and another winter in Concord, and at the Round Hill School in Northampton. During the two years 1827 to 1829 he would have charge of the high school in Livingston County, New York. He must have been an exceedingly disciplined scholar for also, in this his senior year, he was serving as one of the conductors of a student periodical, the Harvard Register.
(At the Concord Free Public Library, under Accession # 10443, is Henry Thoreau’s personal copy, presented to the library by Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau in 1874. On the front free endpaper is inscribed “D.H. Thoreau / Cambridge / Mass 1833.”)11 AS STUDIED BY THOREAU
HISTORY’S NOT MADE OF WOULD. WHEN SOMEONE REVEALS, FOR INSTANCE, THAT A PARTICULAR INFANT WOULD INVENT THE SEWING MACHINE, S/HE DISCLOSES THAT WHAT IS BEING CRAFTED IS NOT REALITY BUT PREDESTINARIANISM. THE HISTORIAN IS SETTING CHRONOLOGY TO “SHUFFLE,” WHICH IS NOT A PERMISSIBLE OPTION BECAUSE IN THE REAL WORLD SUCH SHUFFLE IS IMPOSSIBLE. THE RULE OF REALITY IS THAT THE FUTURE HASN’T EVER HAPPENED, YET. THERE IS NO SUCH “BIRD’S EYE VIEW” AS THIS IN THE REAL WORLD, FOR IN THE REAL WORLD NO REAL BIRD HAS EVER GLIMPSED AN ACTUAL HISTORICAL SEQUENCE.
Concord Free Public Library “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project
11. During this year Professor Buttmann was issuing his ÜBER DIE ENTSTEHUNG DER STERNBILDER AUF DER GRIECHISCHEN SFÄRE. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1827
Since the siting of the monument in celebration of “the 19th of April 1775” in the town square rather than on the battleground itself had excited such disapproval from the citizenry of Concord, the Yeoman’s Gazette proposed that the monument be relocated to the site of the Old North Bridge. Presumably, since there wasn’t a bridge there any longer, the monument would have to be located on the town side of the Concord River, where the Army troops fell, rather than on the west bank from which direction the Minutemen had been approaching. (This impediment wouldn’t be resolved until a new bridge was constructed in 1874.) In response to the egregious pamphlet issued in Lexington in 1825, alleging that “Inhabitants of Lexington feel it to be
particularly incumbent on them to lay this statement of facts before the publick, on account of some recent publications stating that ‘at Concord the first blood was shed between the British and the armed Americans’,” the Reverend Ezra Ripley had been busily collecting the depositions of Concord survivors in order to reveal the “present pretensions and claims of the citizens of Lexington” and their “unjust claim upon the public faith” based on what had been in Lexington not a real battle but only a “massacre.” They were attempting to “wrest from the inhabitants of Concord” what was rightfully theirs, “the legitimate honors which their brave and patriotic fathers achieved and bequeathed to them.” Although the Lexington militiamen deserved the “highest praise for their courage and love of country and liberty,” all the “progress of civil liberty and national freedom in various parts of the world” which had been made to date had begun in Concord.12
12. Ezra Ripley, D.D. A HISTORY OF THE FIGHT AT CONCORD ON THE 19TH OF APRIL 1775. Concord MA: Allen and Atwill, 1827 HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY The Reverend made passing reference to the fate of the third stricken soldier at the Old North Bridge, but without indicating where his body had been buried.13
FIGURING OUT WHAT AMOUNTS TO A “HISTORICAL CONTEXT” IS WHAT THE CRAFT OF HISTORICIZING AMOUNTS TO, AND THIS NECESSITATES DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN THE SET OF EVENTS THAT MUST HAVE TAKEN PLACE BEFORE EVENT E COULD BECOME POSSIBLE, AND MOST CAREFULLY DISTINGUISHING THEM FROM ANOTHER SET OF EVENTS THAT COULD NOT POSSIBLY OCCUR UNTIL SUBSEQUENT TO EVENT E.
Concord Free Public Library “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project
13. Of the three stricken soldiers of the 4th Regiment Light Infantry Company, Thomas Smith, Patrick Gray, and James Hall, two had died and were buried at the North Bridge itself, while the third was carried toward town before succumbing to his wounds. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY Abel Boyer’s and William Bentley Fowle’s BOYER’S FRENCH DICTIONARY: COMPRISING ALL THE ADDITIONS AND IMPROVEMENTS OF THE LATEST PARIS AND LONDON EDITIONS, WITH A VERY LARGE NUMBER OF USEFUL WORDS AND PHRASES, NOW FIRST SELECTED FROM THE MODERN DICTIONARIES OF BOISTE, WAILLY, CATINEAU, AND OTHERS; WITH THE PRONUNCIATION OF EACH WORD ... (Published by T. Bedlington, and Bradford & Peaslee, 1827). The final portion of this dictionary, the English-to-French portion, bears the following header information:
AN ENGLISH-FRENCH DICTIONARY, DESIGNED AS A SECOND PART TO THE BOSTON EDITION OF BOYER’S FRENCH DICTIONARY, WITH TARDY’S PRONUNCIATION. BOYER’S FRENCH DICT.
A copy of this would find its way into the personal library of a descendant of the Huguenots, in Concord, Massachusetts, to wit Henry Thoreau. That copy is now in the possession of the Concord Free Public Library. Accession No. 10440: Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in sheepskin; red spine label.
BETWEEN ANY TWO MOMENTS ARE AN INFINITE NUMBER OF MOMENTS, AND BETWEEN THESE OTHER MOMENTS LIKEWISE AN INFINITE NUMBER, THERE BEING NO ATOMIC MOMENT JUST AS THERE IS NO ATOMIC POINT ALONG A LINE. MOMENTS ARE THEREFORE FIGMENTS. THE PRESENT MOMENT IS A MOMENT AND AS SUCH IS A FIGMENT, A FLIGHT OF THE IMAGINATION TO WHICH NOTHING REAL CORRESPONDS. SINCE PAST MOMENTS HAVE PASSED OUT OF EXISTENCE AND FUTURE MOMENTS HAVE YET TO ARRIVE, WE NOTE THAT THE PRESENT MOMENT IS ALL THAT EVER EXISTS — AND YET THE PRESENT MOMENT BEING A MOMENT IS A FIGMENT TO WHICH NOTHING IN REALITY CORRESPONDS.
Concord Free Public Library “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1830
Baron Joseph-Marie de Gérando’s INSTITUTES DU DROIT ADMINISTRATIF FRANÇAIS (4 volumes, Paris).
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s Englishing of Baron de Gérando’s DU PERFECTIONNEMENT MORAL, OU DE L’ÉEDUCATION DE SOI-MÉME (Paris, 1824) as SELF-EDUCATION; OR THE MEANS AND ART OF MORAL PROGRESS. TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF M. LE BARON DEGERANDO (Boston: Published anonymously, in its initial edition, by Carter and Hendee).
SELF-EDUCATION; OR ... This volume would be found in the personal library of Henry Thoreau and can now be viewed downstairs in Special Collections at the Concord Free Public Library. Accession No. 10416: Inscribed in pencil on front free endpaper and front lining leaf: “Thoreau.” Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Quarter-bound in brown cloth with printed spine label, light brown paper boards.
THE FALLACY OF MOMENTISM: THIS STARRY UNIVERSE DOES NOT CONSIST OF A SEQUENCE OF MOMENTS. THAT IS A FIGMENT, ONE WE HAVE RECOURSE TO IN ORDER TO PRIVILEGE TIME OVER CHANGE, APRIVILEGING THAT MAKES CHANGE SEEM UNREAL, DERIVATIVE, A MERE APPEARANCE. IN FACT IT IS CHANGE AND ONLY CHANGE WHICH WE EXPERIENCE AS REALITY, TIME BEING BY WAY OF RADICAL CONTRAST UNEXPERIENCED — A MERE INTELLECTUAL CONSTRUCT. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY THERE EXISTS NO SUCH THING AS A MOMENT. NO “INSTANT” HAS EVER FOR AN INSTANT EXISTED.
Concord Free Public Library “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1831
Mrs. Eliza Ware Rotch Farrar’s THE STORY OF THE LIFE OF LAFAYETTE AS TOLD BY A FATHER TO HIS CHILDREN.
In the rare books collection of the Concord Free Public Library we now find a volume from the library of Henry Thoreau, bearing the autograph of John Thoreau, Jr., and we notice that although this volume alleged that it was a translation of materials by “Adrien Marie Legendre,” actually it consisted primarily of the instructional materials of Professor Charles Davies: ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRY; WITH NOTES. TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF A.M. LEGENDRE, MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE, AND OF THE LEGION OF HONOUR AND OF THE ROYAL SOCIETIES OF LONDON AND EDINBURGH, &C. FOR THE USE OF THE STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY AT CAMBRIDGE, NEW ENGLAND ... BY JOHN FARRAR (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, Little & Wilkins, 1831). (Google Books has made something similar to this available in electronic text, to wit an 1830 2d edition of the same materials published by White, Gallaher, & White; Collins & Hannay; and James Ryan of New-York and allegedly edited by a David Brewster, LL.D.) “A.-M. LEGENDRE”
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.
Concord Free Public Library “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1833
Gulian Crommelin Verplanck (1786-1870)’s DISCOURSES AND ADDRESSES ON SUBJECTS OF AMERICAN HISTORY, ARTS, AND LITERATURE (New York: J. & J. Harper). A copy of this would be inscribed in ink on the front free endpaper “Mr John Thoreau Jr.” and, beneath that in pencil, “Henry D. Thoreau,” would be presented in 1874 by Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau to the Concord Library, and is now in Special Collections at the Concord Free Public Library. CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE
Concord Free Public Library “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1837
At this point about half the children of Massachusetts were receiving what passed as a free public education, and were thereby stigmatized as poor white trash. One of the things they were learning in these schools, of course, was that although they were better than unschooled free black children, they were not as good as the children of families who were able to pay to send them to a private school such as the school of the Thoreau brothers.
The Thoreaus lived on the site of the present Concord Free Public Library building (which has been erected in 1873), in the “Parkman house, to fall of 1844.” It was in this home that the Thoreau brothers had their school. I don’t know whether this piece of “Parkman” property in Concord had anything to do with the Bostonian adventurer, historian, and horticulturist, Francis Parkman, or with his physician uncle, the Doctor George Parkman who was a real estate speculator and would get himself murderized and cut into little pieces in 1849 by attempting to collect money he had loaned to the chemistry professor at Harvard Medical College, but I rather suspect not. I suspect, instead, that it had to do with Deacon William Parkman, the first postmaster of Concord, a local guy who if related to George Parkman at all was related but distantly. His house and shop were on the Library corner behind the Black Horse tavern. This building became the Concord post office when Parkman was succeeded as postmaster by the lawyer John L. Tuttle: HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY In support of this I submit the following contemporary entry from Waldo Emerson’s journal:
Henry Thoreau told a good story of William Parkman, who (kept store) lived in the house he now occupies, & kept a store close by. He hung out a salt fish for a sign, & it hung so long & grew so hard, black & deformed, that the deacon forgot what thing it was, & nobody in town knew, but being examined chemically it proved to be salt fish. But duly every morning the deacon hung it on its peg.
This early story about Deacon William Parkman of the general store on Main Street (near where the Concord Free Public Library now stands) would later be worked into the WALDEN text as:
WALDEN: This closed car smells of salt fish, the strong New PEOPLE OF England and commercial scent, reminding me of the Grand Banks and WALDEN the fisheries. Who has not seen a salt fish, thoroughly cured for this world, so that nothing can spoil it, and putting the perseverance of the saints to the blush? with which you may sweep or pave the streets, and split your kindlings, and the teamster shelter himself and his lading against sun wind and rain behind it, –and the trader, as a Concord trader once did, hang it up by his door for a sign when he commences business, until at last his oldest customer cannot tell surely whether it be animal, vegetable, or mineral, and yet it shall be as pure as a snowflake, and if it be put into a pot and boiled, will come out an excellent dun fish for a Saturday’s dinner.
WILLIAM PARKMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY (Of course, for the first half of this year Thoreau was still in his dorm room at college.)
CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT
DATE: Adrien Rouquette again journeyed from New Orleans to France, this time preparing for the practice of the law. He would have unhappy love affairs, find that he preferred literature to law, and return to Louisiana.
October 25, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson lectured at the lyceum in Lowell, Massachusetts. He would receive $15. THE LIST OF LECTURES
Henry Thoreau translated out of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s TORQUATO TASSO, a copy of which he had in his personal library (this copy is now at the Concord Free Public Library): TORQUATO TASSO
Accession No. 10407: Inscribed on front free endpaper: “D.H. Thoreau / H23.” Some marginal markings and annotations. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Half-bound in sheepskin, marbled paper boards; leather spine label.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project The People of Walden: Waldo Emerson HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY SPRING Oct. 25. She appears, and we are once more children; we commence again our course with the new year. Let the maiden no more return, and men will become poets for very grief. No sooner has winter left us time to regret her smiles, than we yield to the advances of poetic frenzy. “The flowers look kindly at us from the beds with their child eyes, and in the horizon the snow of the far mountains dissolves into light vapor.” — Goethe, Torquato Tasso. THE POET “He seems to avoid — even to flee from us,— To seek something which we know not, And perhaps he himself after all knows not.”—Ibid.
October 26, Thursday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 26th of 10 M / With my Wife & Mary Williams Rode to Portsmouth & attended Moy [Monthly] Meeting — In the First Meeting Ruth Davis Mary Hicks & Hannah Hall preached & Ruth Davis prayed In the last Meeting it was an exercising & to me distressing Season in that there seemed to be a disposition in some to lay waste our excellent discipline in a manner that I could not unite with — We dined at Susanna Hathaways & then rode home — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
Henry Thoreau translated out of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s TORQUATO TASSO, a copy of which he had in his personal library (this copy is now at the Concord Free Public Library): TORQUATO TASSO
Oct. 26. “His eye hardly rests upon the earth; His ear hears the one-clang of nature; What history records, —what life gives, — Directly and gladly his genius takes it up: His mind collects the widely, dispersed, And his feeling animates the inanimate. Often he ennobles what appeared to us common, And the prized is as nothing to him. In his own magic circle wanders The wonderful man, and draws us With him to wander, and take part in it: He seems to draw near to us, and remains afar from us: He seems to be looking at us, and spirits, forsooth, Appear to him strangely in our places.” —Ibid.
HOW MAN GROWS “A noble man has not to thank a private circle for his culture. Fatherland and world must work upon him. Fame and infamy must he learn to endure. He will be constrained to know himself and others. Solitude shall no more lull him with her flattery. The foe will not, the friend dares not, spare him. Then, striving, the youth puts forth his strength, feels what he is, and feels himself soon a man.”
“A talent is builded in solitude, A character in the stream of the world.”
“He only fears man who knows him not, and he who avoids him will soonest misapprehend him.” —Ibid.
ARIOSTO “As nature decks her inward rich breast in a green variegated dress, so clothes he all that can make men honorable in the blooming garb of the fable.... The well of superfluity bubbles near, and lets us see variegated HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY wonder-fishes. The air is filled with rare birds, the meads and copses with strange herds, wit lurks half concealed in the verdure, and wisdom from time to time lets sound from a golden cloud sustained words, while frenzy wildly seems to sweep the well-toned lute, yet holds itself measured in perfect time.”
BEAUTY “That beauty is transitory which alone you seem to honor.” — Goethe, Torquato Tasso. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1838
Noah Webster became president of the New Haven Common School Convention.
The Thoreaus were living in the “Parkman House, to fall of 1844,” on the site of the present Concord Free Public Library building in Concord (which would not be erected until 1873). It was in this home that the Thoreau brothers would hold their school.
CONCORD ZOOM MAP HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1839
The Thoreaus were living near (but not on) the site of the present Concord Free Public Library building (which would anyway not be erected until 1873), in the “Parkman house, to fall of 1844.” It was in this home that the Thoreau brothers would hold their school. CONCORD ZOOM MAP
A word of caution: In a photo he used in his HENRY DAVI D THOREAU: A PROFILE (NY: Hill and Wang, 1971), Professor Walter Roy Harding unfortunately misidentified the Nathan Brooks house (which was the one that was moved in 1872 to make way for the CFPL) as this Parkman house, and this misidentification has since been perpetuated due to the unwarranted credulity of uncritical readers toward whatever gets published as a book. In fact the Parkman store and house were located behind and to the right of the Nathan Brooks house, on the Main Street side, and are visible as such in this photo. To summarize: the present CFPL building occupies the Nathan Brooks house site, not the Parkman house site at which the Thoreau family resided. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1840
14 Professor Chester Dewey and Ebenezer Emmons, MD’s REPORT ON THE HERBACEOUS FLOWERING PLANTS OF MASSACHUSETTS, ARRANGED ACCORDING TO THE NATURAL ORDERS OF LINDLEY, ILLUSTRATED CHIEFLY BY POPULAR DESCRIPTIONS OF THEIR CHARACTER, PROPERTIES, AND USES, bound with REPORT ON THE QUADRUPEDS OF MASSACHUSETTS. Published agreeably to an Order of the Legislature, by the Commissioners on the Zoological and Botanical Survey of the State. Cambridge: Folsom, Wells, And Thurston, Printers to the University (Henry Thoreau would have his own copy of this, and that copy is now in the Special Collections of the Concord Free Public Library). FLOWERING PLANTS QUADRUPEDS OF MASS.
Accession No. 10419: Signature of Henry D. Thoreau on front of original paper wrapper. A few pencil annotations in the hand of Henry David Thoreau. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Rebound in green cloth (the original printed tan paper wrapper retained).
14. Dr. Emmons had started out as one of Professor Dewey’s students. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY Sam Black was the Thoreau family cat and cared not a bit about the constant emigration of Concord’s youth to more opportune climes. But here’s something of which Sam Black would have approved: in this year began serious human predation of the American Egret Egretta alba, to supply its long, silky ornamental nuptial plumes to adorn long, silky ornamental nuptial ladies’ bonnets.
The Thoreaus were living near (but not on) the site of the present Concord Free Public Library building, in the “Parkman house, to fall of 1844.” It was in this home that the Thoreau brothers would hold their school. CONCORD ZOOM MAP
According to Dr. Jarvis, there were some alterations made in the church structure to accommodate the fact that there were no longer four deacons associated with the services of the Reverend Ripley: In accordance with old customs the seats for the Deacons were adjoined to and in front of the pulpit in the church until the last alteration in 1840. The floor of this apartment and the seats were raised 8 or 9 inches above the rest of the house so that the occupants could see and be seen by all the congregation. The four deacons always sat there until the retirement of Deacons Parkman15 and [John] White and by Deacons [Francis] Jarvis and [Thomas] Hubbard until their death. Deacons [Joe?] Brown and [Cyrus] Hosmer sat there on the forenoon of Communion day. The Deacons were always in their seats before Dr. Ripley arrived, and when he entered the house they all rose and bowed, stood until he passed them and ascended the pulpit steps; as he passed they reverentially bowed their heads, and the Doctor courteously bowed in return. This was a graceful and dignified ceremony. THE DEACONS OF CONCORD
November 9, Election Day: “The Dutchman,” President Martin Van Buren, received few votes. Richard Gourgas would soon be dismissed from his job as postmaster of Concord, a spoils-system job, and replaced by the Whig who was running the local bookstore, John Stacy.
Monday Nov. 9th 1840. Events have no abstract and absolute importance, but only concern me as they are related to some man. The biography of a man who has spent his days in a library, may be as interesting as the Peninsular campaigns. Gibbon’s memoirs prove this to me. To my mind he travels as far when he takes a book from the shelf, as if he went to the barrows of Asia. If the cripple but tell me how like a man he turned in his seat, how he now looked out at a south window then a north, and finally looked into the fire, it will be as good as a tour on the continent or the prairies. For I measure distance inward and not outward. Within the compass of a man’s ribs there is space and scene enough for any biography. My life passes warmly and cheerily here within while my ears drink in the pattering rain on the sill. It is as adventurous as Crusoe’s — as full of novelty as Marco Polo’s, as dignified as the Sultan’s, as momentous as that of the reigning prince. GIBBON’S LIFE AND WORKS
15. Deacon William Parkman, who had become a deacon of the 1st Parish Church in 1788, had left off being a deacon in 1826, and had died in 1832. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1841
The Thoreaus were living near (but not on) the site of the present Concord Free Public Library building, in the “Parkman house, to fall of 1844.” It was in this home that the Thoreau brothers would hold their school. CONCORD ZOOM MAP HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1842
The Thoreaus were living near (but not on) the site of the present Concord Free Public Library building, in the “Parkman house, to fall of 1844.” It was in this home that the Thoreau brothers would hold their school. CONCORD ZOOM MAP HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1843
The Thoreaus were living near (but not on) the site of the present Concord Free Public Library building, in the “Parkman house, to fall of 1844.” It was in this home that the Thoreau brothers would hold their school. CONCORD ZOOM MAP HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
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
Thoreau was preparing to go to Walden Pond to work on his first 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 two brothers. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1847
The surveying text in Henry Thoreau’s library was the 15th edition, revised, of Professor Charles Davies, LL.D.’s ELEMENTS OF SURVEYING, AND NAVIGATION; WITH A DESCRIPTION OF THE INSTRUMENTS AND THE NECESSARY TABLES (New York: A.S. Barnes & Co., No. 51 John Street, 1847; 359 pages). This copy is presently in the rare books collection of the Concord Free Public Library. Google Books has provided electronic text of this 15th edition but in a printing dated the previous year — presumably this would have been identical except for the date on the cover page. CHARLES DAVI E S, LL.D.
Accession No. 10439: Signature of Henry D. Thoreau on t.p. Extensive pencil annotations on back lining leaf. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in calf; black spine label.
This was one of the most widely used books on surveying during the middle of the 19th century and Thoreau annotated his copy with notes from William Galbraith’s MATHEMATICAL AND ASTRONOMICAL TABLES on particular mathematical problems. In his journal entry of June 9, 1850 he would list nine books recommended by Galbraith in regard to magnetic variation in compass needles. Thoreau’s awareness of the importance of magnetic variation is clear from his advertising broadside, on which he indicates that he notes the variation of the compass in order that his survey can be verified by others. During the early 1850s he makes references in his journal and field notebooks to books and articles on this subject, and to observations he was making of compass needle variations in the vicinity of Concord.16
16. For a listing of the various surveying books used in the 19th Century in America, refer to: THE UZES LIST OF BOOKS HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1848
Nicholas Marcellus Hentz relocated from Tuskegee, Alabama to Columbus, Georgia.
Gregor Mendel, in his 4th year of studies at the Theological College, attended additional lectures on agriculture at the Brünn Philosophical Institute. The teacher was Professor Franz Diebl (1770-1859). In June, Mendel received a certificate of completion from the College, and in early August he became a parish priest in the collegiate church at Altbrünn.
The Boston Society of Natural History, which had been organized in 1830 out of what remained of the Linnaean Society that had flourished from 1813 to 1823, moved into its new quarters on Mason Street in the building known as the Massachusetts Medical College. PROCEEDINGS, FOR 1848
Dr. Henry Jacob Bigelow got married with Susan Sturgis (1825-1853), a daughter of William Sturgis and Elizabeth Davis Sturgis of Boston.
Up to this point Professor Jacob Bigelow’s FLORULA BOSTONIENSIS, A COLLECTION OF PLANTS OF BOSTON AND ITS VICINITY had been the standard flora for the New England region. With the publication of Fisher Professor of Natural History in Harvard College Asa Gray, M.D.’s A MANUAL OF THE BOTANY OF THE NORTHERN UNITED STATES, FROM NEW ENGLAND TO WISCONSIN AND SOUTH TO OHIO AND PENNSYLVANIA HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY INCLUSIVE, (THE MOSSES AND LIVERWORTS BY WM. S. SULLIVANT,) ARRANGED ACCORDING TO THE NATURAL SYSTEM; WITH AN INTRODUCTION, CONTAINING A REDUCTION OF THE GENERA TO THE LINNÆAN ARTIFICIAL CLASSES AND ORDERS, OUTLINES OF THE ELEMENTS OF BOTANY, A GLOSSARY, ETC. (Boston & Cambridge: James Munroe and Company, London: John Chapman),17 Professor Bigelow’s contribution had been made obsolete.
17. This volume would be owned by Henry Thoreau and by Ellery Channing, and Channing’s copy, with his typical scrawling all over it, is now at the Concord Free Public Library. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
MANUAL OF THE BOTANY
In this year Professor Gray also put out the 1st volume of his GENERA OF THE PLANTS OF THE UNITED STATES (you can now purchase a polyester necktie, guaranteed not to eat you alive, printed with Isaac Sprague’s illustration of the Venus Flytrap Dionæa muscipula from this volume). HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1850
Publication, in New-York by Leavitt & Allen, of POEMS OF WILLIAM COWPER, ESQ., WITH A NEW MEMOIR COMPILED FROM JOHNSON, SOUTHEY AND OTHER SOURCES, a copy of which would be in the personal library of Henry Thoreau and from which he would extrapolate “Verses Supposed To Be Written by Alexander Selkirk” for use in WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. WILLIAM COWPER, ESQ.
Publication, in Boston by Sanborn, Carter, Bazin, & Co. at 25 and 29 Cornhill, of George Copway (1818- 1863)’s THE TRADITIONAL HISTORY AND CHARACTERISTIC SKETCHES OF THE OJIBWAY NATION. BY G. COPWAY, OR, KAH-GE-GA-GAH-BOWH, CHIEF OF THE OJIBWAY NATION. ILLUSTRATED BY DARLY. COPWAY’S OJIBWAYS
A copy of the 1855 republication of this would wind up on the shelves of Thoreau’s library, and then in Special Collections at the Concord Free Public Library. CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1851
Publication, at Albany, New York, by the firm of Weed, Parsons & Co. and by Charles Van Benthuysen, during the previous year and this year, of a 4-volume set entitled THE DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF THE STATE OF NEW- YORK. ARRANGED UNDER DIRECTION OF THE HON. CHRISTOPHER MORGAN, SECRETARY OF STATE … BY E.B. O’CALLAGHAN ... FOUR VOLUMES; PLATES (SOME FOLDED). A set of this would wind up on the shelves of Henry Thoreau’s library, and then, with the signature of Henry D. Thoreau on each front free endpaper, in the Concord Town Library, and then, as of 1873, at the Concord Free Public Library. CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
January 6, Monday: A surviving record of the Concord Social Library in Emerson’s handwriting
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY (1817-1894) was the excavator of its ruins], Charles Dickens’s PICKWICK PAPERS, William Makepeace Thackeray’s VANITY FAIR, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s SCARLET LETTER, Lieutenant Jenkins’s UNITED STATES EXPLORING EXPEDITION (one of the later volumes in the elaborate series of reports on the elaborate South Seas exploring expedition of Charles Wilkes, generally titled REPORTS OF THE US EXPLORING EXPEDITION OF 1838-1842), and a selection of British and American journals:
John Stacy, Concord bookseller and stationer, had been the librarian of the Concord Social Library, which had been established in 1821 to house the collection of the earlier Charitable Library Society, and the library materials had been being maintained in his bookstore on the Milldam. The records and holdings of the Concord Social Library were in this year being transferred to the Concord Town Library — and in 1873 would be passed on to the Concord Free Public Library.
May 24, Saturday: Henry Thoreau did some sort of surveying work at the West Center schoolhouse in Concord. The government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts began to slightly encourage the formation of town public HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY libraries. Thoreau would report:
WALDEN: We boast that we belong to the nineteenth century and are making the PEOPLE OF most rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little this village does for its own culture. I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be flattered WALDEN by them, for that will not advance either of us. We need to be provoked, – goaded like oxen, as we are, into a trot. We have a comparatively decent system of common schools, schools for infants only; but excepting the half-starved Lyceum in the winter, and latterly the puny beginning of a library suggested by the state, no school for ourselves. We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment. It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure – if they are indeed so well off-to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever? Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of Concord? Can we not hire some Abélard to lecture to us? Alas! what with foddering the cattle and tending the store, we are kept from school too long, and our education is sadly neglected. In this country, the village should in some respects take the place of the nobleman of Europe. It should be the patron of the fine arts. It is rich enough. It wants only the magnanimity and refinement. It can spend money enough on such things as farmers and traders value, but it is thought Utopian to propose spending money for things which more intelligent men know to be of far more worth. This town has spent seventeen thousand dollars on a town-house, thank fortune or politics, but probably it will not spend so much on living wit, the true meat to put into that shell, in a hundred years. The one hundred and twenty-five dollars annually subscribed for a Lyceum in the winter is better spent than any other equal sum raised in the town. If we live in the nineteenth century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the nineteenth century offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial? If we will read newspapers, why not skip the gossip of Boston and take the best newspaper in the world at once? –not be sucking the pap of “neutral family” papers, or browsing “Olive-Branches” here in New England. Let the reports of all the learned societies come to us, and we will see if they know any thing. Why should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co. to select our reading? As the nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himself with whatever conduces to his culture, –genius –learning –wit –books –paintings –statuary –music – philosophical instruments, and the like; so let the village do, –not stop short at a pedagogue, a parson, a sexton, a parish library, and three selectmen, because our pilgrim forefathers got through a cold winter once on a bleak rock with these. To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions; and I am confident that, as our circumstances are more flourishing, our means are greater than the nobleman’s. New England can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and board them round the while, and not be provincial at all. That is the uncommon school we want. Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.
PETER ABÉLARD During this year, Concord would in fact create its 1st public library (this Town Library would never have a building of AN INFORMED CITIZENRY
its own, but would occupy space in the Court House and in the new Town House on Monument Square). HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY May 24, Saturday: Our most glorious experiences are a kind of regret. Our regret is so sublime that we may mistake it for triumph. It is the painful plaintively sad surprise of our Genius remembering our past lives and contemplating what is possible. It is remarkable that men commonly never refer to, never hint at, any crowning experiences –where the common laws of their being were unsettled –and the divine & eternal laws prevailed in them. Their lives are not revolutionary –they never recognize any other than the local and temporal authorities It is a regret so divine & inspiring so genuine –based on so true & distinct a contrast –that it surpasses our proudest boasts and the fairest expectations. My most sacred and memorable life is commonly on awaking in the morning –I frequently awake with an atmosphere about me as if my unremembered dreams had been divine –as if my spirit had journeyed to its native place, and in the act of reentering its native body had diffused an elysian fragrance around The Genius says “Oh! That is what you were! That is what you may yet be!” It is glorious for us to be able to regret even such an existence. A sane & growing man revolutionizes every day. What institutions of man can survive a morning experience A single nights sleep –if we have indeed slumbered & grown in our sleep –puts them behind us like the river Lethe. It is no unusual thing for him to see the kingdoms of this world pass away. It is an interesting inquiry to seek for the medicines which will cure our ails in the plants which grow around us. At first we are not disposed to believe that man & plants are so intimately related. Very few plants have been medically examined– And yet this is the extent of most mens botany and it is more extensive than would at first be supposed. The botanist is startled by some countryman’s familiarity with an obscure plant to him rare & strange. He who has been an observer for some years knows not what it is, but the unobserving countryman, who sees nothing but what is thrust upon him or the old woman who rarely goes out of the house shows an easy familiarity with it –& can call it by name. I am struck by the fact that though any important individual experience is rare –though it is so rare that the individual is conscious of a relation to his maker transcending time & space & earth –though any knowledge of or communication from “Providence” is the rarest thing in the world– Yet men very easily, –regarding themselves in the gross speak of carrying out the designs of Providence as nations. How often the Saxon man talks of carrying out the designs of Providence –as if he had some knowledge of Providence & his designs. Men allow themselves to associate Providence & design of Providence with their dull prosaic every day thoughts of things That language is usurped by the stalest and deadest prose which can only report the most choice poetic experience This “Providence” is the stalest jest in the universe. The office-boy sweeps out his office “by the leave of Providence.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1854
March 30, Thursday: 1st Lieutenant John Wynn Davidson, who was commanding a reinforced company under orders to locate a fugitive band of Jicarilla Apaches and keep them from fleeing westward across the Rio Grande, disobeyed orders and attacked the Jicarilla camp on a ridge near Cieneguilla (present-day Pilar, New Mexico). They soon found themselves surrounded in a basin below the village, and in the fight every member of the 15- man Company F detachment was killed or wounded. The hard campaigning of 1854 would leave the exhausted men of Company F with threadbare uniforms, played-out horses and damaged equipment. Nevertheless, Colonel Thomas Turner Fauntleroy would plan to send Company F of the 1st US Regiment of Dragoons back into the field early in the following year. WHITE ON RED, RED ON WHITE
Henry Thoreau went to the Island at 6 AM. Later in the day, he read an article on the zoologist Étienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire in the January issue of Westminster Review, entitled “Le Principe des Connexions.”
March 30. 6 A.M.— To Island. First still hour since the afternoon of the 17th. March truly came in like a lamb and went out like a lion this year. Remarkably and continuously pleasant weather from the very first day till the lath. Apparently an early spring, –buds and birds well advanced,– then suddenly very severe cold and high winds cold enough to skim the river over in broad places at night, and commencing with the greatest and most destructive gale for many a year, felt far and wide; and it has never ceased to blow since till this morning. Vegetation is accordingly put back. The ground these last cold (thirteen) days has been about bare of snow, but frozen. Some had peas and potatoes in before it. First half of month very pleasant and mild spring weather, last half severe winter cold and high winds, The water at its highest, –not very high,– this month on the 17th. Ducks have been lurking in sheltered places not frozen. Robins feed along the edge of the river. At the Island I see and hear this morning the cackle of a pigeon woodpecker at the hollow poplar; had heard him tapping distinctly from my boat’s place 1/4+ of a mile. Great flocks of tree sparrows and some F. hyemalis on the ground and trees on the Island Neck, making the air and bushes ring with their jingling. The former –some of them– say somewhat like this: a eke eke, ter twee twee, tweer tweer twa. It sounded like a new bird. The black ducks seem always to rise with that loud, hoarse croaking — quacking. The river early is partly filled with thin, floating, hardly cemented ice, occasionally turned on its edge by the wind and sparkling in the sun. If the sun had kept out of the way one day in the past fortnight, I think the river would have frozen to bear. Read an interesting article on Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the friend and contemporary of Cuvier, though opposed to him in his philosophy. He believed species to be variable. In looking for anatomical resemblances he found that he could not safely be guided by function, form, structure, size, color, etc., but only by the relative position and mutual dependence of organs. Hence his Le Principe des Connexions and his maxim, “An organ is sooner destroyed than transposed,” — “tin organ eat plutot altere, atrophie, aneanti, que transpose.” A principal formula of his was, “Unity of Plan, Unity of Composition.” Concord Mar. 30th ’54 The undersigned, wishing to enjoy equal advantages with their fel- low countrymen at a distance, earnestly request, that Mr Emerson will read to the Lyceum as many of the lectures which he has read abroad the past winter as may be convenient for him, including the one on Poetry; though they promise to repay him only with an eager attention. Henry D. Thoreau[ ] N. A. Barrett Josephine Hosmer A. Merrick [LP.] Cheney [J.M. Cheney] [FM Mackay] N. Brooks Samuel Hoar[ ] Josiah Bartlett Mary M. Brooks Anne M. Whiting Geo[]M. Brooks Louisa J. Whiting[ ] HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY [A. D. Frye] Sophia E. Thoreau[ ] John H Bent John Thoreau Cynthia D[.] Thoreau JW. Walcott John [Brown] Jr [B.N. Holden] Alvan Pratt— Cyrus Peirce Albert Stacy Rufus Hosmer Jonas Hastings James Giles [Da]nl. Shattuck Charles Bowers A[C] Collier Moses Pritchard Julius M. Smith [ ] Cyrus Warren N[.] Henry[] Warren Nancy Warren Elijah Wood Jr O.[L.] Page Francis Monroe [F.]A. Wheeler Saml. Staples F.E. Bigelow L [May]
WALDO EMERSON ALBERT STACY
August 12, Saturday: In his journal, Henry Thoreau noted the first watermelon of the season. He went by boat to Conantum (Gleason J6). He walked the Fitchburg Railroad tracks to Bare or Pine Hill in Lincoln (Gleason J9).
Bronson Alcott completed a re-reading of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, and also of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. TIMELINE OF WALDEN
The Concord librarian, Albert Stacy, purchased a copy of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS for the town library at a cost of $0.75, and the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson purchased two copies for $2.00. A favorable review under the heading “Editorial Correspondence” presumably by the Reverend John Sullivan Dwight appeared in Dwight’s Journal of Music, A Paper of Art and Literature (5:149-50):
... Thoreau is one of those men who has put such a determined trust in the simple dictates of common sense, as to earn the vulgar title of “transcendentalist” from his sophisticated neighbors. ... Of course, they find him strange, fantastical, a humorist, a theorist, a dreamer. It may be or it may not.... Walden’s literary style is admirably clear and terse and elegant; the pictures wonderfully graphic; for the writer is a poet and a scholar as well as a tough wrestler with the first economical problems of nature, and a winner of good cheer and of free glorious leisure out of what men call the “hard realities” of life. Walden Pond, a half mile in diameter, in Concord town, becomes henceforth as classical as any lake of Windermere. And we doubt not men are beginning to look to transcendentalists for the soberest reports of good hard common-sense, as well as for the models of the clearest writing.
Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS under the heading “New Publications” in the Boston Commonwealth, 2:4. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
The Bunker-Hill Aurora and Boston Mirror provided a WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS review entitled “H.D. Thoreau’s Life at Walden Pond,” presumably by William W. Wheildon, on its page 2 in columns 3-5: “Thoreau’s book we earnestly commend to the perusal of our friends. It is refreshing to week day mortals during these blistering summer days. It is a ‘psalm of life,’ of consolation and healing, to those whom the wolf of want has driven into a corner. It shows at least what can be done by man, if he reaches, by any untoward circumstances, an extremity. It opens the heart of a man deeply enamored of Nature. It is a book with which men cannot quarrel. It can have no counterpart. No man ever lived as Thoreau lived, before, for a similar purpose. No man will imitate his example. Yet his forest life has lessons of the deepest wisdom.”
We mean, before long, to say how delightful a book this is [no subsequent notice located]; but it is now Saturday, the very day when people buy books, and we can only say that it is just the pleasantest and most readable, the most thought-provoking book of the present season. It is a better work than the author[’]s previous one, “A [W]eek on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” though we reckon that as a book which will live in American literature a good while. “Walden” is a record of two years’ sojourning in a house built by the author with his own hands, near Walden Pond. He was a squatter upon the land, and his sovereignty was over all he surveyed. Most lively accounts he gives of his life there, mingled with pages of philosophical (sensible or other) reflections upon all sorts of topics. No more attractive book has been printed for a long time. It ought, to be sure, considering the author’s theories of food and raiment, to be printed upon birch-bark, but it is, on the contrary, issued in Ticknor & Fields’ best style.
Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS under the heading “New Publications” in the Boston Olive HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY Branch, 3:3-4.
This is indeed a quaint book, as any person, who is in the least familiar with the character of the author, might expect. It gives a full account of his experience during his sojourn on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Mass. Having imbibed the idea that the daily life of his neighbors, with its cares, its trials and its conformity to fashion and custom was little better than a penance, he made himself a home in that secluded spot. He built a house, which cost him about thirty dollars; furnished it scantily and began to keep “bachelor’s hall.” There in his solitary abode he read the great book of Nature; watched the stars, the birds and the waters, and mused and philosophized after his own fashion. Besides, he had a small piece of land near this cottage, which he cultivated, and which yielded him a small harvest. His expenditures for food and clothing were very trifling, and it will no doubt, astonish many to know that so moderate a sum supported a person two years. He gives the details of his life and we presume they will entertain the reader as they have us.
“SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS” appeared in The National Anti-Slavery Standard.
Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS under the heading “New Publications” on the second page of the HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY New Bedford, Massachusetts Mercury, column 3:
This is a remarkable history of remarkable experiences. Mr. Thoreau is an eccentric genius, and affects the philosopher, despising all the ordinary aims and petty ambitions of the world, looking in a half cynical, half amused mood upon men and things, and meanwhile retiring into a semi barbarous state builds with his own hands a hut on Walden Pond in Connecticut [sic], where for twenty-six months he lives like a hermit on the labor of his hands, looking to nature, ‘kindest mother still,’ for the supply of his physical wants, and as a perpetual fountain of delight to his eye and soul. This volume is in some measure a record of his external and internal being during his retiracy, and is perfectly unique in experience and expression. A simple, pure heart, high cultivation and a luxuriant fancy, give to Mr. Thoreau a vigorous intellectual life, and impart a freshness and charm to his style which leads one on quite enchanted. For its fine descriptions of nature, it will bear more than one reading, while its stern and true lessons on the value of existence, its manly simplicity, its sage reflections, will drop many a good seed for content and true living, to spring up and flourish and beautify new homes, albeit in civilized life, for we do not think any will be so enamored of Mr. Thoreau’s experience, as to seek it in his way.
Review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS on the second page of the Roxbury Norfolk County Journal, HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY column 6:
Mr. Thoreau is an eccentric genius as well as an original thinker and good writer. His eccentricity led him to build a hut upon the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, in which he lived alone for two years, laboring in his garden patch to raise food for the support of life, and all that he might experience the pleasures of solitude and a perfectly independent life. But Mr. Thoreau is a man of education, of intellect, of taste, — though he did not show much of the latter in his odd sort of life, according to the general estimation of the world, — and he did not live alone in the woods like a savage. He mused and studied — mused somewhat on the works of nature, somewhat more on mankind, and not in the most loving and gentle spirit, and he studied his own erratic mind. The latter occupation might have been more profitable, perhaps, had he observed it from a different point of view. The book which he now gives to the world after coming out from his self imposed exile, is a sort of history of his hermitage, an account of his solitary mode of living, a description of the external things which occupied his attention, colored throughout with a sort of philosophy which is little else than the peculiarities of Mr. Thoreau’s mind. The narrative and descriptions are certainly very interesting and attractive, full of life and nature, and the book is in this respect quite a charming one. In other respects it may find fewer admirers, but altogether, from its origin and character, it may be set down as a remarkable book, which will command the attention of the tasteful reader and of the thoughtful student. It is hardly necessary to say that it is published in the neat style which characterizes all the volumes issued by these publishers.
In New Bedford, Friend Daniel Ricketson completed a reading of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS and began HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY to cultivate the author:
Finished this morning reading Walden, or Life in the Woods, by H. D. Thoreau. I have been highly interested in this book, the most truly original one I ever read, unless the life of John Buncle, an old book written by an eccentric English Gentleman. The experience of Thoreau and his reflections are like those of every true lover of Nature. His views of the artificial customs of civilized life are very correct. Mankind labor and suffer to supply themselves with the unnecessaries of life, — leisure for enjoyment is rarely obtained. I long for mankind to be emancipated from this thralldom which has spread its nets and snares over so large a portion of the human family. A love for a more simple life increases with me, and I hope that the time will ere long come when I may realize the peace to be derived therefrom. Simplicity in all things, house, living, dress, address, &c. &c. My fortune, though not large, is ample, and were my style of living less expensive I might have considerable for charitable purposes. One of my greatest luxuries has been in books, — good books I value beyond most all else in the world of earthly treasure, after my family, — handsome editions of my favorite authors. Such I want in the best of paper, type, and binding and English, for my reading is confined pretty much to my native language. England, Scotland, or rather Great Britain and America, have furnished nearly all the authors I am acquainted with. Genuine English literature is my line of reading.
On this day or the following one, Thoreau was written to by Friend Daniel Ricketson in New Bedford.
Mailed a letter to Henry D. Thoreau expressive of my satisfaction in reading his book, “Walden, or Life in the Woods.” His volume has been a source of great comfort to me in reading and will I think continue to be so, giving me cheerful views of life and feeling of confidence that misfortune cannot so far as property is concerned deprive me or mine of the necessities of life, and even that we may be better in every respect for the changes.
Friend Daniel included on this day the interesting information that William Cowper’s “The Task” was his “greatest favorite.” (I think it no exaggeration to say that you could count on the fingers of one foot the people for whom Cowper’s “The Task” would their “greatest favorite,” or even readable — Thoreau is one of the few HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY people I have heard of, who had their own personal copy of this poem.)
Brooklawn, near New Bedford
Mass. Aug. 12th. 1854–
Dear Sir,
I have just finished reading “Walden” and hasten to thank you for the great degree of satisfaction it has afforded me. Having always been a lover of Nature, in man, as well as in the material universe, I hail with pleasure every original production in literature which bears the stamp of a genuine and earnest love for the true philosophy of human life.— Such I assure you I esteem your book to be. To ma- ny, and to most, it will appear to be the wild musings of an eccentric and strange mind, though all must recognize your affectionate re- gard for the gentle denizens of the woods and pond as well as the great love you have shewn for what are familiarly called the beau- ties of Nature. But to me the book appears to evince a mind most thoroughly self possessed, highly cultivated with a strong vein of common sense. The whole book is a prose poem (pardon the sole- cism) and at the same time as simple as a running brook.
I have always loved ponds of pure translucent water, and some of my happiest and most memorable days have been passed on and around the beautiful Middleboro’ Ponds, particularly the largest, As- sawampset–here king Philip frequently came, and a beautiful round hill near by, is still known as “King Philip’s look-out.” I have often felt an inclination when tired of the noise and strife of society, to re- tire to the shores of this noble old pond, or rather lake, for it is some 5 or 6 miles in length and 2 broad. But I have a wife and four chil- dren, & besides have got a little too far along, being in my fortysec- ond year, to undertake a new mode of life. I strive however, and have striven during the whole of my life, to live as free from the restraint of mere forms & cermonies as I possibly can. I love a quiet, peaceful rural retirement; but it was not my fate to realize this until a little past thirty years of age–since then I have been a sort of rustic, gen- teel perhaps, rustic. Not so very genteel you might reply, if you saw HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY the place where I am writing. It is a rough board Shanty 12 x 14 three miles from New Bedford in a quiet & secluded spot–here for the present I eat & sleep, read, write, receive visitors &c. My house is now undergoing repairs &c and my family are in town.
A short time since a whip-poor-will serenaded me, and later at night I hear the cuckoos near my windows. It has long been my delight to observe the feathered tribes, and earlier in life I was quite an orni- thologist. The coming of the first Blue bird in early Spring is to me still a delightful circumstance. But more particularly soothing to me is the insect hum so multitudinous at this season.— Now as I write the crickets & other little companions are sweetly & soothingly sing- ing around my dwelling, & occasionally in my room. I am quite at home with partridges, Quails, rabbits skunks & woodchucks. But Winter is my best time, then I am a great tramper through the woods. O how I love the woods. I have walked thousands of miles in the woods hereabouts. I recognize many of my own experiences in your “Walden”. Still I am not altogether given up to these matters–they are my pastimes. I have a farm to at tend to, fruit trees & a garden & a little business occasionally in town to look after, but much lei- sure nevertheless. In fact I am the only man of leisure I know of, ev- ery body here as well as elsewhere is upon the stir. I love quiet, this you know friend Thoreau dont necessarily imply that the body should be still all the time. I am often quietest, ar’nt you, when walk- ing among the still haunts of Nature or hoeing perhaps beans as I have oftentimes done as well as corn & potatoes &c &c.
Poetry has been to me a great consolation amid the jarring elements of this life. The English poets some of them at least, and one Latin, our good old Virgil, have been like household gods to me.— Cowper’s Task, my greatest favorite now lies before me in which I had been reading & alternately looking at the western sky just after sunset before I commenced this letter. Cowper was a true lover of the country. How often have I felt the force of these lines upon the country in my own experience
“I never framed a wish, or formed a plan, That flattered me with hopes of earthly bliss But there I laid the scene.”
All through my boyhood, the country haunted my thoughts. Though blessed with a good home, books & teachers, the latter however with one exception were not blessings, I would have exchanged all for the life of a rustic. I envied as I then thought the freedom of the farmer boy. But I have long thought that the life of the farmer, that is most farmers, possessed but little of the poetry of labour. How we accu- mulate cares around us. The very repairs I am now making upon my house will t o some considerable extent increase my cares. A rough board shanty, rye & indian bread, water from the spring, or as in HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY your case, from the pond, and other things in keeping, do not burden the body & mind. It is fine houses, fine furniture, sumptuous fare, fine clothes, and many in number, horses & carriages, servants &c &c &c, these are the harpies, that so disturb our real happiness.
My next move in life I hope will be into a much more simple mode of living. I should like to live in a small house, with my family, uncar- peted white washed walls, simple old fashioned furniture & plain wholesome old fashioned fare. Though I have always been inclined to be a vegetarian in diet & once lived in capital health two years on the Graham system.
Well this will do for myself. Now for you friend Thoreau. Why return to “the world” again? a life such as you spent at Walden was too true & beautiful to be abandoned for any slight reason.
The ponds I allude to are much more secluded than Walden, and re- ally delightful places Should you ever incline again to try your “philosophy of living” I would introduce you into haunts, that your very soul would leap to behold. Well, I thought I would just write you a few lines to thank you for the pleasure I have received from the reading of your “Walden”, but I have found myself running on till now. I feel that you are a kindred spirit and so fear not. I was pleased to find a kind word or two in your book for the poor down trodden slave. Wilberforce, Clarkson and John Woolman & Anthony Benezet were household words in my father’s house.— I early became ac- quainted with the subject of slavery for my parents were Quakers, & Quakers were then all Abolitionists. My love of Nature, absolute, un- defiled nature makes me an abolitionist. How could I listen to the woodland songs–or gaze upon the outstretched lanscape, or look at the great clouds & the starry heavens and be aught but a friend of the poor and oppressed coloured race of our land. But why do I write–it is in vain to portray these things–they can only be felt and lived, and to you of all others I would refrain from being prolix.
I have outlived, or nearly so, all ambition for notoriety. I wish only to be a simple, good man & so live that when I come to surrender up my spirit to the Great Father, I may depart in peace.
I wrote the above last evening. It is now Sunday afternoon, and alone in my Shanty I sit down to my desk to add a little more. A great white cloud which I have been watching for the past half hour is now ma- jestically moving off to the north east before the fine s. w. breeze which sets in here nearly every summer afternoon from the ocean. We have here the best climate in New England–shelter ed on the north & east by dense pine woods from the cold winds which so cut up the healths of eastern folk, or rather are supposed to–but I think if the habits of our people were right the north easters would do but little harm. I never heard that the Indians w ere troubled by them– HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY but they were nature’s philosophers and lived in the woods. I love to go by my instincts, inspiration rather. O how much we lose by civi- lization! In the eyes of the world you & I are demi savages— But I rather think we could stand our hand at the dinner table or in the drawing room with most of folks. I would risk you any where, and as for myself I have about done with the follies of “society.” I never was trump’d yet.
I have lived out all the experiences of idle youth–some gentle, & some savage experiences but my heart was not made of the stuff for a sportsman or angler–early in life I ranged the woods, fields & shores with my gun, or rod, but I found that all I sought could be ob- tained much better without the death dealing implements. So now my rustic staff is all the companion I usually take, unless my old dog joins me–taking new track as he often does, and bounding upon me in some distant thicket. My favorite books are–Cowper’s task, Thomson’s Seasons Milton, Shakespeare, &c &c–Goldsmith Gray’s Elegy–Beattie’s Minstrel (parts) Howitt, Gil. White, (Selbourne) Be- wick (wood engraver) moderns–Wordsworth Ch. Lamb–De Quincy, Macauly, Kit. North, &c &c
These and others are more my companions than men. I like talented women & swear lustily by Mary Wolstoncroft, Mde– Roland, Joan d’arc & somewhat by dear Margaret Fuller.
The smaller fry, I let go by–
Again permit me to thank you for the pleasure & strength I have found in reading “Walden.”
Dear Mr Walden good bye for the present.
Yours most respectfully
Daniel Ricketson
Henry D. Thoreau Esq HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1855
Republication, in Boston by Sanborn, Carter, Bazin, & Co. at 25 and 29 Cornhill, of George Copway’s 1850 volume, THE TRADITIONAL HISTORY AND CHARACTERISTIC SKETCHES OF THE OJIBWAY NATION. BY G. COPWAY, OR, KAH-GE-GA-GAH-BOWH, CHIEF OF THE OJIBWAY NATION. ILLUSTRATED BY DARLY.
COPWAY’S OJIBWAYS
A copy of this would wind up on the shelves of Henry Thoreau’s library, and then in Special Collections at the HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY Concord Free Public Library. CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1857
November 27, Friday: Father Isaac Hecker wrote to Orestes Augustus Brownson from Rome.
Henry Thoreau visited beautiful downtown Concord: Standing before Stacy’s large glass windows this morning, I saw that they were gloriously ground by the frost. I never saw such beautiful feather and fir-like frosting. His windows are filled with fancy articles and toys for Christmas and New Year’s presents, but this delicate and graceful outside frosting surpassed them all infinitely. I saw countless feathers with very distinct midribs and fine pinnae. The half of a trunk seemed to rise in each case up along the sash, and these feathers branched off from it all the way, sometimes nearly horizontally. Other crystals looked like pine plumes the size of life. If glass could be ground to look like this, how glorious it would be! We notice, in this journal entry from Concord in the Year of Our Lord 1857, Thoreau’s above reference to glass grinding: “they were gloriously ground by the frost.” At that point in time, the glass-grinding factories that were producing such large slabs of sheet glass for use in shop windows had been in production for about nine years. Not only patterned plate glass, but transparent plate glass, was for the first time available and reasonably priced in large slabs in commercial quantities. This windows through which Thoreau was staring at John Stacy’s bookstore would have been some of the few such transparencies as yet installed in local shops. GLASS WINDOWS
November 27, Friday: Mr. Wesson says that he has seen a striped squirrel eating a white-bellied mouse on a wall –had evidently caught [it]; also that the little dipper is not a coot, –but he appears not to know a coot, and did not recognize the lobed feet when I drew them. Says the little dipper has a bill like a hen, and will not dive at the flash so as to escape, as he has proved.18 Says that a loon can run but little way and very awkwardly, falling on its belly, and cannot rise from the ground. Makes a great noise running on the water before it rises. Standing before Stacy’s large glass windows this morning, I saw that they were gloriously ground by the frost. I never saw such beautiful feather and fir-like frosting. His windows are filled with fancy articles and toys for Christmas and New-Year’s presents, but this delicate and graceful outside frosting
surpassed them all infinitely. I saw countless feathers with very distinct midribs and fine pinnae. The half of a trunk seemed to rise in each case up along the sash, and these feathers branched off from it all the way, sometimes nearly horizontally. Other crystals looked like pine plumes the size of life. If glass could be ground to look like this, how glorious it would be! You can tell which shopman has the hottest fire within by the frost being melted off. I was never so struck by the gracefulness of the curves in vegetation, and wonder that Ruskin does not refer to frostwork. P.M. –Rode to the kiln and quarry by William Farrar’s, Carlisle, and to gorge behind Melvin’s. The direction of the strata at this quarry is like that of Curly-pate and the Easterbrooks quarries, east-northeast by west-southwest, though the latter are very nearly two miles southeast. Was struck by the appearance of a small hickory near the wall, in the rocky ravine just above the trough. Its trunk was covered with loose scales unlike the hickories near it and as much as the shagbark; but probably it is a shaggy or scaly-barked variety of Carya glabra. It may be well to observe it next fall. The husk is not thick, like that of the shagbark, but quite thin, and splits into four only part way down. The shell is not white nor sharply four-angled like the other, but it is rather like a pignut. The stratification trends there as at Curly-pate, or perhaps more north and south. That trough place on the side of the rocky valley to catch the trickling spring for the sake of the cattle, with a long slab cover to the trough that leads to it to fend off the feet of cattle that come to drink, is an agreeable object and in keeping with the circumstances, amid the hickories and perhaps ash trees. It reminds me of life sometimes in the pasture, –that other creatures than myself quench their thirst at this hillside. 18.Vide December 26, 1857. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY I think that Ruskin is wrong about reflections in his “Elements of Drawing,” page 181. He says the reflection is merely the substance “reversed” or “topsy-turvy,” and adds, “Whatever you can see from the place in which you stand, of the solid objects so reversed under the water, you will see in the reflection, always in the true perspective of the solid objects so reversed.”
Here, in a photograph made sometime between 1865 and 1868, courtesy of Leslie Perrin Wilson of the Concord Free Public Library, is the closest approximation we have to the sort of “plate glass” window through which Thoreau was peering on this day. The shop on the left is 23-25 Main Street, which was John Stacy’s business which his son Albert Stacy had by 1850 taken over. The shop on the right is one that he set up after the Civil War. We note immediately that this type of shop window might more appropriately be referred to as a glass plate window rather than a plate glass window, as it was clearly built up from multiple polished glass plates in a frame rather than, as today, of one solid slab of almost invisible glass entirely filling a window space: HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1858
March 26, Friday: Prescott Keyes was born, a son of John Shepard Keyes and Martha Prescott Keyes (he would in 1881 get married with Alice Reynolds, a daughter of Grindall Reynolds).
Waldo Emerson wrote from Concord to Henry Stephens Randall of New York that “Thoreau’s study seems at present to be equally shared between natural and civil history,” adding “he reads both with a keen and original eye.” Emerson was soliciting (and would obtain) a 2d freebie copy of a 4-volume state-published documentary history, one copy of which he already had in his library and that Thoreau had already consulted — either Emerson’s 4-volume set or the 4-volume set thus obtained for the library of Henry Thoreau (I don’t know for sure which) is now safely in the possession of the Concord Free Public Library: Lately, a friend of mine comes occasionally to my library to explore [THE D OCUMENTARY H ISTORY OF THE S TATE OF N EW Y ORK: –ARRANGED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE HON. CHRISTOPHER MORGAN, SECRETARY OF STATE. By Dr. Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan (Albany: Weed, Parsons, & Co., public printers, 1849/1851, four volumes)], and finds them to contain much valuable matter to his purpose. His estimation is the most valuable, that he under estimated them when he first looked at them, a good while since; & he is a very curious & very instructed scholar in early American History, especially in all that concerns the Indians.... He is Henry D. Thoreau, a land- surveyor in this town, a good scholar, and though far less known than he ought to be, very well-known in this region as the author of a book called “A Week on the Concord & Merrimack Rivers,” and “Walden, or Life in the Woods.”
HISTORY OF NEW YORK, I HISTORY OF NEW YORK, II HISTORY OF NEW YORK, III HISTORY OF NEW YORK, IV HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY (Thoreau would copy from this source into his Indian Notebooks #6 and #8, his Fact Book, and his Canadian Notebook for the 1852-1854 period.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1860
May 12, Saturday: Henry Thoreau surveyed the boundary between Moses Prichard’s woods skirting the river, which were furnished with winding walks and rustic seats and formed an attractive and cool retreat, and the Joseph Holbrook houselots on Main Street in Concord. Thoreau’s charge was $1.50. Holbrook’s house was on the site of the house of common entertainment that belonged to William Buss in 1660, almost opposite the site that is now the Concord Free Public Library. This survey shows that the garbage disposal of that day was the pig, for Thoreau included the “piggery.” Thoreau’s charge was $0.25. Joseph Holbrook also owned land in Great Meadows and part of Frosty Poplar Hollow near Gowing’s Swamp and Copan.
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/55.htm
A group of 105 white miners were trekking toward Pyramid Lake, seeking retribution against the redskins for their having massacred the five white rapists at Williams Station, when the Payute intercepted the group, managing to kill roughly half of them. Two days after the Reverend Theodore Parker’s death, Dr. B. Appleton (a Boston physician who had been in attendance during his last months) and Parker’s close friend Professor Pierre Jean Édouard Desor performed an autopsy, removing the brain and the heart. Expecting the corpse to be shipped back to Massachusetts for reburial, they sealed it in a lead casket, packed tightly in hemp and pickled in strong spirits. The brain and heart were put in separate boxes and sent on ahead, perhaps assuming that after the organs were studied they would be interred in the casket with the rest of Parker’s corpse. Parker’s widow, however, considered that moving his HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY corpse would violate one of his final wishes, and would have the remainder interred in the Protestant cemetery
in Firenze in which Elizabeth Barrett Browning would be being interred in the following year, and Thoreau’s friend Thomas Cholmondeley in 1864:
So have I seen a pine tree in the woods, old, dry at its roots, capped with age-resembling snow; it stood there, and seemed to stand; but a little touch of wind drove it headlong, and it fell with a long, resounding crash. —Theodore Parker
We know that his brain was sent to Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe at the Perkins School for the Blind, for a sailor would show up at the Howes’ door unexpectedly with a brain in a box. The cover letter had been lost in transit, so Julia Ward Howe stuck the box and its grisly contents in a closet on the top floor of the Perkins School (one of the Howe daughters would reminisce about being terrified of that closet as a child). Dr. Howe, meanwhile, would not mention the disgusting matter to anyone; for years, even Mrs. Parker would not know where her husband’s brain had gotten to. What happened to the box containing the heart is even more unclear; it may have been sent to Dr. Samuel Cabot, Parker’s physician and president of the Boston Society of Natural History.
Parker’s gravestone in Italy is of marble, about 4 feet high, and is topped by an “eternal flame” in a lamp that resembles a Unitarian-Universalist chalice. The stone provides a side view of Parker’s bust, with laurel wreath. The stone has become tilted and someday may fall and shatter. The cemetery is opened for visitors from 10AM to 1PM, except on Sundays and Mondays. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY THEODORE PARKER THE GREAT AMERICAN PREACHER BORN AT LEXINGTON MASSACHUSETTS UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AUGUST 24 1810 DIED AT FLORENCE ITALY MAY 10 1860 HIS NAME IS ENGRAVED IN MARBLE HIS VIRTUES IN THE HEARTS OF THOSE HE HELPED TO FREE FROM SLAVERY AND SUPERSTITION
May 12. Celandine. Very hot.
2.30 P. M.—81°. We seek the shade to sit in for a day or two. The neck-cloth and single coat is too thick; wear a half-thick coat at last [?]. The sugar maple blossoms on the Common resound with bees. Ostrya flower commonly out on Island, how long? Maybe a day or two. First bathe in the river. Quite warm enough. River five and one half plus inches below summer level. Very heavy dew and mist this morning; plowed ground black and moist with it. The earth is so dry it drinks like a sponge. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1862
At some point that Spring: At some point during this spring, shortly before his death, Henry Thoreau gave to Edmund Hosmer his personal copy of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, pointing out the lock of John’s hair pasted into the front and the poem that accompanied it, and said:
You know how a pregnant woman has to eat for two. I have felt that I needed to live for John.
According to Raymond R. Borst, this happened on May 5th: “At Thoreau’s request, his friend Edmund Hosmer spends the night with him” and “In appreciation for this kindness, Thoreau asks his sister to give Hosmer his memorial copy of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS with a lock of his brother John’s hair taped in it.” Borst’s reference is to the Concord Saunterer, 11, Number 4 for Winter 1976, page 16.
Thoreau was then in the process of revising A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS for Ticknor & Fields to reissue it.
At some point, also, Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau presented Henry with a handwritten list of people to whom, she suggested, he might want to leave some special gift. Her list included in no particular sequence Bronson Alcott, H.G.O. Blake, Theophilus Brown, Ellery Channing, Aunt Louisa Dunbar, Edith Emerson, Edward Waldo Emerson, Edmund Hosmer, Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, Elizabeth Sherman Hoar, Horace Mann, Jr., Friend Daniel Ricketson, Mrs. Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, the Concord Town Library, and the Boston Society of Natural History. Thoreau worked at this list, jotting down alongside the names various small gifts (such as his two-volume edition of Froissart’s CHRONICLES for Ellery), FROISART’S CHRONICLES, I FROISART’S CHRONICLES, II
until he got down to the entry for Ellen Emerson. Evidently at this point he was unable to proceed, for the bequest to her (of his volume on the mineralogy of Maine and Massachusetts, evidently because it was by her uncle Charles T. Jackson), and all the remainder, are not in his handwriting but instead in Sophia’s. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1866
The Fitchburg Railroad bought a piece of land at Walden Pond near the tracks, set up a place to picnic on the shore at Ice Fort Cove, and added sand for a bathing beach near the tracks (opposite where the beach is now). Concord’s Walden Woods area would soon be further developed to include swings, bathing houses, pavilions, dancing platforms, and other attractions. There were paths around the pond and through the woods and boats on the pond, there were football and baseball fields, and a cinder racetrack in the vicinity would make the pond a popular destination for a day trip from Boston via the train (and a money-maker for the railroad in the summer). This cinder track for foot and bicycle races consisted of a straight run of 120 yards culminating in a 220-yard circle, and was in the woods opposite the tracks from the pond. Traces of the cinders can be found there to this day. They built a wooden bridge for people to cross the tracks, and this bridge is visible in a period painting of Walden that is in the Concord Free Public Library Art Collection. This excursion park on the railroad would be destroyed by fire in 1902. SPORTS HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1869
William Munroe purchased a site between Sudbury Road and Main Street for a proposed library building. After removal of the Nathan Brooks House to Hubbard Street and the widening of Main Street, the area would be ready for this construction. The Concord Free Public Library would be constructed in a Gothic and mansard style and dedicated in 1873. The building would be renovated and altered over the years, with major remodeling taking place in 1917 with removal of the original tower and spire and 1933 when architect Harry B. Little would transform both exterior and interior. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1870
Although plate glass sheets as large as 84"x60" had by this year become possible, little of this sort of thing was as yet being produced. GLASS WINDOWS
Most glass plate shop windows, in this period probably still consisted of the sort of windows that are evident in this photograph made sometime between 1865 and 1868, supplied to the Kouroo Contexture by Leslie Perrin Wilson of the Concord Free Public Library. The shop on the left is 23-25 Main Street in beautiful downtown Concord, which was John Stacy’s business which his son Albert had by 1850 taken over. The shop on the right is one that Albert Stacy set up after the Civil War. This type of shop window might more appropriately be referred to as a glass plate window rather than a plate glass window because it was being built up from multiple polished glass plates set into a frame rather than, as today, of one solid slab of almost invisible glass entirely filling a window space: HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1873
Frederic Hudson’s JOURNALISM IN THE UNITED STATES, FROM 1690-1872. The newsman and author became a member of Concord’s Library Committee.
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY October 1, Wednesday 2PM: In Concord, dedication ceremonies were held for a building designed by architects Snell and Gregerson, which was to house the Concord Free Public Library. William Munroe had provided the funds. The collection at that time amounted to 10,061 volumes, for which the checkout rate was 3.28 checkouts per annum per volume on an average.
Having found a reference in the town records to the lending of books in 1672, Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar announced at the dedication ceremony that Concord had been the 1st American town to have begun a public HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY library. It is unknown whether anyone in the crowd who heard this claim actually paid it any attention.
LOVE ME, LOVE MY TOWN
This is what had been on the site during Henry Thoreau’s years: HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY This is the gothic horror that was at this point created by these infamously over-the-top Boston architects.
(Over the years the building has been periodically renovated and expanded. The most significant such alteration has been as of 1933, when architect Harry Britton Little renovated the exterior from Victorian Gothic style to Georgian style. Despite this external extreme restyling, the octagonal lobby has remained as it was.) Here is an excerpt from Waldo Emerson’s “Address at the Opening of the Concord Free Public Library”: Henry Thoreau we all remember as a man of genius, and of marked character, known to our farmers as the most skillful of surveyors, and indeed better acquainted with their forests and meadows and trees than themselves.... He, too, was an excellent reader. No man would have rejoiced more than he in the event of this day. In a private letter to a lady, he writes: “Do you read any noble verses? For my part, they have been the only things I remembered, —— or that which occasioned them, —— when all things else were blurred and defaced. All things have put on mourning but they: for the elegy itself is some victorious melody in you, escaping from the wreck”.... In saying these things for books, I do not for a moment forget that they are secondary, mere means, and only used in off-hours, only in the pause, and, as it were, the sleep, or passive state of the mind ... when the mind itself wakes, all books, all past acts are forgotten, huddled aside as impertinent in the august presence of the creator. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY This new CFPL was not simply a continuation of the previously existing Concord Town Library. It was an entirely new organization with new funding and a new administrative structure. It was established as a joint public/private venture and still functions in that manner. The staffing, and the general collections, are supported by tax appropriations, while the property, buildings, special collections, and artwork are owned and supported by a private, self-perpetuating, nonprofit corporation devoted to the protection of the documentary heritage of the town.
Boston publisher James Thomas Fields was unable to attend the dedication ceremonies, but presented, from his The Atlantic Monthly files (along with four other manuscripts), as a generous gift suitable to the occasion, the manuscript for Thoreau’s essay “Walking.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1874
Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau deposited her brother’s surveying papers at the Concord Free Public Library.
View Henry Thoreau’s surveys courtesy of the Concord library’s presence on the internet: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_surveys/Thoreau_surveys.htm
Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau presented her brother Henry Thoreau’s personal copy, between blue-gray paper boards and bearing a printed spine label, of Giacomo Costantino Beltrami’s LA DÉCOUVERTE DES SOURCES DU MISSISSIPPI ET DE LA RIVIÈRE SANGLANTE … (Nouvelle-Orléans: Impr. par Benjamin Levy, 1824) to the Concord Free Public Library. We note in this volume, now filed as Accession No. 10423, some markings and annotations in pencil.
LA DÉCOUVERTE ... She presented, also, her brother’s personal copy of the 2d edition of the English translation of Professor Philip Karl Buttmann’s GREEK GRAMMAR FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS, FROM THE GERMAN OF PHILIP BUTTMANN (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, and Company, 1826), and this is now filed as Accession # 10443. On the front free endpaper is inscribed “D.H. Thoreau / Cambridge / Mass 1833.” BUTTMANN’S GREEK GR. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1876
October 7, Saturday: Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau died in Bangor, Maine, bequeathing her brother’s surveying papers and the portrait that Samuel Worcester Rowse had made in 1854 to the Concord Free Public Library, and sending the three trunks of Henry’s manuscripts to H.G.O. Blake. Brad Dean’s Commentary
TIMELINE OF JOURNAL
THOREAU LIFESPANS
December 7, Thursday, 1876: Waldo Emerson wrote to H.G.O. Blake to inform him that the two boxes containing Henry Thoreau’s journals and surveys, weight 225 pounds, had been located at the Concord Free Public Library.
December 20, Wednesday: Coming to Boston visiting the Athenaeum, Waldo Emerson brought along the two boxes of Henry Thoreau’s journals to be shipped off to H.G.O. Blake. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1878
During this year and the following one, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody donated to the open shelves of the Concord Free Public Library a number of volumes printed between 1524 and 1878, the bulk of them printed between 1820 and 1850. (Of this gift the original extent of which cannot now be determined, some 415 volumes remain to be counted on the library’s shelves. Refer to Leslie Perrin Wilson’s typescript thesis Introduction to a Bibliography of Books Presented to the Concord Free Public Library by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody with A Bibliography of Books Presented to the Concord Free Public Library by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, done in 1982.)
This was the prison in Concord, Massachusetts:
The old state prison of Rhode Island on Gaspee Street north of the cove, a 2-story granite structure completed in 1838 at a cost of about $1,300 per cell, had cost a total of $51,500. In the following year a more compact county jail had been added next the jailkeeper’s home on the east side of this structure. In this year the prisoners were transferred to new $450,000 state prison complex constructed of bluestone with granite trim, on land purchased in the village of Howard in Cranston in 1869. This edifice consists of a central building and two wings containing 252 cells, connected by iron bridges with the keeper’s house in front and with the mess-room, kitchen, and hospital in the rear. The wall around the prison yard was 20 feet in height and had a granite sentry tower at each corner. These would be served by the Pawtuxet Valley Branch of the New York, Providence, & Boston RR. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1879
Daniel Chester French sculpted 2 busts and a head of Waldo Emerson. (In 1911 he would sculpt the seated figure that is in the Concord Free Public Library.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1885
For Concord’s 250th Celebration of Incorporation, Judge John Shepard Keyes compiled for the reenactors a list of historic locations. This list included “Burial place of ... a British soldier wounded at the North Bridge.”19 The location indicated was on the northeast side of the Courthouse on Monument Street, where the Keyes family home had stood before it burned in the 1849 Courthouse fire (John S. Keyes Papers, Special Collections, Concord Free Public Library).
February 18, Wednesday: ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, which some take to be the great American indictment against slavery, was first published in the USA during this year in which the practice of human enslavement was being defended in America by no one at all. The Irish were, however, still in considerable general disrepute — for instance, during this year the Irish were being characterized by John Beddoe, in THE RACES OF BRITAIN, as “Africanoid.”20 Samuel Langhorn Clemens therefore told his illustrator to be careful not to make Huck “Irishy.” He did not want his book to be confrontational or socially helpful; to the contrary, he needed for it to sell. The author needed to and he desired to pander rather than attempt any sort of social corrective.
According to Noel Ignatiev’s HOW THE IRISH BECAME WHITE, “To be acknowledged as white, it was not enough for the Irish to have a competitive advantage over Afro- Americans in the labor market; in order for them to avoid the taint of blackness it was necessary that no Negro be allowed to work in occupations where Irish were to be found.”
According to the jokes that were going the rounds in those days among non-Irish white racists (the bulk of the population, actually), the Irish were “Negroes turned inside out” while the American free blacks were “smoked Irish.”
It has been well said, that inside the charmed Caucasian chalk circle it is the sum of what you are not –not Indian, not Negro, not a Jew, not Irish, etc.– that make you what you are. And, that’s as true now as it was then.
19. Of the three stricken soldiers of the 4th Regiment Light Infantry Company, Thomas Smith, Patrick Gray, and James Hall, two had died and were buried at the North Bridge itself, while the third was carried toward town before succumbing to his wounds. 20. THE RACES OF BRITAIN: A CONTRIBUTION TO THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF WESTERN EUROPE. Bristol, England: Arrowsmith, 1885, page 11. Bear in mind that the description “Nigger Jim” does not appear in this book — it was not Mark Twain but his first biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, who initiated all our references to the Jim character of this novel as “Nigger Jim.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY The Concord Free Public Library nevertheless immediately banned this new fiction from its shelves as “the veriest trash.” Louisa May Alcott, in particular (if we can believe a popular writer, Thomas Beer, who claimed to have found this in an unprinted letter from Miss Alcott to Frances Hedges Butler –whoever she was– but who has been caught red-handed at inventing other stuff of that nature in his earlier biography of Stephen Crane), possibly was outraged by the temerity of this author:
If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses, he had best stop writing for them.
— From Nat Hentoff’s FREE SPEECH FOR ME – BUT NOT FOR THEE: HOW THE AMERICAN LEFT AND RIGHT RELENTLESSLY CENSOR EACH OTHER (HarperCollins/Harry Asher Books)
(There is no indication, however, that the Concord Free Public Library ever removed from its shelves another famous boy’s story which has buried in it a the-black-man-and-the-pig story worthy to be told at a Ku Klux Klan rally. The censorious do tend to be unconscious!)
March 17, Tuesday: Newspapers across the US reported that the Concord Free Public Library had banned Mark Twain’s ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN for “being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY March 18, Wednesday: The Hartford Courant for this date editorialized that it was a favorable development, that the Concord Free Public Library had banned ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN:
The public library committee of Concord, Mass., have given Mark Twain’s new book, “Huckleberry Finn,” a wide advertisement by refusing to allow it to be put on their shelves. The result will be that people in Concord will buy the book instead of drawing it from the library, and those who do will smile not only at the book but at the idea that it is not for respectable people.
Samuel Langhorn Clemens predicted, to Charles L. Webster, manager of his publishing firm, that this would increase sales:
Mch 18, ’85. Dear Charley,— The Committee of the Public Library of Concord, Mass., have given us a rattling tip-top puff which will go into every paper in the country. They have expelled Huck from their library as “trash and suitable only for the slums.” That will sell 25,000 copies for us sure. S.L.C.
Amy Belding Brown has been tracking the movements of Louisa May Alcott with great care. She points out that on January 11th she wrote to Mary E. Edie: “We do not live in the old house. It is sold. We live in Boston.” Louisa had been living in rented rooms on Chestnut Street in Boston since January, with the exception of a couple of day trips to Concord. If this thing with the public library committee of Concord actually did happen as reported in the Hartford Courant, then, it would have needed to have happened on one of those day trips. Louisa’s journal indicates that she was in Concord on February 27th and returned to Boston on the 28th. She would be in Concord again from April 11th to June 20th, when she would go to Nonquitt near New Bedford for the summer. She would purchase her place at 10 Louisburg Square on Beacon Hill in Boston in September and move in on September 30th. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1902
The Fitchburg Railroad had, in 1866, bought a piece of land at Walden Pond near the railroad tracks, set up a place to picnic on its shore at Ice Fort Cove, and added sand for a bathing beach near the tracks (that’s exactly opposite where the beach is now). They had “improved” the Walden Woods area to include swings, bathing houses, pavilions, dancing platforms, etc. There were boats on the pond and paths around it and through the woods, there were football and baseball fields, there was even a racetrack for foot and bicycle races — anything and everything to make this pond a popular destination for a summer day trip from Boston via buying a ticket on their train. They had even put in a wooden bridge for people to cross the tracks, which is visible in a period painting of the pond in the Concord Free Public Library Art Collection. SPORTS
In this year, however, this excursion park on the railroad was destroyed by fire. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1910
Here is a photo we have of the Concord Free Public Library as of approximately this year, before it was renovated to the Georgian style: HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1911
Daniel Chester French sculpted the seated figure of Waldo Emerson that is in the Concord Free Public Library. (He had done a clay model from life, of this friend of his father Henry Flagg French, and from this clay model in 1879 had already created two busts and a head. We may note that although as a young sculptor he had done portrait work of local people he knew personally –among them Simon Brown who was married to Henry Flagg French’s sister Ann, and Elizabeth Rockwood Hoar– since he had been only twelve when Henry Thoreau had died, he had never had a chance to get to know him.)
Allen French’s THE SIEGE OF BOSTON.
VIEW THE PAGE IMAGES
Moorfield Storey’s and Edward Waldo Emerson’s EBENEZER ROCKWOOD HOAR: A MEMOIR (Houghton Mifflin) made a passing mention of the Concord mass-murderer Lieutenant Daniel Hoar. EBENEZER ROCKWOOD HOAR
The two daughters of Joanna Hoar [the 1st American ancestress], by marriage with Henry Flint and Edmund Quincy, became the sources of the Adams and Quincy families. Her youngest son, Leonard Hoar, was educated at Harvard College, where he graduated in 1650, and of which he became the President in 1672, the first who was a graduate of the college. Thus early was the relation established between Harvard College and the Hoar family. The eldest son who accompanied her to this country, John Hoar, when he grew up settled in Concord, which was then “the extreme western frontier town of English settlement in New England.” Thenceforward the family dwelt in Concord, Lincoln, Lexington, Waltham and Watertown, within a circle of six miles’ radius. John Hoar was a lawyer and a citizen, whose thought, speech, and action were fearlessly independent of others in a day when magistrates and ministers were formidable. His humane and brave conduct in sheltering and protecting the poor group of “Praying Indians” of Nashobah, when, in King Philip’s War, a cruelty begotten of fear took momentary possession of Concord, is recorded in Walcott’s “Concord in the Colonial Period.” In 1 676, he went into the wilderness and redeemed Mrs. Rowlandson from captivity, a very dangerous expedition. His independence in the matter of church-going, and his remarks on the preaching of Rev. Edward Bulkeley, proved “an expensive luxury” to him, HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY as Mr. Walcott says, for he was fined and temporarily disbarred; but his life reflected honor on his name. John Hoar’s son Daniel was a lieutenant and presumably had some military experience, but Daniel’s son John “was a soldier in the old French War and was a prisoner among the Indians for three months,” serving also as selectman of Lexington. From him came Samuel Hoar of Lincoln, who, as a Lieutenant of the Lincoln Company, was at Concord bridge on April 19, 1775, where also were two great-grandfathers and three great-uncles of Judge Hoar. Lieutenant Hoar served in the Provincial and Continental forces, and fought at Saratoga. Later he was a magistrate and sat in the Legislature of Massachusetts, first, as a representative from Lincoln, and afterwards as senator. He married Susannah Pierce, whose father was Colonel Abijah Pierce of Lincoln, one of the town’s Committee of Safety in the days preceding the outbreak of the Revolution, and colonel of a regiment of Minute-men. Their first-born son was Samuel, who through a long life sustained and advanced the simple and brave ideals of Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1913
Rose Standish Whiting of Plymouth, daughter of William Whiting of Concord, donated a portrait of her father by Henry S. Shubbell to the Concord Free Public Library. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1936
November: Any number of readers have been thrown off stride by the manner in which Henry Thoreau critiqued a hapless family of Irish ecological refugees in the “Baker Farm” chapter of WALDEN, and have drawn an adverse conclusion as to Thoreau’s general sociability. But consider, this book had begun with a pointed discussion of household economy, of aims and manners of living. The record is more complex than what is contained in just this one chapter, in regard to Thoreau’s attitudes toward and dealings with people, common or otherwise, and such a mere excerpt should not be tendentiously taken out of its evocative context to make a point that could only be sustained by carefully disregarding other evidence. What comes to light in the aggregate, not only on the basis of Thoreau’s own reports but also on the basis of the testimonies of the many who knew him, is that he was a gentle and considerate man whose dealings with common people were predominantly marked by neighborly interest and fellow feeling. Although WALDEN happens to have become the primary repository of his cultural legacy, in fact Thoreau didn’t spend his whole life as a youth at Walden Pond, or crowing about that early experiment in living, or condemning others for failing to live as skillfully as he himself lived. He had found that he had several more lives to live, and had been in the process of living them, when snuffed by TB in 1862 — howevermuch the popular imagination seems intent upon containing this changing person at Walden Pond and in the years 1845-1846. There was so much more, and part of this is the nature and extent of Thoreau’s relations with his neighbors and passing strangers (including runaway slaves and poor Irishmen) during the years that he was no longer elaborating his early manuscript A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS while in residence at Walden Pond.
MEN OF CONCORD AS PORTRAYED IN THE JOURNAL OF HENRY DAVI D THOREAU, ed. Francis Henry Allen with illustrations by Newell Convers Wyeth, issued in this year, is simply a 240-page compilation of excerpts from the JOURNAL in which Thoreau is allowed to describe and discuss, and report his walks and talks with, various of his neighbors, as a corrective for this general misperception of Thoreau’s neighborliness: Many readers, thinking of Henry Thoreau as the stanch individualist, the apostle of wild nature, the rebel against man-made institutions, the “hermit of Walden,” forget that he had any but the most formal relations with human beings outside of his own family. And yet his JOURNAL records many and many a conversation with fellow-townsmen, and its readers encounter much shrewd and understanding comment on the ways and manners of this and that individual or group. He talked familiarly with farmers, hunters, and fishermen — as familiarly as he did with his friend Ellery Channing, with Edward Sherman Hoar, Friend Daniel Ricketson, and H.G.O. Blake. Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson, in his
HENRY DAVI D THOREAU AS REMEMBERED BY A YOUNG FRIEND
has testified to the regard in which Thoreau’s humbler neighbors held him.... [A]fter speaking of Thoreau’s propensity for taking the other side in conversation “for the joy of the intellectual fencing,” Dr. Emerson goes on to say: “Thoreau held this trait in check with women and children, and with humble people who were no match for him. With them he was simple, gentle, friendly, and amusing.” “His simple, direct speech and look and bearing were such that no plain, common man would put him down in his books as a fool, or visionary, or helpless, as the scholar, writer, or reformer would often be regarded by him.... He loved to talk with all kinds and conditions of men if they had no hypocrisy or pretense about them, and though high in his HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY standard of virtue, and most severe with himself, could be charitable to the failings of humble fellow-men.” A man who lived on a farm and had worked in the Thoreaus’ plumbago-mill told Dr. Emerson that Thoreau was the best friend he ever had. “He was always straight in his ways: and was very particular to be agreeable.... When I saw him crossing my field I always wanted to go and have a talk with him.... He liked to talk as long as you did, and what he said was new.”
Although the matter was not publicized, MEN OF CONCORD’s pen-and-ink drawings had been done by his son Andrew Wyeth, rather than by the painter himself. Wyeth hoped to induce the Concord Free Public Library to pay him $5,000 for the entire set of a dozen original painted panels that had been used to create this book, but that was something that would not come about. The paintings would be sold individually on the general market, and eventually the library would come into possession of five of them, “The Carpenters Repairing Hubbard’s Bridge,” “Thoreau and Miss Mary Emerson,” “Johnny and His Woodchuck-Skin Cap,” “Fishing Through the Ice,” and “The Muskrat Hunters....” Other of the paintings would go to: • pen-and-ink drawings — privately held • jacket illustration — Brandywine River Museum
• endpaper illustration — Canajoharie Library and Art Museum • “Mr. Alcott in the Granary Burying Ground” — Boston Athenaeum • “A Man of a Certain Probity...” — privately held • “Barefooted Brooks Clark Building Wall” — privately held • “Thoreau and the Three Reformers” — privately held • “Barefooted Brooks Clark Building Wall” — privately held • “Thoreau Fishing” — location unknown
According to the Preface, “Wyeth was a lifelong admirer of Thoreau, whose spirit has become a part of him. His work for this book, therefore, is a tribute from an intellectual disciple to an author who has had an important formative influence on his character and work.” One of the pieces of material selected is from the journal of February 13, 1841:
Extract: “A Lean Farm”
February 13, 1841: My neighbor says that his hill-farm is poor stuff and “only fit to hold the world HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY together.” He deserves that God should give him better for so brave a treatment of his gifts, instead of humbly putting up therewith. It is a sort of stay, or gore or gusset, and he will not be blinded by modesty or gratitude, but sees it for what it is; knowing his neighbor’s fertile land, he calls his by its right name. But perhaps my farmer forgets that his lean soil has sharpened his wits. This is a crop it was good for, and beside, you see the heavens at a lesser angle from the hill than from the vale. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1938
Late in the year: Newell Convers Wyeth displayed his entire series of Thoreau paintings in the art gallery of the Concord Free Public Library — he described this as “a corking little gallery.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1945
Newell Convers Wyeth painted his “Nightfall.” After her son Caleb Kendall Wheeler was shot down over Budapest, Mrs. Ruth Robinson Wheeler gave the Concord Free Public Library his “The Carpenters Repairing Hubbard’s Bridge” in memory of her son. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
1947
The Concord Free Public Library acquired Newell Convers Wyeth’s “Thoreau and Miss Mary Emerson” and “Johnny and His Woodchuck-Skin Cap.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY
2003
Newell Convers Wyeth’s “Fishing Through the Ice” and “The Muskrat Hunters ...” were deposited at the Concord Free Public Library in memory of Emilie Thomas, by her family.
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 2017. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: April 28, 2017 HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY 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.
Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY 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
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY JEFFERSON’S LEGACY:
THE FUNCTIONS OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS,
PAST AND PRESENT21
… The Jefferson Building, opened in 1897, is a grand monument to civilization, culture, and American achievement. The austere Adams Building, opened in 1938, functions primarily as a giant bookstack for over 12 million of the Library’s approximately 20 million books and pamphlets. The modern Madison Building, completed in 1980, with its 2.5 million square feet of space, is by far the largest structure…. The Library of Congress was established as the American legislature prepared to move from Philadelphia to the new capital city of Washington. On April 24, 1800, President John Adams approved legislation that appropriated $5,000 to purchase “such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress.” The first books, ordered from London, arrived in 1801 and were stored in the U.S. Capitol, the Library’s first home. On January 26, 1802, President Thomas Jefferson approved the first law defining the role and functions of the new institution…. Bibliophile and book collector extraordinaire, Jefferson took a keen interest in the Library and its collection while he was President of the United States from 1801 to 1809. Throughout his presidency, he personally recommended books for the Library, and he appointed the first two Librarians of Congress. In 1814 the British army invaded Washington and burned the Capitol, including the 3,000-volume Library of Congress. By then retired to Monticello, Jefferson offered to sell his personal library to the Congress to “recommence” its library. The purchase was approved in 1815, doubling the size of the Library of Congress and, more significantly, expanding it beyond the scope of a legislative library devoted primarily to legal, economic, and historical works. … Yet in the early 1850’s it appeared that the Smithsonian Institution might become the American national library. Its talented and aggressive librarian, Charles Coffin Jewett, tried to move the institution in that direction and turn it into a national bibliographical center as well. Jewett’s efforts were opposed, however, by Smithsonian Secretary Joseph Henry, who insisted that the Smithsonian focus its activities on scientific research and publication. In fact, the Secretary favored the eventual development of a national library at the Library of Congress, which he viewed as the appropriate foundation for “a collection of books worthy of a Government whose perpetuity principally depends on the intelligence of the people.” On July 10, 1854, Henry dismissed Jewett, ending any possibility that the Smithsonian might become the national library. Moreover, 12 years later Henry was to transfer the entire 40,000-volume library of the Smithsonian Institution to the Library of Congress. In all, the Library of Congress suffered difficult times during the 1850’s. In the first place, the growing intersectional rivalry between North and South hindered the strengthening of any government institution. Furthermore, in late 1851 the most serious fire in the Library’s history destroyed about two-thirds of its 55,000 volumes, including two-thirds of Jefferson’s library. Congress responded quickly and generously: in 1852 a total of $168,700 was appropriated to restore the Library’s rooms in the Capitol and to replace the lost books. But the books were to be replaced only, with no particular intention of supplementing or expanding the collection. This policy reflected the conservative philosophy of Senator James A. Pearce of Maryland, the chairman of the Joint Committee on the Library, who favored keeping a strict limit on the Library’s activities. In fact, a few years later, the Library lost two of its most important governmental functions. On January 28, 1857, a joint resolution transferred responsibility for the distribution of public documents to the Bureau of the Interior, and responsibility for the international exchange of books and documents on behalf of the U.S. government was shifted to the Department of State. Back in 1846, when the Smithsonian Institution was founded, both the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress were designated repositories for U.S. copyright deposits. On February 5, 1859, with the consent of Library officials, this law was repealed…. 21.[By John Y. Cole, Director, Center for the Book, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 20540-8200. Dates and statistics per his For CONGRESS AND THE NATION: A CHRONOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (Washington DC: Library of Congress, 1979)] HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY The individual responsible for transforming the Library of Congress into an institution of national significance was Ainsworth Rand Spofford, a former Cincinnati bookseller and journalist who served as Librarian of Congress from 1865 until 1897……. In the first years of his administration Spofford obtained congressional approval of six laws or resolutions that ensured a national role for the Library of Congress. The legislative acts were: • an appropriation providing for the expansion of the Library in the Capitol building, approved in early 1865; • the copyright amendment of 1865, which once again brought copyright deposits into the Library’s collections; • the Smithsonian deposit of 1866, whereby the entire library of the Smithsonian Institution, a collection especially strong in scientific materials, was transferred to the Library; • the 1867 purchase, for $100,000, of the private library of historian and archivist Peter Force, establishing the foundation of the Library’s Americana and incunabula collections; • the international exchange resolution of 1867, providing for the development of the Library’s collection of foreign public documents; and • the copyright act of 1870, which centralized all copyright registration and deposit activities at the Library.
… Spofford’s most impressive collection-building feat, and certainly the one that had the most far-reaching significance for the Library, was the centralization of all U.S. copyright deposit and registration activities at the Library in 1870. The copyright law ensured the continuing development of the Americana collections, for it stipulated that two copies of every book, pamphlet, map, print, and piece of music registered for copyright in the United States be deposited in the Library. This act also eventually forced the construction of a separate Library building, for by 1875 all shelf space was exhausted and the books, “from sheer force of necessity,” were being “piled on the floor in all directions.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY FROM THE LIBRARIES OF HENRY THOREAU
AND OTHER MEMBERS OF THAT FAMILY22
Three titles (Cholmondeley’s Ultima Thule, A Code of Gentoo Laws, and Mills’s The History of British India) were given to Thoreau by Englishman Thomas Cholmondeley, one (Lesley’s Manual of Coal) by Benjamin Smith Lyman, one (McKenney’s Memoirs) by William Ellery Channing (the poet), one (the Smithsonian report for 1856) by Horace Mann. Other books in the collection belonged to members of Thoreau’s family—his aunts Maria, Elizabeth, and Jane, his father John, his brother John, and his sister Helen. Most of the volumes were presented by Sophia Thoreau to the Concord Free Public Library in 1874. Several came from other donors (as noted in the Item List, below), including one (Oswald’s An Etymological Dictionary) originally presented to the CFPL by Sophia Thoreau, deaccessioned in 1906, acquired by Stephen H. Wakeman and later by George Russell Ready, who donated it once again to the CFPL in 1985. Some of the titles were presented by Henry David Thoreau to the Concord Town Library (predecessor of the Concord Free Public Library) and transferred from the Town Library to the Concord Free Public Library on its establishment in 1873. Bell, Thomas (1792-1880). A HISTORY OF BRITISH QUADRUPEDS, INCLUDING THE CETACEA. BY THOMAS BELL … ILLUSTRATED BY NEARLY 200 WOODCUTS (London: John Van Voorst, 1837). xviii, 526 pages. Pencil notes on endpapers (those on front paste-down endpaper erased). Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in blue- green cloth. Accession no. 10409. Beltrami, Giacomo Constantino (1779-1855). LA DÉCOUVERTE DES SOURCES DU MISSISSIPPI ET DE LA RIVIÈRE SANGLANTE. DESCRIPTION DU COURS ENTIRE DU MISSISSIPPI, QUIE N’ÉTAIT CONNU, QUE PARTIELLEMENT, ET D’UNE GRANDE PA RTI E DE CELUI DE LA RIVIERE SANGLANTE, PRESQUE ENTIÈREMENT INCONNUE; AINSI QUE DU COURS ENTIRE DE L’OHIO. APERÇUS HISTORIQUES, DES ENDROITS LES PLUS INTÉRESSANS, QU’ON Y RECONTRE. OBSERVATIONS CRITICO-PHILOSOPHIQUES, SUR LES MOEURS, LA RELIGION, LES SUPERSTITIONS, LES COSTUMES, LES ARMES, LES CHASSES, LA GUERRE, LA PA IX, LE DÉNOMBREMENT, L’ORGINE, &C. &C. DE PLUSIEURS NATIONS INDIENNES. PARALLELE DE CES PEOPLES AVEC CEUX DE L’ANTIQUITÉ, DU MOYEN AGE, ET DU MODERNE. COUP D’OEIL, SUR LES COMPAGNIES NORD-OUEST, ET DE LA BAIE D’HUDSON, AINSI QUE SUR LA COLONIE SELKIRK. PREUVES EVIDENTES, QUE LE MISSISSIPPI EST LA PREMIÈRE RIVIÈRE DU MONDE. PAR G. C. BELTRAMI … (Nouvelle-Orléans: Impr. par B. Levy, 1824). v, 327 pages. Some markings and annotations in pencil. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Blue-gray paper boards, printed spine label. Accession no. 10423. Bénard, Théodore Aimé Napoléon (1808-1873). DICTIONNAIRE CLASSIQUE UNIVERSEL FRANÇAIS, HISTORIQUE, BIOGRAPHIQUE, MYTHOLOGIQUE, GÉOGRAPHIQUE ET ÉTYMOLOGIQUE ... PAR M. TH. BÉNARD … QUINZIÈME ÉDITION, REVUE ET CORRIGÉE AVEC SOIN (Paris: Librairie Classique d’Eugène Belin, 1867). vii, 736 pages. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Quarter-bound in black cloth with printed spine label; printed blue paper boards. Accession no. 10435.
22. http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Fin_Aids/ThoreauBooks.htm#Bell HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY Boyer, Abel (1667-1729). BOYER’S FRENCH DICTIONARY; COMPRISING ALL THE ADDITIONS AND IMPROVEMENTS OF THE LATEST PARIS AND LONDON EDITIONS, WITH A VERY LARGE NUMBER OF USEFUL WORDS AND PHRASES, NOW FIRST SELECTED FROM THE MODERN DICTIONARIES OF BOISTE, WAILLY, CATINEAU, AND OTHERS; WITH THE PRONUNCIATION OF EACH WORD, ACCORDING TO THE DICTIONARY OF THE ABBÉ TARDY: TO WHICH ARE PREFIXED, RULES FOR THE PRONUNCIATION OF FRENCH VOWELS, DIPHTHONGS, AND FINAL CONSONANTS, CHIEFLY COLLECTED FROM THE PROSODY OF THE ABBÉ D’OLIVER, WITH A TABLE OF FRENCH VERBS, &C. … (Boston: T. Bedlington, and Bradford & Peaslee, 1827). 530, 250 pages. (Second sequence of pagination has separate t.p.: An English-French dictionary, designed as a second part to the Boston edition of Boyer’s French dictionary, with Tardy’s pronunciation.) Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in sheepskin; red spine label. Accession no. 10440. Buttmann, Philipp Karl (1764-1829). GREEK GRAMMAR FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS, FROM THE GERMAN OF PHILIP BUTTMANN. SECOND EDITION OF THE TRANSLATION (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, and Company, 1826). vii, 336 pages. Inscribed on front free endpaper: “D.H. Thoreau / Cambridge / Mass 1833.” Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in leather, red spine label. Accession no. 10443. Chalmers, Thomas (1780-1847). SERMONS, PREACHED IN THE TRON CHURCH, GLASGOW. BY T. CHALMERS, D.D. MINISTER OF THE TRON CHURCH, GLASGOW … (New York: Kirk & Mercein, 1819). 375 pages. Presented by Mary Fenn, Nov. 8, 1995. Inscribed on t.p.: Maria Thoreau / from her friend Rev. C. Suvall [?]. Quarter-bound in leather; blue-gray paper boards. No accession no. Cholmondeley, Thomas (1823-1863). ULTIMA THULE; OR, THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY A RESIDENCE IN NEW ZEALAND. BY THOMAS CHOMONDELEY (London: John Chapman, 1854). iv, 344 pages. Inscribed (by Thoreau) on t.p.: “Henry D. Thoreau / from / Thomas Cholmondeley.” Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Rebound in dark red cloth. Accession no. 10395. A CODE OF GENTOO LAWS, OR, ORDINATIONS OF THE PUNDITS, FROM A PERSIAN TRANSLATION, MADE FROM THE ORIGINAL, WRITTEN IN THE SHANSCRIT [sic] LANGUAGE (London: [s.n.], 1776). lxxiv, 61, 322 pages; plates. Inscribed in Thoreau’s hand on front free endpaper: “Henry D. Thoreau / from / Thomas Cholmondeley.” Inscribed beneath (in another hand): “E.R. Hoar, / from / Henry D. Thoreau. / May 1862.” Presented by Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, 1895. Bound in light brown calf; red spine label. Accession no. 27332. Copway, George (1818-1863). THE TRADITIONAL HISTORY AND CHARACTERISTIC SKETCHES OF THE OJIBWAY NATION. BY G. COPWAY, OR, KAH-GE-GA-GAH-BOWH, CHIEF OF THE OJIBWAY NATION. ILLUSTRATED BY DARLY (Boston: Sanborn, Carter, Bazin, & Co., 1850). 266 pages. Signature of H. D. Thoreau on front free endpaper (in ink) and on front lining leaf (in pencil). Annotations in pencil on back lining leaf. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in purple cloth. Accession no. 10400. Davies, Charles (1798-1876). ELEMENTS OF SURVEYING, AND NAVIGATION; WITH A DESCRIPTION OF THE INSTRUMENTS AND THE NECESSARY TABLES. BY CHARLES DAVI ES … REVISED EDITION (New York A.S. Barnes & Co., 1847). 188, 100 pages; folding plates. Signature of Henry D. Thoreau on t.p. Extensive pencil annotations on back lining leaf. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in calf; black spine label. Accession no. 10439. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY THE DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF THE STATE OF NEW-YORK. ARRRANGED UNDER DIRECTION OF THE HON. CHRISTOPHER MORGAN … BY E.B. O’CALLAGHAN … (Albany: Weed, Parsons & Co., 1850-1851). Four volumes; plates (some folded). (Imprint in Volume 4: Albany: Charles Van Benthuysen, 1851). Signature of Henry D. Thoreau on front free endpaper of each volume. Early Concord Town Library volumes, transferred to the CFPL in 1873. Bound in blue cloth. Accession numbers: 5800-5803. Farmer, John (1789-1838). COLLECTIONS, HISTORICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS; AND MONTHLY LITERARY JOURNAL … EDITED BY J. FARMER AND J.B. MOORE. Vol. III (Concord [N.H.], J.B. Moore, 1824). iv, 388, 88, [9] pages. Inscribed on front lining leaf: D H Thoreau. Very faint pencil signature of John Thoreau on t.p. Presented (donor unrecorded), 1927. Half-bound in leather, marbled paper boards. Accession no. 65368. Farrar, John (1779-1853). AN ELEMENTARY TREATISE ON MECHANICS, COMPREHENDING THE DOCTRINE OF EQUILIBRIUM AND MOTION, AS APPLIED TO SOLIDS AND FLUIDS, CHIEFLY COMPILED, AND DESIGNED FOR THE USE OF THE STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY AT CAMBRIDGE, NEW ENGLAND. BY JOHN FARRAR … (Cambridge: Printed by Hilliard and Metcalf, at the University Press, 1825). vii, 440 pages; folded plates. Signature of Henry D. Thoreau on front free endpaper. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in blue-gray paper boards, tan paper spine, with printed spine label. Accession no. 10431. Farrar, John (1779-1853). ELEMENTS OF ELECTRICITY, MAGNETISM, AND ELECTRO-MAGNETISM, EMBRACING THE LATE DISCOVERIES AND IMPROVEMENTS, DIGESTED INTO THE FORM OF A TREATISE; BEING THE SECOND PART OF A COURSE OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, COMPILED FOR THE USE OF THE STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY AT CAMBRIDGE, NEW ENGLAND … BY JOHN FARRAR … (Cambridge: Printed by Hilliard and Metcalf, at the University Press, 1826). vii, 395 pages; folded plates. Inscribed on front free endpaper: D.H. Thoreau [in pencil] / Henry. D. Thoreau [in ink]. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in blue-gray paper boards, tan paper spine, with printed spine label. Pages unopened. Accession no. 10430. Farrar, John (1779-1853). AN EXPERIMENTAL TREATISE ON OPTICS, COMPREHENDING THE LEADING PRINCIPLES OF THE SCIENCE, AND AN EXPLANATION OF THE MORE IMPORTANT AND CURIOUS OPTICAL INSTRUMENTS AND OPTICAL PHENOMENA, BEING THE THIRD PART OF A COURSE OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, ‘ COMPLIED FOR THE USE OF THE STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY AT CAMBRIDGE, NEW ENGLAND. BY JOHN FARRAR … (Cambridge: Printed by Hilliard and Metcalf, at the University Press, 1826). vii, 350 pages; folded plates. Inscribed on front lining leaf: “D H Thoreau / Cambridge.” Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Light brown paper boards, gray-green cloth spine. Accession no. 10432. Farrar, Timothy (1788-1874). REPORT OF THE CASE OF THE TRUSTEES OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE AGAINST WILLIAM H. WOODWARD. ARGUED AND DETERMINED IN THE SUPERIOR COURT OF JUDICATURE OF THE STATE OF NEW- HAMPSHIRE, NOVEMBER 1817. AND ON ERROR IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES, FEBRUARY 1819. BY TIMOTHY FARRAR … (Portsmouth, N.H.: John W. Foster, [1819]). [4], 406 pages. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in sheepskin; red spine label. Accession no. 10422. Gérando, Joseph Marie de (1772-1842). SELF-EDUCATION; OR THE MEANS AND ART OF MORAL PROGRESS. TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF M. LE BARON DEGERANDO [by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody] (Boston: Carter and Hendee, 1830). xi, 456 pages. Inscribed in pencil on front free endpaper and front lining leaf: “Thoreau.” Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Quarter- bound in brown cloth with printed spine label, light brown paper boards. Accession no. 10416. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY Giraud, Jacob Post (1811-1870). THE BIRDS OF LONG ISLAND. BY J.P. GIRAUD, JR. … (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1844). xxi, 397 pages; plate. Signature of Henry D. Thoreau on front free endpaper. Sheet with notes in Thoreau’s hand (“Nuttall says of Cooper’s Hawk…”) tipped to p. 21. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in dark brown cloth. Accession no. 10411. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832). TORQUATO TASSO. EIN SCHAUSPIEL VON GOETHE [disbound from a larger collection and bound separately, without information concerning place of publication, publisher, or date of publication]. Pages [187]-314. Inscribed on front free endpaper: “D.H. Thoreau / H23.” Some marginal markings and annotations. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Half-bound in sheepskin, marbled paper boards; leather spine label. Accession no. 10407. Hayward, John (1781-1869). THE NEW ENGLAND GAZETTEER; CONTAINING DESCRIPTIONS OF ALL THE STATES, COUNTIES AND TOWNS IN NEW ENGLAND: ALSO DESCRIPTIONS OF THE PRINCIPAL MOUNTAINS, RIVERS, LAKES, CAPES, BAYS, HARBORS, ISLANDS, AND FASHIONABLE RESORTS WITHIN THAT TERRITORY. ALPHABETICALLY ARRANGED. BY JOHN HAYWARD … SECOND EDITION (Concord, N.H.: Israel S. Boyd and William White; Boston: John Hayward, 1839). Unpaged ([ca. 508 pages]); plates. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in leather; spine label. Accession no. 10438. Horatius Flaccus, Quintus. QUINTI HORATII FLACCI OPERA. ACCEDUNT CLAVIS METRICA ET NOTAE ANGLICAE JUVENTUTI ACCOMMODATAE. CURA B.A. GOULD (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1833). iv, 340 pages. Signature of Henry D. Thoreau on front paste-down endpaper. Inscribed on front free endpaper: “Mary Wheeler / from / Miss Thoreau / June 7th / 1874”; on back paste-down endpaper, in another hand: “Presented to Mary Azuba Wheeler / by Miss Sophia Thoreau / at Concord, Mass. June 1874.” Annotations and markings in pencil throughout. Presented by Mary A. Wheeler Tilton (Mrs. Edward S.), 1911. Bound in leather; black spine label. Accession no. 44583. Hunter, John Dunn (1798-1827). MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF SEVERAL INDIAN TRIBES LOCATED WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI; INCLUDING SOME ACCOUNT OF THE SOIL, CLIMATE, AND VEGETABLE PRODUCTIONS, AND THE INDIAN MATERIAL MEDICA: TO WHICH IS PREFIXED THE HISTORY OF THE AUTHOR’S LIFE DURING A RESIDENCE OF SEVERAL YEARS AMONG THEM. BY JOHN D. HUNTER (Philadelphia: Printed and published for the author, by J. Maxwell, 1823). 402 pages. Signature of Henry D. Thoreau on t.p. Extensive pencil annotations in Thoreau’s hand on front free endpaper. Signature of previous owner (partially covered by library bookplate) on front paste-down endpaper, and notes in the same hand on blank page opposite t.p. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Gray- bound paper boards, cloth spine; black spine label. Accession no. 10413. Josse, Augustin Louis (1763-1841). A GRAMMAR OF THE SPANISH LANGUAGE, WITH PRACTICAL EXERCISE … BY M JOSSE. REVISED, AMENDED, IMPROVED, AND ENLARGED BY F. SALES … SEVENTH AMERICAN EDITION … (Boston: Munroe and Francis, 1836). 468 pages. Inscribed on front free endpaper: “D H. Thoreau.” Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in leather; black spine label. Accession no. 10427. Lardner, Dionysius (1793-1859). POPULAR LECTURES ON SCIENCE AND ART; DELIVERED IN THE PRINCIPAL CITIES AND TOWNS OF THE UNITED STATES. BY DIONYSIUS LARDNER … FIFTEENTH EDITION (New York: Henry W. Law, 1856). Two volumes; plates (one folded). HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY Early Concord Town Library volumes (Concord Town Library bookplate in Volume 1), transferred to the CFPL in 1873. Bound in black cloth. Accession numbers: 1399-1400. Legendre, Adrien Marie (1752-1833). ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRY, BY A. M. LEGENDRE … TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH, FOR THE USE OF THE STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY AT CAMBRIDGE, NEW ENGLAND, BY JOHN FARRAR … NEW EDITION, IMPROVED AND ENLARGED (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, Little, and Wilkins, 1831). xv, 235 pages; folded plates. (At head of title: STEREOTYPE EDITION.) Signature of John Thoreau Jr. on t.p. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Quarter-bound in sheepskin, blue-gray paper boards. Accession no. 10433. Leonard, Levi Washburn (1790?-1864). THE LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC CLASS BOOK, EMBRACING THE LEADING FACTS AND PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE. ILLUSTRATED BY ENGRAVINGS, WITH MANY DIFFICULT WORDS EXPLAINED AT THE HEADS OF THE LESSONS, AND QUESTIONS ANNEXED FOR EXAMINATION; DESIGNED AS EXERCISES FOR THE READING AND STUDY OF THE HIGHER CLASSES IN COMMON SCHOOLS. SELECTED FROM THE REV. JOHN PLATT’SLLITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC CLASS BOOK, AND FROM VARIOUS OTHER SOURCES, AND ADAPTED TO THE WANTS AND CONDITION OF YOUTH IN THE UNITED STATES. BY LEVI W. LEONARD … (Keene, N.H.: John Prentiss, 1826). xii, 318 pages; plates. Inscribed on back free endpaper: [in ink] “Helen L Thoreau / Concord Academy / [in pencil] 1827.” Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in sheepskin; black spine label. Accession no. 10436. Lesley, J. Peter (1819-1903). MANUAL OF COAL AND ITS TOPOGRAPHY. ILLUSTRATED BY ORIGINAL DRAWINGS, CHIEFLY OF FACTS IN THE GEOLOGY OF THE APPALACHIAN REGION OF THE UNITED STATES OF NORTH AMERICA. BY J. P. LESLEY … (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott and Co., 1856). 224 pages. Inscribed on front free endpaper by Benjamin Smith Lyman (Sept. 1, 1856), and later by Lyman for Henry D. Thoreau (Concord, Apr. 10, 1859). Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in dark brown cloth. Accession no. 10402. Macdonnel, D.E. A DICTIONARY OF SELECT AND POPULAR QUOTATIONS, WHICH ARE IN DAILY USE; TAKEN FROM THE LATIN, FRENCH, GREEK, SPANISH AND ITALIAN LANGUAGES; TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH, WITH ILLUSTRATIONS, HISTORICAL AND IDIOMATIC. BY D.E.. MACDONNEL … FIRST AMERICAN FROM THE FIFTH LONDON EDITION, CORRECTED, WITH ADDITIONS … (Philadelphia: A. Finley, 1810). vi, 387 pages. Inscribed on front lining leaf: “D Thoreau’s.” Inscribed on t.p.: “Eliza Thoreau.” Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in leather; red spine label. Accession on 10426. Macgillivray, William (1796-1852). DESCRIPTIONS OF THE RAPACIOUS BIRDS OF GREAT BRITAIN. BY WILLIAM MACGILLIVRAY (Edinburgh: Maclachlan & Stewart, 1836). vii, 482 pages; plates. Signature of Henry D. Thoreau on front free endpaper. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in gray-green cloth. Accession no. 10401. McKenney, Thomas Loraine (1785-1859). MEMOIRS, OFFICIAL AND PERSONAL; WITH SKETCHES OF TRAVELS AMONG THE NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN INDIANS; EMBRACING A WAR EXCURSION, AND DESCRIPTIONS OF SCENES ALONG THE WESTERN BORDERS. BY THOMAS L. MCKENNEY … TWO VOLUMES IN ONE … (New York: Paine and Burgess, 1846). Two volumes in one (340, 136 pages); plates. (Title of Volume 2: ON THE ORIGIN, HISTORY, CHARACTER, AND THE WRONGS AND RIGHTS OF THE INDIANS, WITH A PLAN FOR THE PRESERVATION AND HAPPINESS OF THE REMNANTS OF THAT PERSECUTED RACE … ) Inscribed on front free endpaper: “From the author, as a / token of his high respect, & / friendly regards, to Miss / Fuller. / July 3/46.” Inscribed beneath this, in Thoreau’s hand: “Henry D. Thoreau / from / W.E. Channing / Ap. 1857.” Clipping (“The HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY Cherokees and the President,” by George Lowrey, Acting Principal Chief, Cherokee Nation) tipped to back lining leaf. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in purple-bound cloth. Accession no. 10415. McLellan, Henry Blake (1810-1833). JOURNAL OF A RESIDENCE IN SCOTLAND, AND TOUR THROUGH ENGLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, SWITZERLAND AND ITALY, WITH A MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR, AND EXTRACTS FROM HIS RELIGIOUS PAPERS. COMPILED FROM THE MANUSCRIPTS OF THE LATE HENRY B. MCLELLAN. BY I. MCLELLAN, JR. (Boston: Allen and Ticknor, 1834). xvi, 377 pages. Inscribed on front free endpaper: “To D H Thoreau / from his Aunt / Elisabeth.” Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in blue cloth; printed spine label. Accession no. 10398. Massachusetts. Zoological and Botanical Survey. REPORTS ON THE FISHES, REPTILES AND BIRDS OF MASSACHUSETTS. PUBLISHED AGREEABLY TO AN ORDER OF THE LEGISLATURE, BY THE COMMISSIONERS ON THE ZOOLOGICAL AND BOTANICAL SURVEY OF THE STATE (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1839). xii, 426 pages; plates. Some pencil annotations in the hand of Henry David Thoreau. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Accession no. 10396. Massachusetts. Zoological and Botanical Survey. REPORTS ON THE HERBACEOUS PLANTS AND ON THE QUADRUPEDS OF MASSACHUSETTS. PUBLISHED AGREEABLY TO AN ORDER OF THE LEGISLATURE, BY THE COMMISSIONERS ON THE ZOOLOGICAL AND BOTANICAL SURVEY OF THE STATE (Cambridge: Folsom, Wells, and Thurston, 1840). viii, 277, 86 pages. (Each part has special t.p. and separate paging.) Signature of Henry D. Thoreau on front of original paper wrapper. A few pencil annotations in the hand of Henry David Thoreau. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Rebound in green cloth (the original printed tan paper wrapper retained). Accession no. 10419. Mill, James (1773-1836). THE HISTORY OF BRITISH INDIA. BY JAMES MILL … FOURTH EDITION WITH NOTES AND CONTINUATION, BY HORACE HAYMAN WILSON … (London: James Madden, 1848). Nine volumes. Inscribed on front paste-down endpaper of Volume 1: “Henry D. Thoreau / from / Thomas Cholmondeley.” Signature of Henry D. Thoreau on front free endpapers of Volumes 2-9. Early Concord Town Library volumes, with Concord Town Library bookplate on the front paste-down endpaper of each, partially covered by CFPL bookplate. “Presented by H.D. Thoreau” inscribed on Town Library bookplates (the inscription mostly obscured by CFPL bookplate in all but Volume 3). Transferred to the CFPL in 1873. Bound in plum cloth. Title page lacking and folding map detached in Volume 1. Accession nos. 3498-3506. More, Hannah (1745-1833). PRACTICAL PIETY; OR, THE INFLUENCE OF THE RELIGION OF THE HEART ON THE CONDUCT OF THE LIFE. BY HANNAH MORE … IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. II (Boston: Munroe and Francis, 1811). 234 pages. (Volume 1 lacking.) Inscribed on front free endpaper: “Jane Thoreau’s 1811.” Presented by Mrs. William Brown, 1952. Bound in gray paper boards with cream paper spine; printed spine label. Accession no. 104924. Newman, Henry. NEUMAN AND BARETTI’S DICTIONARY OF THE SPANISH AND ENGLISH LANGUAGES; WHEREIN THE WORDS ARE CORRECTLY EXPLAINED, AGREEABLY TO THEIR DIFFERENT MEANINGS, AND A GREAT VA RI ET Y OF TERMS, RELATING TO THE ARTS, SCIENCES, MANUFACTURES, MERCHANDISE, NAVIGATION, AND TRADE, ELUCIDATED. STEREOTYPE EDITION, CAREFULLY REVISED … (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, Little, and Wilkins, 1831). Two volumes. Inscribed on front free endpaper of each volume: “D.H. Thoreau.” Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in leather; red and HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY black spine labels. Accession numbers: 10428-10429. Oswald, John (1804-1867). AN ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, ON A PLAN ENTIRELY NEW. BY JOHN OSWALD … REVISED AND IMPROVED AND ESPECIALLY ADAPTED TO THE PURPOSE OF TEACHING ENGLISH COMPOSITION IN SCHOOLS AND ACADEMIES, BY J.M. KEAGY (Philadelphia: Edward C. Biddle, 1844). 10, [v]-xxx, [31]-523, 20 pages. (Publisher’s advertisements occupy 20 pages following text.) Signature of Henry D. Thoreau in ink on front paste-down endpaper. Originally presented to the CFPL by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Deaccessioned by the CFPL in 1906. Bookplate of Stephen H. Wakeman tipped to front free endpaper (No. 1063 in the [1924] printed catalog of the Stephen H. Wakeman Collection). Purchased by George Russell Ready of Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, in 1963. Presented by George Russell Ready to the CFPL in 1985. Quarter-bound in leather and brown (mauve) cloth with swirl pattern. Accompanied by sales slip and other materials relating to Ready’s purchase of the volume. Original accession no. 10437. The Panoplist, for the year ending June, 1807. VOLUME THE SECOND. CONDUCTED BY AN ASSOCIATION OF FRIENDS TO EVANGELICAL TRUTH (Boston: Printed by E. Lincoln, 1807). xii, 584 pages. Faint pencil signature of John Thoreau on t.p. and on front paste-down endpaper. Mathematical calculations (in pencil) on back paste-down endpaper. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Quarter-bound in leather, marbled paper boards; red spine label. (Lacks free endpapers; t.p. damaged.) Accession no. 10425. Ricketson, Daniel (1813-1898). THE AUTUMN SHEAF: A COLLECTION OF MISCELLANEOUS POEMS. BY DANIEL Ricketson (New Bedford: Published by the author, 1869). 300 pages. Inscribed on front free endpaper: “Miss Sophia E. Thoreau, / with the affectionate regards / of Danl. Ricketson. / Brooklawn, / April 24th 1869.” Purchased of Malcolm M. Ferguson, June 6, 2000. Bound in green cloth. No accession no. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, MEDEA, A TRAGEDY OF SENECA. EDITED BY CHARLES BECK … (Cambridge and Boston: James Munroe & Co., 1834). xii, 69 pages. Signature of H.D. Thoreau on front free endpaper. Inscribed on front lining leaf: “W.M.R. French / Chicago, 1872.” (William Merchant Richardson French was the brother of sculptor Daniel Chester French.) Annotations in pencil throughout. Presented by Alice Helen French (Mrs. William M.R. French), 1940. Bound in dark green cloth; printed spine label. Accession no. 85227. Smithsonian Institution. NINTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE BOARD OF REGENTS OF THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, SHOWING THE OPERATIONS, EXPENDITURES, AND CONDITION OF THE INSTITUTION UP TO JANUARY 1, 1855. AND THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE BOARD UP TO FEBRUARY 24, 1855 (Washington: Beverley Tucker, 1855). 463 pages. Pencil signature of Henry D. Thoreau on front free endpaper. Early Concord Town Library volume. Transferred to the CFPL in 1873. Bound in dark brown (black?) cloth. Manuscript fragment of Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod (in his hand) and printed Smithsonian materials relating to Agassiz’s Contributions to the Natural History of the United States discovered in volume in 1981, later removed to the CFPL’s Henry David Thoreau papers (Vault A35, Thoreau, Unit 1, Box 2, Folder 6). Accession no. 5686. Smithsonian Institution. ANNUAL REPORT OF THE BOARD OF REGENTS OF THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, SHOWING THE OPERATIONS, EXPENDITURES, AND CONDITION OF THE INSTITUTION, FOR THE YEAR 1856. AND THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE BOARD UP TO JANUARY 28, 1857 (Washington: Cornelius Wendell, 1857). 467 pages. HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY Inscribed in ink inside front cover: “Henry D. Thoreau / from Horace Mann.” Early Concord Town Library volume. Transferred to the CFPL in 1873. Bound in dark brown (black?) cloth. Accession no. 5688. STAR OF EMANCIPATION … (Boston: For the fair of the Massachusetts Female Emancipation Society, 1841). 108 pages; plates. Inscribed in pencil on blank reverse of frontispiece: “Maria Thoreau / June 1st 1842.” Presented by Annie E. Gregory, 1874. Bound in brown cloth. Accession no. 9588. Cataloged as: Vault A45, Thoreau, Unit 5. Story, Joseph (1779-1845). COMMENTARIES ON THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES; WITH A PRELIMINARY REVIEW OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY OF THE COLONIES AND STATES, BEFORE THE ADOPTION OF THE CONSTITUTION. BY JOSEPH STORY … ABRIDGED BY THE AUTHOR, FOR THE USE OF COLLEGES AND HIGH SCHOOLS … (Boston: Hilliard, Gray and Company, 1833). xliii, 736 pages. Inscribed in ink on front free endpaper: “Henry D. Thoreau”; and below this, in pencil: “D H Thoreau.” Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in sheepskin, red spine label. Accession no. 10420. UNITED STATES. DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY. [Bound volume of four folded maps to accompany the report of Israel DeWolf Andrews on the trade and commerce of the British North American colonies, the trade of the Great Lakes and rivers, internal improvements in each state, the Gulf of Mexico, Straits of Florida, and the cotton crop of the United States] (Washington: B. Tucker, 1853). Pencil signature of Henry D. Thoreau on blank verso of the first and last maps in the volume (that on the first map followed by the pencil note in Thoreau’s hand: “Andrews Report to / with 4 U.S. maps Report Thos Corwin 1853 [sic].” Early Concord Town Library volume. Transferred to the CFPL in 1873. Bound in dark brown cloth. Accession no. 5595. United States. Senate. Select Committee on the Harper’s Ferry Invasion. REPORT. THE SELECT COMMITTEE OF THE SENATE APPOINTED TO INQUIRE INTO THE LATE INVASION AND SEIZURE OF THE PUBLIC PROPERTY AT HARPER’S FERRY … (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1860). 71, 255 pages. (36th Congress, 1st Session. Senate. Rep. Com. No. 278) Pencil signature of Henry D. Thoreau on front paste-down endpaper. Presented by Annie E. Gregory, 1874. Bound in dark brown cloth. Accession no. 9616. Verplanck, Gulian Crommelin (1786-1870). DISCOURSES AND ADDRESSES ON SUBJECTS OF AMERICAN HISTORY, ARTS, AND LITERATURE. BY GULIAN C. VERPLANCK (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1833). 257, 6 pages. (Publisher’s booklist, 6 pages following text.) Inscribed in ink on front free endpaper: “Mr John Thoreau Jr.”; beneath this, in pencil: “Henry D. Thoreau.” Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in plum cloth; printed spine label. Accession no. 10399. Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de (1694-1778). HISTOIRE DE CHARLES XII, ROI DE SUÈDE. PAR VOLTAIRE. D’UNE ÉDITION STÉRÉOTYPE DE PARIS (New York: Collins and Co., 1831). 287 pages. Faint pencil signature of H.L. [Helen L.] Thoreau on front free endpaper. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in light brown leather, black spine label. Accession no. 10406. Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de (1694-1778). HISTOIRE DE L’EMPIRE DE RUSSIE, SOUS PIERRE-LE-GRAND, PAR VOLTAIRE … ÉDITION STÉRÉOTYPE, D’APRÈS LE PROCÉDÉ DE FIRMIN DIDOT (Paris: De l’imprimerie et de la fonderie stereotypes de Pierre Didot l’Aine, et de Firmin Didot, 1815). Two volumes in one (230, 223 pages). HDT WHAT? INDEX
CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY CONCORD FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY Signature of H. D. Thoreau in ink on front lining leaf. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Quarter-bound in sheepskin, pink paper boards. Inscribed in pencil on page [1]: “”Cambridge, Mass.” Accession no. 10706. West, Jane (1758-1852). LETTERS ADDRESSED TO A YOUNG MAN, ON HIS FIRST ENTRANCE INTO LIFE, AND ADAPTED TO THE PECULIAR CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE PRESENT TIMES … (Charlestown: Printed by Samuel Etheridge, for Samuel H. Parker, Court-Street, Boston, 1803). Two volumes in one (208, 160 pages). Inscribed in ink on front free endpaper: “John Thoreau Jr / 1834.” Source unidentified. Bound in leather; black spine label. Unaccessioned. Woodhouselee, Alexander Fraser Tytler (1747-1813). ELEMENTS OF GENERAL HISTORY, ANCIENT AND MODERN. BY ALEXANDER FRASER TYTLER … WITH A CONTINUATION, TERMINATING AT THE DEMISE OF KING GEORGE III., 1820. BY REV. EDWARD NARES … TO WHICH ARE ADDED, A SUCCINCT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES; WITH ADDITIONS AND ALTERATIONS. BY AN AMERICAN GENTLEMAN … WITH AN IMPROVED TABLE OF CHRONOLOGY; A COMPARATIVE VIEW OF ANCIENT AND MODERN GEOGRAPHY; AND QUESTIONS ON EACH SECTION. ADAPTED FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS AND ACADEMIES, BY AN EXPERIENCED TEACHER (Concord, N.H.: Horatio Hill, & Co., [1830]). 527, 44 pages. (The continuation by Edward Nares and the “Questions for the Examination of Scholars” have separate title pages, each dated 1830; the latter is paged separately.) Signature of Henry D. Thoreau in ink on front paste-down endpaper and (in the form “H.D. Thoreau”) on front free endpaper. Presented by Sophia E. Thoreau, 1874. Bound in leather; black spine label. Accession no. 10408.