HISTORIC HOUSES STILL IN CONCORD
October 21, Sunday: Henry Thoreau and his father John Thoreau had just had a conversation about the old houses in Concord:
October 21: ... I have been thinking over with father the old houses in this street— There was the Hubbard (?) house at the fork of the roads—The Thayer (Bo house— (now Garrisons) The Sam Jones’s now Channings— Willoughby Prescots (a bevel roof— which I do not remember) where Lorings is— (Hoars was built by a Prescott)— Ma’m Bond’s. The Jones Tavern (Bigelow’s) The old Hurd (or Cumming’s?) house— The Dr Hurd House— The Old Mill—& The Richardson Tavern (which I do not remember— On this side— The Monroe house in which we lived —The Parkman House in which Wm Heywood 20 years ago told me^that he helped raise the rear of 60 years before—(it then sloping to one story behind) & that then it was called an old house Dr Ripley said that a Bond built it. The Merrick house— A rough-cast house where Bates’ is Betty—& all the S side of the mill dam— Still further from the center—the old houses & sites are about as numerous as above— Most of these houses— slanted to one story behind. OLD HOUSES
“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY
Traveling Much in Concord “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
1644
The “Elisha Jones” house (also known as the home of Judge John Shepard Keyes) was being constructed as a two-story frame house with a side gable with triangular pediment entry portico. This phase of the work would complete in 1650. A shed known as the “Bullet Hole House” would be attached at the mid-18th Century during this home’s occupation by Minute Man Elisha Jones. The house would be extensively altered beginning in 1695; the present fenestration is indicative of these alterations. It would appear that this is the oldest structure presently in existence in Concord. OLD HOUSES
NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT
Traveling Much in Concord “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
1657
The Jonathan Ball House now housing the Concord Art Center as established by Abba May Alcott Nieriker eventually would be built on a rectangular house lot between Mill Brook and the ridge to its north that “Thomas Dane, Carpenter of Concord,” 54 years of age, that was in this year purchased from the Reverend Peter Bulkeley. This lot was intersected by the town’s Straite Street, with an orchard and at least one barn already in existence on the brook side of “the highway under the hill through the Towne” (now Lexington Road), and a house already in existence on the raised side of the highway. The Reverend Bulkeley had earlier purchased this property from George Haywood.1 Dane had come with the Reverend Bulkeley and his wife when they had set sail from England in May 1635. His will, which indicates religious conviction, I commit my Soul to God yt gave it to mee, hoping and believeing in Jesus Cht my only Savior, that he will receive my Soul into the Armes of his mercy, and raise my body to Eternall glory at the resurrection. . . . left his “dwelling house, barns, and orchard” to his son Joseph Dane, who presumably sold it (since by 1692 this plot would no longer pertain to the Dane family). OLD HOUSES
NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE
1. George Haywood’s grant had been one of the 1st recorded in Concord. HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
1660
During this decade and the following two decades, the “John Meriam” house was being constructed in Concord, on a brick foundation around a central chimney stack, as a two-story saltbox with five bays and a modified roof pitch. This structure would be altered in 1730 but then would stand largely without alteration. It would be at this house site that the running battle between the militia and the army would begin on April 19, 1775. This is a structure still in existence. OLD HOUSES
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.
Traveling Much in Concord “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
1666
In Concord, Timothy Wheeler was again deputy and representative to the General Court.
The bridge across the Concord River at Concord that had washed away in the previous year, the one below Joseph Barrett’s, Esq. that went to Lee’s hill, was replaced by another where the South Bridge would later stand.
In Concord, Nathaniel Ball, Sr. recorded ownership of a “house lott” of 13 acres. (This property eventually would become the Alcott family’s “Hillside” and the Hawthorne family’s “The Wayside.”) OLD HOUSES
THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
Traveling Much in Concord “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
1686
From this year until 1775 the “Farwell Jones” house, homestead of the Jones family of Concord, Massachusetts, would be being constructed in phases on a site probably already occupied, as a two-story, side- gabled, three-bay house. Initially this house would have but a single chimney. (In an even later timeframe the present Greek Revival front porch with arches would be added.) OLD HOUSES
THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
Traveling Much in Concord “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
1693
In Concord, Thomas Brown continued as Town Clerk.
In Concord, Jonathan Prescott was deputy and representative to the General Court.
In the Concord vicinity, the “William Smith” house was constructed on a stone foundation as a two-story Early Georgian with a plaster cove cornice, a triangular pediment door surround with a 6-light transom, and a covenant chimney. A lean-to addition would be erected at the building’s rear. Captain William Smith of the Lincoln Minuteman Company was the brother of Abigail Adams. This is a structure still in existence. OLD HOUSES
DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.
Traveling Much in Concord “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
1700
From this year into 1745, in the vicinity of Concord, the “Jacob Whittemore” house was being constructed as a two-story side gable Georgian 5-bay edifice around a central chimney. Its front door had heavy entablature. Associated with this house would be a barn, a cornhouse, a cider mill, and a blacksmith shop. Jacob Whittemore was a son of Dr. Nathaniel Whittemore, publisher of a widely circulated almanac as well as physician. This house would later pertain to the family of Lexington minute man John Muzzy. This structure is still in existence. OLD HOUSES
Early in the 1700s, Samuel Miles constructed his house on “faier haven way” (the present Williams Road) on the over-400 acres of the South Quarter of Concord (Nine Acre Corner area) belonging to the Miles family. In this house his son Captain Charles Miles of Revolutionary fame would be born in 1727 and would live most of his life. OLD HOUSES
CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT
Traveling Much in Concord “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
1703
In Concord, Abraham Wood, Joseph French, Stephen Hosmer, John Wheeler, Jonathan Hubbard, and William Wilson were Selectmen.
In Concord, Abraham Wood continued as Town Clerk.
In Concord, Jonathan Hubbard continued as Town Treasurer.
John Wheeler was Concord’s deputy and representative to the General Court.
The older of the two Hunt houses on Monument Street in Concord, pictured below, the unpainted one in the back, was erected in this year by William Hunt and his sons Nehemiah Hunt and Isaac Hunt. The newer part, in front, the part that is painted, would be built around 1800 by a later Nehemiah Hunt. William Henry Hunt (1839-1926), through whose bequest the Hunt Gymnasium would be built, would be the last of the Hunts to live on this site, as he would erect a new house for himself across the road and sell the property on which the old house stood to Russell Robb — who would take it down.
The small-pox prevailed in the town in 1703; but it does not appear that any died of the disease. In 1792 it was introduced by inoculation. A hospital was fitted up where Mr. Augustus Tuttle now [1835] lives; and 130 persons went there at several times to be inoculated under the care of the three physicians of the town. From some cause the disease spread. It appeared at Amos Wright’s (Deacon Jarvis’s [Francis Jarvis]), at Cyrus Hosmer’s, at Deacon Chandler’s, and at Ephraim Potter’s. At the last place a new hospital was fitted up where the sick were taken, and near which a small burying-ground and grave-stone now [1835] mark the melancholy ravages of this disease. Ten persons were its victims, — 2 by inoculation and 8 by contagion, — and were buried by themselves; it being considered improper to inter them in the usual ground. Happily for mankind, the terrors which HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the appearance of this disease once inspired, are much mitigated by kine-pock inoculation.2
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
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
1715
The “Major John Buttrick” house was constructed in Concord, Massachusetts on a fieldstone foundation as a two-story classical box with ell. It had a front porch with a triangular pediment, and an associated barn with shed and woodhouse. This is a structure still in existence, although it would be extensively altered during the 1775-1785 period by Joseph Derby and then during the 1883-1887 period by another Joseph Derby and then in the 1937-1938 period by Mrs. Stedman Buttrick, Sr. HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
1716
In Concord, Joseph Dakin, William Wilson, Benjamin Whittemore, John Flint, and Daniel Brooks were Selectmen. Ordinarily, Concord’s five selectmen acted as Overseers of the Poor and as Assessors, but in this period there was in addition a board of five Overseers of the Poor.
In Concord, William Wilson continued as Town Clerk.
In Concord, Samuel Jones continued as Town Treasurer.
Boston Light, the 1st lighthouse built in the US and the last to remain currently staffed, was built on Little Brewster Island in Boston HarborBOSTON HARBOR . This 1st stone lighthouse was financed by a tax of a
penny a ton on all vessels entering and leaving the harbor. The first keeper, George Worthylake, was paid £50 a year. He made additional money by acting as a harbor pilot for incoming vessels, and kept a flock of sheep on Great Brewster Island. In a 1717 storm his sheep would be out on the long sand spit off Great Brewster when the tide came in, and would be drowned. In 1718 Worthylake and his family would be out in a boat when an accident would happen and they would drown.3
Boston Light in 1789
Captain James Minot deeded the home that eventually would become the east wing of Concord’s Colonial Inn HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
to his son James Minot, Jr.
During this year and the following one, what we know as “The Wayside” was being constructed on a granite foundation as a two-story side gable Georgian house. It is also known as the “Samuel Whitney” house because during the fighting in 1775 it would be the home of the Reverend Samuel Whitney. The present front bay would be added, by the Alcotts, during the 1845-1887 alterations. The East and West additions have romantic detailing while the west porch, which would be tacked on circa 1900, has late Victorian details. This would be the home not only of the Alcott family but also of the Hawthorne family, and finally of Daniel and Harriet 1 Lothrop (Harriet was known by her pen name “Margaret Sidney”). Between 1716 and 1778 a 1 /2-story side gable barn with a shed attached to its north wall would be associated with this structure, but the barn would be moving around. It would be moved to the west side of the house by Bronson Alcott, by 1845, and then finally Nathaniel Hawthorne would have it moved to the east side of the house, in 1860.
Concord had in the previous year kept a grammar school for but one quarter, in different parts of the town, and 3. Boston having been during the colonial era the maritime center of America, there had been other beacons before this Boston Light. There had been, for instance, a beacon on nearby Point Allerton in Hull as early as 1673, and the town of Hull had already built a lighthouse on the northern bluff as of 1681. So what is meant when people say that this is our 1st lighthouse is merely that the structure on Little Brewster, rebuilt after the Brits destroyed it during the revolution, happens to be the most antique still in existence. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the total expense for education had been £40. In this year, however, it raised £50 for its schools, £35 for the grammar school at the town center and £5 for each of the grammar schools of the other three divisions of the town. HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
1717
In Concord, Caleb Ball, son of Nathaniel Ball, Jr., sold his house and barn with 3 3/4 acres, plus other farming land, to Samuel Fletcher, a “glazer.” (This property would be owned and occupied by Samuel Fletcher, Jr., Nathaniel Colburn, and John Breede until 1769, but eventually it would become first the Alcott family’s “Hillside” and then the Hawthorne family’s “The Wayside.”) OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
1723
In Concord, Samuel Heywood, Samuel Chandler, George Farrar, John Flint, Benjamin Whittemore, and John Fassett were Selectmen. Ordinarily, the town’s five selectmen acted as Overseers of the Poor and as Assessors, but in this period there was in addition a board of five Overseers of the Poor. ASTRONOMY
In Concord, John Flint continued as Town Clerk.
In Concord, Samuel Chandler was Town Treasurer.
Benjamin Whittemore was Concord’s deputy and representative to the General Court.
On the Island of Jersey in the English Channel, Marie Le Galais was born.
William Clark sold the plot of land along Lexington Road in Concord on which the Jonathan Ball House (now houses the Concord Art Center) stands to Jonathan Ball (born 1691). The deed described the purchase as “...a tract of land near the meeting house ... containing seven acres ... six acres that are above the countrey road ... and the other acre that lyes below the countrey road ... with all the Buildings.” In 1761, Ball would erect a new house next to the existing house. OLD HOUSES
Of the proprietors of Grafton in 1728, a number would be from Concord: John Flint, Benjamin Barrett, Ebenezer Wheeler, Joseph Barrett, Eleazer Flagg, Joseph Meriam, Jacob Taylor, Samuel Chandler, John Hunt and Joseph Taylor. This was due to the success of a petition in this year to the General Court, that the white people be allowed to purchase local land from native Americans. James Watson, Samuel Hill, Zerubabel Eager and 32 others, inhabitants of Concord, Sudbury, Marlborough, and Stow, petitioned for liberty to purchase land of the Indians at Hassanamisco (Grafton).4
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.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
1724
Dr. Nathaniel Whittemore’s almanacs, produced in Boston, were being relied upon not only in Massachusetts but also in Rhode Island and Connecticut, and as far west as New York.
Benjamin Whittemore, a son of Dr. Whittemore, was Concord’s deputy and representative to the General Court.
In Concord, John Fassett, Benjamin Whittemore, John Flint, George Farrar, and Samuel Chandler were Selectmen. Ordinarily the town’s five selectmen acted as Overseers of the Poor and as Assessors, but in this period there was in addition a board of five Overseers of the Poor.
In Concord, John Flint continued as Town Clerk.
In Concord, Samuel Chandler continued as Town Treasurer.
Between this year and 1740 the house and barn and old farmstead in Concord that we know as the “Bensen- Tarbell-Ball place” would be being constructed. Henry Thoreau would describe this: “Tarbell’s hip-roofed house looked the picture of retirement –of cottage size under its noble elm with its heap of apples before the door and the wood coming up within a few rods –it being far off the road. The smoke from his chimney so white and vaporlike, like a winter scene.” The structures would be demolished in 2001 to make way for a modern large house, and a driveway to other lots. HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
1733
Ephraim Hartwell (1) worked as a cordwainer (shoemaker) and farmer while also operating a cider mill. The “Ephraim Hartwell” house of Concord was constructed on a stone foundation, not initially as a tavern but as a two-story side-gabled home. This structure would not be in use as a tavern until between 1756 and 1787. in 1783, while in use as a tavern, a gambrel addition would be placed on the east gable end. In 1830 a shingle- sided shed attachment would be constructed extending north from this gambrel. In this same year the Samuel Brooks house was constructed on a fieldstone basement foundation as a two-story Georgian design with an added wing and porch on its east side. The front door of the Samuel Brooks house has a simple entablature. Both of these structures are still in existence. OLD HOUSES Narragansett township No. 6, lying west of Pembroke, N.H., was granted in 1733 to Concord and 13 other towns, for services rendered in King Philip’s war in 1676.5
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.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
1740
The house in which Cynthia Dunbar (Thoreau) would grow up and in which she would in 1817 give birth to her son David Henry had been constructed on the Virginia Road near Concord at some date since 1720. HENRY THOREAU THOREAU RESIDENCES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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At the intersection of Main Street and Sudbury Road in Concord, James Holden built what is now known as the Nathan Brooks House. It has been used not only as a home but also as a tavern, called the “Black Horse.” (Deacon Samuel Miles and 19 other disaffected members of the 1st Parish Church would meet there in 1745 when they became distressed by the preaching of the Reverend Daniel Bliss, to form what would be know as the West Church, or West Congregation, or Black Horse Church. Nathan Brooks and his second wife Mary Merrick Brooks would live in this structure from their marriage in 1823 until Brooks’s death in 1863, and Mrs. Brooks would continue in this house after his death. The building would be bought by William Munroe, founding benefactor of the Concord Free Public Library, in preparation for construction of the library building, and moved in 1872 to what is now number 45 Hubbard Street. It is now known as the Nathan Brooks House.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
1745
At the Black Horse tavern at the intersection of Main Street and Sudbury Road in Concord, built some five years earlier, Deacon Samuel Miles and 19 other disaffected members of the 1st Parish Church met in protest against the preaching of the Reverend Daniel Bliss and formed the West Church, or West Congregation, or Black Horse Church. (Nathan Brooks and his second wife Mary Merrick Brooks would live in this structure from their marriage in 1823 until Brooks’s death in 1863, and Mrs. Brooks would continue in this house after his death. The building would be bought by William Munroe, founding benefactor of the Concord Free Public Library, in preparation for construction of the library building, and moved in 1872 to what is now number 45 Hubbard Street. It is now known as the Nathan Brooks House.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
1760
The house in which little David Henry Thoreau would be born must by this point definitely have been constructed out on Virginia Road, for when the young Jonas Minot, who would become Henry’s step- grandfather, married Mary Hall in this year, they set up housekeeping there. THOREAU RESIDENCES The following table exhibits the appropriations for several objects at different periods in the town of Acton:6
1750 1760 1770 1780 1790 1800 1810 1820 1830
Minister £50 £52 £70 £3,562 £80 $353 $353 $363 ___
Schools 13 12 24 2,000 49 333 450 450 450
Roads 26 70 60 800 120 400 500 600 800
Incidental 20 12 80 10,000 100 500 1,000 1,400 600
The first town School [in Acton] was kept in 1741, when it was voted to have a “reading, writing, and moving school for six months.” In 1743 a similar one was established and £18 old tenor, equal to about £3 lawful money, was raised for its support. Whether this afforded the only means of education does not appear. It is probable some schools might have been supported by private subscription. Several youth, as was then customary, resorted to the clergyman, for their education. People, however, enjoyed few other opportunities than were afforded in their own families. In 1760, the town [of Acton] was divided into six school districts, and in 1771 into seven. In 1797 the town [of Acton] was divided into four districts, East, West, South, and Middle, and several new houses were built. This division has since been continued. The money is divided among the districts in proportion to the taxes. From the return made to the state in 1826, it appears, that the aggregate time of keeping the schools was 28 months, and that they were attended by 412 pupils, of whom 227 were males, and 185 females. 139 were under 7 years of age, 160 from 7 to 14, and 113 from 14 upwards.7
6. 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.) 7. 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
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
Beginning in this year and completing by 1765, a house was being constructed in Concord for the widow Olive Stow on a granite foundation as a two-story side gable Georgian 5-bay structure surrounding a central chimney stack. Rumor has it that it was being erected on the site of a previous house that had dated to 1684- 1689. This “Widow Olive Stow” home is a structure still in existence and sports a triangular pediment door surround. OLD HOUSES
VALUATION.— From the returns of the assessors in the offices of the secretary of the Commonwealth and the town clerk, I [Dr. Lemuel Shattuck] have compiled the following tables, which will afford interesting information, illustrative of the wealth of the town at different periods. The only articles mentioned in the valuations of personal property, taken under the province charter, were horses, oxen, cows, sheep, swine, slaves, and faculty. The total valuation of personal and real estate, in 1706, as reduced to our present [1835] currency nearly according to the received tables of depreciation, was $9,898, and for several subsequent periods, was as follows.8
Year. Polls. Horses. Oxen. Cows. Sheep. Swine. Tot. Value.
1719 310 272 454 704 814 422 $12.695
1725 375 326 562 975 1371 551 12.071
1740 359 278 474 866 —— 550 7.623
1753 442 298 542 1024 1166 510 50.002
1760 335 268 301 813 627 418 44.306
1771 371 216 422 951 706 375 44.940
8. 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
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
1761
In Concord, Benjamin Brown, Andrew Conant, John Jones, James Barrett, and James Chandler were Selectmen.
In Concord, Benjamin Brown was Town Clerk.
The town of Concord began to appoint Wardens (officers similar to Tythingmen). This would continue until 1791.
In Concord, John Beaton continued as Town Treasurer.
Charles Prescott was Concord’s deputy and representative to the General Court.
Jonathan Ball erected a new house, now the Concord Art Center, alongside the existing house on the plot of land he had purchased from William Clark along Lexington Road in Concord in 1723. This Jonathan Ball House would be owned by Captain Joseph Butler at the time of the revolution. The Provincial Congress would meet in the church across the street and order supplies to be brought from nearby towns and stored in Concord. OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
1769
Since 1717, the house that eventually would become the Alcott family’s “Hillside” and the Hawthorne family’s “The Wayside” in Concord had been owned and occupied by Samuel Fletcher, Jr., Nathaniel Colburn, and John Breede. From this year into 1776, it would be owned and occupied by Samuel Whitney (who would be the Muster Master for the Concord Minutemen at the start of the American Revolution). OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
1776
In Concord, Ephraim Wood, Nathan Merriam, and Nehemiah Hunt were Selectmen.
In Concord, Ephraim Wood was again Town Clerk.
In Concord, Abijah Bond was again Town Treasurer.
Joseph Hosmer and John Cuming were Concord’s deputies and representatives to the General Court.
In Concord, Ephraim Wood was again Town Clerk.
In Concord, Abijah Bond was again Town Treasurer.
Colonel Roger Brown had purchased four acres of the old ironworks near Concord with water rights on the Assabet River, and had founded a fulling mill, and in this year he hired a crew of workmen to extensively rebuild the old structure that would be his home. OLD HOUSES
Samuel Whitney was no longer occupying the house that eventually would become the Alcott family’s “Hillside” and the Hawthorne family’s “The Wayside.” During the nine months that Concord hosted Harvard College, it was occupied by the eminent natural philosopher John Winthrop. The house would in 1778 be purchased as their residence by Daniel Hoar, Sr. and his son, Daniel, Jr. OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
1777
James Freeman graduated at Harvard College. He would pursue theological studies as a graduate resident.9
The proprietors of King’s Chapel in Boston gave permission to the members of the Old South Church (Congregational), who had been displaced from their own meetinghouse by the British, to worship at their edifice. Due to anti-British sentiment, it was popularly being termed the Stone Chapel. Before long the original congregation would return and the two societies, one Episcopalian (Church of England) and the other Congregational, would be sharing the facilities.
Captain Joseph Butler was the current owner of the Jonathan Ball House in Concord, with its commodious cellar and cave in the retaining wall stretching back into the body of the ridge. The Provincial Congress met in the church across the street and ordered supplies to be brought from nearby towns for safer storage. When General Gage learned where the hiding places were he gave instructions to Lieutenant Colonel Smith to lead an expedition to destroy said military stores. Since we find Captain Butler’s name in these instructions, we may presume that he was storing some of these military supplies in his cellar and in the cave, one of several such that the settlers had dug into the base of the ridge. OLD HOUSES
Peter Clark of Concord,10 son of Benjamin Clark, and Ebenezer Hubbard of Concord, son of Ebenezer Hubbard, graduated from Harvard.
PETER C LARK [of Concord], son of Benjamin Clark, was graduated [at Harvard] in 1777, was a lawyer in Southborough, and died in July, 1792, aged 36.11 EBENEZER HUBBARD [of Concord], son of Ebenezer Hubbard, was graduated [at Harvard] in 1777, ordained at Marblehead, January 1, 1783, and died December 15, 1800, aged 43.12
9. After graduation James Freeman prepared a company of men from Cape Cod for service in the Revolutionary army. 10. This is not the Reverend Peter Clark of Salem. 11. 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.) 12. Ibid. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1778
The Concord house that eventually would become the Alcott family’s “Hillside” and the Hawthorne family’s “The Wayside” would be owned and occupied by Daniel Hoar, Sr. and by his son, Daniel, Jr., until the latter’s death in 1823. Daniel, Jr.’s heirs, some of them occupying the house between 1823 and 1827, would then sell it to Darius Merriam. OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
1779
From this year into 1781, the “Joshua Brooks, Jr.” house would be being constructed in Concord on a brick foundation at a site which had seen continuous family occupancy from the year 1666. The house was a two- story preclassical “box” structure with a rear ell. Brooks was one of the veterans of the North Bridge skirmish of 1775. This is a structure still in existence. OLD HOUSES The following table, exhibiting the number of deaths between several specified ages, the number each year, the aggregate amount of their ages, average age, &c. &c. during the 50 years commencing January 1, 1779, and ending December 31, 1828, was compiled from records carefully kept by the Rev. Dr. Ripley [Ezra Ripley]. Great labor has been expended to make it correct and intelligible.
Under to to to to to to to to to to to Aggre. Average Year. Total. 1 5 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 Am. Age. Age.
1779 2 0 0 1 2 0 0 0 2 4 1 0 12 578 48
1780 1 2 1 1 0 0 1 1 3 0 0 0 10 307 30
1781 3 1 0 1 0 2 0 1 1 2 1 3 15 721 48
1782 1 2 1 0 1 2 0 1 1 5 3 1 18 933 52
1783 5 2 1 0 4 2 3 1 2 3 1 0 24 811 34
1784 4 1 1 2 2 0 0 1 1 2 1 2 17 607 35
1785 2 0 1 0 3 2 2 3 2 2 0 0 17 672 39
1786 4 1 0 4 3 1 1 0 1 2 1 1 19 590 31
1787 2 2 0 0 1 2 1 1 2 0 1 0 12 416 35
1788 2 0 2 0 2 2 2 1 2 3 3 0 19 877 46
1789 3 1 0 1 2 3 0 1 1 4 1 0 17 694 41
1790 2 5 2 2 2 0 3 0 3 4 3 0 26 970 37
1791 3 1 0 0 0 1 2 1 3 3 3 0 17 841 49
1792 5 0 0 1 4 3 1 6 2 2 1 1 26 1021 39
1793 1 0 3 0 1 2 2 4 1 3 0 2 19 894 47
1794 1 1 1 0 4 3 0 1 5 1 3 1 21 1018 49 HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
Under to to to to to to to to to to to Aggre. Average Year. Total. 1 5 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 Am. Age. Age.
1795 0 2 0 4 3 4 1 1 2 2 2 0 21 824 39
1796 1 8 2 0 2 2 2 2 1 6 1 0 27 926 34
1797 3 1 1 1 2 1 4 1 1 3 3 0 21 893 43
1798 4 3 0 2 2 0 1 0 1 5 2 1 21 831 39
1799 0 1 0 1 4 0 2 3 4 4 1 0 20 1006 50
1800 3 7 0 0 0 4 1 2 1 4 2 1 25 926 37
1801 3 3 2 6 3 0 2 2 3 4 4 0 32 1197 37
1802 2 4 1 3 2 2 1 3 1 6 2 0 27 1067 39
1803 2 7 2 3 4 9 3 0 3 2 2 1 38 1194 31
1804 4 4 0 3 3 1 3 3 1 4 2 1 29 1037 39
1805 12 1 0 3 6 2 0 2 2 2 5 0 35 1132 32
1806 5 4 0 1 6 2 1 3 4 1 4 1 32 1201 39
1807 7 1 0 2 6 2 3 1 3 4 2 1 32 1182 37
1808 1 5 1 0 0 1 3 2 4 0 2 0 19 722 38
1809 2 3 0 0 2 1 3 1 2 2 2 1 19 821 43
1810 5 1 1 3 3 4 4 3 6 4 3 1 38 1626 45
1811 1 2 2 0 4 1 1 2 4 2 2 0 21 881 42
1812 3 6 2 1 1 5 2 2 3 3 3 1 32 1131 36
1813 3 2 1 2 4 2 3 3 1 4 2 0 27 1094 40
1814 2 0 0 0 4 4 4 1 3 0 2 2 22 1012 46
1815 4 2 4 5 4 5 3 4 5 4 6 1 47 1910 41
1816 6 1 0 1 2 0 1 3 2 4 1 0 21 802 38
1817 2 4 2 2 4 0 5 1 1 0 0 0 21 495 28
1818 2 1 0 2 1 4 1 3 3 2 1 0 20 825 41 HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
Under to to to to to to to to to to to Aggre. Average Year. Total. 1 5 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 Am. Age. Age.
1819 2 2 1 4 0 3 3 4 2 4 1 1 27 1006 37
1820 2 3 0 0 2 3 2 5 0 5 6 0 28 1374 49
1821 3 5 0 2 0 1 3 3 2 10 4 0 33 1582 48
1822 2 10 1 3 5 2 2 3 2 4 2 2 38 1285 34
1823 5 3 1 1 2 1 3 3 2 1 3 1 26 970 37
1824 4 3 0 1 1 2 4 4 3 5 2 0 29 1244 43
1825 3 7 1 1 2 2 5 6 4 6 3 0 40 1645 41
1826 8 6 4 0 3 2 8 4 1 5 2 0 43 1367 32
1827 2 2 0 0 1 3 1 2 1 0 3 0 19 893 44
1828 4 4 0 0 0 1 3 1 2 5 1 2 23 1020 48
It is impossible to specify the diseases by which the several persons died. As far as can be ascertained from the Rev. Dr. Ripley [Ezra Ripley]’s records, it appears that about one seventh of the whole number died of consumption, one fifth of fevers of various kinds, one twelfth of old age, one sixteenth of canker-rash, one nineteenth of the dropsy, one twenty-fifth of paralytic affections, and nearly the same number each of dysentery and casualties. By adding the columns in the above table, we shall find that the whole number, who died during the 50 years, was 1242; of whom 153 died under 1 year of age; 137 of 1 and under 5; 42 of 5 and under 10; 70 of 10 and under 20; 119 of 20 and under 30; 101 of 30 and under 40; 106 of 40 and under 50; 106 of 50 and under 80; 106 of 80 and under 90; 28 of 90 and under 100; and a native black of 105. Of these 107 died in January, 111 in February, 118 in March, 103 in April, 88 in May, 81 in June, 88 in July, 95 in August, 115 in September, 121 in October, 121 in November, and 94 in December. These proportions generally hold good in particular years, more deaths occurring in the spring and autumn than at other seasons of the year. Of those who lived 80 years and over, 54 were males and 81 females; 90 and over, 8 were males and 21 females; 95 and over, 3 were males and 4 females. The year when the least number of deaths occurred was 1780, and when the greatest, 1815. The yearly average is 25 nearly. the least average age was in 1817, the greatest average in 1812. The aggregate amount of all the ages, for 50 years, is 49,192, and the mean average age nearly 40. Estimating our population, during this period, at an average of 1665, which is nearly HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
correct, as will appear on reference to our account of the population, we shall find that 1 in 66 dies annually.
153 or 1 in 8 1-8 died under 1 year. 620 or 1 in 2 lived 40 and upwards.
218 or 1 in 5 2-3 died under 2 years. 570 or 1 in 2 1-3 lived 45 and upwards.
255 or 1 in 4 8-9 died under 3 years. 514 or 1 in 2 2-5 lived 50 and upwards.
270 or 1 in 4 3-5 died under 4 years. 463 or 1 in 2 3-5 lived 55 and upwards.
290 or 1 in 4 1-3 died under 5 years. 408 or 1 in 3 1-11 lived 60 and upwards.
304 or 1 in 4 1-11 died under 6 years. 354 or 1 in 3 1-2 lived 65 and upwards.
332 or 1 in 3 3-4 died under 10 years. 296 or 1 in 4 1-5 lived 70 and upwards.
358 or 1 in 3 1-2 died under 15 years. 209 or 1 in 5 1-17 lived 75 and upwards.
402 or 1 in 3 1-11 died under 20 years. 135 or 1 in 9 1-5 lived 80 and upwards.
472 or 1 in 2 3-5 died under 25 years. 69 or 1 in 18 lived 85 and upwards.
521 or 1 in 2 2-5 died under 30 years. 29 or 1 in 42 5-6 lived 90 and upwards.
571 or 1 in 2 1-3 died under 35 years. 7 or 1 in 177 3-7 lived 95 and upwards.
622 or 1 in 2 died under 40 years. 2 lived to 99, and 1 to 105.
In these calculations minute fractions are omitted. They exhibit results highly favorable to the health of the town. Few towns are so healthy.13
From time immemorial it has been the custom of the church to administer the ordinance of baptism to such adults and their children, as “owned the covenant,” without joining the church in full communion. This covenant was the same as that which admitted to full communion, with the exception of the clause which referred to the communion, and was used for both cases till 1795, when the following was adopted to be subscribed by the individuals who “own it.” Three hundred and two have signed it since 1795. “I do now seriously profess my belief in one God, who is ever all and blessed for every more. “I believe the Holy Scriptures were given by inspiration 13. In France, 1 in 31 arrives to the age of 70; in London 1 in 10; in Philadelphia, 1 in 15; and in Connecticut 1 in 8. In Salem, 1 in 48 dies annually; in Philadelphia, 1 in 45; in Boston, 1 in 41; in London, 1 in 40; in Paris, 1 in 32; and in Vienna, 1 in 22. — See History of Dedham and American Quarterly Review, Vol. VIII. p. 396. 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
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
of God, and are able to make wise unto salvation, through faith, which is in Christ Jesus; and I will endeavor to observe them as the rule of my life in faith and practice. “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God; and that God so loved the world as to give his only Son to die, the just for the unjust, that whosoever believeth in him might not perish, but have everlasting life. “I believe that repentance towards God and faith in Jesus Christ are the gospel conditions of salvation, and therefore, penitently confessing all my sins to God, I look for salvation through Christ alone. “I believe that baptism is a Christian ordinance, a sign of visible discipleship to Christ, and an act of dedication to God, and that the proper subjects of it are believers in the Christian religion, and their offspring and charge. And I now promise that I will endeavor, by the grace of God assisting, to educate my children and charge according to the Christian religion. “In testimony of this my belief and promise I hereunto subscribe my name.” The covenant for admission into full communion, used by Rev. Emerson, was taken with him into the army and lost, no copy being in the records. In 1779 a new one was prepared, and used until 1795, when the following, now [1835] in use, was substituted. “Professing a firm belief of revealed religion, and that the Holy Scriptures, which contain it, are given by inspiration of God, and resolving to take them for your rule of faith and practice, you do now, as far as you know your own heart, sincerely avouch and choose the one only living and true God to be your God and portion; the Lord Jesus Christ to be your Mediator and Saviour; the Holy Ghost to be your sanctifier and guide; giving up yourself unto God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, to be his and his only for ever.14 “Sensible that in many things you have offended, and that your sufficiency is of God, you do now, with penitence for your sins, humbly implore the divine aid to enable you henceforth to walk before God in love, and in all holy conversation and godliness. “Convinced of the importance of early instruction in virtue and piety, you now promise, that you will conscientiously endeavor to educate all such as are, or may be, committed to your care, agreeably to the prescriptions of God’s holy word. “You do also covenant with this church of Christ and promise, that you will walk with us as a member of our body; that you will attend on the administration of the
14. The expression, “the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” was stricken out in 1826. HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
word and ordinances among us, and submit to the Christian watch, discipline, and regulations of this church, so long as God shall continue your life and abode with us. “All this you profess and promise in the presence of the all-seeing God, and by the help of his spirit and grace will live agreeably to the same. “I do, therefore, as a minister of Jesus Christ, and as pastor of this church, acknowledge you a member, and receive you into fellowship; and we declare, that we do and will look upon you as a member of the same body with ourselves, and will treat you with that affection and watchfulness which your relation to us now calls for; watching over you not for your halting, but for your edification; praying God, now and ever, to build up you, and us, and all his saints, a spiritual building, an holy house, a living temple unto himself the Lord our God. Amen.” At the adoption of this covenant, some alterations in the customs of the church were made. The practice of giving relations of religious exercises of mind before admission to the communion, of “making public confession of particular crimes committed previously to any voluntary engagement and profession of religion,” and of calling for a vote on the admission of members, was discontinued. Members are now admitted before the church on examination of the pastor only, after having been publicly propounded, and no objection appearing. Since 1828, they have remained in their pews when the covenant is read to them. During the ministry of Rev. Dr. Ripley, to the ordination of his colleague, 383 persons were admitted to the church in full communion, 449 owned the covenant, 1541 were baptized, 101 were regularly dismissed and one was excommunicated. At the death of Mr. Emerson the number of communicants was estimated at 150. January 1, 1815, the church contained 156, — 54 males and 102 females. The number now [1835] is about 138. The funds of the church amount to $350. John Cushing, Esq. gave $111 for the benefit of the poor communicants. The “Minott Fund,” of $132, was begun in 1778, by Mrs. Bulah Minott and other members of the church, for the purchase of the elements and other purposes, at the discretion of the minister and deacons. Miss Abigail Dudley, in 1813, bequeathed a legacy to the church, which was set apart for a singing fund. One of the communion vessels was given by Margaret Bridges, of Ireland, April 6, 1676; another by Thomas Brown, Sen. (the Town Clerk several years from 1689); another by the wife of Duncan Ingraham, Esq.; four were purchased by the treasurer of the church in 1714; eight with a donation from John Cuming, Esq. of $222.22 for that purpose; and the baptismal basin from a part of the Minott fund. The version of Psalms and Hymns, by Sternold and Hopkins, was used in the church prior to 1766, each line of which was read separately by the deacons when sung. On the 18th of February of HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
that year, it was voted “to sing Tate and Brady’s version three months on trial.” In June following, Watts’s version was introduced, and used till June 1, 1828, when the Cambridge collection was substituted. Singers were first seated about 1774, when the custom of giving out the line by the deacons was discontinued; and the church then voted, that Deacon Wheeler should lead in singing one half of the time and the singers in the congregation the other half. In 1779 it took into consideration “the melancholy decay of singing in public worship, and chose 20 persons, who should sit together in the seats below and take the lead in singing.” The women to sit separate from the men. They removed into the gallery soon after the repair of the house in 1792. Under various leaders the church music has improved conformably by to the spirit of the times.15
15. Ibid. HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
1783
In Concord, Ephraim Wood, John Buttrick, and George Minott were Selectmen.
In Concord, Ephraim Wood was again Town Clerk.
In Concord, Timothy Minott was Town Treasurer.
Joseph Barrett was Concord’s deputy and representative to the General Court.
Concord’s revolutionary Committee of Correspondence, Inspection and Safety was for the last time renewed. The committee of correspondence, etc., chosen March, 1776 [for Concord], were John Cuming, Esq., Ephraim Wood, Jr., Esq., Capt. Jonas Heywood, Capt. Joseph Hosmer, James Barrett, Esq., Capt. David Brown, and Capt. George Minot. In 1777, Colonel John Buttrick, Josiah Merriam, Isaac Hubbard, Capt. Abishai Brown, Capt. David Wheeler, Mr. Ephraim Potter, and Lieut. Nathan Stow. In 1778, John Cuming, Esq., Colonel John Buttrick, Ephraim Wood, Jr., Esq., Jonas Heywood, Esq., James Barrett, Esq., Capt. David Brown, and Mr. Josiah Merriam. These were re-elected in 1779, 1780, 1781 & 1782. In 1783, James Barrett, Esq., Jonas Heywood, Esq., Ephraim Wood, Jr., Esq., Capt. David Wood, and Lieut. Joseph Hayward. This committee was not chosen afterwards.16
16. 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
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
The “Ephraim Hartwell” Tavern, an important locale during the Concord/Lexington fighting in 1775, at this point had a gambrel addition placed on its east gable end. Although modified, this a structure still in existence. There are some problems with the following table. The first problem is that it makes it appear that there were OLD HOUSES
considerably fewer persons of color in Concord, than there actually were, because it counts only heads of households. The second problem, more important, is that it makes the magic date 1780 of the “Massachusetts Bill of Rights” far more significant, in the elimination of Northern slavery, than actually it had been. Precious little seems actually to have happened in that year to improve the lives of persons of color in Massachusetts, or their societal standing! Concord MA Population
1679 ? 480 whites 1706 ? 920 whites 1725 6 slaves 1,500 whites 1741 21 slaves ? 1754 19 slaves ? 1780: Passage of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights 1783 15 blacks 1,306 whites 1790 29 blacks 1,556 whites 1800 38 blacks 1,641 whites 1810 28 blacks 1,605 whites 1820 34 blacks 1,754 whites 1830 28 blacks 1,993 whites HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
For this year, Ezra Wheeler of Concord kept a diary interleaved in his copy of the Bickerstaff Almanac. Town Clerks of Lincoln17
Ephraim Flint 1746-1752, 1754, 1756-1757 Grosvenor Tarbell 1799-1803
Ebenezer Cutler 1753, 1755, 1759 Thomas Wheeler 1804-1806
Samuel Farrar 1758, 1760-1766 Elijah Fiske 1810-1821
John Adams 1767-1777 Stephen Patch 1822-1827
Abijah Pierce 1778-1779, 1781 Charles Wheeler 1828-1830
Samuel Hoar 1780, 1782, 1787-1798, Elijah Fiske 1831 1807-1809
Richard Russell 1783-1786
17. Ibid. HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
1790
In around this year Jonas Hastings18 had this brick house built at the corner of Walden Street and Main Street
18. There was a Jonas Hastings who had been born on January 12, 1725 in Haverhill, Massachusetts. His father and mother were John Hastings born on September 2, 1691 in Haverhill, Massachusetts and Ednah Bailey Hastings born during June 1686 in Bradford, Massachusetts. He got married with Lydia Corliss on May 23, 1751 in Salem, New Hampshire (she had been born on June 22, 1727 in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and was a daughter of Jonathan Corliss and Elizabeth Moore Corliss). There was, however, another Jonas Hastings, Sr., who had been born on September 15, 1729 in Watertown, Massachusetts. His father and mother were Joseph Hastings II (1685-after 1742) and Lydia Browne Hastings (1697-after 1742). He got married with Mary Benjamin on February 26, 1756. The couple would have one child, Mary Hastings born on April 21, 1757 in Waltham, Massachusetts, who would get married with Moses Stickney (1751-1852) on September 9, 1777 in Princeton, Massachusetts and would die on September 5, 1846 in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. This Jonas Hastings would die at about the age of 42 in about 1771 in Waltham, Massachusetts. To make the matter more confusing, there was yet a 3d person of that name, Lieutenant Jonas Hastings, Jr. born on July 31, 1762 in Waltham, Massachusetts, a son of Jonas Hastings, Sr. who got married with Frances Leath or Leathe on August 27, 1785 and died on May 26, 1844 in Stow, Massachusetts, and yet a 4th person of that name, Jonas Hastings III, a son of Jonas Hastings, Jr. born in 1786 in Stow. Which of these three was the Jonas Hastings who had the Jonas Hastings brick house built in Concord, Massachusetts in about 1790, I do not know. There was a Jonas Hastings alive in the vicinity of Concord during Henry Thoreau’s lifetime, with whom Henry had contact, and I don’t know about him either. I also do not know whether this large brick structure was originally erected as a single-family residence in which the family of this Jonas Hastings was going to reside, or whether it was erected commercially, as possibly a four-apartment or six-apartment rental property (it is long gone and I have not seen a floor plan). [According to Leslie Perrin Wilson, Librarian at the CFPL, “Jonas Hastings of Concord (who did not build, but only lived in, the house associated with his name) was born in Weston, Massachusetts in 1805, and died in Concord in 1873 at the age of 67-plus. His wife Almira Jones Hastings, also born in Weston, was connected to Henry Thoreau on his mother’s side.” According to a descendant, “the ‘Jonas Hastings of Concord’ was Jonas Hastings IV, son of the Jonas born in 1786 in Stow or Waltham, Massachusetts with Betsey Granbery, and grandson of the Jonas born in 1762 in Waltham with Frances Leath, and great- grandson of the Jonas born in 1729 in Watertown with Mary Benjamin.”] HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
in Concord:
(It would be one of the nine Concord houses to shelter the Thoreau family. The Thoreaus would refer to it as “the brick house” and would reside there from 1823 to 1826. In 1892 the structure would be taken down to make way for the business block being put up by pharmacist John C. Friend.) THOREAU RESIDENCES HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
1804
The “Noah Brooks” house was constructed in Concord, not initially for use as a tavern but as a two-story Federal style home with attached kitchen and shed. Either during this same year, or perhaps before, the “Daniel Taylor” house was constructed as a two-story side gable five-bay house. The door was surrounded with entablature. This “Daniel Taylor” house would undergo alterations beginning in 1850. This is a structure still in existence. OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
1808
When Isaac Hurd, Jr. got married with Mary Heald, his clerk Moses Prichard came to board with them.
The widow Mary Brooks Merriam remarried, in about this year, with William Swan.
Joseph Chandler and Jonas Lee were Concord’s deputies and representatives to the General Court. James Barrett would be a Selectman, until 1810.
In Concord, Nathan Wood was a Selectman.
Tilly Merrick was Concord’s deputy and representative to the General Court.
John L. Tuttle of Concord was a Senator, and also was the Middlesex County Treasurer.
In the Concord vicinity, from this year into 1810, the John Nelson house was being constructed on a granite foundation, in 2-story “Adam” style with low hipped roof. Possibly, the Daniel Brown house (built in about 1700) was incorporated as part of the structure of the kitchen. Nelson may have used plans from Asher Benjamin’s 1797 handbook, THE COUNTRY BUILDER’S ASSISTANT for many details of the construction including the cornice and the doorway. This is a structure still in existence.19 OLD HOUSES
For a year, Ralph Sanger, hired from elsewhere, would be teaching Concord’s grammar students.
1785 Nathaniel Bridge 9 months 1812 Isaac Warren 1 year
1786 JOSEPH HUNT 2½ years 1813 JOHN BROWN 1 year
1788 William A. Barron 3 years 1814 Oliver Patten 1 year
1791 Amos Bancroft 1 year 1815 Stevens Everett 9 months
1792 Heber Chase 1 year 1815 Silas Holman 3 months
1793 WILLIAM JONES 1 year 1816 George F. Farley 1 year
1794 Samuel Thatcher 1 year 1817 James Howe 1 year
19. In this year Benjamin was designing the house at 60 or 61 Beacon Street, and the Fourth Meeting House of the First Church on Chauncy Street, in Boston. HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
1795 JAMES TEMPLE 2 years 1818 Samuel Barrett 1 year
1797 Thomas O. Selfridge 1 year 1819 BENJAMIN BARRETT 1 year
1798 THOMAS WHITING 4 years 1820 Abner Forbes 2 years
1802 Levi Frisbie 1 year 1822 Othniel Dinsmore 3 years
1803 Silas Warren 4 years 1825 James Furbish 1 year
1807 Wyman Richardson 1 year 1826 EDWARD JARVIS 1 year
1808 Ralph Sanger 1 year 1827 Horatio Wood 1 year
1809 Benjamin Willard 1 year 1828 David J. Merrill 1 year
1810 Elijah F. Paige 1 year 1829 John Graham 1 year
1811 Simeon Putnam 1 year 1831 John Brown
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 HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
1810
In the Concord vicinity, adjacent to the John Nelson house, between this year and 1824, was being constructed a one-story gable barn. This barn structure would be altered in 1830. It is a structure still in existence. OLD HOUSES
POPULATION.— Concord possesses few of those advantages of water- power, peculiar to many manufacturing towns, which favor a rapid growth. It is dependent on the industry of its inhabitants, its improvements in agriculture and the mechanic arts, and the general advancement of the surrounding country, for its increase in wealth and population. The incorporation of other towns, principally within it original limits, has, at various times, reduced its population and resources, and renders it difficult to estimate its growth with accuracy. In 1706 the polls were 230, nearly half as many as they now [1835] are; but they were scattered throughout six now incorporated towns. In 1753, just before the incorporation of Lincoln, the polls were 442, greater than at any other period in our history prior to 1820; and it is probable the population and wealth of the town was proportionably great. The population in 1764, including part of Carlisle, then belonging to Concord, was 1584, of whom 736 were white males, 821 white females, and 27 negroes. There were 6 slaves in 1725; 21 in 1741; and 19 in 1754. September 1, 1783, three years after the town was reduced to its present [1835] territorial limits, it contained 1321 inhabitants, of whom 15 were blacks. In 1790, there were 1590. The following table give the number at three different periods since.
1800 1810 1820
Male. Female. Male. Female. Male. Female.
Under 10 years 202 195 207 195 210 207
From 10 to 16 121 126 115 101 117 138
From 16 to 26 142 189 153 168 184 165
From 26 to 45 159 172 162 175 186 205
45 and upwards 158 177 150 179 150 192
782 859 787 818 847 907
Blacks 38 28 34
Total 1679 1633 1788 HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
In 1820 there were 9 foreigners not naturalized, 262 engaged in agriculture, 16 in commerce, and 140 in manufactures. From the above statement and a subsequent one on the valuation, it will appear that the town, from 1800 to the close of the war in 1815, remained nearly stationary. Since that time it has had a slow but gradual increase. The proportion of births to the deaths is estimated at about 3 to 1, producing a large redundant population, which is scattered in every state in the union. The associations with “Old Concord” are dear to many in distant lands, who owe their ancestral origin to its inhabitants.20
At about this point the Jonathan Ball House on Lexington Road in Concord was owned by Jonas Lee, a leader of the Democrats who several times was elected to the Massachusetts Legislature. It was Lee who built the addition on the east side of the house, and during its construction he and his 4th wife got into a quarrel over the position of the chimney. “He directed the mason to build it in the side, she in the corner of the room. They argued, scolded, and raved about it till the mason got out of patience, and began laying the bricks as Mr. Lee directed. Mrs. Lee started up and kicked over the bricks as fast as laid. The mason kept on laying, the woman kicking, and Jonas swearing, till all were exhausted.” This chimney stands on the side of the room — the men won. The house was subsequently occupied by Charles B. Davis who kept a store (this store included the town post office) next door. OLD HOUSES
In Concord, Nathan Wood was a Selectman.
Tilly Merrick was Concord’s deputy and representative to the General Court.
John L. Tuttle of Concord was a Senator, and also was the Middlesex County Treasurer.
General William Hildreth was Sheriff of Concord.
The population of nearby Lincoln, which in 1800 had been 756, had at this point fallen to 713. According to a valuation taken [in Lincoln] in 1784, it appears that there were 143 polls, 26 of whom were not rateable; 88 dwelling-houses, 84 barns, 1 tan-yard, 1 grist-mill, and 21 other buildings; 454 acres of tillage land, 429 of English mowing, 800 meadow, 1502 pasturing, 2057 wood land, 2128 ‘other land,’ and 137 unimproveable; 840 barrels of cider were made, 105 horses, 155 oxen, 266 neat cattle, 378 cows, 155 sheep, and 136 swine were held. Probably, if an estimate was made now [1835], it would not essentially vary from the above. The polls in 1790, were 156; the houses in 1801, 104. The population in 1764 was 639, including 28 negroes, and in 1790, 740; in 1800, 756; in 1810, 713; in 1820, 786; and in 1830, 709.21 20. 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
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
Lincoln has been said to have been (despite lack of real statistics upon which to base such a claim) a reasonably healthy town:
From 1760 to 1770, to 1780, to 1790, to 1800, to 1810, to 1820, —Total.
Intentions of Marriage 56 79 65 69 73 59 =401.
Marriages 38 40 35 48 87 56 =274.
Births 185 196 186 192 168 164 =1091.
Deaths 83 122 104 86 118 94 =607.
It appears from this table that the excess of births over the deaths is 484, more than two to one; and, according to the census, that, from 1790 to 1800, one in 86 died annually; from 1800 to 1810, one in 64; and from 1810 to 1820, one in 78; a result which is highly favorable to the healthiness of the town [of Lincoln].22 Town Clerks of Lincoln23
Ephraim Flint 1746-1752, 1754, 1756-1757 Grosvenor Tarbell 1799-1803
Ebenezer Cutler 1753, 1755, 1759 Thomas Wheeler 1804-1806
Samuel Farrar 1758, 1760-1766 Elijah Fiske 1810-1821
John Adams 1767-1777 Stephen Patch 1822-1827
Abijah Pierce 1778-1779, 1781 Charles Wheeler 1828-1830
Samuel Hoar 1780, 1782, 1787-1798, Elijah Fiske 1831 1807-1809
Richard Russell 1783-1786
21. 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.) 22. Ibid. 23. 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
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The population of nearby Carlisle, which in 1800 had been 634, had at this point risen to 675, but this trend would not persist over the long term. The population [of Carlisle] in 1800 was 634; in 1810, 675; in 1820 681; in 1830, 566. In 1820, 119 persons were engaged in agriculture, 1 in commerce. and 34 in manufactures. The valuation in 1831 gives the following results: 138 rateable polls, 17 not rateable, 83 dwelling-houses, 88 barns, 4 grist and saw mills; 314 acres of tillage land, 524 acres of upland mowing, 661 acres of meadow, 294 acres of pasturing, 882 acres of woodland, 3607 acres unimproved, 884 unimproveable, 213 acres used for roads, and 109 acres covered with water; 46 horses, 200 oxen, 474 cows and steers; 3668 bushels of corn, 541 bushels of rye, 490 of oats, 362 tons of English hay, and 468 tons of meadow hay. By comparing the valuations for several periods since the incorporation it will appear that the town has made little or no progress, but in many things has retrograded.24
These were the 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
24. Ibid. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1823
In the building that had been used as the Black Horse tavern at the intersection of Main Street and Sudbury Road in Concord, Nathan Brooks and his new second wife Mary Merrick Brooks, daughter of Concord storekeeper Tilly Merrick, took up housekeeping. (The couple would add to the daughter by the previous marriage, Caroline Downes Brooks, two sons, George Merrick Brooks and Charles Augustus Brooks, who would die while an infant. This would be their home until Brooks’s death in 1863, and Mrs. Brooks would continue in this house after his death. The building would be bought by William Munroe, founding benefactor of the Concord Free Public Library, in preparation for construction of the library building, and moved in 1872 to what is now 45 Hubbard Street. It is now known as the Nathan Brooks House.)
Elisha Fuller was admitted to the bar and began a legal practice in Concord. He was son of the Reverend Timothy Fuller of Princeton, and had graduated at Harvard College in 1815. He would relocate to Lowell HDT WHAT? INDEX
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during June 1831.
In Concord, Jonathan Hildreth continued as a Selectman.
Nathan Brooks was Concord’s deputy and representative to the General Court.
John Keyes of Concord would be a senator for Middlesex County until 1830 (after that he would be a member of the House and sometimes its Speaker).
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 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Per Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU: A BIOGRAPHY (NY: Knopf, 1966): “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
Chapter 1 (1817-1823) -Downing gives a cursory account of the Thoreau and Dunbar heritage and more fully traces the nature and movement of the Thoreau family in the first five years of Henry’s life. Thoreau’s father, John, while intellectual, “lived quietly, peacefully and contentedly in the shadow of his wife,” Mrs. Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau, who was dynamic and outspoken with a strong love for nature and compassion for the downtrodden. • 1st Helen -quiet, retiring, eventually a teacher. • 2nd John Jr. -“his father turned inside out,” personable, interested in ornithology, also taught. • 3rd Henry (born July 12,1817) -speculative but not noticeably precocious. • 4th Sophia -independent, talkative, ultimately took over father’s business and edited Henry’s posthumous publications. The Thoreau’s constantly struggled with debt, and in 1818 John Sr. gave up his farm outside Concord and moved into town. Later the same year he moved his family to Chelmsford where he opened a shop which soon failed and sent him packing to Boston to teach school.
“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
In 1823 uncle Charles Jones Dunbar discovered graphite in New Hampshire and invited John Thoreau to join Dunbar and Stow Pencil Makers back in Concord. Henry’s Concord youth was “typical of any small town American boy of the 19th century.” Henry attended Miss Phœbe Wheeler’s private “infants” school, then the public grammar school, where he studied the Bible and English classics such as William Shakespeare, John Bunyan, Dr. Samuel Johnson and the Essayists. Henry was considered “stupid” and “unsympathetic” by schoolmates he would not join in play, earning the nicknames “Judge” and “the fine scholar with the big nose.” At school he was withdrawn and anti-social but he loved outdoor excursions. From 1828-1834 Henry attended Concord Academy (Phineas Allen, preceptor). Allen taught the classics -Virgil, Sallust, Caesar, Euripides, Homer, Xenophon, Voltaire, Molière and Racine in the original languages- and emphasized composition. Henry also benefitted from the Concord Lyceum and particularly the natural history lectures presented there. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
WALTER HARDING’S BIOGRAPHY Chapter 3 (1833-1837) -Thoreau enters Harvard (president Josiah Quincy), having barely squeezed by his entrance exams and rooming with Charles S. Wheeler Thoreau’s Harvard curriculum: Greek (8 terms under Felton and Dunkin)-composition, grammar, “Greek Antiquities,” Xenophon, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Sophocles, Euripides, Homer. Latin Grammar (8 terms under Beck and McKean)-composition, “Latin Antiquities,” Livy, Horace, Cicero, Seneca, Juvenal. Mathematics (7 terms under Pierce and Lovering) English (8 terms under ET Channing, Giles, W&G Simmons)- grammar, rhetoric, logic, forensics, criticism, elocution, declamations, themes. Mental Philosophy (under Giles) Paley, Stewart. Natural Philosophy (under Lovering)-astronomy. Intellectual Philosophy (under Bowen) Locke, Say, Story. Theology (2 terms under H Ware)-Paley, Butler, New Testament. Modern Languages (voluntary) Italian (5 terms under Bachi) French (4 terms under Surault) German (4 terms under Bokum) Spanish (2 terms under Sales) Attended voluntary lectures on German and Northern literature (Longfellow), mineralogy (Webster), anatomy (Warren), natural history (Harris). Thoreau was an above average student who made mixed impressions upon his classmates. In the spring of ‘36 Thoreau withdrew due to illness -later taught for a brief period in Canton under the Rev. Orestes A. Brownson, a leading New England intellectual who Harding suggests profoundly influenced Thoreau. (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Allen, Gay Wilson. “A New Look at Emerson and Science,” pages 58-78 in LITERATURE AND IDEAS IN AMERICA: ESSAYS IN MEMORY OF HARRY HAYDEN CLARK. Robert Falk, ed. Athens OH: Ohio UP, 1975 “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
Allen examines NATURE and Waldo Emerson’s attitudes toward science in the light of four of Emerson’s early lectures. These lectures, given in 1833-34, were about science, and were titled “The Uses of Natural History,” “On the Relation of Man to the Globe,” “Water,” and “The Naturalist.” Allen’s 1975 essay furthers the work done by Harry Haydon Clark in his 1931 essay “Emerson and Science;” Clark did not have access to these lectures. The first lecture, “The Uses of Natural History,” was, Allen says, a “preliminary sketch” for NATURE. In this lecture Emerson elaborated on the uses of nature much as he did in NATURE: how nature contributes to human health (beauty, rest); to civilization (with due Emersonian skepticism about technology); to knowledge of truth (here Allen discusses the influence of geology on Emerson: how the age of the earth and the slowness of earth’s transformative processes confuted traditional religious doctrine); and to self-understanding (nature as language that God speaks to humanity — nature as image or metaphor of mind) (60-64). Emerson’s second lecture, “On the Relation of Man to the Globe,” was also a preliminary sketch for NATURE. In this lecture, Allen says, Emerson drew heavily on his readings in geology, along with some biology and chemistry, and attempted to demonstrate how marvelously the world is adapted for human life. (64) Emerson’s sources included Laplace, Mitscherlich, Cuvier; his arguments echoed Lamarck (evolution, nature adapted to humans) and [the Reverend William] Paley (argument from design) (64-67). The third lecture, “Water,” was Emerson’s “most technical” according to Allen, which is, perhaps, why it is not discussed at any length. It is also not assessed for its scientific accuracy. Allen does say that Emerson “read up on the geological effects of water, the laws of thermodynamics, the hydrostatic press, and related subjects” (67). Allen says that Emerson’s fourth lecture, “The Naturalist,” “made a strong plea for a recognition of the importance of science in education” (60). Emerson “emphasized particularly the study of nature to promote esthetic and moral growth” (67). Emerson wanted science for the poet and poetry for the scientist; the fundamental search for the causa causans (67-69). He was reading Gray and other technical sources, observing nature, and reading philosophers of science, especially Coleridge and Goethe (68). Allen says that the value of these lectures is not merely the light they shed on Nature but what they reveal about “his reading and thinking about science before he had fused his ideas thus derived with the Neoplatonic and ‘transcendental’ ideas of Plotinus, Swedenborg, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, and seventeenth-century English Platonists” (69). HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
Allen concludes that Waldo Emerson’s theory of nature in NATURE is derived far more from Neoplatonism than modern scientific knowledge, but Emerson was not turning his back on science; he wanted instead to spiritualize science, to base science on the theory that the physical world is an emanation of spirit, “the apparition of God” (Chapter 6), or “a projection of God in the unconscious.” (70) Allen contends that Emerson’s theory anticipates Phenomenology in its emphasis on mind/world interactions and correspondences. Science, Allen says, continued to have a “pervasive influence” on Emerson’s thought even after 1836: Indeed, the two most basic concepts in his philosophy, which he never doubted, were “compensation” and “polarity,” both derived from scientific “laws,” i.e. for every action there is a reaction, and the phenomena of negative and positive poles in electrodynamics. To these might also be added “circularity,” which translated into poetic metaphors the principle of “conservation of energy.” (75) One could argue, I think, that these scientific laws were themselves “derived from” philosophical and metaphysical speculations (e.g. Kant); their life-long conceptual importance to Emerson, in other words, does not seem precisely described as scientific. [Cecily F. Brown, March 1992] HDT WHAT? INDEX
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March: John Thoreau, Senior left off teaching school at 6 Cornhill Court in Boston, David Henry Thoreau was taken out of the Boston infant school, and the Thoreaus removed from Whitwell’s house on Pinckney Street in Boston to rent space in the Jonas Hastings house in Concord, built in about 1790, Deacon William Parkman’s brick house at the corner of Main Street and Walden Street,
where the father would go into the pencil-making business of Dunbar & Stow that was making use of graphite that Charles Jones Dunbar had discovered in 1821 near Bristol in New Hampshire, and also take up responsibility for the mill, milldam, race, and pond on Mill Brook just south of the “Milldam” district.
(Over the years the family would be living in nine different Concord buildings — nine, that is, in Concord alone, without adding in all the places they had lived elsewhere.)
We now know exactly where Henry’s Uncle Charles had discovered the plumbago because Dr. Brad Dean has tracked down the following source information:
Collections, Historical & Miscellaneous, and Monthly Literary Journal. Vol. 2. Concord, N.H.: J. B. Moore, 1823. Edited by John Farmer and Jacob B. Moore. Plumbago, or Graphite.—This article has lately been discovered in the towns of Bristol and Francestown in this State. In Bristol, it has been found of superior excellence, and is said to be very abundant. By the politeness of Mr. Charles S. Dunbar, the proprietor of the land which contains it, the editors have been furnished with several specimens, one of which, they sent to Dr. MITCHELL of New-York, who, in a communication on the subject, speaks as follows: “Your specimen of Plumbago was cordially received. I set a value upon it, by reason of the native and Fredonian source whence it came, and on account of its own apparent worth and excellence. “It is pleasing to find our landed proprietors inquiring somewhat below the surface, for the good things contained in the grants they received by superficial measurement.—When they shall go deep into the matter, they will learn the importance of the French maxim, approfondessez, which, you know, means, go to the bottom of the subject. I trust the time is approaching when the purchaser of lands will require not merely a geometrical description, but a geological one; whereby the purchaser shall know that the gets so many acres free and clear, and moreover, such and so many strata nice and proper. “I congratulate you on the discovery of such a treasure in our country. Much is due to the Mines that supply HDT WHAT? INDEX
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us with pencils and crucibles.” Specimens have been furnished Professor Dana, of Dartmouth College, who thinks it equal to the celebrated Burrowdale ore. That which has been discovered in Francestown is said to be of good quality. We are not informed whether it exists in large or small quantities. There has also been found in the south part of Francestown, near Lewis’s mills, some beautiful specimens of Rock Crystal.
Which is to say, Uncle Charles had discovered the graphite deposit in the Bristol, New Hampshire area, here:
(Brad has visited the area and tells us there’s nothing much there to be seen now, to mark the place where the graphite had been.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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This photograph of Concord Center, taken in about 1865, shows in the distance the Jonas Hastings house belonging to Deacon William Parkman in which the Thoreaus were to reside from 1823 to 1826, at the corner of Main and Walden Streets.
As you can see, initially the Hastings corner had projected out into what is now part of Main Street, so that the house would need to be moved backward to allow Main Street to be widened prior to the opening in 1873 of the newly constructed Concord Free Public Library. (The Hastings house would ultimately be taken down to HDT WHAT? INDEX
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make way for the business block put up by pharmacist John C. Friend in 1892.)
THOREAU RESIDENCES David Henry Thoreau began to attend Miss Phœbe Wheeler’s infant school. Here is a later reminisce of this period in the life of the Thoreau family: “Mother reminds me that when we lived at the Parkman house she lost a ruff a yard and a half long and with an edging three yards long to it, which she had laid on the grass to whiten, and, looking for it, she saw a robin tugging at the tape string of a stay on the line. He would repeatedly get it in his mouth, fly off and be brought up when he got to the end of his tether. Miss Ward thereupon tore a fine linen handkerchief into strips and threw them out, and the robin carried them all off. She had no doubt that he took the ruff.”
April 21, 1852: … Was that a large shad bush where fathers mill used to be.? There is quite a water fall beyond. where the old dam was Where the rapids commence at the outlet of the pond, the water is singularly creased as it rushes to the fall HDT WHAT? INDEX
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One of little David’s toys, which he later said had really caught his attention, was a little pewter soldier (had it been cast at Concord’s new lead factory?).
The Thoreau family, John Thoreau, Senior and Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau with the 5-year-old David Henry Thoreau, and his older two siblings Helen Louisa Thoreau and John Thoreau, Jr. and his younger sibling Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau, with their grandmother the widow Mary Jones Dunbar Minot, spent a memorable pic nic day that March on the exposed sandbar at the mouth of the cove on Walden Pond.25 When Henry remembered this for WALDEN, below, he remembered it as his having been four years old, but later he corrected this to his having been five years old:
WALDEN: When I was four years old, as I well remember, I was brought from Boston to this my native town, through these very woods and this field, to the pond. It is one of the oldest scenes stamped on my memory. And now to-night my flute has waked the echoes over that very water. The pines still stand here older than I; or, if some have fallen, I have cooked my supper with their stumps, and a new growth is rising all around, preparing another aspect for new infant eyes. Almost the same johnswort springs from the same perennial root in this pasture, and even I have at length helped to clothe that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams, and one of the results of my presence and influence is seen in these bean leaves, corn blades, and potato vines.
25. The water level of Walden Pond would be correspondingly low again, and the sandbar again exposed, in the year 2002! HDT WHAT? INDEX
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While he was still age 6, David would be tossed by a Concord cow.
Henry would also later record another childhood memory from approximately this period, of driving cattle down the lane past Walden Pond. This has some historical context, which I will quote from page 140 of Ruth HDT WHAT? INDEX
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R. Wheeler’s CONCORD: CLIMATE FOR FREEDOM:
After the Narragansett grants to veterans of King Philip’s War, Concord farmers acquired pastures in New Ipswich, Ashburnham, Westminster, Templeton, and Holden, sometimes adjacent to farms owned by sons and cousins. Every May the dry cows and young stock were assembled and driven over the road to summer pasture. The men and boys made the drive on foot or on horseback and as roads improved a “democrat” or utility vehicle went along to hold oats for the horses, blankets, and a youngster or two. Farmers on the way would rent a fenced field to hold the stock at night and would allow the boys to sleep in the barn. Reciprocally, Concord farmers had fenced yards to hold overnight upcountry stock being driven to market. These were very small drives compared to those we see in pictures of the West, but they were usually a boy’s first trip away from home: they stood for romance and adventure. During the nineteenth century, as Boston grew and became a busy seaport, traders gradually took over the business, buying up cows, driving them off to pasture, feeding them in the fall on the aftermath in Concord fields, and finally driving them down to stockyards in Watertown or dressing them off in Concord for salt beef. Of course, this gave farmers extra income as butchers, tanners, candlemakers, and coopers. Now picket fences became necessary in the village to keep stray animals out of one’s yard.
Note that I am not saying that Thoreau’s memory of driving cattle past Walden Pond would have had to have originated specifically in this Year of Our Lord 1822, nor that it was of such a large herd or over such a long distance, but only that it is likely that he would have held this memory in the context of such local cow business precisely as now an adult’s memories of cows encountered on the farm during childhood would be held in the context of stories heard about the “Wild West” and about “cowboys” on “cattle drives.”
Now that I have mentioned some Spring and Autumn business that Thoreau would have been observing in about this year of 1822, I will take the occasion, and mention some Winter business that he may well have been observing in about this year as well: Bear in mind that there were no snowplows in those days of sleighs and sledges. Public roads were not plowed during the winter, they were packed. The device that packed the snow was termed a “pung” and it was pulled by oxen rather than horses. If the snow was deep or wet, the pung would need to be pulled by several yoke of oxen. A good pack of snow on a road could sometimes assure smooth sleighing for the duration of the winter. THOREAU RESIDENCES
The remark about the flute at this point in WALDEN may remind us that Thoreau’s intent was, importantly, to see with “new infant eyes.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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After August 6, 1845: … Well now to-night my flute awakes the echoes over this very water, but one generation of pines has fallen and with their stumps I have cooked my supper, And a lusty growth of oaks and pines is rising all around its brim and preparing its wilder aspect for new infant eyes. …
Per Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU: A BIOGRAPHY (NY: Knopf, 1966): “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
Chapter 1 (1817-1823) -Downing gives a cursory account of the Thoreau and Dunbar heritage and more fully traces the nature and movement of the Thoreau family in the first five years of Henry’s life. Thoreau’s father, John, while intellectual, “lived quietly, peacefully and contentedly in the shadow of his wife,” Mrs. Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau, who was dynamic and outspoken with a strong love for nature and compassion for the downtrodden. • 1st Helen -quiet, retiring, eventually a teacher. • 2nd John Jr. -“his father turned inside out,” personable, interested in ornithology, also taught. • 3rd Henry (born July 12,1817) -speculative but not noticeably precocious. • 4th Sophia -independent, talkative, ultimately took over father’s business and edited Henry’s posthumous publications. The Thoreau’s constantly struggled with debt, and in 1818 John Sr. gave up his farm outside Concord and moved into town. Later the same year he moved his family to Chelmsford where he opened a shop which soon failed and sent him packing to Boston to teach school.
“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
In 1823 uncle Charles Jones Dunbar discovered graphite in New Hampshire and invited John Thoreau to join Dunbar and Stow Pencil Makers back in Concord. Henry’s Concord youth was “typical of any small town American boy of the 19th century.” Henry attended Miss Phœbe Wheeler’s private “infants” school, then the public grammar school, where he studied the Bible and English classics such as William Shakespeare, John Bunyan, Dr. Samuel Johnson and the Essayists. Henry was considered “stupid” and “unsympathetic” by schoolmates he would not join in play, earning the nicknames “Judge” and “the fine scholar with the big nose.” At school he was withdrawn and anti-social but he loved outdoor excursions. From 1828-1834 Henry attended Concord Academy (Phineas Allen, preceptor). Allen taught the classics -Virgil, Sallust, Caesar, Euripides, Homer, Xenophon, Voltaire, Molière and Racine in the original languages- and emphasized composition. Henry also benefitted from the Concord Lyceum and particularly the natural history lectures presented there. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
WALTER HARDING’S BIOGRAPHY Chapter 3 (1833-1837) -Thoreau enters Harvard (president Josiah Quincy), having barely squeezed by his entrance exams and rooming with Charles S. Wheeler Thoreau’s Harvard curriculum: Greek (8 terms under Felton and Dunkin)-composition, grammar, “Greek Antiquities,” Xenophon, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Sophocles, Euripides, Homer. Latin Grammar (8 terms under Beck and McKean)-composition, “Latin Antiquities,” Livy, Horace, Cicero, Seneca, Juvenal. Mathematics (7 terms under Pierce and Lovering) English (8 terms under ET Channing, Giles, W&G Simmons)- grammar, rhetoric, logic, forensics, criticism, elocution, declamations, themes. Mental Philosophy (under Giles) Paley, Stewart. Natural Philosophy (under Lovering)-astronomy. Intellectual Philosophy (under Bowen) Locke, Say, Story. Theology (2 terms under H Ware)-Paley, Butler, New Testament. Modern Languages (voluntary) Italian (5 terms under Bachi) French (4 terms under Surault) German (4 terms under Bokum) Spanish (2 terms under Sales) Attended voluntary lectures on German and Northern literature (Longfellow), mineralogy (Webster), anatomy (Warren), natural history (Harris). Thoreau was an above average student who made mixed impressions upon his classmates. In the spring of ‘36 Thoreau withdrew due to illness -later taught for a brief period in Canton under the Rev. Orestes A. Brownson, a leading New England intellectual who Harding suggests profoundly influenced Thoreau. (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Allen, Gay Wilson. “A New Look at Emerson and Science,” pages 58-78 in LITERATURE AND IDEAS IN AMERICA: ESSAYS IN MEMORY OF HARRY HAYDEN CLARK. Robert Falk, ed. Athens OH: Ohio UP, 1975 “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
Allen examines NATURE and Waldo Emerson’s attitudes toward science in the light of four of Emerson’s early lectures. These lectures, given in 1833-34, were about science, and were titled “The Uses of Natural History,” “On the Relation of Man to the Globe,” “Water,” and “The Naturalist.” Allen’s 1975 essay furthers the work done by Harry Haydon Clark in his 1931 essay “Emerson and Science;” Clark did not have access to these lectures. The first lecture, “The Uses of Natural History,” was, Allen says, a “preliminary sketch” for NATURE. In this lecture Emerson elaborated on the uses of nature much as he did in NATURE: how nature contributes to human health (beauty, rest); to civilization (with due Emersonian skepticism about technology); to knowledge of truth (here Allen discusses the influence of geology on Emerson: how the age of the earth and the slowness of earth’s transformative processes confuted traditional religious doctrine); and to self-understanding (nature as language that God speaks to humanity — nature as image or metaphor of mind) (60-64). Emerson’s second lecture, “On the Relation of Man to the Globe,” was also a preliminary sketch for NATURE. In this lecture, Allen says, Emerson drew heavily on his readings in geology, along with some biology and chemistry, and attempted to demonstrate how marvelously the world is adapted for human life. (64) Emerson’s sources included Laplace, Mitscherlich, Cuvier; his arguments echoed Lamarck (evolution, nature adapted to humans) and [the Reverend William] Paley (argument from design) (64-67). The third lecture, “Water,” was Emerson’s “most technical” according to Allen, which is, perhaps, why it is not discussed at any length. It is also not assessed for its scientific accuracy. Allen does say that Emerson “read up on the geological effects of water, the laws of thermodynamics, the hydrostatic press, and related subjects” (67). Allen says that Emerson’s fourth lecture, “The Naturalist,” “made a strong plea for a recognition of the importance of science in education” (60). Emerson “emphasized particularly the study of nature to promote esthetic and moral growth” (67). Emerson wanted science for the poet and poetry for the scientist; the fundamental search for the causa causans (67-69). He was reading Gray and other technical sources, observing nature, and reading philosophers of science, especially Coleridge and Goethe (68). Allen says that the value of these lectures is not merely the light they shed on Nature but what they reveal about “his reading and thinking about science before he had fused his ideas thus derived with the Neoplatonic and ‘transcendental’ ideas of Plotinus, Swedenborg, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, and seventeenth-century English Platonists” (69). HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
Allen concludes that Waldo Emerson’s theory of nature in NATURE is derived far more from Neoplatonism than modern scientific knowledge, but Emerson was not turning his back on science; he wanted instead to spiritualize science, to base science on the theory that the physical world is an emanation of spirit, “the apparition of God” (Chapter 6), or “a projection of God in the unconscious.” (70) Allen contends that Emerson’s theory anticipates Phenomenology in its emphasis on mind/world interactions and correspondences. Science, Allen says, continued to have a “pervasive influence” on Emerson’s thought even after 1836: Indeed, the two most basic concepts in his philosophy, which he never doubted, were “compensation” and “polarity,” both derived from scientific “laws,” i.e. for every action there is a reaction, and the phenomena of negative and positive poles in electrodynamics. To these might also be added “circularity,” which translated into poetic metaphors the principle of “conservation of energy.” (75) One could argue, I think, that these scientific laws were themselves “derived from” philosophical and metaphysical speculations (e.g. Kant); their life-long conceptual importance to Emerson, in other words, does not seem precisely described as scientific. [Cecily F. Brown, March 1992] HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1826
Spring: In Concord, the organization of a chapter of Royal Arch Masons (over and above the town’s existing Corinthian Lodge of Free Masons).
The Thoreaus moved from the brick house Jonas Hastings had erected in about 1790 at the corner of Main Street and Walden Street in Concord into the Davis house next door to the substantial residence of the attorney Samuel Hoar26 and across the street from the “Shattuck House (now William Monroe’s)”: the actual journal entry is “Davis’s House, (next to S. Hoar’s) to May 7th, 1827.”27
David Henry was attending the Concord Academy and studying under Preceptor Phineas Allen. THOREAU RESIDENCES
“Is a house but a gall on the face of the earth, 26. It was in this year that Samuel Hoar was becoming a Massachusetts senator. (In politics, Hoar began as a Federalist, became a Whig, and would continue as a Whig until the nomination of slavemaster Zachary Taylor for president.) 27. This house is now at #166 Main Street in Concord, and is referred to as the Concord Academy’s Aloian House. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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a nidus which some insect has provided for its young?” –JOURNAL May 1, 1857 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1827
The Concord house that eventually would become the Alcott family’s “Hillside” and the Hawthorne family’s “The Wayside” was purchased by Darius Merriam, who would live in it most of the time until 1832 and then sell it to Horatio Cogswell. OLD HOUSES
The house on Monument Street built by early settler Humphrey Barrett in the 17th Century was left by a childless descendant to Abel Barrett Heywood. A.B. Heywood would successfully farm the land but eventually succumb to drink. The farm would then be sold to S.A. Hartshorn, and later auctioned to D.G. Lang. Lang would in 1885 build a new house on the property and demolish the old structure in 1886. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1830
The “Ephraim Hartwell” Tavern of Concord, an important locale during the fighting in 1775, at this point had a shingle-sided shed attachment constructed on the gambrel addition on its east gable end. This is a structure still in existence. OLD HOUSES There are some problems with the following table. The first problem is that it makes it appear that there were considerably fewer persons of color in Concord, than there actually were, because it counts only heads of households. The second problem, more important, is that it makes the magic date 1780 of the “Massachusetts Bill of Rights” far more significant, in the elimination of Northern slavery, than actually it had been. Precious little seems actually to have happened in that year to improve the lives of persons of color in Massachusetts, or their societal standing! Concord MA Population
1679 ? 480 whites 1706 ? 920 whites 1725 6 slaves 1,500 whites 1741 21 slaves ? 1754 19 slaves ? 1780: Passage of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights 1783 15 blacks 1,306 whites 1790 29 blacks 1,556 whites 1800 38 blacks 1,641 whites 1810 28 blacks 1,605 whites 1820 34 blacks 1,754 whites 1830 28 blacks 1,993 whites HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
1832
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Roger Malvin’s Burial” relied on tales of a famous, or infamous, interracial dustup that had occurred in what would become Maine on May 9, 1725. THE BATTLE OF PEQUAKET
The house that eventually would become the Alcott family’s “Hillside” and the Hawthorne family’s “The Wayside” was purchased by Horatio Cogswell, who would make it his home during some of the time until 1845. (In 1836, however, the house would be occupied by Albert Lawrence Bull, brother of Ephraim Wales Bull.) OLD HOUSES [Anonymous, by Bronson Alcott], “Principles and Methods of Intellectual Instruction Exhibited in the Exercises of Young Children,” Annals of Education, II (January, 1832), 52-56; II (November, 1832), 565-570; III (May 1833), 219-223. HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
1836
Albert Lawrence Bull, brother of Ephraim Wales Bull, would for this year be the occupant of the house in Concord that would become the Alcott family’s “Hillside” and then the Hawthornes’ “The Wayside.” OLD HOUSES
August: Ephraim Wales Bull, who had been a maker of gold leaf in the “Cornhill” district after an apprenticeship to Louis Lauriat, the only master goldbeater in Boston, began to show the symptoms of lung trouble and on the advice of his physician moved out of Boston for his health, to Concord where his brother Albert Lawrence happened to be living on the what eventually was to become Hawthorne estate “The Wayside.” He purchased from Mr. French and refurbished the tiny cottage now known as Grapevine Cottage, and moved into it in this month, giving up for the time being the business of gold-beating. This cottage was across from the Hawthornes and had 300 yards of road frontage. He would build a white lattice fence all along the front of his property “as high as a man could reach” in order to protect his grapes trellises, and presumably also to protect his privacy as although he joined Concord’s “Social Circle” he was never exactly what you’d call conversational. At some point, also, he would become partly crippled in a fall from a ladder. OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
1844
Fall: After suggesting that the Alcott family build themselves a home on one of the tracts of land which he owned on Walden Pond, and after giving up on that idea as entirely impractical, Waldo Emerson, along with Abba Alcott’s brother the Reverend Samuel Joseph May, agreed to purchase the Horatio Cogswell place on
Lexington Road from the wheelwright of Concord, for $850.00, for the use of the Alcott family. The house and plot were to be held in the name of the May family in order that creditors of Bronson Alcott would not be able to attach it. Emerson agreed to the purchase of eight acres of the Concord meadow, across the road from this house, for an additional $500.00, so the Alcott family would be able to raise vegetables to feed themselves. The Alcotts would rename the place “Hillside” in honor of the grand estate of Benjamin Marston Watson, one of Alcott’s benefactors, in Plymouth MA, and would be living in this home for three years.
The basic house was one of those sound old structures built around a huge central chimney, with hand-hewn beams and wide floorboards.28 HILLSIDE THE WAYSIDE OLD HOUSES
28. This house had been erected in 1775 by one of the few families in Concord who had been rich enough to be able to afford slaves, but had fallen into considerable disrepair and may have been a real mess — a previous owner had been penning pigs in the ten-foot strip between house and road that passed for a front yard. HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
Fall: William Thomas Green Morton entered Harvard Medical School, where at the chemistry lectures of Dr. Charles T. Jackson he would learn of the anesthetic properties of sulfuric ether (the med student would leave without graduating).
As the Thoreaus built their “Texas” House on Texas Street (now Belknap Street), it was Henry Thoreau who dug the cellar hole. This was to be the family home and boardinghouse “to August 29th, 1850” (this structure would be damaged beyond repair by fire and the devastating hurricane of 1938).
“Is a house but a gall on the face of the earth, a nidus which some insect has provided for its young?” –JOURNAL May 1, 1857 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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This structure, and the shanty Thoreau would build on Walden Pond in the spring, summer, and fall of 1845: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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were they traditionally framed or were they “balloon” framed29? HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
Americans’ technologies of building in the first decades of the 19th Century had evolved gradually from those of their 17th- and 18th-Century ancestors and for the most part would have been recognizable to earlier generations of housewrights. But a radically new way of putting buildings together appeared in the early 1830s, probably first developed by carpenters struggling to keep pace with the rapid growth of the settlement of Chicago on the tree-poor Illinois prairie. “Balloon framing” replaced the massive timber frame with a structural skin of numerous light, weight-bearing members, later standardized as two-by-fours, which were simply nailed together, not intricately joined. Carpenters could put up a balloon frame more quickly and could use much smaller-dimensioned lumber. Balloon framing was adopted first by builders in fast-growing Western cities and commercial towns, for whom speed and economizing on materials were highly important. It was slower to arrive in older, Eastern cities and took even longer to arrive in the countryside, where it did not really begin to replace the old ways until after 1860. Eventually rapid construction with lighter lumber triumphed almost everywhere; traditional timber framing and log construction had almost disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century.
REPLICA OF CABIN
THOREAU RESIDENCES
29. The house was damaged beyond repair by fire and hurricane in the 1930s. HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
On Princes Street in Edinburgh, Scotland, the Scott Monument stood complete in all its magnificence.
The enormously expensive monument includes 64 statues mostly of characters from Sir Walter Scott’s novels, but with some figures from Scottish history. One of the statues on the upper tier of the northeast buttress, next to Robert the Bruce, purports to represent Robert Paterson, called “Old Mortality.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
1845
Early January: After suggesting that the Bronson Alcott / Abba Alcott family build a home on a tract of land which he owned on Walden Pond, and giving up that idea as impractical, Waldo Emerson and the Reverend Samuel Joseph May completed, early in January, their purchase in the name of the May family of the Cogswell place
on Lexington Road. This house would be renamed the Hillside in honor of Benjamin Marston Watson, one of Alcott’s benefactors, who had a much grander estate of that name in Plymouth MA, and would be for the use of the Alcott family. They paid $850.00.30 Emerson purchased eight acres of meadow across the road from this house for an additional $500.00 so the family could raise their own vegetables. The house and plot were registered in such manner that Alcott’s creditors would not be able to attach it. Bronson immediately added wings to the structure, and the family would live in this home for three years. Bronson would draw the sketch below after he had added wings. This is the home which the Alcotts would eventually be selling to the
30. The place was in considerable disrepair and may have been a real mess for a previous owner had kept pigs in the 10-foot strip between house and road that passed for a front yard — although the man from whom the house had been purchased, Horatio Cogswell, was a wheelwright by trade. However, the basic house was one of those sound old structures built around a huge central chimney, with hand-hewn beams and wide floorboards. (It had been erected in 1775 by one of the few families in Concord who had been rich enough to be able to afford slaves.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
Hawthornes, who would rename it again, as “Wayside,” and add porches and a writerly tower:
THE WAYSIDE NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The Association of Masters of the Boston Public Schools released their counter-counter-counterpublication to Horace Mann, Sr.’s counter-counterpublication, titled REJOINDER TO THE “REPLY” OF THE HON. HORACE MAN; SECRETARY OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BOARD OF EDUCATION, TO THE “REMARKS” OF THE ASSOCIATION OF BOSTON MASTERS, UPON HIS SEVENTH ANNUAL REPORT, in more than 200 pages. HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
June 10, Tuesday: In Concord, the Middlesex House, which had been created out of an old country house, burned (but would be rebuilt). This illustration, since it contains telephone wires, is assuredly the new structure rather than the old structure (which has been described as a converted country house):31
I [John Shepard Keyes] was busy with a full bar of the lawyers at the calling of the docket the Tuesday following when an alarm of fire caused the court to break up, and the old Middlesex Hotel was burnt to the ground. It caught from a defective flue, and in an hour was entirely consumed, no other buildings were burnt tho in much danger, and the prisoners in jail were removed as it was within 30 or 40 ft of the hotel. A good story was told and I think truly of my old law teacher E Millen Esq who rushed up to his room at the first alarm seized a valise and brought it safely out when on looking at it & finding it not his own with a lawyers care and prudence carried it back to the room and bore away his own, leaving that to its fate. I believe it was rescued with much of the furniture but the old hall, bar room dining room and parlor that had seen so much, and heard more of the good old times gone by, were wiped out. It made quite a hole in Concord, and although rebuilt after a year or more the new 31. This hotel stood on the corner of the Mill Dam and Monument Square, opposite the Wright Tavern (where the pay telephones are now). A hotel had existed on the site prior to 1789, when John Richardson traded his house for the hotel then held by Middlesex County to house jailers and county court officials. The hotel was a center of town and county life in the period when the county courts were held in Concord and prior to the arrival of the railroad in the early 1840s. Rebuilt in 1846, the hotel would go through a succession of owners and proprietors, including Ebenezer Thompson, Thomas D. Wesson, Herman Newton, Samuel A. Hartshorn, George Heywood and James W. Jacobs. It would close in 1882, remain vacant for nearly two decades, be sold in 1900 (to Stedman Buttrick, Edward Waldo Emerson, Richard F. Barrett, and Prescott Keyes), then sold to the Town of Concord, and finally demolished. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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one never had the business or the success of the old. J.S. KEYES AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Margaret Fuller reviewed the NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE for the New-York Tribune. This specimen of her Sex objectified the author cold-bloodedly and perfunctorily as a “specimen” of “the Black Race,” and added her voice to the white voices presuming that Frederick Douglass himself had authored the written form of this self-presentation: The book is prefaced by two communications — one from William Lloyd Garrison, and one from Wendell Phillips. That from the former is in his usual over-emphatic style. His motives and his course have been noble and generous; we look upon him with high respect; but he has indulged in violent invective and denunciation till he has spoiled the temper of his mind. Like a man who has been in the habit of screaming himself hoarse to make the deaf hear, he can no longer pitch his voice on a key agreeable to common ears. ...that prevalent fallacy which substitutes a creed for faith, a ritual for a life.... Unspeakably affecting is the fact that he never saw his mother at all by daylight. “I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day. She was with me in the night. She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Who Wrote Douglass’s ARRATIV N ? E HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1849
From this year the end of the Civil War, the owner of the Jonathan Ball House in Concord would be Sheriff Sam Staples. Sam married Lucinda Wesson, daughter of Thomas Wesson, local tavern keeper and owner of the Middlesex Hotel who disapproved of both town ministers because they preached temperance, and refused to let his daughter be married to Sam by either of them. Instead, he got Waldo Emerson to perform the ceremony in the hotel. OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
1850
Daniel Shattuck made over the whole store building which is now a central part of Concord’s Colonial Inn into a dwelling which he rented to John F. Skinner; the building would until late 1893 therefore be known locally as the Skinner House. Shattuck used the timbers of the White family’s barn to build an ell on the Lowell Road side, about this time, and a stable for himself. These barn timbers were recycled timbers that originally had been cut for the town meetinghouse in 1667, had then been re-used in 1710 when the old meetinghouse was replaced with a new one (not for that new meetinghouse but in another new building, on the south side of the common, which was intended for law courts and town meetings). Then Deacon John White had eventually moved this court building, when it was old, to the rear of his West House, for use as his family’s barn.
Beginning at this point, the “Daniel Taylor” house built in 1804 or before would be undergoing alterations. As modified, this is a structure still in existence. OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
OLD HOMES TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD
April 1, Tuesday: The Alcott family’s “Hillside” that eventually would become the Hawthorne family’s “The Wayside” had in January come to be owned by trustees for Mrs. Amos Bronson Alcott (until 1852). At this point the family moved in, and the house would provide a home for Mr. and Mrs. Alcott and their four daughters until, on November 17, 1848, they would relocate by train to a basement apartment on Dedham Street in the South End of Boston. OLD HOUSES
Bronson Alcott immediately proceeded to cut Horatio Cogswell’s wheelwright shop into two halves and tack these onto the main house as wings. He also combined several small rooms into a larger kitchen, built new stairs, cleaned out the well and installed a new pump, and constructed a shower stall apparatus in which buckets of water were raised overhead with pulleys and counterweights and dumped mechanically over the bather.
It rained and melted the remaining ice on Walden Pond, which had been dark-colored and saturated with water.
WALDEN: In 1845 Walden was first completely open on the 1st of April; in ’46, the 25th of March; in ’47, the 8th of April; in ’51, the 28th of March; in ’52, the 18th of April; in ’53, the 23rd of March; in ’54, about the 7th of April. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Early in the day it was very foggy, and as Henry Thoreau chopped young pines into studs for his shanty, using his borrowed axe, he heard a stray goose groping about over the pond and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog. (In the famous 1962 John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance advertisement illustration by Tom Covell, however, he is listening to the distant drumming of a Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus in the forest.) TIMELINE OF WALDEN
Incidentally, in case one wonders why Thoreau was not utilizing the construction technique known as balloon framing in the construction of his shanty, Professor Walter Roy Harding has asserted that the reason was that actually balloon framing is used only for houses of more than one story. This is inaccurate, and one wonders who might have told Harding such a fabulation. Houses of one story, and split-levels, equally with houses of multiple stories, get conventionally framed and braced in the balloon manner. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Summer: Charles Lane visited Hillside for several weeks in an attempt to restore the influence he had had over the
Alcott family at Fruitlands, but Abba Alcott had won and knew she had won and she was both intractable and
intransigent. If she had seen this first usage of the phrase “manifest destiny” in regard to our nation’s future, she might have applied it quite readily to that fact that the future was going to be a future of Abba and not Charles having influence over Bronson Alcott. Lane went away to visit with the Shakers muttering about how it was Bronson’s job in the family to keep the garden “free of weeds” and Abba’s job in the family to keep the house “clear of all intruders.” He left his son William Lane with the Shakers and went down to the socialist community of the North American Phalanx near Raritan, New Jersey, and then on to New-York, floating “on the placid bosom of the Stream of Love.” THE ALCOTT FAMILY MOTHER ANN LEE AND THE “SHAKERS” HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
1852
April 7, Wednesday: Since Henry Thoreau checked out the Canadian Geological Survey’s REPORT OF PROGRESS FOR 1849-50 (Montreal, Toronto) from the Boston Society of Natural History, my guess is that after his lecture on PERUSE THIS REPORT
“Reality” during the snowstorm of the previous evening he had not attempted a return trip to Concord, but had instead perhaps stayed over at the Alcott home. Of course, it is possible that he was taken into the parsonage of the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, his sponsor, for this month of April was the month in which the Alcotts were making a large transition. The Hawthorne family, Nathaniel, Sophia, and their three young children Una, Julian, and Rose, desiring to return to Concord, agreed to purchase the rundown Hillside property from the Alcotts and Waldo Emerson for a total of $1,500.00, a down payment of $250.00 of which was to be made to Samuel Eliot Sewall as executor of the Alcott interest and placed in a trust fund for Abba and a payment of $500.00 of which was to be made to the Emersons, who would set it up as a trust fund for Bronson Alcott. (The balance of $750.00 was to be paid into Sam Sewall’s trust fund for Abba within one year.) On this basis the Alcotts were in the process of moving from their slum place on High Street into a rundown 4-story brick house in a good neighborhood on Beacon Hill, 20 Pinkney Street, agreeing to pay a rent of $350.00 per year. By this point in her trajectory, Abba Alcott had had quite had her fill of being a do-gooder and being treated like one,32 and was determined to run this home on Beacon Hill as a private boardinghouse. THE WAYSIDE OLD HOUSES
Winter: With the Alcott family moving to a basement apartment in Boston, the Hawthornes transferred to Samuel Eliot Sewall as trustee the agreed $1,500.00 purchase price for the frame home, painted a rusty olive, that the Alcotts had purchased in 1845 after the Consociate Family at Fruitlands near Harvard, Massachusetts had fallen apart, and paid $500.00 to Waldo Emerson, in addition, for eight acres of Concord meadow he had obtained to go with that house, across the road. The Alcotts had named their refuge Hillside because of its being situated at the foot of a glacial sand hill (esker??),33 and the Hawthornes would be renaming it “The Wayside” because, like the “Wayside Inn” tavern of renown, it was directly alongside a main post road, in this case the route through to Lexington. Nathaniel’s pacing back and forth along the top of this hill would soon be creating a distinct path in the thin soil. The family would be living in this house until going abroad in 1853, and then the house would be occupied by the family of Mrs. Hawthorne’s brother, Dr. Nathaniel Peabody. OLD HOUSES
32. “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.” —C.S. Lewis 33. As the geologist Jeff Unruh would comment in 1993, “Topography doesn’t happen for nothing.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1853
In Concord, after the Hawthornes would go abroad in this year, their “The Wayside” would be being leased and rented to members of their family, including Sophia’s sister, Mary Peabody (Mrs. Horace) Mann, by Mrs. Hawthorne’s brother, Dr. Nathaniel Peabody, until 1859. OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
1855
October 21, Sunday: Henry Thoreau and his father John Thoreau had just had a conversation about the old houses in Concord:
October 21: ... I have been thinking over with father the old houses in this street— There was the Hubbard (?) house at the fork of the roads—The Thayer (Bo house—(now Garrisons) The Sam Jones’s now Channings— Willoughby Prescots (a bevel roof— which I do not remember) where Lorings is— (Hoars was built by a Prescott)— Ma’m Bond’s. The Jones Tavern (Bigelow’s) The old Hurd (or Cumming’s?) house— The Dr Hurd House— The Old Mill—& The Richardson Tavern (which I do not remember— On this side— The Monroe house in which we lived —The Parkman House in which Wm Heywood 20 years ago told me^that he helped raise the rear of 60 years before—(it then sloping to one story behind) & that then it was called an old house Dr Ripley said that a Bond built it. The Merrick house— A rough-cast house where Bates’ is Betty—& all the S side of the mill dam— Still further from the center—the old houses & sites are about as numerous as above— Most of these houses—slanted to one story behind. OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1856
January 19, Saturday: The great elm in from of postmaster Charles B. Davis’s house in Concord was chopped down, as explained in Henry Thoreau’s journal: “Davis and the neighbors were much alarmed by the creaking in the late storms, for fear it would fall on their roofs. It stands two or three feet into Davis’s yard” “Four men, cutting at once, began to fell the big elm at 10 A.M., went to dinner at 12, and got through at 2:30 P.M. They used a block and tackle with five balls, fastened to the base of a buttonwood, and drawn by a horse ...” “The tree was so sound I think it might have lived fifty years longer; but Mrs. Davis said that she would not like to spend another such a week at the last before it was cut down.” Afterwards, Thoreau would write: “I have attended the felling and, so to speak, the funeral of this old citizen of the town...” (we note that someone has planted another elm in place of that old tree, on the east side of the Concord Art Center). OLD HOUSES
Thoreau for the 10th time (Dr. Bradley P. Dean has noticed) deployed in his journal a weather term that had been originated by Luke Howard: “There were eight or ten courses of clouds, so broad that with equal intervals of blue sky they occupied the whole width of the heavens, broad white cirro-stratus in perfectly regular curves from west to east across the whole sky.”
Thoreau made a reference to Natick, Massachusetts and to Oliver N. Bacon’s and Samuel Hunt’s A HISTORY OF NATICK, FROM ITS FIRST SETTLEMENT IN 1651 TO THE PRESENT TIME: WITH NOTICES OF THE FIRST WHITE FAMILIES, AND ALSO AN ACCOUNT OF THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION, OCT. 16, 1851, REV. MR. HUNT’S HDT WHAT? INDEX
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ADDRESS AT THE CONSECRATION OF DELL PARK CEMETERY, &C.... A HISTORY OF NATICK
January 19: Another bright winter day. P.M. — To river to get some water asclepias to see what birds’ nests are made of. The only open place in the river between Hunt’s Bridge and the railroad bridge is a small space against Merrick’s pasture just below the Rock.34 As usual, just below a curve, in shallow water, with the added force of the Assabet. The willow osiers of last year’s growth on the pollards in Shattuck’s row, Merrick’s pasture, from four to seven feet long, are perhaps as bright as in the spring, the lower half yellow, the upper red, but they are a little shriveled in the bark. Measured against the great elm in front of Charles Davis’s on the Boston road, which he is having cut down. The chopper, White, has taken off most of the limbs and just begun, tried his axe, on the foot of the tree. He will probably fall it on Monday, or the 21st. At the smallest place between the ground and the limbs, seven feet from the ground, it is fifteen feet and two inches in circumference; at one foot from the ground on the lowest side, twenty-three feet and nine inches. White is to have ten dollars for taking off the necessary limbs and cutting it down merely, help being found him, He began on Wednesday. Davis and the neighbors were much alarmed by the creaking in the late storms, for fear it would fall on their roofs. It stands two or three feet into Davis’s yard. As I came home through the village at 8.15 P.M., by a bright moonlight, the moon nearly full and not more than 18° from the zenith, the wind northwest, but not strong, and the air pretty cold, I saw the melon-rind arrangement of the clouds on a larger scale and more distinct than ever before. There were eight or ten courses of clouds, so broad that with equal intervals of blue sky they occupied the whole width of the heavens, broad white cirro-stratus in perfectly regular curves from west to east across the whole sky. The four middle ones, occupying the greater part of the visible cope, were particularly distinct. They were all as regularly arranged as the lines on a melon, and with much straighter sides, as if cut with a knife. I hear that it attracted the attention of those who were abroad at 7 P.M., and now, at 9 P.M., it is scarcely less remarkable. On one side of the heavens, north or south, the intervals of blue look almost black by contrast. There is now, at nine, a strong wind from the northwest. Why do these bars extend cast and west? Is it the influence of the sun, which set so long ago? or of the rotation of the earth? The bars which I notice so often, morning and evening, are apparently 34. Hubbard’s Bridge and, I have no doubt. Lee’s Bridge, as I learned in my walk the next day. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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connected with the sun at those periods, BOTANIZING In Oliver N. Bacon’s History of Natick, page 235, it is said that, of phænogamous plants, “upwards of 800 species were collected from Natick soil in three years’ time, by 11 single individual.” I suspect it was Bacon the surveyor. There is given a list of those which are rare in that vicinity. Among them are the following which I do not know to grow here: Actæa rubra (W.),35 Asclepias tuberosa,36 Alopecurus pratensis,37 Corallorhiza odontorhiza (?) (Nutt.), Drosera filiformis (Nutt.), Ledum latifolium,38 Malaxis lilifolia (W.) (what in Gray?), Sagina procumbens.39 Among these rare there but common here are Calla Virginica, Glecoma hederacea, Iris prismatica, Lycopus Virginicus, Mikania scandens, Prunus borealis, Rhodora Canadensis, Xyris aquatica, Zizania aquatica. They, as well as we, have Equisetum hyemale, Kalmia glauca, Liatris scariosa, Ulmus fulva, Linnæa borealis, Pyrola maculata, etc., etc. Bacon quotes White, who quotes Old Colony Memorial account of manners and customs, etc., of our ancestors. Bacon says that the finest elm in Natick stands in front of Thomas F. Hammond’s house, and was set out “about the year 1760.” “The trunk, five feet from the ground, measures fifteen and a half feet.” G. Emerson gives it different account, q.v. Observed within the material of a robin’s nest, this afternoon, a cherry-stone. Gathered some dry water milkweed stems to compare with the materials of the bird’s nest [Yellow Warbler Dendroica petechia] of the 18th. The bird used, I am almost certain, the fibres of the bark of the stem, –not the pods,– just beneath the epidermis; only the bird’s is older and more fuzzy and finer, like worn twine or string. The fibres and bark have otherwise the same appearance under the microscope. I stripped off some bark about one sixteenth of an inch wide and six inches long and, separating ten or twelve fibres from the epidermis, rolled it in my fingers, making a thread about the ordinary size. This I could not break by direct pulling, and no man could. I doubt if a thread of flax or hemp of the same size could be made so strong. What an admirable material for the Indian’s fish-line! I can easily get much longer fibres. I hold a piece of the dead weed in my hands, strip off a narrow shred of the bark before my neighbor’s eyes and separate ten or twelve fibres as fine as hair, roll them in my fingers, and offer him the thread to try its strength. He is surprised and mortified to find that he cannot break it. Probably both the Indian and the bird discovered for themselves this same (so to call it) wild hemp. The corresponding fibres of the mikania seem not so divisible, become not so fine and fuzzy; though somewhat similar, are not nearly so strong. I have a hang-bird’s nest from the riverside, made almost entirely of this, in narrow shreds or strips with the epidermis on, wound round and round the twigs and woven into a basket. That is, this bird has used perhaps the strongest fibres which the fields afforded and which most civilized men have not detected. Knocked down the bottom of that summer yellowbird’s nest made on the oak at the Island last summer. It is chiefly of fern wool and also, apparently, some sheep’s wool(?), with a fine green moss (apparently that which grows on button-bushes) inmixed, and some milkweed fibre, and all very firmly agglutinated together. Some shreds of grape-vine bark about it. Do not know what portion of the whole nest it is.
35. Found since. 36. Probably here. 37. Found since. 38. Found since. 39. Found since. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1859
Henry Thoreau recorded in his journal that the water level in Walden Pond was recovering from its low during the previous year.
William Henry Hunt married with Elizabeth Baker, nine years older than himself. As the story has been told by Leslie Perrin Wilson: William Henry Hunt’s successful transformation into a progressive farmer was made possible by his marriage to a somewhat older woman of means — a life-changing opportunity which he had the good sense to seize. He fell in love with, and in 1859 –at the age of twenty– married Elizabeth Baker, a cultured woman some ten years his senior, who brought a son of about eight to the union. ...In marrying William Henry Hunt, Elizabeth Baker probably sought acceptance for herself and her son. ...They raised Theodore, who used the last name Hunt while in his stepfather’s household. Did the young people of Concord treat Theodore more respectfully after his mother’s marriage became an accepted local fact? It is not known, and possibly not knowable. But the fact that he grew up, left Concord, and achieved considerable success without leaving an impress on local memory indicates that whatever bonds to community he formed while living in the town were easily loosened once he left to pursue his own life.... [There is a] thin thread of evidence linking Theodore Hunt of Concord to the well-known music scholar and lexicographer Theodore Baker, author of a dictionary of musical terms (published in 1895) and of a biographical dictionary of music (1900) that is still, in much expanded and revised form, a standard resource today.
As the story would be told by Edward Emerson Simmons: A woman had come to Concord, with no husband, and given birth to a child. This, for New England at that time, was a terrible scandal. The boy was my age and went to school. All the other boys whispered behind his back as if he had been in jail, although by this time his mother was properly married to a young farmer up on Barret’s Hill. No one ever spoke to her in church or bowed. My mother, very quietly, every summer, put on her best clothes and walked the mile or more up the hill to call. VIEW THE PAGE IMAGES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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In Concord, after the death of Mr. Horace Mann, Sr., and during the continued absence of the family of the Hawthorne family in Europe, the family of Mrs. Hawthorne’s brother, Dr. Nathaniel Peabody, would move out of “The Wayside” so it could be occupied instead for a couple of years by Mrs. Hawthorne’s sister, Mrs. Horace Mann, and her three sons. OLD HOUSES
The 17th-Century Humphrey Hunt House next to the later Hunt/Hosmer House on Lowell Road, that was described in detail by Thoreau in his journal, had presumably been built by Samuel Hunt, and had passed out of Hunt family ownership from 1692-1701, being then owned by Adam Winthrop (for that reason the house HDT WHAT? INDEX
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has sometimes been referred to as the “Winthrop House”). In 1701 it had come back into the Hunt family. After the death of Humphrey Hunt in 1852, it was purchased by Edmund Hosmer, who at this point tore it down. This painting of the Humphrey Hunt House is part of the Art Collection of the Concord Free Public Library: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1860
By this year the Ingraham/Vose House on Walden Street, built prior to the American Revolution by the wealthy Duncan Ingraham and known also as the “Tea House,” had been torn down. This house had been purchased in 1783 by the John Vose who in 1826 was involved in the formation of the Trinitarian Congregational Church. The first meetings of the church were held in that house. Mrs. Abigail Garfield Saunders was a later owner.
The widowed Mrs. Mary Peabody Mann and her four sons moved out of “The Wayside” so it could be reoccupied by Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family as they returned from their extended stay in Europe. They would be living again in this Concord home until the widowed Mrs. Hawthorne would take her two daughters and son abroad again in October 1868. The Hawthornes’ neighbors were the Alcotts, since they had purchased HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the Orchard House (previously referred to as the Moore house) next door.
During this year Henry Thoreau surveyed the property:
OLD HOUSES
Rose Hawthorne would allegedly inform her husband George Parsons Lathrop that in about this year, while she was age 9, Henry Thoreau “used to flit in and out of the house with long, ungainly, Indian-like stride, and his piercing large orbs, staring, as it were in vacancy” (we are not aware that Thoreau visited “The Wayside” during this period other than for purposes of this survey of the plot of ground).
View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm
(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be HDT WHAT? INDEX
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recovered.)
View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_surveys/51a.htm HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1863
September 27, Sunday: Bronson Alcott noted: “Abby walks with me to Walden. We find the old paths by which I used to visit [Henry Thoreau] from ‘Hillside,’ but the grounds are much overgrown with shrubbery, and the site of the hermitage is almost obliterated.” ALCOTT FAMILY HILLSIDE HERMITS
(It is clear that at this point no cairn had yet been begun at the site on the shore of Walden Pond, where Emerson’s (Thoreau’s) shanty had once stood.) THOREAU’S CAIRN HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1864
May 24, Tuesday: People were continuing to kill each other at North Anna / Jericho Mill / Hanover Junction. In addition, on this day, people were killing each other at Wilson’s Wharf / Fort Pocahontas.
In Concord on this day, however, people were burying each other. Waldo Emerson recorded in his journal that:
Yesterday, May 23, we buried Hawthorne in Sleepy Hollow, in a pomp of HAWTHORNE sunshine and verdure, and gentle winds. James Freeman Clarke read the service in the church and at the grave. Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Agassiz, Hoar, Dwight, Whipple, Norton, Alcott, Hillard, Fields, Judge LONGFELLOW Thomas, and I attended the hearse as pallbearers. Franklin Pierce was J.R. LOWELL with the family. The church was copiously decorated with white flowers delicately arranged. The corpse was unwillingly shown, — only a few PROF. AGASSIZ moments to this company of his friends. But it was noble and serene in its aspect, — nothing amiss, — a calm and powerful head. A large company JUDGE E.R. HOAR filled the church and the grounds of the cemetery. All was so bright and J.S. DWIGHT quiet that pain or mourning was hardly suggested, and Holmes said to me C.K. WHIPPLE that it looked like a happy meeting. C.E. NORTON Clarke in the church said that Hawthorne had done more justice than any other to the shades of life, shown a sympathy with the crime in our BRONSON ALCOTT nature, and, like Jesus, was the friend of sinners. HILLARD I thought there was a tragic element in the event, that might be more JAMES T. FIELDS fully rendered, — in the painful solitude of the man, which, I suppose, JUDGE THOMAS could not longer be endured, and he died of it. I have found in his death a surprise and a disappointment. I thought him a greater man than any of his works betray, that there was still a great deal of work in him, and that he might one day show a purer power. Moreover, I have felt sure of him in his neighbourhood, and in his necessities of sympathy and intelligence, — that I could well wait his time, — his unwillingness and caprice, — and might one day conquer a friendship. It would have been a happiness, doubtless to both of us, to have come into habits of unreserved intercourse. It was easy to talk with him, — there were no barriers, — only, he said so little, that I talked too much, and stopped only because, as he gave no indications, I feared to exceed. He showed no egotism or self-assertion, rather a humility, and, at one time, a fear that he had written himself out. One day, when I found him on top of his hill, in the woods, he paced back the path to his house, and said, “This path is the only remembrance of me that will remain.” Now it appears that I waited too long. Lately he had removed himself the more by the indignation his perverse politics and unfortunate friendship for that paltry Franklin Pierce awakened, though it rather moved pity for Hawthorne, and the assured belief that he would outlive FRANKLIN PIERCE it, and come right at last. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“The Wayside” would be occupied by the widowed Mrs. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, with her two daughters Una Hawthorne and Rose Hawthorne and her son Julian Hawthorne, until, while again living in Europe, in October 1868 they would vend the place to George and Abby Gray. OLD HOUSES HAWTHORNE MAY 23, 1864 How beautiful it was, that one bright day In the long week of rain! Though all its splendor could not chase away The omnipresent pain. The lovely town was white with apple-blooms, And the great elms o’erhead Dark shadows wove on their aerial looms Shot through with golden thread. Across the meadows, by the gray old manse, The historic river flowed: I was as one who wanders in a trance, Unconscious of his road. The faces of familiar friends seemed strange; Their voices I could hear, And yet the words they uttered seemed to change Their meaning to my ear. For the one face I looked for was not there, The one low voice was mute; Only an unseen presence filled the air, And baffled my pursuit. Now I look back, and meadow, manse, and stream Dimly my thought defines; I only see — a dream within a dream — The hill-top hearsed with pines. I only hear above his place of rest Their tender undertone, The infinite longings of a troubled breast, The voice so like his own. There in seclusion and remote from men The wizard hand lies cold, Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen, And left the tale half told. Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic power, And the lost clew regain? The unfinished window in Aladdin’s tower Unfinished must remain! HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1866
Frederic Hudson resigned as managing editor of the New-York Herald and retired to Concord with his invalid wife Eliza Woodward Hudson and their son Woodward Hudson. The family lived on Main Street, in a house located where #252 stands today. He would devote his retirement to caring for Mrs. Hudson and to writing an exhaustive history of journalism in America, JOURNALISM IN THE UNITED STATES, FROM 1690-1872, which would be published in 1873.
During the late 1860s, the Jonathan Ball House and the one next door to it on its lot in Concord were owned by the Joel Walcott family. OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1868
Charles Hosmer Walcott got married at the Jonathan Ball House in Concord, and Waldo Emerson wrote one of his brothers that: “In your Ball House young Walcott was married day before yesterday with the good wishes of all the town.” Edward Emerson would write, in MEMOIRS OF MEMBERS OF THE SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD (FOURTH SERIES, 1909): “The newly married pair began their housekeeping in the large old- fashioned house on the ‘Great Road’ to Boston.... The house, though low-studded, was very well built and homelike, snugly placed under the hill at the east corner of the Common. It had one drawback, its vis-à-vis was the ‘Yellow Block’ since removed, a tenement house well stocked with humanity of a humble class, not especially disorderly, however, and with much worthy leaven in the lump—also many children.” OLD HOUSES
Lebbeus H. Rogers the balloonist had just made a promotional ascent in Cincinnati on behalf of a biscuit and grocery firm of which he had just been made a partner, and was giving an interview to the Associated Press in their offices after his ascent, when he observed them using Cyrus Dakin’s invention, carbon paper. He immediately lost all interest in going up in balloons and, abandoning his new interest in the biscuit business, went into the mass manufacture of carbon paper as the firm of L.H. Rogers & Co. in New York.40
Whereas carbon paper had been being made entirely by hand, by using a wide brush to apply a mixture of carbon black (a pigment) and oil in naphtha (a solvent) to sheets of paper, Rogers’s company eventually would develop the first carbon-coating machine and introduce the use of hot wax applied by rollers to replace that messy oil applied by brush. In 1870 this firm would achieve its first major sale ($1,500), and it goes without saying, this sale would be to the United States Department of War.
40. Dakin allegedly had invented carbon paper in Concord, Massachusetts in 1823 and sold the rights to the Associated Press. None of this has been in any manner corroborated. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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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
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1870
“The Wayside” would be being owned by Abby Gray, and Mr. and Mrs. George Gray, with a son and a daughter,41 would for a couple of years be residing in the house, until in 1872 they would rent to Miss Mary C. Pratt so that she could there begin a boarding school. OLD HOUSES
Sophia Peabody Hawthorne published her travel writings as NOTES IN ENGLAND AND ITALY. She was occupying her last years in transcribing more of her deceased husband Nathaniel’s journals, which would be published in 1878, seven years after her death, as PASSAGES FROM THE FRENCH AND ITALIAN NOTEBOOKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
41. In memory of Hawthorne, Mrs. Abby Gray’s son George Arthur painted murals on the ceiling of the Tower Study. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1872
Richard Henry Dana, Jr. put out a new edition of TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST with significant changes.
Alexander H. Japp’s MEMOIR OF N. HAWTHORNE.
In England, building the reputation of her father with the help of Robert Browning, Una Hawthorne prepared certain unfinished The Atlantic Monthly manuscripts as SEPTIMUS FELTON; OR, THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. This would be prepared in Boston by James R. Osgood in terra-cotta cloth decoratively stamped in black and gilt, inside a half-morocco slipcase.
According to an “Afterward” on page 474 of the Dover Edition of Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU: A BIOGRAPHY, Henry Thoreau’s grave was moved from the New Burying Ground to
Authors’ Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery “ten years or so after the original burial,” which would be at about this point. Walt Whitman would write about a visit he would make to Concord during the Fall of 1881, that he “spent a half hour at Hawthorne’s and Thoreau’s graves. I got out and went up of course on foot, and stood a long while and ponder’d. They lie close together in a pleasant wooded spot well up the cemetery hill, ‘Sleepy Hollow.’ The flat surface of the first was densely cover’d by myrtle, with a border of arbor-vitae, and the other had a brown headstone, moderately elaborate, with inscriptions. By Henry’s side lies his brother John, of whom much was expected, but he died young.” Clearly, as of Whitman’s visit in 1881 at least, Henry’s grave DIGGING UP THE DEAD HDT WHAT? INDEX
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had already been relocated to the tourist spot they were calling Authors’ Ridge, and clearly, the headstone Walt saw in 1881 was dissimilar to the severely plain and small one that is above Henry’s body now. One wonders what that inscription said. (By 1874 the old Thoreau family stones would be recycled to cover a drainage ditch, and new “neat, plain, brown” ones set in place above the graves. The cemetery association keeps spare gravestones for Henry’s grave in a shed somewhere, as these memorabilia do seem from time to time to wander away.)
The Brooks family house that stood where the Concord Free Public Library now stands, at the intersection of Main Street and Sudbury Road, was at this point moved to 45 Hubbard Street. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Bronson Alcott’s CONCORD DAYS42 (pages 11-17): My friend and neighbor united these qualities of sylvan and human in a more remarkable manner than any whom it has been my happiness to know. Lover of the wild, he lived a borderer on the confines of civilization, jealous of the least encroachment upon his possessions. “Society were all but rude In his umbrageous solitude.”
I had never thought of knowing a man so thoroughly of the country, and so purely a son of nature. I think he had the profoundest passion for it of any one of his time; and had the human sentiment been as tender and pervading, would have given us pastorals of which Virgil and Theocritus might have envied him the authorship had they chanced to be his contemporaries. As it was, he came nearer the antique spirit than any of our native poets, and touched the fields and groves and streams of his native town with a classic interest that shall not fade. Some of his verses are suffused with an elegiac tenderness, as if the woods and brooks bewailed the absence of their Lycidas, and murmured their griefs meanwhile to one another,—responsive like idyls. Living in close companionship with nature, his muse breathed the spirit and voice of poetry. For when the heart is once divorced from the senses and all sympathy with common things, then poetry has fled and the love that sings. The most welcome of companions was this plain countryman. One seldom meets with thoughts like his, coming so scented of mountain and field breezes and rippling springs, so like a luxuriant clod from under forest leaves, moist and mossy with earth-spirits. His presence was tonic, like ice-water in dog- days to the parched citizen pent in chambers and under brazen ceilings. Welcome as the gurgle of brooks and dipping of pitchers,—then drink and be cool! He seemed one with things, of nature’s essence and core, knit of strong timbers,—like a wood and its inhabitants. There was in him sod and shade, wilds and waters manifold,—the mould and mist of earth and sky. Self- poised and sagacious as any denizen of the elements, he had the key to every animal’s brain, every plant; and were an Indian to flower forth and reveal the scents hidden in his cranium, it would not be more surprising than the speech of our Sylvanus. He belonged to the Homeric age,—was older than pastures and gardens, as if he were of the race of heroes and one with the elements. He of all men seemed to be the native New-Englander, as much so as the oak, the granite ledge; our best example of an indigenous American, untouched by the old country, unless he came down rather from Thor, the Northman, whose name he bore. 42. Bronson Alcott. CONCORD DAYS. Boston MA: Roberts Brothers, 1872 [bound in green cloth, blind-stamped; “Concord Days” stamped in gold in center of front cover; spine stamped in gold; brown wove endpapers] Although this volume was issued in 1872, according to a date past the title page, it appears to be a series of journal entries (with some other stuff inserted) initiated between April and September of 1869. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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A peripatetic philosopher, and out-of-doors for the best part of his days and nights, he had manifold weather and seasons in him; the manners of an animal of probity and virtue unstained. Of all our moralists, he seemed the wholesomest, the busiest, and the best republican citizen in the world; always at home minding his own affairs. A little over-confident by genius, and stiffly individual, dropping society clean out of his theories, while standing friendly in his strict sense of friendship, there was in him an integrity and love of justice that made possible and actual the virtues of Sparta and the Stoics,—all the more welcome in his time of shuffling and pusillanimity. Plutarch would have made him immortal in his pages had he lived before his day. Nor have we any so modern withal, so entirely his own and ours: too purely so to be appreciated at once. A scholar by birthright, and an author, his fame had not, at his decease, travelled far from the banks of the rivers he described in his books; but one hazards only the truth in affirming of his prose, that in substance and pith, it surpasses that of any naturalist of his time; and he is sure of large reading in the future. There are fairer fishes in his pages than any swimming in our streams; some sleep of his on the banks of the Merrimack by moonlight that Egypt never rivalled, a morning of which Memnon might have envied the music, and a greyhound he once had, meant for Adonis; frogs, better than any of Aristophanes; apples wilder than Adam’s. His senses seemed double, giving him access to secrets not easily read by others; in sagacity resembling that of the beaver, the bee, the dog, the deer; an instinct for seeing and judging, as by some other, or seventh sense; dealing with objects as if they were shooting forth from his mind mythologically, thus completing the world all round to his senses; a creation of his at the moment. I am sure he knew the animals one by one, as most else knowable in his town; the plants, the geography, as Adam did in his Paradise, if indeed, he were not that ancestor himself. His works are pieces of exquisite sense, celebrations of Nature’s virginity exemplified by rare learning, delicate art, replete with observations as accurate as original; contributions of the unique to the natural history of his country, and without which it were incomplete. Seldom has a head circumscribed so much of the sense and core of Cosmos as this footed intelligence. If one would learn the wealth of wit there was in this plain man, the information, the poetry, the piety, he should have accompanied him on an afternoon walk to Walden, or elsewhere about the skirts of his village residence. Pagan as he might outwardly appear, yet he was the hearty worshipper of whatsoever is sound and wholesome in nature,—a piece of russet probity and strong sense, that nature delighted to own and honor. His talk was suggestive, subtle, sincere, under as many masks and mimicries as the shows he might pass; as significant, substantial,—nature choosing to speak through his mouthpiece,— cynically, perhaps, and searching into the marrows of men and times he spoke of, to his discomfort mostly and avoidance. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Nature, poetry, life,—not politics, not strict science, not society as it is,—were his preferred themes. The world was holy, the things seen symbolizing the things unseen, and thus worthy of worship, calling men out-of-doors and under the firmament for health and wholesomeness to be insinuated into their souls, not as idolaters, but as idealists. His religion was of the most primitive type, inclusive of all natural creatures and things, even to “the sparrow that falls to the ground,” though never by shot of his, and for whatsoever was manly in men, his worship was comparable to that of the priests and heroes of all time. I should say he inspired the sentiment of love, if, indeed, the sentiment did not seem to partake of something purer, were that possible, but nameless from its excellency. Certainly he was better poised and more nearly self-reliant than other men. “The happy man who lived content With his own town, his continent, Whose chiding streams its banks did curb As ocean circumscribes its orb, Round which, when he his walk did take, Thought he performed far more than Drake; For other lands he took less thought Than this his muse and mother brought.” More primitive and Homeric than any American, his style of thinking was robust, racy, as if Nature herself had built his sentences and seasoned the sense of his paragraphs with her own vigor and salubrity. Nothing can be spared from them; there is nothing superfluous; all is compact, concrete, as nature is. His politics were of a piece with his individualism. We must admit that he found little in political or religious establishment answering to his wants, that his attitude was defiant, if not annihilating, as if he had said to himself: — “The state is man’s pantry at most, and filled at an enormous cost,—a spoliation of the human common-wealth. Let it go. Heroes can live on nuts, and free-men sun themselves in the clefts of rocks, rather than sell their liberty for this pottage of slavery. We, the few honest neighbors, can help one another; and should the state ask any favors of us, we can take the matter into consideration leisurely, and at our convenience give a respectful answer. “But why require a state to protect one’s rights? the man is all. Let him husband himself; needs he other servant or runner? Selfkeeping is the best economy. That is a great age when the state is nothing and man is all. He founds himself in freedom, and maintains his uprightness therein; founds an empire and maintains states. Just retire from those concerns, and see how soon they must needs go to pieces, the sooner for the virtue thus withdrawn from them. All the manliness of individuals is sunk in that partnership in trade. Not only must I come out of myself, if I will be free and independent. Shall one be denied the privilege on coming HDT WHAT? INDEX
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of mature age of choosing whether he will be a citizen of the country he happens to be born in, or another? And what better title to a spot of ground than being a man, and having none? Is not man superior to state or country? I plead exemption from all interference by men or states with my individual prerogatives. That is mine which none can steal from me, nor is that yours which I or any man can take away.” “I am too high born to be propertied, To be a secondary at control, Or useful serving man and instrument To any sovereign state throughout the world.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1873
In Concord, Abby Gray sold “The Wayside” to her renter, Miss Mary C. Pratt, who was using the place as a successful boarding school known as The Wayside Family School for Girls. OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Louisa May Alcott’s WORK, with a character alleged by some to have been based on Thoreau. THE ALCOTT FAMILY
Mark Twain patented a self-pasting scrapbook, to be manufactured by Slote, Woodman & Company and sold by J.B. Lippincott & Company.
The freestyle swim stroke was invented (which means that Thoreau hadn’t swum freestyle).
Harriet Beecher Stowe had been born in Litchfield CT, and so after her Florida sojourn she purchased a classic 19th-Century gray wood and brick home at 77 Forest Avenue in Hartford. At this “Nook Farm” she would entertain fellow literary lights, paint watercolors and oils, work in her garden, and, in the small sitting room near her 10-sided bedroom, write several more novels, until she would die simpleminded in 1896. Mark Twain would record that when he visited, she was wandering around, popping up behind visitors and going “boo.” This home is now open to the public and houses the drop-leaf mahogany table at which in her heyday she had written portions of UNCLE TOM’S CABIN. While you are in Hartford, you might also stop by Gallaudet Square at Farmington and Asylum avenues to see the statue to Alice Cogswell, first pupil of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (the deaf school has removed, as of 1921, to West Hartford). Also, you might visit Christ Church at 45 Church Street, on the north wall of which is a tablet in honor of Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney, one of the first American “scribbling women” to make a substantial sum of money by writing. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1879
In Concord, “The Wayside” was owned by Mr. and Mrs. George Parsons Lathrop (Mrs. Lathrop was Rose Hawthorne), who would make it their home until their redheaded little son, Francis Hawthorne Lathrop, would die in 1881. OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1881
In Concord, after the death of Francis Hawthorne Lathrop, “The Wayside” would be occupied for a couple of years by Mrs. Julian Hawthorne and her six children. (When Julian would return from abroad in Spring 1882, he would rejoin his family there.) OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1883
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s SKETCHES AND STUDIES.
Julian Hawthorne prepared DR. GRIMSHAWE’S SECRET, published in Boston by James R. Osgood in gray cloth pictorially stamped in black and gilt with the monogram “J.R. Osgood” on the binding).
Mr. and Mrs. Daniel and Harriett Lothrop (he was a Boston publisher, she, under the pen name Margaret Sidney, the author of THE FIVE LITTLE PEPPERS) purchased “The Wayside” from Mr. and Mrs. George Parsons Lathrop (Rose Hawthorne). They acquired some pieces of Hawthorne furniture from Rose and George. They and their daughter, Miss Margaret Mulford Lothrop, would have control of the property until 1940. As can be seen in the photograph below with its windows boarded up, which was taken at about the turn of the century, during this period of its ownership the house would neither always have someone living in it, nor would it always be in an appropriate condition of maintenance.
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1963
In Concord, “The Wayside” was declared a National Historic Landmark. OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1965
“The Wayside” became the first home of a writer to be acquired by the National Park Service, and was made a part of Minute Man National Historical park. Restoration would continue with the help of Margaret Lothrop until her death in 1970. OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1971
In Concord, “The Wayside” opened to the public. OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1975
Celebration of self continued with MEMOIRS OF MEMBERS OF THE SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD: SIXTH SERIES, FROM 1939 TO 1974 (Clinton, Massachusetts: The Colonial Press).
The barn at “The Wayside” was restored as a visitor center. OLD HOUSES HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1993
Fall: According to the Thoreau Society Bulletin, the Yellow House at 255 Main Street was again on the real estate market, this time with a M$1.295 asking price. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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2001
The 1724-1740 Bensen-Tarbell-Ball house and barn and old farmstead, which had been described by Henry Thoreau as “Tarbell’s hip-roofed house looked the picture of retirement –of cottage size under its noble elm with its heap of apples before the door and the wood coming up within a few rods –it being far off the road. The smoke from his chimney so white and vaporlike, like a winter scene,” was demolished. The lot is to be occupied by a modern large house, with a driveway to other lots.
“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY
Traveling Much in Concord “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2015. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: February 3, 2015 HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES
Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES HDT WHAT? INDEX
TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD OLD HOMES