Walden Pond WALDEN POND

“There ain’t anything that is so interesting to look at as a place that a book has talked about.” — Mark Twain, TOM SAWYER ABROAD

The Thoreau Media Center has sponsored the attitude, without offering evidence, that Walden Pond was so named because some family in Concord had come there as an early settler from the town of Saffron Walden in England. Although it was only in 1652 or 1653 that for the 1st time a Concord property record mentioned the name “Walden Pond,” obviously such a geographical feature would have had to have had a name prior to such a late point in English settlement time. That prior name would have needed to have been either 1.) some native American name which the white people didn’t bother to preserve, or 2.) some variant of Walden/Waldens Woods/ Pond as now. So, leaving speculation aside, we know at the very least that this name Walden/Waldens Wood/Pond predates the Minot family of Saffron Walden’s arrival in Concord (Samuel Minot, son of the first John Minot and Lydia Butler Minot, the first member of this family to arrive in Concord, was not even born until July 3, 1665). Since there was already a Richard Waldron, probably a younger brother of Representative William HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

WALDRON of Dover, New Hampshire associated with Major Simon Willard, the woodland may have been previously named for this man or for the Walden family of the early Massachusetts Bay Colony. An educated guess would be that the name Walden as applied to the pond would have been derived from the name Walden as applied to the woodland within which it is situated, rather than vice versa, for the simple fact that the name “Walden” means woodlands, and my working hypothesis, which of course needs to be confirmed or disconfirmed by investigation into historical records, is that we will find that at some point these woodlands had been owned by that Walden/Waldron family of which Richard Waldron was a member. Terrain such as this, utterly sandy and uneven and lacking in either fish or game, would have been useful only for the collection of firewood and the manufacture of charcoal, and thus would have ordinarily been being referred to anyway as woodland, meaning firewood-collection-area, hence the placename “Walden Woods” would have been regarded as very appropriate from two standpoints: not only the putative ownership of the region by the Walden family, but also the derivation of the name for the woodlands per a family name indicating woodlands.

A theory that Walden Pond was named after some family other than the Minots, from Saffron Walden in England, would of course need to establish that some such family had arrived in Concord in the Massachusetts Bay Colony prior to 1653. I don’t myself right now know of anyone who has sponsored such a speculation.

Therefore for the time being I am considering the story being told by the Thoreau Media Center to be a just-so story, being offered to the public merely because it has a pleasant sound to it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Walden Pond BLOODY GROUND

Literature is a plant which thrives best in spots where blood has been spilt long ago. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

There is a case in which this is decidedly true, and a case in which this is decidedly false. Why would Hawthorne have conflated a truth and a falsehood into one assertion? The case in which this is decidedly true is the case in which the responsibility for the bloodshed lies with someone else, whom one may blame, and in the blaming direct one’s hostility outward. The case in which this is decidedly false, the case in which literature is a blighted growth, suppressed, maligned, is the case in which the responsibility for the bloodshed lies with oneself or with someone or something associated with oneself, the case in which it does not make one’s life work to blame the perp because in blaming one would need to focus one’s hostility inward, and allow it to eat at oneself, and recreate oneself. We don’t want to be wrong, we want other people to be wrong. We don’t need to molest ourselves, we need to molest other people. The purpose behind conflating these two situations, two situations so very different, is simple: the case which is decidedly false is hidden behind the case which is decidedly true, and being hidden, need never be known. To mask a piece of paper, simply put it behind another piece of paper. To hide an act of aggression, describe it as defensive. (For instance, to hide a 19th- Century racial concentration camp at Pike Island, Minnesota, recreate a tourist exhibit of an 18th-Century frontier outpost, Fort Snelling, above it. Etc.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

18,000 BCE

On the basis of Carbon-14 measurements, this was the last Glacial Maximum, the coldest period of the most recent Ice Age. People made wall paintings in caves, for example in the cave of Lascaux, France. Rope was in use, according to evidence there.

The extreme terminal moraine of the farthest reaching advance of the ice of our current Ice Age fell across Staten Island, where Henry Thoreau would reside, and therefore date to this period or earlier (prior to the publication of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, Thoreau never lived anywhere except on top of the same sort of terrain of glacial detritus characteristic of Walden Woods — that landscape was in fact the sole landscape with which he to that point had had any experience at all).

Chauvet cave in France.

People living in or visiting caves in what are now Israel and Jordan were putting notches on bones to record sequences of numbers (the devices are thought to have functioned primarily as lunar calendars).

By about this point or at least by 13,000 BCE, the spear thrower and the harpoon would have been invented.

The first-known artifact with a map on it, made of bone, has been at what is now Mezhirich — it appears to show the region immediately around the site at which it was found.

THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION Based on the best global evidence available (continuous cores from abyssal marine sediments and from the summit domes of the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets), the Walden paleo-valley was probably glaciated four times. These well-dated global records match the tally of four glaciations present in both the sea- cliffs of Nantucket and and [sic] drill cores of Georges Bank. Based on the best astronomical dates on hand, these glaciations culminated about 22, 130, 420, and 620 thousand years ago, plus or minus a few thousand years. During each of the four ice sheet culminations, the same source of ice moved over the same paleo-valley with the same HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

mechanisms, and reached roughly the same thickness over roughly the same resistant bedrock topography. Even more conservative was the bedrock highland associated with the Bloody Bluff Fault that divides the watersheds of the Sudbury River and Charles River. This suggests that comparable drainage scenarios were present during each ice advance and retreat, meaning that a series of broadly similar glacial lakes existed in the Sudbury Valley as the ice sheets came and went. Using Occam’s Razor, the default assumption is that previous ice sheets made previous versions of Walden. Not clones or identical twins but fraternal twins, perhaps the relationship Thoreau had in mind when he linked Walden and White Ponds. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, WALDEN’S SHORE, pages 98-9 TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

15,200 BCE

The receding of the glacial ice past Concord, Massachusetts toward the north, creating what has now become Walden Woods (“Historic woodland surrounding Walden Pond, especially to the north. Generally characterized by irregular topography and sterile soils associated with meltdown collapse of the Walden kame delta”) and what has now become Walden Pond. (“Lake in Concord, Massachusetts, created by melting of multiple residual blocks of stagnant ice and maintained by the filling of large voids with groundwater beneath a steady state water table. Its western basin was the site of Thoreau’s famous experiment in deliberate living and the inspiration for his book WALDEN”).

Were one to dig downward at the pond’s deepest point, at 102 feet of water depth, one would need to burrow through the 12 feet of soft sediments that have accumulated during the interim millennia, before reaching the relatively thin layer of “gravelly sand” detrius that had once covered over and insulated these blocks of stagnant ice — and, immediately below that thin layer, one’s burrowing would come to an abrupt halt as one encountered a smooth surface of Andover granite bedrock. Point d’appui. “Glacial polish, grooves, and striations are almost certainly present.” THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

8,000 BCE

Little information is available for the New England region during the Early Archaic Period. We know that oaks, pitch pines, and beeches were beginning to flourish. As the glacier melted, it deposited scraped up erosional debris atop the bedrock. Streams stemming from the melting glaciers formed valleys such as the Mill Brook valley. Enormous buried blocks of ice would eventually be creating water-filled depressions in the landscape. These “kettle ponds” would include not only Walden Pond, Fair Haven Bay, and White Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, but also Spy Pond, the Mystic Lakes, and Fresh Pond in Cambridge. NEW ENGLAND

Walden

White

Fair Haven

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

Walden Pond “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1170

At this time France was the most heavily populated area of Europe, and Lyon the second-largest city in France. The man whom we now refer to as “Peter Waldo” or as “Pierre Vaudès”, who seems to have been known as Vaudès1 of Lyon –a prosperous merchant whose surname might well have seemed to have meant “of the forest,” as in the Latin Rex Nemorensis, but did not, as it actually merely indicated that the town of his nativity had been Waldum or Vaux, which had been in that era a town near Lyon (no longer in existence as any name similar to this)– attempted to obtain the translation of the BIBLE into the language of the people. In his 30th HISTORY OF year, he hired two priests to translate the BIBLE into common French. He then accepted the invitation of LUKE THE BIBLE 18:23 to sell all he had and give the proceeds to the poor. He joined a movement already then in existence, and came to lead it in a campaign of publicity to the effect that the “church of Rome was in a state of apostasy from the true faith of the gospel; that she was the harlot of Babylon, and the barren fig-tree which our Lord cursed; that we are not bound to obey the pope, who is not the true head of the church; that monasticism is like corrupt carrion and has the mark of the beast; and that masses and purgatory, the dedication of temples, and the worship of the saints are inventions of the devil.” No quotations are extant from the teachings of Pierre Waldo/Vaudès of Lyon, and likewise no pictorial depictions have survived the Inquisition; therefore I have employed as a substitute for such lost historical material a 19th-Century engraving of Friend Elias Hicks, and a very Waldensian quotation from one of Friend Elias’s sermons: To be a Christian is to be Christ- like.

VAUDÈS OF LYON

The Waldo family is said to be descended from one Thomas Waldo of Lyon, who was also identified with these Waldensians, and who was perhaps Vaudès’s brother. Peter himself apparently never married. Another brother of Peter became a galley slave.

The followers of Peter Waldo were known as Waldenses, as well as Leonists (poor of Lyon) and Sabatati or Insabatati (wearers of sabots, that is, of the wooden shoes of the peasantry, the first saboteurs being people who threw their wooden shoes into the gears of a machine and brought it to a halt), and Humiliatists (professors of humility) — and Henry Thoreau was descended from them. Therefore when, in WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE 1. The given name “Peter” for this man Vaudès is a name that first would appear in any extant record a full century and a half after that man’s death. A century and a half amounts to some six generations. In other words, the faithful of the 14th Century would be hypothesizing about a Founding Father of the 12th Century who actually was of roughly the generation of their great-great-great- grandparents. The given, or Christian, name they selected for this eponymous daddy may well have been selected to be identical with Peter the founder of the Roman church. Because of this, it is the unanimous opinion now, of Waldensian historians, that we can have no idea whatever, what the given name of the founder of this movement in Lyon, France in 1170 CE might actually have been. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

WOODS, Thoreau plays around with strange and fanciful derivations of “Walden Pond” such as an eponymous “Squaw Walden,” and “Walled-In Pond,” and “Saffron Walden” in England (182-3), he is mentioning by implication a religious tradition with obvious similarities to his own manner of life, a tradition that was persecuted and virtually exterminated by the true believers of those dark ages. Even if we are scholars we must acknowledge the irony of such silence. It is a wink and a nod directed at others who may desire to live such a life, so incomprehensible to good Christians in Christendom. He is writing a book about how to lead that religious life in the midst of American progress and prosperity. Yet has anyone pointed to this association with the name “Walden” to you before? Hey, all you have to do is look in a good old dictionary, it’s not a big job of research.2

These Waldenses are predecessors of St. Francis, and predecessors of the Protestant movement, perhaps springing out of such earlier dissenting sects as the Albigensians or Cathari (against the heresy of which the Waldensians preached with great fervor), the Patarenes, and the Henricans. The main area of their persistence is the Cottian Alps south-west of Turin.

Waldo is a copse between Lavant and Goodwood in Sussex, England. We can establish that the root of this word is weald, wold, wald, walt, “a wood,” in Anglo-Saxon. That final “o” would be approximately equivalent to the definite article “the,” as for instance in haelo meaning the whole, health, what is integral, and maenego meaning the many, the multitude, what is made up of many members.

Those who embraced this religious discipline were also variously termed Pauperes or “poor ones,”3 Picards or “those who read the Bible for themselves,”4 Waldenses,5 Vaudois and Valdese or “those who live in the valleys,” and finally Huguenots or people who are of no worldly worth because they have made a religious covenant, people who have “sought individual perfection apart from the Roman Church, rejected the official clergy, abstained from oaths and the use of force, and attempted in general to reintroduce primitive Christian fellowship and apostolic simplicity of living.” The sociologist Henri Desroches has termed this les religions de contraband. The eight centuries between AD313, when Constantine (280?-337CE) began to transform the Christian Church into a mere apparatus of the state and Lactantius (240-320CE) began to accommodate its belief system to this new regime of power,6 and the middle of the 1170s when Pierre Valdès began to teach that we should utilize the life of Jesus as the prime moral example for our own lives, were dark and wicked ages indeed, or at least, they were dark and wicked in Christendom.

2. Interestingly, although our annotated editions of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS in the English language talk about the newspaper receipt on the blank side of which Thoreau originally jotted down this word, and although they talk about Walden Street in Waltham, Massachusetts, the only edition of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS that I know of, that presents this information about Thoreau’s connection with the “Poor of Lyon” explicitly and bluntly, is the Spanish edition by Carlos Sánchez-Rodrigo and Parsifal Ediciones of Barcelona in 1989: O Pobres de Lyon. Sociedad religiosa fundada por Pierre de Valdo a fines del siglo XII, que aspiraba a restituir la pobreza evangélica a la iglesia. 3. The entire subject of the first chapter of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 4. Thus Thoreau’s “pickerel” metaphor. 5. To get this reference into his text, Thoreau pretends that “Waldenses” is merely a plural form for “Walden” like the more obvious “Waldens,” whereas in point of fact “Waldenses” is not a plural but a collective term. 6. According to the standard story, a document termed the “Donation of Constantine,” the Emperor donated the Roman state to the Christian church. However, in the 15th Century this document was discovered to be an 8th-Century forging. As usual in such cases, the official lie had been constructed by exact inversion: what had happened was that the Christian church had been donated to the Roman state. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1635

September 2, Sunday: The General Court, at its session at New-Town (Cambridge) on September 12th per the new Gregorian calendar, granted an inland town and parish site7 to be named Concord8 to a group of petitioners including “Mr. Buckly and ———— merchant, and about twelve more families,” by means of the following Act of Incorporation: It is ordered that there shall be a plantation att Musketaquid, and that there shall be 6 myles of land square to belonge to it ; and that the inhabitants thereof shall have three yeares imunities from all public charges except trainings. Further that, when any that shall plant there, shall have occasion of carrying of goods thither, they shall repair to two of the nexte majistrates, where the teams are, whoe shall have power for a yeare to press draughts att reasonable rates, to be paid by the owners of the goods, to transport their goods thither at seasonable tymes ; and the name of the place is changed and here after to be called Concord.

7. Town and parish would be equivalent for the first two centuries of its existence, until in 1834 the legislature would sever church and government, which severance would not become effective until 1856. Which is to say, it would not be until the year 1857 that the town government would desist from paying out of tax moneys various bills in support of the parish, such as the salaries of the minister and the organist. 8. The redactive tradition is that the name either was an expression of the desired relation between the native Americans and the new settlers, or in hope that the two reverends in the town, Jones and Bulkeley, would be able to get along despite their differing theologically over one of the hot religious issues of the period. This interpretation is bolstered only by the fact that there is not an identifiable town in England named Concord, when other neighboring towns were borrowing names from the “old country.” No historical document now extant makes any claim as to why Concord was named Concord, or for that matter why the name is made to rhyme with “conquered.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

In all likelihood it was Simon Willard who set the four boundary stones at the corners of this Concord “6 myles of land square.” At that time there were no neighboring grants on any side of the square, Concord being the initial white settlement above tidewater. Later measurements show that Willard set his corner markers to delimit a square not six miles on a side, but six miles plus 142 rods on a side. (When Watertown would insist that its own grant, since it was specified as running eight miles toward the west, converged to a point north of Walden Pond, the General Court would issue an order on August 20, 1638, that these Watertown lines were to be extended only so far “as Concord bounds give leave.”)

On this very day the ship carrying the Reverends Thomas Shepard and John Jones sighted the land of their HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

New World.9 (Since there were a total of five ministers and their families on board, I am presuming that this ship would have been the Susan and Ann with the Reverend Bulkeley also aboard and listing his age on the manifest as 50, but the Reverend Bulkeley could well have come on some other vessel arriving in the same year.) The story is that the Reverends Jones and Peter “Big Pray” Bulkeley would be naming their new plantation as they were, “Concord,” because at that time a controversy was raging over whether each congregation should be separate and self-governing on the model of the Plymouth congregation, or whether all congregations should be governed by an assembly of ministers as in Presbyterianism. Although Jones was favoring decentralization while Bulkeley was favoring centralization, they nevertheless were setting out to live “in concord” with one another. Well, at any rate, that’s the story.

The name Walden was given to the pond very early, perhaps by [Major Simon] Willard in honor of the Minot family of Dorchester who came from Saffron Walden, England, or in honor of Major [Richard] Waldren, a contemporary of Willard who was also a trader with the Indians. Some doubt has been cast on the derivation of the name from Saffron Walden because the Minots came late to Concord (about 1686), but widow Rachel Biggs, who died in 1646, was one of the incorporators of Concord, with large holdings south of Walden. Her son John’s widow Mary Dossett Biggs was the second wife of Captain John Minot, the pioneer of Dorchester, and father of Captain James Minot who moved to Concord.

HENRY’S RELATIVES

JOHN MINOT

9. How is it then, that the general court on the mainland had already made an award to a group of petitioners including “Mr. Buckly”? The answer is, the “Mr. Buckly” of this document was not the Reverend Peter, but was his grown son Edward Bulkeley who had been born and raised in Odell, England and had come over to America a year earlier to prepare the way. Presumably this Edward had already visited the site of Concord and verified that it was very similar to the site of Odell in England, in being low and marshy and on an exceedingly still stream like the lazy River Ouse. This Edward would, upon the father’s death, succeed as the reverend of Concord in 1660. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

If the name was not derived from that of some English locality, ^Saffron Walden ^ for instance ^ perhaps I have conjectured that ^who knows but it was called, originally, Walled-in Pond.

So far as it can be said that the town of Hingham MA had any legislative incorporation, it was incorporated on this day, as the twelfth such town in the Massachusetts Bay colony, after a number of white settlers had relocated there from other local towns: “The name of Barecove is changed and hereafter to be called Hingham.” We do not know the names of any of the initial white settlers in the area, or the dates on which they arrived, although there is still in existence a “list of the names of such persons as came out of the town of Hingham, and towns adjacent, in the County of Norfolk, in the Kingdom of England, into New England, and settled in Hingham” which leads us to believe that already in 1833 there were inhabitants, among them Ralph Smith, Nicholas Jacob and family, the weaver Thomas Lincoln, Edmund Hobart and wife from Hingham, and Thomas Hobart and family from Windham, in Norfolk, England, when in that year Theophilus Cushing, Edmund Hobart, Senior, Joshua Hobart, and Henry Gibbs of Hingham, England, all of whom eventually would relocate to Hingham, arrived in other towns of the Massachusetts Bay colony. I here subjoin the names of those who settled or received grants of land here, in the respective years mentioned. Possibly there may be some names omitted, which have escaped my observation, and those of others inserted to whom lands were granted, but who never settled here. The list is as perfect, however, as long, careful, and patient examination of public and private records call make it. In 1635, in addition to those before-mentioned (namely: Joseph Andrews, Thomas Chubbuck, Henry Gibbs, Edmund Hobart, Sen., Edmund Hobart, Jr., Joshua Hobart, Rev. Peter Hobart, Thomas Hobart, Nicholas Jacob, Thomas Lincoln, weaver, Ralph Smith), were Jonas Austin, Nicholas Baker, Clement Bates, Richard Betscome, Benjamin Bozworth, William Buckland, James Cade, Anthony Cooper, John Cutler, John Farrow, Daniel Fop, Jarvice Gould, Wm. Hersey, Nicholas Hodsdin, Thos. Johnson, Andrew Lane, Wm. Large, Thomas Loring, George Ludkin, Jeremy Morse, William Nolton, John Otis, David Phippeny, John Palmer, John Porter, Henry Rust, John Smart, Francis Smith (or Smyth), John Strong, Henry Tuttil, William Walton, Thomas Andrews, William Arnall, George Bacon, Nathaniel Baker, Thomas Collier, George Lane, George Marsh, Abraham Martin, Nathaniel Peck, Richard Osborn, Thomas Wakely, Thomas Gill, Richard Ibrook, William Cockerum, William Cockerill, John Fearing, John Tucker. In 1636, John Beal, senior, Anthony Eames, Thomas Hammond, Joseph Hull, Richard Jones, Nicholas Lobdin, Richard Langer, John Leavitt, Thomas Lincoln, Jr., miller, Thomas Lincoln, cooper, Adam Mott, Thomas Minard, John Parker, George Russell, HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

William Sprague, George Strange, Thomas Underwood, Samuel Ward, Ralph Woodward, John Winchester, William Walker. In 1637, Thomas Barnes, Josiah Cobbit, Thomas Chaffe, Thomas Clapp, William Carlslye (or Carsly), Thomas Dimock, Vinton Dreuce, Thomas Hett, Thomas Joshlin, Aaron Ludkin, John Morrick, Thomas Nichols, Thomas Paynter, Edmund Pitts, Joseph Phippeny, Thomas Shave, Ralph Smith, Thomas Turner, John Tower, Joseph Underwood, William Ludkin, Jonathan Bozworth. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1652

Professor William E. Cain asserts bluntly in the introductory papers to his A HISTORICAL GUIDE TO HENRY DAVID THOREAU (NY, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) that Walden Pond had been named “after a town, ‘Saffron Walden,’ forty miles from London” –offering this not as a hypothesis but as a straightforward assertion of fact, offering no legitimating evidence or argumentation whatever– and I have never been able to uncover even a shred of legitimating evidence for such a hypothesis. In fact, we have hard evidence to the contrary: we have a property record dating to the year 1652 that mentions the name “Walden Pond,” and yet Samuel Minot, the son of the first John Minot and Lydia Butler Minot who the first member of this family to arrive in Concord, was not even born until July 3, 1665 –thirteen full years after this name was clearly already in use– so we know that name far predates the arrival of the Minot family of Saffron Walden at Concord. Furthermore, there is no reason to “reach” in the manner in which Cain reached for his just-so explanation, since we know that there was a Sheriff Richard Waldron on the scene, associated with Major Simon Willard (this Richard Waldron was, among other things, the speaker of the General Court of Massachusetts, and according to James Savage his name was commonly spelled “Walden” — spelled that way even by him). Clearly we should not at this point be resting upon certitude, and it seems a more appropriate lead for us to be following, that we should be searching early property records on a general suspicion that the pond derived its name from Sheriff Waldron’s family.

To the constables of Dover NH, Hampton, Salisbury NH, Newbury, Rowley, Ipswich, Lynn, Boston, Roxbury, Dedham, and until these Vagabond-Quakers are carried out of this jurisdiction: YOU, and every one of you, are required in the King’s Majesty’s Name, to take the Vagabond-Quakers, Ann Coleman, Mary Tompkins, Alice Ambrose, and make them fast to the cart’s tail, and driving the cart through your several towns, to whip them on their backs, not exceeding ten stripes apiece in each town, and so convey them from constable to constable till they come out of this jurisdiction, as you will answer it at your peril; and this shall be your warrant. Per me, RICHARD WALDEN

RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

Walden Pond “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

SO, on a very cold day, your deputy, Walden, caused these women to be stripped from the middle upward, and tied to a cart, and after a while cruelly whipped them; which some of their friends seeing testified against, for which Walden put two of them in the stocks. Having despatched them in this town, [Deputy Richard Walden] made way to carry them over the waters and through the woods to another. The women denied to go unless they had a copy of their warrant. So your executioner sought to set them on horseback, but they slid off. Then they endeavored to tie each to a man on horseback; that would not do either, nor any course they took, till the copy was given them; insomuch that he was almost wearied with them. But the copy being given them, they went with the executioner. And through dirt and snow at Salisbury NH, half-way the leg deep, the constable forced them after the cart’s tail, at which he whipped them. Under which cruelty and sore usage, the tender women traversing their way through all was a hard spectacle to those who had in them anything of tenderness. But the presence of the Lord was with them, in the extremity of their sufferings, that they sung in the midst of them, to the astonishment of their enemies. At Hampton, William Fifield, the constable, the next morning would have whipped them before day, but they refused, saying that they were not ashamed of their sufferings. Then he would have whipped them on their clothes, contrary to the warrant, when he had them at the cart. But they said, “Set us free, or do according to thy order,” which was to whip them on their naked backs. Then he spake to a woman to take off their clothes. The woman said she would not do it for all the world, and so did other women deny to do it. Then he said, “I profess, I will do it myself.” So he stripped them, and then stood trembling, with the whip in his hand, as a man condemned, and did the execution in that condition. Now, amongst the rest of the spectators, Edward Wharton, beholding their torn bodies and weary steps, and yet no remorse in their persecutors, could not withhold, but testified against them, seeing this bloody engagement. Whereupon one of your officers said, “Edward Wharton, what do you here?” “I am here,” answered Edward, “to see your wickedness and cruelty, that so if you kill them, I may be able to declare how you murdered them.” But the Lord unexpectedly wrought a way at that time to deliver them out of the tyrants’ hands, so through three towns only were they whipped, but cruelly, and then they were discharged. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1662

December 22, Monday:During this year, in the Mother Country, England, a Puritan plot to overthrow the monarchy had been discovered and not only were the English Quakers being rumored to have been involved, but one named Reginald Fawcett had in fact participated. In what may well have been the first technical use of the term “disown” by the Religious Society of Friends, Friend Francis Howgill was interrogated about the involvement of Reginald Fawcett and he informed the court officials that “Fawcett has been disowned by us these six years.”10 so nothing much had come of this in the form of additional persecutions for the Quakers in England. QUAKER DISOWNMENT

In the New England colony, however, in this year in which Friend Deborah Wilson was wandering the streets of Salem “naked as the day she came into the world” in order to dramatize to the Puritans the nakedness of their sin,11 the Puritans were installing a Quaker Act which would inaugurate a fresh period of religious persecution of Quaker dissenters.

During this year a total of three young Quaker women had come from England to Dover, where for six weeks they had been preaching in private residences against professional ministers, against restrictions on individual conscience, and against other established customs of the town. They controverted Dover’s Congregational minister, the Reverend John Reyner. One of the elders of 1st Church, Hatevil Nutter, had prepared a citizens’ petition “humbly craving relief against the spreading & the wicked errors of the Quakers among them.” The Crown Magistrate, Richard Waldron, ordered a severe punishment, including whippings in at least 11 towns and travel over 80 miles in bitterly cold weather. Constables John and Thomas Roberts of Dover seized the three women and carried out the punishment as instructed. George Bishop described the event: “Deputy Waldron caused these women to be stripped naked from the middle upwards, and tied to a cart, and after awhile cruelly whipped them, whilst the priest stood and looked and laughed at it.” Sewall’s HISTORY OF THE QUAKERS continues: “The women thus being whipped at Dover, were carried to Hampton and there delivered to the constable.... The constable the next morning would have whipped them before day, but they refused, saying they were not ashamed of their sufferings. Then he would have whipped them with their clothes on, when he

10. Braithwaite, William C. THE SECOND PERIOD OF QUAKERISM. York, England: William Sessions Ltd. with the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, 1979, page 30. 11. There is a 19th-Century update on this story. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

had tied them to the cart. But they said, “set us free, or do according to thine order. He then spoke to a woman to take off their clothes. But she said she would not for all the world. Why, said he, then I’ll do it myself....

So he stripped them, and then stood trembling whip in hand, and so he did the execution. Then he carried them to Salisbury through the dirt and the snow half the leg deep; and here they were whipped again. Indeed their bodies were so torn, that if Providence had not watched over them, they might have been in danger of their lives.” In Salisbury, Dr. Walter Barefoot convinced the constable to swear him in as a deputy, but after he had received the women and the warrant, what he did was put a stop to the punishment, instead dressing their wounds and returning them to the Maine side of the Piscataqua River. Eventually these three Quaker women would return to Dover and establish a worship group. In time, over a third of Dover’s citizens would become Quaker, and John Greenleaf Whittier would immortalize this suffering in poetry: How They Drove the Quaker Women from Dover The tossing spray of Cochecho’s falls Hardened to ice on its icy walls, As through Dover town, in the chill gray dawn, Three women passed, at the cart tail drawn, Bared to the waist, for the north wind’s grip And keener sting of the constables whip The blood that followed each hissing blow Froze as it sprinkled the winter snow. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Priest and ruler, boy and maiden followed the dismal cavalcade; And from door and window, open thrown, Looked and wondered, gaffer and crone.

Friend Elizabeth Hooton, who had been tortured in the Bay Colony in 1661 under its previous Cart and Whip Law and who had then audaciously sailed to England and obtained an audience with King Charles II, and who had succeeded in persuading this English king to sign for her a letter about her rights, arrived in this year back in Boston harbor, accompanied by her adult daughter.

Authorities of the Massachusetts Bay Colony ordered her to be tied behind a cart, stripped to the waist, and whipped to the border of the colony. She returned, and was subjected to the lash, an incredible total of eight HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

times, and a total of four times was abandoned in “the wilderness, to be devoured, where were bears and wolves, besides wild Indians” — but this 60-year-old Friend simply would not cease nor desist in her testimony. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Nor would other local Quaker women, inspired by her example, cease and desist.

There is at least a possibility that at least a decade prior to this event, Walden Pond (or Waldens Pond) in Walden Woods (or Waldens Wood) had being named after an owner, perhaps deputy sheriff Richard Waldron who was active in the Bay colony in the second half of the 17th Century. In witness of this, consider the following court order, followed by descriptive remarks as to the manner in which the order was carried out, from George Bishop’s NEW ENGLAND JUDGED BY THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD, something printed in London in 1703 describing a persecution of the Religious Society of Friends that had been initiated in Dover NH on this day, December 22, 1662. First we will consider the order itself, then the manner of its implementation:

On the following screen is presented what the source NEW ENGLAND JUDGED BY THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD has to say as to the actual manner of implementation of this official named Walden’s warrant to the constables:

[see following screen] HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1676

August 6, Sunday (Old Style): Weetamoo, the squaw sachem of Pocasset (now Tiverton, Rhode Island, and not to be confused with Pocasset, Massachusetts) who had allied with her kinsman Metacom, was captured by twenty men of Taunton at Gardiner’s Neck in Swansea, along with her few remaining followers. She made a break for it on a hastily constructed raft, attempting to get across the Taunton River. When her drowned body was discovered the English mutilated it and, cutting off the head, carried it into Taunton where they mounted it atop a pole on the village green.12 “KING PHILLIP’S WAR”

In American history it is ordinarily, unfortunately, no accident when it is women and children of color who are the ones being offed. In fact the white colonists typically considered it to be of more long-term benefit to them, to kill off the women and children of the natives, than to kill off their adult males, their warriors. The reason for this attitude was simple: these warriors represented only the present of the group of color, whereas women and children of color represented the future of the breed. Thus it would come about that, when in one of the military actions only 52 adult red males had been offed but all of 114 red women and children had been offed, the Reverend William Hubbard would celebrate the statistics of this as a “signal Victory, and Pledg [sic] of Divine Favour to the English” — for these 114 defenseless women and children had been “Serpents of the same Brood” (fast forward, if you please, to November 29-30, 1864 and the Reverend John Milton Chivington of the Sand Creek reservation massacre just at the edge of Denver, and to the explanation that this lay reverend race murderer offered to us all, that “nits breed lice”). On this same day, in Concord, according to the historian Daniel Gookin, superintendent of the native encampment at Deer Island, some white citizen sighted three of the local native American women with three of their children13 wandering a bit too far from their official encampment on the shore of Flint’s Pond, onto 12. In John Hanson Mitchell’s WALKING TOWARDS WALDEN: A PILGRIMAGE IN SEARCH OF PLACE (Reading MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1995, page 259) there is a gratuitous reference to “…a raiding party under the control of Queen Weetamoo…” which would seem to suggest that this squaw sachem, although separated from her consort Quinnapin, had something to do with the hostilities. Such an imputation is of course utterly false. These tribal groupings on occasion did have female leaders, but a female leader would have functioned only in a peacetime context and would have had nothing whatever to do with warfare. After the race war Quinnapin would be tried and executed: he definitely had been a wartime leader. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

the “Hurtleberry Hill” just to the southwest of Walden Pond — the geographical feature that eventually would come to be known by the curious name Mount Misery. This little group, led by John Stoolemester (a native American, who was armed because he had just been released from military service with the whites and had not yet had an opportunity to turn in his weapon), was, presumably, merely out picking “hurtleberries” or huckleberries or whatever, but the countryside around and about Concord had been declared to be a Vietnam- style “free fire zone.” They had ventured than the permitted one mile, indeed they had gone as the crow flies about one and one half miles, from their recognized habitation, all the way to the other side of Walden Pond and onto the Hoar farm! So after the local white men had exchanged some bread and cheese for some of the berries, four of them, Lieutenant Daniel Hoar (a nephew of John Hoar), Daniel Goble and his nephew Stephen Goble (who had no wife or child and probably was no more than 22 years of age), Nathaniel Wilder, went out to make themselves the death of this pic-nic. The three women and three children were chased and then murdered on the north slope of the hill. Their bodies were stripped of their coats and left to lie exposed. When the bodies would be found, some would be noticed to have been “shot through” while others would be noticed to have had “their brains beat out with hatchets.”14

THE HOARS OF MOUNT MISERY

13. Six people who of course had names, but their names would be no part of the record kept by the people who terminated them for having committed this extreme error. 14. A brief but indicative record of this race atrocity has been preserved in Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... The form of Shattuck’s record is more informative than its content. His record appears only in the 2d footnote on his page 62, indicating, quite clearly, that as far as he is concerned, any race atrocities which involve white perpetrators and nonwhite victims could be at best mere footnotes to the significant events of a town’s past. His note is preceded by an invidiously false but intendedly exculpatory declaration, that “Strict regard was paid to the rights of friendly Indians by the government.” He proceeds to refer to the murdered wives as “squaws” and to this racial mass murder of them and their children as their having been “killed.” Making no mention in such a context of the town of Concord, he situates this act of genocide “on a hill in Watertown, now in Lincoln.” He makes no mention of the fact that the six Concordians who were thus executed had been Concordians, as if, after all, they had only been reds rather than real people, nor does he make any mention of the fact that the four perps had been Concordians or, for that matter, of the obvious fact that such an egregious atrocity could only have been constructed by construing it, at that time, as having constituted an official military engagement of the Concord Militia. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

In the days of King Philip’s War, the Indians had spared the town of Concord. They burned the neighboring settlements, Sudbury, Chelmsford, Stow, but one of their chieftains said, as they glanced over Concord from a hill-top, “We shall never prosper if we go there. The Great Spirit loves that town.” This was an Indian legend, and one could well believe it. Plain, low, quiet, the village had no obvious distinction. — Van Wyck Brooks, THE FLOWERING OF NEW ENGLAND HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Later, when Andrew Pittimee, a local Native American who had been serving as a sergeant of the red guides for the white troops fighting in the race war, would return to Concord, he would not be able to find his family.15 His wife had simply disappeared and was nowhere to be found. His two sisters also had disappeared; they were nowhere to be found. Inquiries revealed that three Indian women and three Indian children had been killed while out huckleberrying –where had they been buried — had their bodies even been buried– and Pittimee started going around making much trouble, talking of equal hanging for all. A lot of red men were being judged, why shouldn’t some white men be judged? The white militiamen who had set up this afternoon’s fun, Lieutenant Daniel Hoar (in charge, giving the orders, defending his family’s farm), Stephen Goble and Daniel Goble, and Nathaniel Wilder, eventually found themselves judged, not only by red people whose opinions really did not count for much, but also by landowners, selectmen, white men whose opinions really did count, to be guilty of the crime of murder. But, gee whiz, weren’t they just “following orders”?

THE HOARS OF MOUNT MISERY

[see next screen]

15. The fact that the white Concord soldiers were willing to be led through the forest by this Andrew Pittimee the red Concordian did not imply that they considered him human or of equivalent standing and rights with themselves, for according to the Reverend William Ames’s (October 6, 1605-January 11, 1654, a Harvard College graduate) CONSCIENCE WITH THE POWER AND CASES THEREOF (pages 188-9), “as it is lawfull to use the helpe of beasts, as of Elephants, Horses, &c. So also is it lawfull to use the aid of beastlike men.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

AT A COUNCIL Held in BOSTON, August 30, 1675. he Council judging it of abfolute Necef= fity for the Security of the Englifh, and Tthe Indians that are in Amity with us, that they be Reftrained their ufual Commerce with the Englifh, and Hunting in the Woods, during the Time of Hoftility with thofe that are our Ene= mies, Do Order, that all thofe Indians that are defirous to Approve themfelves Faithful to the Englifh, be Confined to their feveral Plantations under= written, until the Council fhall take further Order; and that they fo order the fetting of their Wigwams, that they may ftand Compact in fome one Part of their Plantations refpectively, where it may be beft for their own Provifion and Defence. And that none of them do prefume to Travel above one Mile from the Center of fuch their Dwelling, unlefs in Company with fome Eng- lifh, or in their Service near their Dwellings; and excepting for gathering and fetching in their Corn with one Englifhman, on Peril of being taken as our Enemies, or their Abettors : And in Cafe that any of them fhall be taken without the Limits abovefaid, except as abovefaid, and do lofe their Lives, or be otherwife damnified, by Englifh or In- dians; The Council do hereby Declare, that they fhall account themfelves wholly Innocent, and their Blood or other Damage (by them fuftained) will be upon their own Heads. Alfo it fhall not be lawful for any Indians that are in Amity with us, to entertain any ftrange Indians, or receive any of our Enemies Plunder, but fhall from Time to Time make Difcovery whereof to fome Englifh, that fhall be Appointed for that End to fojourn among them, on Penalty of being reputed our Enemies, and of being liable to be proceeded againft as fuch. Alfo, whereas it is the Manner of the Heathen that are now in Hoftility with us, contrary to the Practice of all Civil Nations, to Execute their bloody Infolencies by Stealth, and Sculking in fmall Parties, declaring all open Decifion of their Controverfie, either by Treaty or by the Sword. The Council do therefore Order, That after the Publication of the Provifion aforefaid, It fhall be lawful for any Perfon, whether Englifh or Indian, that fhall find any Indians Travelling or Sculking in any of our Towns or Woods, contrary to the Limits above=named, to command them under their Guard and Examination, or to Kill and deftroy them as they beft may or can. The Council hereby declaring, That it will be moft acceptable to them that none be Killed or Wounded that are Willing to furrender themfelves into Cuftody. The Places of the Indians Refidencies are, Natick, Punquapaog, Nafhoba, Wamefit, and Haffanemefit: And if there be any that belong to any other Plantations, they are to Repair to fome one of thefe. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Now more recently, on page 57 of John Hanson Mitchell’s TRESPASSING: AN INQUIRY INTO THE PRIVATE OWNERSHIP OF LAND (Reading MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998), an extrabogus version of the Concord genocide story has resurfaced without references being cited. According to this author Mitchell’s inventive elaborations and suppressions, no native children were involved and only one woman was offed, her innocent activities at the time remain unspecified, only one white perpetrator was involved, who had been a passing stranger, the offense had been against town laws, it not being mentioned whether this was a Concord town law or a Boston statute — and the local militia of course had nothing whatever to do with the incident. Thus it is that history gets rewritten to serve the self-respect of the descendant children of the victor:

By the 1670s this Puritan concept of written law, of a higher doctrine, had become so established that during King Philip’s War, when the wife of one of the sometime residents at Nashobah was killed by a passing Englishman at Hurtleberry Hill, the town fathers, finding the white man guilty under the aegis of town laws, felt compelled to hang him. That is not to say that the native peoples of the Americas did not also have a concept of law or, for that matter, a concept of the division of land. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

“Denial is an integral part of atrocity, and it’s a natural part after a society has committed genocide. First you kill, and then the memory of killing is killed.” — Iris Chang, author of THE RAPE OF NANKING (1997), when the Japanese translation of her work was cancelled by Basic Books due to threats from Japan, on May 20, 1999.

“Historical amnesia has always been with us: we just keep forgetting we have it.” — Russell Shorto HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1689

June 27, Monday (June 17, Old Style), day: Advance word of Penacook massing for battle on Cochecho was known as far away as Chelmsford in the Bay colony. The native vendetta against Major Richard Waldron was described in a warning letter from Chelmsford that arrived by courier in Dover a day late, on June 28th. Waldron, aware of the tensions, reported told his townsfolk that he could assemble 100 men simply by lifting his finger. “Go plant your pumpkins,” he is reported as saying. On June 27th, at four of the five Cochecho garrisons, an Indian squaw appeared requesting shelter for the night. Because this was a common request, each one was taken in. That night each of these undefended garrisons was opened silently from the inside so that Penacook war parties could rush in. Waldron, then 74, is said to have wielded his sword in defense. All of his family was killed or captured. He himself was tied to a chair and cut across the chest repeatedly as each warrior symbolically “crossed out” his trading account with the merchant (who was widely believed to be dishonest in his accounts). The attackers cut off one hand. After his ears and nose were cut off and shoved into his mouth, he was obliged to fall on his own sword. The garrison was torched. “KING PHILLIP’S WAR”

(There is a strong possibility that the family that met its end in this way was the family after whom Walden Woods had been named, and the pond in that woods. Other accounts, such as that the placename “Walden” was based upon the town of Saffron Walden in England, are not only unsubstantiated but also chronologically unlikely simply because Walden Pond had already been known by that name as of 1652, well over a decade before the first known settlers from that district of England eventually arrived in the new town of Concord.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1690

At about this point the Straton family owned most of the land to the west of the Concord-Lincoln-Wayland Road between the buildings of Concord town and Walden Pond:

WALDEN: Farther down the hill, on the left, on the old road in the PEOPLE OF woods, are marks of some homestead of the Stratton family; whose WALDEN orchard once covered all the slope of Brister’s Hill, but was long since killed out by pitch-pines, excepting a few stumps, whose old roots furnish still the wild stocks of many a thrifty village tree.

JOSEPH STRATON

Henry Thoreau would add to this, in his personal copy of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, “Surveying for Cyrus Jarvis Dec. 23 ’56 - he shows me a deed of this lot containing 6 A. 52 rods all on the W. of the Wayland Road — & consisting of plowland, orchading [sic?] & woodland — sold by Joseph Straton to Samuel Swan of Concord In holder Aug. 11th 1777.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1777

August 11, Monday: The Straton family sold its holdings that lay to the west of the Concord-Lincoln-Wayland Road between the buildings of Concord town and Walden Pond to Samuel Swan of Concord:

JOSEPH STRATON

Henry Thoreau would note, in his personal copy of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, “Surveying for Cyrus Jarvis Dec. 23 ’56 - he shows me a deed of this lot containing 6 A. 52 rods all on the W. of the Wayland Road — & consisting of plowland, orchading [sic?] & woodland - sold by Joseph Straton to Samuel Swan of Concord In holder Aug. 11th 1777.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1794

Henry Thoreau would report, in regard to the Walden Pond of approximately this period, that:

WALDEN: An old man, a potter, who lived by the pond before the PEOPLE OF Revolution, told him once that there was an iron chest at the WALDEN bottom, and that he had seen it. Sometimes it would come floating up to the shore; but when you went toward it, it would go back into deep water and disappear. I was pleased to hear of the old log canoe, which took the place of an Indian one of the same material but more graceful construction, which perchance had first been a tree on the bank, and then, as it were, fell into the water, to float there for a generation, the most proper vessel for the lake. I remember that when I first looked into these depths there were many large trunks to be seen indistinctly lying on the bottom, which had either been blown over formerly, or left on the ice at the last cutting, when wood was cheaper; but now they have mostly disappeared.

JOHN WYMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1795

In his Message to Congress of this year, George Washington delivered some thoughts on race relations in America:

It is necessary that we should not lose sight of an important truth which continually receives new confirmations, namely, that the provisions heretofore made with a view to the protection of the Indians from the violences of the lawless part of our frontier inhabitants are insufficient. It is demonstrated that these violences can now be perpetrated with impunity, and it can need no argument to prove that, unless the murdering of Indians can be restrained by bringing the murderers to condign punishment, all the exertions of the Government to prevent destructive retaliations by the Indians will prove fruitless and all our present agreeable prospects illusory. The frequent destruction of innocent women and children, who are chiefly the victims of retaliation, must continue to shock humanity.

I had to read this a couple of times before it sank it, what this privileged white father was saying to other privileged white fathers from the bully pulpit. The thing that enabled me to break the racial code was realizing that the only relationship that Washington was envisioning, between a white female and a non-white male, was rape and slaughter. Washington was saying, without saying, that unprivileged white men were going out on “village raids,” and raping and slaughtering non-white people, just as had happened near Walden Pond in 1676, and that privileged white men needed to protect white women by forcing unprivileged white men to discontinue this practice. Yet, we notice, Washington offered no effective plan to achieve this race-oriented objective by this class-oriented means, he merely offered that for reasons of race relations the American white upper class needed to bring more firmly under control the American white lower class.

“It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.” — Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141 HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1800

In Concord, xx?xx, Reuben Hunt, and Roger Brown were Selectmen.

William Jones practiced law in Concord.

Joseph Chandler was Concord’s deputy and representative to the General Court.

In Concord, the formation of the Concord Harmonic Society, a choir.

In Concord, the office of Clerk of the Market was discontinued.

Thomas Heald would practice law in Concord, until 1813. He had been born in New Ipswich, New Hampshire on March 31, 1768 and had graduated at Dartmouth College in 1797. He had read law with Jonathan Fay. He would die during Summer 1821 as a judge in Blakely, Alabama.

The population of nearby Lincoln, which in 1764 had been 639 inclusive of 28 negroes, had at this point risen to 756. 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, 709.16

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. On July 16, 1859 he would correct a date mistake buried in the body of the text.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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].17 The poor [of Lincoln] were supported previous to 1785 in such families as undertook it at the lowest rates. £8 were granted for this purpose in 1760, £35 in 1762, and £18 in 1783. A committee was chosen in 1785, consisting of the Hon. James Russell, Edmund Wheeler, and Eleazer Melvin, by whom a poorhouse was built; principally from the liberal donation of the chairman. The land on which it stood was presented by Mr. John Adams. The poor were supported here til about 1800, when the house was abandoned, and the old system of letting them out to the lowest bidder was again adopted. The annual expense now [1835] is between $400 and $500.18

At this turn-of-the-century point Concord was a significant crossroads town and stagecoach stop at the intersection of Lexington Road between Boston and the Berkshire up-country, and Watertown Road (which ran past Walden Pond) between New Hampshire and southern New England. This road up the Nashobah valley to the towns of southern New Hampshire was long known as the Great Road. It was because of the existence of the Great Road, of course, that red-coated troops had marched out of Boston on April 18, 1775. It was HISTORY OF RR because of the existence of the Nashoba Valley, of course, that the Fitchburg/Boston railroad tracks would go past Walden Pond. Just after the turn of the century the Crawford brothers, Thomas Jefferson Crawford and Ethan Allan Crawford, would be moving to the White Mountains of New Hampshire and establishing themselves at the notch which was at the time the only route between the city of Portland, Maine and the hinterlands of northern New Hampshire and Vermont. This notch in the mountain chain could be used for heavy traffic only during the winter, when the heavy snows packed down and provided a passable track for the wagon trains of Portland merchants. It would come to be referred to, of course, as Crawford Notch. The following table exhibits the appropriations for several

17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

objects at different periods in the town of Acton:19

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 Population [of Acton] in 1764 was 611; in 1790, including Carlisle, 853; in 1800, 901; in 1810, 885; in 1820, 1047; and in 1830, 1128.20 Representatives of Lincoln21

Chambers Russell ’54-57, ’59, ’62, ’63, ’5. Joshua Brooks 1809-1811.

Samuel Farrer 1766-1768. Leonard Hoar 1812-1814.

Eleazer Brooks ’74-’78, ’80, ’5, ’7, ’90-’2. William Hayden 1815, 1816.

Chambers Russell 1788. Elijah Fiske 1820-1822.

Samuel Hoar ’94, ’95, ’97, ’98, 1801, ’3-’8. Joel Smith 1824.

Samuel Farrar, Jr. 1800. Silas P. Tarbell 1827, 1828.

Not represented 1758, ’60, ’62, ’69-’73, ’79, ’81, ’82, ’86, ’89, ’93, ’96, ’99, 1802, ’17, ’23, ’25, ’26.

19. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston MA: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy, 1835 (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.) 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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

The surface of the town [of Carlisle] is generally uneven and rocky, though there are no considerable elevations; and the soil is unfavorable to agriculture. Concord River washes its eastern bounds; and a brook arising in Heat Pond in Chelmsford, runs easterly through the north part, which affords sites for two or three small mills. The principal employment of the inhabitants is agriculture. There is [1835] one physician, one store, two taverns, and a few mechanics’ shops to accommodate the immediate wants of the inhabitants. The population 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.22

22. Ibid. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1802

September 26, Sunday: Marshall Tufts was born in Lexington, the son of Thomas and Rebecca Adams Tufts. (Rebecca Adams had grown up near Walden Pond in Lincoln.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1808

The 3d edition of the Reverend William Gilpin’s REMARKS ON FOREST SCENERY, AND OTHER WOODLAND VIEWS, RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY ILLUSTRATED BY THE SCENES OF NEW FOREST IN HAMPSHIRE. IN THREE BOOKS. Thoreau would copy from the two volumes of this new edition into his Fact Book and an extract would appear in WALDEN. ON FOREST SCENERY, I ON FOREST SCENERY, II

The Reverend Gilpin’s OBSERVATIONS ON SEVERAL PARTS OF GREAT BRITAIN, PARTICULARLY THE HIGH- LANDS OF SCOTLAND, RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY, MADE IN THE YEAR 1776 was reprinted again in two volumes at London for T. Cadell and W. Davies, Strand.

THE TOUR MADE IN 1776 PEOPLE OF WALDEN WALDEN: William Gilpin, who is so admirable in all that relates to landscapes, and usually so correct, standing at the head of Loch Fyne, in Scotland, which he describes as “a bay of salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth,” and about fifty miles long, surrounded by mountains, observes, “If we could have seen it immediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of Nature occasioned it, before the waters gushed in, what a horrid chasm it must have appeared!

WILLIAM GILPIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

The 3d edition of the Reverend William Gilpin’s THREE ESSAYS: ON PICTURESQUE BEAUTY; ON PICTURESQUE TRAVEL; AND ON SKETCHING LANDSCAPE: WITH A POEM ON LANDSCAPE PAINTING. TO THESE ARE NOW ADDED, TWO ESSAYS GIVING AN ACCOUNT OF THE PRINCIPLES AND MODE IN WHICH THE AUTHOR EXECUTED HIS OWN DRAWINGS (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies). THREE ESSAYS, 3D EDITION

Thoreau would extrapolate some details from this, in regard to the depth of Loch Fyne, together with its attached snippet of poetry (notice how careful Thoreau is here in his use of quotation marks), in evaluating the slope of the bottom of the “bottomless” Walden Pond:

WALDEN: A factory owner, hearing what depth I had found, thought that it could not be true, for judging from his acquaintance with dams, sand would not lie at so steep an angle. But the deepest ponds are not so deep in proportion to their area as most suppose, and, if drained, would not leave very remarkable valleys. They are not like cups between the hills; for this one, which is so unusually deep for its area, appears in a vertical section through its centre not deeper than a shallow plate.Most ponds, emptied, would leave a meadow no more hollow than we frequently see. William Gilpin, who is so admirable in all that relates to landscapes, and usually so correct, standing at the head of Loch Fyne, in Scotland, which he describes as “a bay of salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth,” and about fifty miles long, surrounded by mountains, observes, “If we could have seen it immediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of Nature occasioned it, before the waters gushed in, what a horrid chasm it must have appeared! So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low Down sunk a hollow bottom, broad, and deep, Capacious bed of waters–.” But if, using the shortest diameter of Loch Fyne, we apply these proportions to Walden, which, as we have seen, appears already in a vertical section only like a shallow plate, it will appear four times as shallow. So much for the increased horrors of the chasm of Loch Fyne when emptied. No doubt many a smiling valley with its stretching cornfields occupies exactly such a “horrid chasm,” from which the waters have receded, though it requires the insight and the far sight of the geologist to convince the unsuspecting inhabitants of this fact. Often an inquisitive eye may detect the shores of a primitive lake in the low horizon hills, and no subsequent elevation of the plain has been necessary to conceal their history. But it is easiest, as they who work on the highways know, to find the hollows by the puddles after a shower. The amount of it is, the imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes. So, probably, the depth of the ocean will be found to be very inconsiderable compared with its breadth. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

The “factory-owner” with whom Thoreau spoke in the 1840s or 1850s would most likely have been Concord’s own Calvin Carver Damon. But this year of 1808 was before the development of Damon’s Damondale: during the course of this year the fulling mill toward the west end of town, on the site of the old bog-iron works, was being sold by the Conant family to John Brown of Concord and to Ephraim Hartwell of New Ipswich, New Hampshire. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1812

In Buenos Aires, a revolutionary junta was explaining to black slaves who had supported its coup that it would not be offering to them their “longed-for liberty” from enslavement, or at least would not be able to offer this “right away, as humanity and reason would wish.” The junta spelled out the reason for this, that to simply decree slaves to be freemen would “unfortunately” fly in the face of “the sacred right of individual liberty” which guaranteed the stability and decency of human society. Now, if you were to ask yourself the question, what sort of “sacred right of individual liberty” it is which “stands in opposition” to a slave’s desire to be a freeman — the answer would gradually come to you, and would help you immeasurably in your thinking on this difficult topic. It was the same in South America during the 19th Century as in North America. The sacred right of individual liberty safeguarded, most of all, slaveholders in their property rights in other human beings. Since property rights are essential to human freedom, human freedom being quite impossible in a condition of bellum omnium contra omnes, slaves simply cannot be freed unless funds can become available to pay just and equitable compensation to their masters. Since we are speaking here of property rights, it is fair to mention that in this year in Baltimore was being 23 published the edition of Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s ILIAD which Henry Thoreau would take to his shanty on Walden Pond in 1845, which would be stolen there from his table one day while he was absent.

23. Homer. THE ILIAD OF HOMER, TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK BY ALEXANDER POPE, IN TWO VOLUMES (Baltimore: Published by Philip H. Nicklin, Fielding Lucas, Jun. and Samuel Jeffries; also New York: M.&W. Ward, 1812). HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

(More than a century later, this copy would turn up in the possession of the family of the woodchopper, Alek Therien — and would then again disappear:

WALDEN: I was never molested by any person but those who PEOPLE OF represented the state. I had no lock nor bolt but for the desk WALDEN which held my papers, not even a nail to put over my latch or windows. I never fastened my door night or day, though I was to be absent several days; not even when the next fall I spent a fortnight in the woods of Maine. And yet my house was more respected than if it had been surrounded by a file of soldiers. The tired rambler could rest and warm himself by my fire, the literary amuse himself with the few books on my table, or the curious, by opening my closet door, see what was left of my dinner, and what prospect I had of a supper. Yet, though many people of every class came this way to the pond, I suffered no serious inconvenience from these sources, and I never missed any thing but one small book, a volume of Homer, which perhaps was improperly gilded and this I trust a soldier of our camp has found by this time. I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough. The Pope’s Homers would soon get properly distributed.– “Nec bella fuerunt, Faginus astabat dum scyphus ante dapes.” “Nor wars did men molest, When only beechen bowls were in request.” “You who govern public affairs, what need have you to employ punishments? Love virtue, and the people will be virtuous. The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.”

ALEXANDER POPE ALBIUS TIBULLUS LYGDAMUS CONFUCIUS MENCIUS This unseemly incident gave Thoreau an opportunity to refer to a peculiar attitude toward ownership, above, which he found in his Eastern texts. A soldier had lost a buckler, and had obtained solace from the idea that although he had lost it, undoubtedly some other soldier of his encampment had found it — and thus it was not truly lost for it was still in use. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1818

A news item relating to the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology: • The brothers Harrison Gray Dyar and Joseph Dyar became apprentices in the Concord clockmaking shop of Lemuel Curtis on the “Milldam”. According to Alfred Munroe’s CONCORD AND THE TELEGRAPH (published by the Concord Antiquarian Society), it would be Harrison Gray Dyar, not any Johnny-come-lately like the American portrait painter Samuel F.B. Morse, who in 1826 “erected the first real line and despatched the first message over it by electricity ever sent by such means in America,” over half a mile of wire alongside the “Causeway” or Lowell Road. This was even years prior to the 1837 joint English patent on electric telegraphy taken out by Sir William Cooke and Sir Charles Wheatstone (Munroe acknowledges that “This may seem strange to most of our readers, as the credit of this great discovery has been generally conceded to Prof. Morse”). According to Colonel William Whiting of Concord, this line had been hung from the trees along the “Causeway” or Lowell Road or Red Bridge or Hunt’s Bridge (over the Concord River at Gleason E6) road, using for insulators the glass phials of an apothecary, “all the way to Curtis’s.”24

The Dyar brothers would record the sparks on a ribbon of moistened litmus paper on a spool that revolved by clockwork. The nitric acid that was formed on the litmus paper by the action of the electricity left clearly legible little red marks on the blue litmus paper. His experiment would work well enough that he would be able to get some cash backing in New-York and run a line at the Long Island racetrack, and then propose to string a wire across New Jersey between New-York and Philadelphia. However, the New Jersey legislature would condemn him as “dangerous” and a “wizard,” and refuse permission for this larger experiment, and then one of his backers would threaten to take him to court to get his money back, and pretty soon it would be all over but the shouting. There is an argument that Samuel F.B. Morse got a lot of his plans for the electric telegraph in America from this Concord experimenter. For instance, Dyar used batteries, and had

24. And ain’t that just great, the home of the brothers George William Curtis and James Burrill Curtis who helped Henry Thoreau raise the frame of his shanty on Walden Pond is not included on the Concord map. Did they reside, then, in some adjoining town? HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

the idea of sending electric impulses along a wire, and had the idea of spacing the sparks in such a way as to form an alphabetic code, and developed such a code. We know also that the famous Morse would marry a sister of Charles Walker, and that Walker had worked with Dyar on this scheme and had retained many of Dyar’s sketches — so we may presume that either Walker or his sister might well have showed those sketches to Morse.25

25. It has also been established that Morse knew others besides Walker who had worked with Dyer. Is this not much too much of a coincidence? In the case of the electric telegraph, it is now clear that funding and organization and social anthropology were more important ingredients of such a success than any of the credited technological tinkering — for a whole lot of people had been developing these technological capabilities without possessing Morse’s political and social connections and without attaining the public and private funding and societal legitimation that would get them anywhere. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1819

John G. Hales’s “Map of Boston and Its Vicinity From Actual Survey by John G. Hales” (Philadelphia: John G. Hales and J. Melish) offered an image of Waldron Pond (Walden Pond) and Sandy Pond (Flint’s Pond) in a Concord/Lincoln woodland:

[next screen] HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1820

A “shoe factory” was started in Concord. At that time shoemaking was a skill-intensive and labor-intensive trade that required little capital investment. It was quite common in Lynn, Massachusetts for a home to have a “ten-footer,” that is, a ten-foot-square shed, in its side or back yard, in which you could find a male shoemaker sitting with a lapstone resting on his leather apron, cutting and shaping shoes. Binders, usually women, would sit in the main house, stitching the inner and outer soles to the uppers. The plan was, therefore, that the handicrafted articles made in such ten-footers in Concord yards, almost finished, would be carried to this central processing building for packing and shipping to wholesalers. The shanty that Henry Thoreau would eventually construct on Walden Pond would in many respects resemble one of these familiar “ten-footers” used by the Lynn and Concord cobblers.26 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

26. Significantly, hides to cure, to manufacture these Lynn shoes, came from Boston’s “shadow city” on the Pacific Ocean: Los Angeles. Influential citizens of this West Coast region, Aryan sons-in-law using the señoritas of the latifundistas and/as breeding stock, were, very often, consumptive junior males of rich families, seeking relief from the Boston climate. The Richard Henry Dana, Jr. of the TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST narrative noticed that these Bostonians had seemed to have left their morals behind, when they became citizens of what was in actuality the most violent region of the Old West. So, when you think of Lynn shoes, think not only of the local cottage labor, think also of the cowhides of the American frontier, and of the slave auction block of downtown “El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles de la Porciunucula.” It is by no accident that one of Henry David Thoreau’s best friends was named “HGO” Blake, and that the LA Times newspaper was founded by General Harrison Gray Otis. Dana Jr. was not the only young Bostonian to visit Los Angeles, he was simply one of the few of these men who visited Los Angeles and returned. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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

During the 1820s and 1830s, Friend William Bassett would be prospering as a shoe merchant of Lynn, involved in the centralization of that industry. He would be taking control of manufacturing, by putting job work out to local cordwainers while finishing off the rough shoes in his own central shops. He would be active in the local Quaker circles, and a leader in the town government. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

It would be during this decade that a Russian whaler stopped by San Nicolàs Island off the California coast. The crew, made up of Inuit from the Kodiak Islands, would of course slaughter as many of the native Americans there as they could. In this year an adobe trading post was being constructed overlooking the ocean “LONE WOMAN” at a cliff near Mission San Juan Capistrano, and this station would become the headquarters for an extensive trade in hide and other commodities between the mission and various Boston schooners. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

But in this year and the next, there would be drought in California.27 In this year, also, a “shoe factory” was being started up in Concord, Massachusetts. At least some of the leather utilized in the construction of these Concord shoes would be coming from the coast of Alta California, where the town of Los Angeles would be becoming Boston’s “shadow city” of the West Coast.28 At that time shoemaking was a skill-intensive and labor-intensive trade that required little capital investment. It was quite common in Lynn MA for a home to have a “ten-footer,” that is, a ten-foot-square shed, in its side or back yard, in which you could find a male shoemaker sitting with a lapstone resting on his leather apron, cutting and shaping shoes. Binders, usually women, would sit in the main house, stitching the inner and outer soles to the uppers. The plan was, therefore, that the handicrafted articles made in such ten-footers in Concord yards, almost finished, would be carried to this central processing building for packing and shipping to wholesalers. The cabin Henry David Thoreau would eventually construct on Walden Pond would in many respects resemble one of these familiar “ten- footers” used by the Lynn and Concord cobblers:

REPLICA OF CABIN

27. According to Mike Davis (a bestselling truckdriver as famous in LA as is that bestselling taxi-driver in Boston whose book is on all the newstands), the urbanization of the Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan Area seems to have taken place during one of the most unusual episodes of climatic and seismic benignity of our Holocene era. There have been two megadroughts in Los Angeles’s prehistory dwarfing anything within our experience. During the past couple of centuries, the longest drought in Southern California has lasted a mere six years, but these megadroughts, which occurred during the “Middle Ages” of Europe, held sway respectively for 140 years and for 220 years. (Generally, abundant rainfall in the Los Angeles region correlates with the El Niño ENSO phenomenon, extended drought with the La Niña ENSO phenomenon.) 28. Significantly, hides to cure, to manufacture these Lynn shoes, came from Boston’s “shadow city” on the Pacific Ocean: Los Angeles. Influential citizens of this West Coast region, Aryan sons-in-law using the señoritas of the latifundistas and/as breeding stock, were, very often, consumptive junior males of rich families, seeking relief from the Boston climate. The Richard Henry Dana, Jr. of the TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST narrative noticed that these Bostonians had seemed to have left their morals behind, when they became citizens of what was in actuality the most violent region of the Old West. So, when you think of Lynn shoes, think not only of the local cottage labor, think also of the cowhides of the American frontier, and of the slave auction block of downtown “El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles de la Porciunucula.” It is by no accident that one of Thoreau’s best friends was named “HGO” Blake, and that the LA Times newspaper was founded by General Harrison Gray Otis. Dana Jr. was not the only young Bostonian to visit Los Angeles, he was simply one of the few of these men who visited Los Angeles and returned. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Largest Scale Global Weather Oscillations around 1820 Southern South Pacific Oscillation current reversal 1814 strong warm El Niño strong 1815 absent cold La Niña 1816 absent cold La Niña 1817 moderate + warm El Niño moderate + 1818 absent cold La Niña 1819 moderate + warm El Niño moderate + 1820 absent cold La Niña 1821 moderate warm El Niño moderate 1822 absent cold La Niña 1823 absent cold La Niña The southern ocean / atmosphere “seesaw” links to periodic Indonesian east monsoon droughts, Australian droughts, deficient Indian summer monsoons, and deficient Ethiopian monsoon rainfall causing weak annual Nile floods. This data is presented from Tables 6.2-6.3 of Quinn, William H. “A study of Southern Oscillation-related climatic activity for AD 622-1900 incorporating Nile River flood data,” pages 119-49 in Diaz, Henry F. and Vera ENSO Markgraf, eds. EL NIÑO: HISTORICAL AND PALEOCLIMATIC ASPECTS OF THE SOUTHERN OSCILLATION. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1821

In Boston, what has now become Beacon Street opened. (In this early era it would be referred to as the Mill Dam — thus, when in 1828 the Milldam Company would be formed in Concord, and the district in Concord known as the Mill Dam developed, it is possible that an implicit reference was being made to this district in Boston.)

E. Lincoln of Boston printed John G. Hales’s small book “Survey of Boston and its Vicinity...” in which the distances from Boston to various locations such as Lincoln and Concord were cited, along with brief notes about these localities: HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

[Lincoln’s] soil is coarse and rocky, a great portion whereof is covered with wood, and not more than one third of the town under culture.... The south part of [Concord] against Lincoln...is hilly and considerably wooded. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

August 11, Saturday: In The Middlesex Gazette an article signed “S” recounted the convenient local legend “–the oldest people telle [sic] me that they heard it in their youth–” that Henry Thoreau would reference in Draft F of “The Ponds.”

A deep and clear body of isolated water such as Walden Pond must have seemed quite mysterious before the development of the geological theory of ice ages, and before the development of an account of how buried masses of ice often linger at the edge of a retreating glacier and gradually melt over centuries or dozens of centuries, to leave precisely such deep water-filled holes. Alas, however, a people with a “forgotten” history of genocide, such as these white Concordians, are ever in dire need of some fanciful account by which their record can precisely be reversed and the people they victimized be portrayed as aggressors while the guilty (or themselves, descendants of the guilty parties and inheritors of the loot the guilt and the shame of genocide) can be allowed to posture as innocent prisoners being tortured and burned alive by barbarous savages. Barbarous savages whom these white Christians trapped in their peaceable villages in the snow of that winter of 1676-1677, and roped together at the neck, and marched onto the Deer Island concentration camp in Boston Harbor and destroyed by starvation and exposure.29 Note that in this 1821 news item the existence of Walden Pond has become a fanciful proof that it is God, not white Concordians, who destroys strange peoples who interfere with the legitimate agendas of white Concordians. This article is not a “news story” at all, but rather it is a fantasy by which white people, as inheritors of desperate deeds, have discovered a way to add to the original affect of the viciousness and greed of their parents the affect of outrage of a surviving victim and thus mobilize, in the service of their own lives, the force of a shame which might otherwise forestall them from further such acts of desperation.

29.The scenario is rather a familiar one –although its deeps have never adequately been fathomed– at least we have been able to observe this legitimation-myth as it repeated itself in Minnesota during our race war and then in Germany before and during World War II. Margaret Fuller, not one easy to deceive, described it as “the aversion of the injurer for him he has degraded.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Walden Pond This pond, in the southerly part of town, has something singular, both in its appearance and in the tradition concerning it. It is said that the place which now contains a body of water, was once a high hill — that on this hill the Indians assembled at certain seasons to celebrate their religious festivals, and at other times to burn and torture prisoners taken in the wars with the early settlers of the country; it was on a meeting of numerous chiefs and tribes for the latter purpose, that this celebrated hill disappeared in the midst of their barbarous rejoicings, and sunk with all its savage inhabitants upon it. And on account of the remarkable depth of the water, which has never been fathomed, it was supposed to have continued to sink to such an amazing depth, that the bottom dropped out one day. This much for tradition — We do not vouch for the truth of the story, still there is enough that is singular about this pond, to warrant a stranger in going a little distance to view it; its banks are very bold, and decorated on all sides with evergreens and other forest trees — its waters are pure — no weeds or grass grow on its borders, no stream runs into it, or issues from it, and it is found to be highest in the driest time. In this deep water many pike and pickerell have been taken, weighing from one to five pounds, and it is confidently asserted, that others have been seen which would probably weigh from ten to twenty pounds; this sort never have been taken. Some of your readers, it is hoped, will give a more particular description of this singular pond.

Perhaps father John Thoreau, or someone else who regularly read the gazettes, clipped this vicious article when it was printed and passed it on to Thoreau in 1853/1854 while he was writing the history of the pond. Perhaps it was passed on with the suggestion that Thoreau be the one to realize the last sentence, “give a more particular description of this singular pond” — give a description of this singular pond that will particularly and effectively remove it forever from the list of geographical landforms available for use by white people as legitimators of genocide. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

We may remember that indeed there was a “high hill” near Concord, upon which a “barbarous” event had taken place. However, this barbarous event was not the torture and slaughter of innocent white people by savage red people, but was, instead, the murder of Native American women and children by white Concordians. For which, you must refer to the events of 1676.

Walden

Mount Misery

According to Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

in the course of this year: “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

WALTER HARDING’S BIOGRAPHY 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. (Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986) HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1822

This was a year of great drought in Massachusetts. Walden Pond must have been being reduced many feet below its normal levels. Was the sandbar at the neck of the cove already exposed? There would not be another great drought like this in Massachusetts until 1963-1966.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

Much of the home lighting of the period was accomplished by means of patent lamps such as this one:

(One wonders if this was the sort of lamp that Thoreau would use in his shanty at Walden Pond. Walden Pond “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1823

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, HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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 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

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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.30 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.

30. The water level of Walden Pond would be correspondingly low again, and the sandbar again exposed, in the year 2002! HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

“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

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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 NAATURE: 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 MA

“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

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1824

Summer: The Ottoman fleet and troops assembled along the coast of Anatolia, preparing for an attempt to overwhelm the autonomous government established in 1821 on the island of Samos offshore by Lykourgos Logothetis (while Admiral Georgios Sachtouris assembled a Greek fleet to forestall this assault). During a period of very low water at Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau helped boil a kettle of chowder on the sandbar at Bay Henry. Later he would record this is WALDEN Draft D of 1852 going into Draft F of 1853- 1854:31 There is a narrow sand-bar running into it [Walden Pond], with very deep water helped boil some on one side [the south side], on which I ^ boiled a kettle of chowder, ^ more than six about the year 1824 ^ as much as 25 years ago rods from the main shore, ^ more than 25 years ago, which it has not been possible for twenty-five years ^ for twenty years at least to do ^ since.

(There is an explanation for why the water level was so low, exposing the sandbar. This had been the final summer of an extended drought period across the United States beginning in 1818, that was possibly due to what has come to be known among weather scientists as the “PNA” Pacific/North American teleconnection pattern in which a positive phase tends to be associated with southern Pacific Ocean “ENSO” warm El Niño episodes and a negative phase, such as the period between 1818 and 1824, with La Niña episodes.)

31.You shouldn’t suppose that little David was helping his grandmother open any tin cans for their “pic nic” on that sandbar! In this year a tin of roast beef would have borne the following instructions: “Cut round on the top with chisel and hammer.” 1 The wall of the can would have been fully /5th-inch thick and the container –empty– would have weighed a full pound. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

WALDEN: The pond rises and falls, but whether regularly or not, and within what period, nobody knows, though, as usual, many pretend to know. It is commonly higher in the winter and lower in the summer, though not corresponding to the general wet and dryness. I can remember when it was a foot or two lower, and also when it was at least five feet higher, than when I lived by it. There is a narrow sand-bar running into it, with very deep water on one side, on which I helped boil a kettle of chowder, some six rods from the main shore, about the year 1824, which it has not been possible to do for twenty-five years; and on the other hand, my friends used to listen with incredulity when I told them, that a few years later I was accustomed to fish from a secluded cove in the woods, fifteen rods from the only shore they knew, which place was long since converted into a meadow. But the pond has risen steadily for two years, and now, in the summer of ’52, is just five feet higher than when I lived there, or as high as it was thirty years ago, and fishing goes on again in the meadow. This makes a difference of level, at the outside, of six or seven feet; and yet the water shed by the surrounding hills is insignificant in amount, and this overflow must be referred to causes which affect the deep springs. This same summer the pond has begun to fall again. It is remarkable that this fluctuation, whether periodical or not, appears thus to require many years for its accomplishment. I have observed one rise and a part of two falls, and I expect that a dozen or fifteen years hence the water will again be as low as I have ever known it. Flint’s Pond, a mile eastward, allowing for the disturbance occasioned by its inlets and outlets, and the smaller intermediate ponds also, sympathize with Walden, and recently attained their greatest height at the same time with the latter. The same is true, as far as my observation goes, of White Pond. The rise and fall of Walden at long intervals serves this use at least; the water standing at this great height for a year or more, though it makes it difficult to walk round it, kills the shrubs and trees which have sprung up about its edge since the last rise, pitch-pines, birches, alders, aspens, and others, and, falling again, leaves an unobstructed shore; for, unlike many ponds and all waters which are subject to a daily tide, its shore is cleanest when the water is lowest. On the side of the pond next my house, a row of pitch pines fifteen feet high has been killed and tipped over as if by a lever, and thus a stop put to their encroachments; and their size indicates how many years have elapsed since the last rise to this height. By this fluctuation the pond asserts its title to a shore, and thus the shore is shorn, and the trees cannot hold it by right of possession. These are the lips of the lake on which no beard grows. It licks its chaps from time to time. When the water is at its height, the alders, willows, and maples send forth a mass of fibrous red roots several feet long from all sides of their stems in the water, and to the height of three or four feet from the ground, in the effort to maintain themselves; and I have known the high-blueberry bushes about the shore, which commonly produce no fruit, bear an abundant crop under these circumstances. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1825

32 According to Marcel R. Garnier’s L’ANCÊTRE (THE ANCESTOR), it was in about this year that John Guillet went from the Isle of Jersey to Québec in the New World.

Harrison Gray Dyar reached his majority and completed his apprenticeship at the Concord clockmaking shop of Lemuel Curtis on the “Milldam”.

Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau joined the Concord Female Charitable Society. One of the many things this society had done for the local “silent poor” was provide snuff, rice, tea, brandy, and spirits to Zilpah White while she had lived (she had died in 1820) “at the very corner of my bean field” near Walden Pond alone in a cabin, and provide yarn that she could weave so as to have some sort of cash income.

WALDEN: Here, by the very corner of my field, still nearer PEOPLE OF to town, Zilpha, a colored woman, held her little house, where WALDEN she spun linen for townsfolk, making the Walden Woods ring with her shrill singing, for she had a loud and notable voice. At length, in the war of 1812, her dwelling was set on fire by English soldiers, prisoners on parole, when she was away, and her cat and dog and hens were all burned up together. She led a hard life, and somewhat inhumane. One old frequenter of these woods remembers, that as he passed her house one noon he heard her muttering to herself over her gurgling pot, –“Ye are all bones, bones!” I have seen bricks amid the oak copse there.

ZILPAH WHITE

SLAVERY

32. In the Huguenot diaspora, the Guillet family was closely entangled with the Thoreau family. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1828

Thomas Cole painted “View of Monte Video, Seat of Daniel Wadsworth, Esq.” in oil on a 19 1/4 x 26 1/8 inch panel. This painting is currently at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford CT as an 1848 bequest of Daniel Wadsworth:

The painting may assist us in understanding Waldo Emerson’s plan which finances never allowed him to implement, to have Thoreau and Bronson Alcott construct for him a Philosopher’s Tower on Emerson’s Cliff just to the south of Walden Pond, and also Thoreau’s remarks in WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS about having a country seat from which one might be the master of all one surveyed.

WALDEN: Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a house but a sedes, a seat? –better if a country seat. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1830

As required by the legislature, John G. Hales (1785-1832) produced a survey map of Lincoln and Concord. Henry Thoreau would hand-copy this survey of Lincoln (in the survey, Walden Woods appears slightly smaller than on Hales’s 1819 map of the area). Josiah Davis and Charles Merriam of Weston became Directors of the Middlesex Mutual Fire Insurance Company. The Middlesex Mutual Fire Insurance Company was incorporated March 3, and organized March 29, 1826. The Hon. Abiel Heywood was chosen President, and the Hon. Nathan Brooks, Secretary and Treasurer, who, with John Keyes, Daniel Shattuck, Elias Phinney of Lexington, and Daniel Richardson of Tyngsborough, have since been Directors. The other directors have been Samuel Burr, 1826 to 1830; Josiah Davis, from 1830; Micah M. Rutter of East Sudbury, 1826 to 1828; Joshua Page of Bedford, 1826 to 1829; Rufus Hosmer of Stow, from 1829; and Charles Merriam of Weston, from 1830. The first policy was issued May 17, 1826; and the following table will show the amount of business in this excellent institution since that time.33

Year Policies Insured Premium Notes Losses

1827 440 $801,247 $41,276.41 $650.00

1828 226 $387,871 $22,177.47 $100.00

1829 406 $645,673 $37,774.13 $857.74

1830 590 $857,700 $53,173.80 $2,924.50

1831 499 $646,279 $39,954.01 $1,452.53

1832 508 $708,064 $45,184.85 $3,150.75

The population of nearby Lincoln, which in 1820 had been 786, had at this point fallen to 709. 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 33. 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 MA

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, 709.34

The population of nearby Carlisle, which in 1800 had been 634, had at this point fallen to 566. 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.35

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

34. 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.) 35. Ibid. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

August 21, Saturday: In the Concord Yeoman Gazette, Walden Pond was referred to as “Wall’d in.”

WALDEN: Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradition, the oldest people tell me that they heard it in their youth, that anciently the Indians were holding a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one of which the Indians were never guilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named. It has been conjectured that when the hill shook these stones rolled down its side and became the present shore. It is very certain, at any rate, that once there was no pond here, and now there is one; and this Indian fable does not in any respect conflict with the account of that ancient settler whom I have mentioned, who remembers so well when he first came here with his divining rod, saw a thin vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a well here. As for the stones, many still think that they are hardly to be accounted for by the action of the waves on these hills; but I observe that the surrounding hills are remarkably full of the same kind of stones, so that they have been obliged to pile them up in walls on both sides of the railroad cut nearest the pond; and, moreover, there are most stones where the shore is most abrupt; so that, unfortunately, it is no longer a mystery to me. I detect the paver. If the name was not derived from that of some English locality, –Saffron Walden, for instance,– one might suppose that it was called, originally, Walled-in Pond.

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

Walden Pond “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1832

November 24, Saturday: The South Carolina Ordinance of Nullification, nullifying federal tariff enactments. READ THE FULL TEXT

The Philadelphia Chronicle reported that “The locomotive engine build by our townsman, M.W. Baldwin, has proved highly successful.” It appears, however, that the truth is not that simple. The previous day’s successful run was not the first time Old Ironsides had been on the rails. It was merely the first time it had been on the rails, when it had not given up and needed to be pushed along by it crew, and when its crew had not needed to steal wood from farm fences to keep it going. It had managed to cover 3 miles, all the way out to the Union Tavern, and then back 3 miles to town, without once breaking down, and without even a halt except to reverse direction. The railroad announced a regular passenger schedule, and indicated that the steam engine would be used on the days that were likely to be fair, and to avoid getting the engine wet, horses would still be employed during periods of rain or snow.36

Desiring to complete long runs on its 135-mile track after the fall of night, the South Carolina Canal & Railroad Company began to push two small flatcars in front of the locomotive, with the floor of the leading car covered with sand, and with a bonfire of pitch pine burning on top of this sand. I’m not sure whether the intent was for the engineer to see ahead along the tracks, or to make the train more visible to people walking along the tracks, or both.37

After a bad crossing accident in England on the Leicester & Swannington railroad line, engineers began piecemeal to add what was known as a “steam trumpet” to their locomotives. Such a whistle had first been used on stationary engines in England. It did not produce a sound anything like the tones to which we are now accustomed, but a sound that was high, pure, shrill, and harsh. This hostile warning caused no nostalgia and possessing no overtones of wanderlust. Thus Henry Thoreau would note at Walden Pond, that the whistle of the locomotive penetrated his woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard as the engine shouted its warning to get off the track. TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

36.And then Old Ironsides proceeded to work for the next two decades and more. In 1833 Old Ironsides would be officially clocked, on a measured one mile stretch of good solid track, at 58 seconds. I don’t know whether that track was “level” meaning horizontal, or downhill “level” meaning without bumps and curves. The directors of the railroad voted to award the builder, Mathias W. Baldwin, $3,500.00 of the $4,000.00 they had pledged, on grounds that they weren’t completely satisfied. They had asked for a five- ton locomotive and he had built them a seven-ton locomotive. Mr. E.L. Miller of the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company journeyed to Philadelphia PA and contracted with this M.W. Baldwin whose locomotives weren’t good enough, to construct a new locomotive that was better, even better than the British ones – and it was to be named the E.L. Miller. 37.We don’t know when the first headlight was added to a locomotive. We only know that night travel was at first uncommon, and that the first headlight was used prior to 1837 because the Alert was constructed in that year with an approximation of a headlight as original equipment. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

The first locomotive to provide shelter for the engine crew was the Samuel P. Ingraham bought by the Beaver Meadow Railroad. Cabs would not become standard equipment for several years, and were initially unpopular with passengers as the cab structure prevented the passengers from being able to watch the water gauge on the boiler. The mythos of this was that, so long as the passengers could observe the meniscus inside the glass tube, the boiler was not going to explode and scald them to death or cut them to pieces with its cast iron shrapnel. However unpopular engine cabs were with the customers, and however late they came to be incorporated into the engine design, we know that in New England winters it was common for members of the crew to lose fingers, toes, noses, ears to frostbite despite the intense radiant heat coming back from the firebox and boiler, and that it was common for these men to knock together various kinds of wind-shielding structures to make their winter ride endurable. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1833

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1 The 31 /2 inch by 25 inch “Map of Boston and Its Vicinity From Actual Survey by John G. Hales” that had been engraved by Edward Gillingham on the basis of surveys done in 1819 was again republished by Nathan Hale with appropriate alterations. CARTOGRAPHY MAPS OF BOSTON

This offered an image of Waldron Pond (Walden Pond) and Sandy Pond (Flint’s Pond) in a Concord/Lincoln HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

woodland without altering the dimensions of that woodland: HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1835

Washington Irving paid $1,800.00 for a little farm in Tarrytown, New York where he would create the cottage Sunnyside, his “snuggery,” the cottage which would be featured in thousands of colorized Currier and Ives lithographs which would hang framed on the walls of thousands of American homes, as their representation HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

of the American dream.

(Henry Thoreau, who had very carefully studied these things, would be well aware in the crafting of his own HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

“Sweat Equity” account of a writerly retreat –WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS outside Concord– that his readers’ points of comparison with the shanty on Walden Pond would of necessity include famous author Irving’s quite nifty “snuggery” outside Tarrytown (not to mention his quite nifty perch in the Alhambra of Granada, Spain), famous author Scott’s famous and quite grandiose “New Money” Abbotsford in Scotland, and famous author Byron’s famous and quite ruined “Old Money” Newstead Abbey in England. In reading WALDEN now, we mustn’t lose sight of these historical points of comparison!)

Four Approaches to the Writer’s Estate

Approach “Old Money” “New Money” “Sweat Equity” “Just Enough Money”

Writer Lord Byron Sir Walter Scott Henry Thoreau Virginia Wolff

Estate Newstead Abbey Abbotsford Walden Pond A Room of One’s Own Results Bailout Insolvency Immortality Feminism HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

THE CRAYON MISCELLANY. BY THE AUTHOR OF THE SKETCH BOOK. NO. 2. CONTAINING ABBOTSFORD AND NEWSTEAD ABBEY (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Blanchard). THE CRAYON MISCELLANY

IN ABOUT THIS TIMEFRAME Thoreau WOULD TAKE NOTES ON Irving’s CRAYON MISCELLANY IN HIS “MISCELLANEOUS READING NOTES FOR 1836-1842” (NOW STORED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA, CHARLOTTESVILLE). HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

George Gordon, Lord Byron’s Newstead Abbey

Sir Walter Scott’s Abbotsford

The 1st of Irving’s trilogy on the prairies and the fur trade, A TOUR OF THE PRAIRIES. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1837

The Stephens cup whistle was installed on a locomotive being constructed in Paterson NJ, the Sandusky. And the development of a railroad whistle code began, which would eventually result in the following signals (here “o” will be used to indicate a brief scream, “–” a longer one):

o ...... Apply brakes. Stop. – – ...... Release brakes. Proceed. – ooo...... Flagman protect rear of train. – – – – ...... Flagman may return from west or south. – – – – – . . . . . Flagman may return from east or north. ooo...... When standing, back. Answer to signal to back. When running, answer to signal to stop at next passenger station. oooo ...... Call for signals. – oo ...... When the train is on a single track, to call attention of engine and train crews of trains of the same class, inferior trains and yard engines and of trains at train order meeting points, to signals displayed for a following section. If not answered by a train, the train displaying the signals must stop and ascertain the cause. When the train is on two or more tracks, to call attention of engine and train crews of trains of the same class, inferior trains moving in the same direction, and yard engines to signals displayed for a following section. oo ...... Answer to “– oo” or any signal not otherwise provided for. – – o – ...... Approaching public crossings at grade. To be prolonged or repeated until the crossing is reached. –––––- ...... Approaching station, junctions, railroad crossings at grade, etc., as may be required. – – o ...... Approaching meeting or waiting points. o – ...... Inspect train line for leak or for brakes sticking. o o o o o o o . . . To alert persons on the track, or frighten livestock off the track, a succession of short blasts were used.

The locomotive Alert was the first constructed with an approximation of a headlight as original equipment, so HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

it could pull trains at night as well as during the day. The locomotive Sandusky was the first constructed with a “steam trumpet” (whistle) as original equipment, and this novelty so enthralled one of the purchasing company’s executives, a Mr. J.H. James, that during its initial trials he tootled the poor engine repeatedly out of steam and caused it to appear deficient in pulling power. “Hey, so I’m sorry, alright?” Bear in mind that this whistle on the Sandusky, and the ones which had since 1833 been installed piecemeal on existing engines by various individual engineers, did not sound anything like the ones to which we are now accustomed. The early steam trumpet produced a sound that was high, pure, shrill, and harsh. Its hostile scream caused no nostalgia and possessing no overtones of wanderlust. Henry Thoreau would say that at Walden Pond, the whistle of the locomotive penetrated his woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard as the engine shouted its warning to get off the track. Such a whistle had first been used on stationary engines in England, and had then started to be added to English locomotives after a bad crossing accident in 1833 on the Leicester & Swannington line. The echoing locomotive blast we now know would not come into use in the 1880s, and thus the sound which we now think of as characteristic of trains was not at all associated with the trains of Thoreau’s period. The later whistles would, by combining several tones, produce a mellower sound, and would thus cause the nomenclature to change from “steam trumpet” to “chime whistle.” TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

Just as for many years automobiles were manufactured with windshields of ordinary glass, ready to shatter into slashing shards and cut the passengers’ faces in the slightest accident, because auto manufacturers had no incentive to install safety glass at a somewhat greater but invisible expense, so also in the early days of railroading, locomotives were built entirely without braking systems. Wasting forward momentum was simply something which was not to be contemplated. In a panic situation the crew would simply leap from the train down the embankments and allow the train to go on its way to whatever obstruction they had glimpsed ahead. Braking first came into existence in a haphazard manner, by crew members thrusting chunks of wood into the spokes of a slowly rolling wheel to lock it at a train station, making it grate and screech against the track and bringing the train ever so slowly to a standstill. Then, when it became clear that there were sound financial reasons why trains needed to back up, reverse gears were incorporated into engine design, and the engineers quickly learned that they could gradually slow down their train by throwing the engine into reverse. Then, in 1837, the Alert was built with a wagon-type wheel brake installed on its engine tender, for use by the fireman. In really desperate situations, when the engineer threw the engine into reverse, his fireman would not merely push on this lever —which caused blocks of wood to rub against the outside of the tender wheels— but stand upon the lever and bounce upon it in order to apply maximum stopping pressure.

This locomotive, manufactured in 1837, weighed over 12 tons and was over 13 feet long with its smokestack standing more than 11 feet above the rails. Its piston was fully a foot across and it was capable of pulling as much as a team of 18 draught horses: HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1841

April: A “winged cat” came to Gilian Baker’s farm in Lincoln near Walden Pond.

WALDEN: Many a village Bose, fit only to course a mud-turtle in a victualling cellar, sported his heavy quarters in the woods, DOG without the knowledge of his master, and ineffectually smelled at old fox burrows and woodchucks’ holes; led perchance by some slight cur which nimbly threaded the wood, and might still inspire a natural terror in its denizens; –now far behind his guide, barking like a canine bull toward some small squirrel which had treed itself for scrutiny, then, cantering off, bending the bushes with his weight, imagining that he is on the track of some stray member of the gerbille family. Once I was surprised to see a cat walking along the stony shore of the pond, for they rarely wander so far from home. The surprise was mutual. Nevertheless the most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular inhabitants. Once, when berrying, I met with a cat with young kittens in the woods, quite wild, and they all, like their mother, CAT had their backs up and were fiercely spitting at me. A few years before I lived in the woods there was what was called a “winged cat” in one of the farm-houses in Lincoln nearest the pond, Mr. Gilian Baker’s. When I called to see her in June, 1842, she was gone a-hunting in the woods, as was her wont, (I am not sure whether it was a male or female, and so use the more common pronoun,) but her mistress told me that she came into the neighborhood a little more than a year before, in April, and was finally taken into their house; that she was of a dark brownish-gray color, with a white spot on her throat, and white feet, and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winter the fur grew thick and flatted out along her sides, forming strips ten or twelve inches long by two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff, the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring these appendages dropped off. They gave me a pair of her “wings,” which I keep still. There is no appearance of a membrane about them. Some thought it was part flying-squirrel or some other wild animal, which is not impossible, for, according to naturalists, prolific hybrids have been produced by the union of the marten and domestic cat. This would have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if I had kept any; for why should not a poet’s cat be winged as well as his horse?

CATS WITH WINGS HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1842

June: Henry Thoreau visited Gilian Baker’s farm in Lincoln near Walden Pond to see the “winged cat” that resided there.38

CATS WITH WINGS HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

38. A similar cat has been observed in West Virginia in 1959. Now that we are aware that genes can be transferred from species to species by viruses (not to mention, by pipette), we find we do not have so great a difficulty in believing what our eyes tell us. It is entirely to Thoreau’s credit that he was able to observe and notice even before the existence of a theory which would legitimate his observation! —May we all develop such skill!

There is a report on winged cats, that mentions Thoreau, at: http://www.messybeast.com/winged-cats.htm Although this is possibly the earliest report of a winged cat, an undated, but old, winged cat was stuffed and mounted in the Niagara Valley, with bony structures near its shoulder blades covered with flaps of skin. The specimen seems genuine, but what the bony structures are is unknown (possibly they are extra limbs). There are around 138 reported sightings of winged cats, in 28 of which there exists physical evidence. There are at least 20 photographs and one video. The impression of “wings” can arise in pet Persians and other longhaired breeds due to fur that mats if the pets are not being adequately groomed by their owner. There also is a rare hereditary medical condition called Feline Cutaneous Asthenia (FCA) that is related to “elastic skin” conditions documented in other animals, and in humans. The skin on the cat’s shoulders, back, and haunches, is abnormally elastic. Even stroking the skin can cause it to stretch. The stretching skin forms pendulous folds or flaps which sometimes contain muscle fibres, enabling them to be moved. They cannot be flapped like a bird’s wing since the flaps do not contain any supporting bones nor any joints. Cutaneous Asthenia literally means “weak skin” and refers to the fragility of the skin. It is also called “dermatoproxy” and “hereditary skin fragility.” There are similar conditions in humans, dogs, mink, horses, cattle and sheep. In cattle and sheep the term “dermatosparaxis” (“torn skin”) is used. In horses a similar condition is called “collagen dysplasia.” It is also known as “cutis elastica” (“elastic skin”). The human form is called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS) and occurs in several different forms. Elastic- skinned people have exhibited themselves as freaks, demonstrating the condition by stretching handfuls of their hyperextensible skin away from their bodies. Arthur Loose the “Rubber Skinned Man,” whose cheeks and jowls hung in pendulous folds 8 inches long, and James Morris the original “India Rubber Man,” who could pull his elastic skin 18 inches from his body, may well have been examples. As the term dermatosparaxis implies, the skin is also abnormally fragile. It tears at the slightest contact with anything sharp — rough surfaces, or even the cat’s own claws when scratching or grooming itself. Like the rest of the cat’s skin, the wing-like projections are covered in fur. If they incorporate sufficient muscle fibres, they can be raised up and down. An interesting aspect of this condition is that the flaps of skin peel off very easily, usually without causing bleeding. This could explain some of the reports of winged cats who suddenly “moulted” their wings, but whose mats were not due to matted fur. The pieces of stretched skin simply slough off. In mammals, the skin comprises two principal layers. The outermost layer, the epidermis, is relatively thin. Below the epidermis is the dermis which is thicker and contains connective tissue. The dermis provides support and packing as well as containing nerves and blood vessels. The dermis consists largely of fibres made mostly of a protein called collagen. Collagen binds the cells of the dermis together. Mammals with Cutaneous Asthenia have defective collagen in certain areas of the skin, this makes it incapable of functioning effectively as tissue packing. As a result, the is extremely flexible and fragile in the affected areas. Most usually affected areas are the shoulders, back and haunches and the stretching gives the appearance of wings sprouting from these areas. Where the defect occurs in regions containing sufficient musculature so that muscle is included in the flaps of skin, the wings can even be moved slightly, providing an explanation for the reports of cats able to lift or move their wings. Even where the wings lack musculature, they would naturally bounce up and down as the cat ran, and give the impression of flapping. A recessive autosomic (non-sex linked) variant feline cutaneous asthenia, which in the homozygous state is apparently lethal, has been discovered in cat breeds with Siamese ancestry. CATS WITH WINGS HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1843

Thomas Wyman died. It was at the settlement of the Wyman estate that Waldo Emerson purchased his plot of woodland with its point touching the shore of Walden Pond, where Henry Thoreau would squat.

WALDEN: Farther in the woods than any of these, where the road PEOPLE OF approaches nearest to the pond, Wyman the potter squatted, and WALDEN furnished his townsmen with earthen ware, and left descendants to succeed him. Neither were they rich in worldly goods, holding the land by sufferance while they lived; and there often the sheriff came in vain to collect the taxes, and “attached a chip,” for form’s sake, as I have read in his accounts, there being nothing else that he could lay his hands on. One day in midsummer, when I was hoeing, a man who was carrying a load of pottery to market stopped his horse against my field and inquired concerning Wyman the younger. He had long ago bought a potter’s wheel of him, and wished to know what had become of him. I had read of the potter’s clay and wheel in Scripture, but it had never occurred to me that the pots we use were not such as had come down unbroken from those days, or grown on trees like gourds somewhere, and I was pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever practised in my neighborhood.

THOMAS WYMAN “Wyman Meadow” by Thoreau’s shanty near the pond is named for this potter: “I suspect that a basal lens of silty clay near its edge gave him access to the raw material he needed.” “Gradually, all four of Walden’s kettles became sealed with a layer of mineral sediment [fine loess got blown around a whole lot, during the long retreat of the glacier] shaped like a contact lens, being thickest and sandiest at the base, silty near the middle, and clay-rich near the tapering edges. The vernacular term “clay pit” often refers to excavations into such layers, which are almost always present beneath hollows, making them responsible for many vernal pools. Thoreau noted several on Cape Cod that perched rainwater well above local aquifers.” We can learn a great deal about Thoreau’s intent in the above paragraph in WALDEN by paying attention to his choice of the term “fictile.” This is how Noah Webster had defined this unusual term in 1828: FIC’TILE, a. [L. fictilis, from fictus, fingo, to feign.] Molded into form by art; manufactured by the potter. Fictile earth is more fragile than crude earth. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

About the only thing this unusual term has going for it in this context is that it is a word remarkably similar to “fictive.” Wyman the potter had been in Walden Woods practicing the “fictile” art by turning new pots — because older ones were cracked. Thoreau was in Walden Woods practicing the “fictive” art by turning new tropes because older ones were all worn out. Neither pots nor tropes grow on trees, sic, which is why new ones must always be being turned. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

June 1 (Pentecost Thursday): Joseph Smith, Jr. “got married with” Elvira Anie Cowles.

Go East, 46-year-old black woman, go East: Isabella39 experienced a command to “go east” and testify, adopted the monicker Sojourner Truth, and departed New-York with but an hour’s notice, with two York shillings in her pocket, carrying her worldly belongings in a pillowcase, to move on foot through Long Island and Connecticut, testifying to whatever audiences she was able to attract. –It is the life of a wandering evangelist, is mine. In the course of attending Millerite meetings to testify, she would accommodate to a number of the apocalyptic tenets of that group.

39. Isabella Bomefree van Wagenen, “Bomefree” being the name of her first husband which by virtue of enslavement she had been denied, and “van Wagenen” being the name of the white family which she assumed and used for a number of years. (“Wagener” was a consistent misspelling perpetrated by the printer of the first version of her NARRATIVE in 1850.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

As Louisa May Alcott has reported in later life, on this same day quite another journey was taking place:

On the first day of June, 1843, a large wagon, drawn by a small horse and containing a motley load, went lumbering over certain New England hills, with the pleasing accompaniments of wind, rain and hail. A serene man with a serene child upon his knee was driving, or rather being driven, for the small horse had it all his own way. Behind a small boy, embracing a bust of Socrates, was an energetic looking woman, with a benevolent brow, satirical mouth and eyes full of hope and courage. A baby reposed upon her lap, a mirror leaned against her knee, a basket of provisions danced about her feet, and she struggled with a large, unruly umbrella, with which she tried to cover every one but herself. Twilight began to fall, and the rain came down in a despondent drizzle, but the calm man gazed as tranquilly into the fog as if he beheld a radiant bow of promise spanning the gray sky.

The Consociate Family of Bronson Alcott was on its way from Concord to “Fruitlands” on Prospect Hill in Harvard, Massachusetts, in the district then known politely as “Still River North” and impolitely as “Hog Street,” with its prospect of Wachusett and Mount Monadnock and its prospect of “ideals without feet or

hands” (an apt phrase said to have been created by Waldo Emerson,40 who himself, if anyone ever metaphorically lacked them, metaphorically lacked feet and hands and other essential body parts), ideals such as “a family in harmony with the primitive instincts of man.” In her fictional account of the journey, Louisa May Alcott invented an additional child and placed it on her father’s knee, obviously where she would have wanted to be, and made it a “serene” child, what she never was but longed to be. The bust of Socrates actually rode between the father Bronson, who was holding the reins, and Charles Lane, on the wagon’s bench. There was no room in this wagon for William Lane or for Anna Alcott, who for all 14 miles of the journey had to

40. But we may note that in Bronson Alcott’s journal for Week 45 in November 1837, Alcott had himself termed himself “an Idea without hands.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

walk alongside it.

At this point the Association of Industry and Education had 113 members, a large proportion of whom were children:

COMMUNITARIANISM Membership

April 1842 41 May 1842 65 End of 1842 83 June 1843 113 Winter 1844 120 Spring 1845 120

Having had enough after less than two months of attempting to teach almost entirely without teaching supplies and without adequate classroom space, Sophia Foord threatened to resign as teacher at the Association. (Promises would be made that would keep her teaching while efforts were made to convert a barn into classrooms, but the problem eventually would be resolved by the need of the community to use its children as a cheap source of incessant factory labor. After Miss Foord left Northampton, she became tutor to the children of the Chase family (Elizabeth Buffum Chace) of Valley Falls, Rhode Island; “she taught botany; she walked with the children over the fields … and made her pupils observe the geographical features of the pond and its banks, and carefully taught them to estimate distances by sight.”)

Railroad service to Concord began. Preliminary earthmoving crews, and then crossties and rails crews, had reached Concord at the rate of 33 feet per day, filling in Walden Pond’s south-west arm to give it its present HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

shape. 1,000 Irishmen were earning $0.50 or $0.60 for bonebreaking 16-hour days of labor. Waldo Emerson was elated because he much preferred riding in the railroad coach to riding in the stage coach which offered a “ludicrous pathetic tragical picture” (his comment from April 15, 1834; I don’t know whether he meant that he felt that he presented a ludicrous pathetic tragical appearance while riding on the stage coach or that the view from the stage coach window presented him with a ludicrous pathetic tragical perspective). He found, however, that when a philosopher rides the railroad “Ideal Philosophy takes place at once” as “men & trees & barns whiz by you as fast as the leaves of a dictionary” and this helps in grasping the real impermanence of matter: “hitherto esteemed symbols of stability do absolutely dance by you” and we experience “the sensations of a swallow who skims by trees & bushes with about the same speed” (June 10, 1834). By this time, with the railroad actually in Concord, Emerson had decided that “Machinery & Transcendentalism agree well.”41

“[The railroad will] only encourage the common people to move about needlessly.” — Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington

41. EMERSON’S JOURNALS AND MISCELLANEOUS NOTEBOOKS 4: 277, 4:296, 8:397. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

October 6, Friday: Nathaniel Hawthorne went for a hike in the bucolic Concord countryside:

I took a solitary walk to Walden Pond. It was a cool, north-west windy day, with heavy clouds rolling and tumbling about the sky, but still a prevalence of genial autumn sunshine. The fields are still green, and the great masses of the woods have not yet assumed their many-colored garments; but here and there, are solitary oaks of a deep, substantial red, or maples of a more brilliant hue, or chestnuts, either yellow or of a tenderer green than in summer. Some trees seem to return to their hue of May or early July, before they put on their brighter autumnal tints. In some places, along the borders of low and moist land, a whole range of trees were clothed in the perfect gorgeousness of autumn, of all shades of brilliant color, looking like the palette on which Nature was arranging the tints wherewith to paint a picture. These hues appeared to be thrown together without a design; and yet there was perfect harmony among them, and a softness and delicacy made up of a thousand different brightnesses. Walden Pond was clear and beautiful, as usual. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

(Did he see what Cindy Kassab saw, that is depicted in her painting?)

In the course of his excursion the author discovered something of great interest and relevance, that even some Irish day-laborers have a life and loved ones and need to have somewhere for their families to lay their heads (see next page). According to the author’s AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS, he got lost on his way home to the Old Manse:

According to my invariable custom, I mistook my way, and emerging upon a road, I turned my back, instead of my face, toward Concord, and walked on very diligently, till a guide-board informed me of my mistake. I then turned about, and was shortly overtaken by an old yeoman in a chaise, who kindly offered me a ride, and shortly set me down in the village.

This has now all been replayed for us, on the last page of Part II: TRAVELING IN STYLE of the Los Angeles Times Magazine for October 16, 1994. The anonymous article, allegedly or ostensibly dealing with early literary appreciation of the aesthetics of hiking through the woods to “Walden Pond,” is facing an advertisement of a cruise from La-La Land to Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlán42, and Cabo San Lucas on the good 42. Minus, of course, the Spanish acute accent in the Times newspaper, which does not truck with foreigners or their languages. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

In a small and secluded dell, that opens upon the most beautiful cove of the whole lake, there is a little hamlet of huts or shanties, inhabited by the Irish people who are at work upon the rail-road. There are three or four of these habitations, the very rudest, I should imagine, that civilized men ever made for themselves, constructed of rough boards, with protruding ends. Against some of them the earth is heaped up to the roof, or nearly so; and when the grass has had time to sprout upon them, they will look like small natural hillocks, or a species of ant-hill, or something in which Nature has a larger share than man. These huts are placed beneath the trees, (oaks, walnuts, and white pines) wherever the trunks give them space to stand; and by thus adapting themselves to natural interstices instead of making new ones, they do not break or disturb the solitude and seclusion of the place. Voices are heard, and the shouts and laughter of the children, who play about like the sunbeams that come down through the branches. Women are washing beneath the trees, and long lines of whitened clothes are extended from tree to tree, fluttering and gambolling in the breeze. A pig, in a stye even more extemporary than the shanties, is grunting, and poking his snout through the clefts of his habitation. The household pots and kettles are seen at the doors, and a glance within shows the rough benches that serve for chairs, and the bed upon the floor. The visiter’s nose takes note of the fragrance of a pipe. And yet, with all these homely items, the repose and sanctity of the old wood do not seem to be destroyed or prophaned; she overshadows these poor people, and assimilates them, somehow or other, to the character of her natural inhabitants. Their presence did not shock me, any more than if I had merely discovered a squirrel’s nest in a tree. To be sure, it is a torment to see the great, high, ugly embankment of the railroad, which is here protruding itself into the lake, or along its margin, in close vicinity to this picturesque little hamlet. I have seldom seen anything more beautiful than the cove, on the border of which the huts are situated; and the more I looked, the lovelier it grew. The trees overshadowed it deeply; but on the one side there was some brilliant shrubbery which seemed to light up the whole picture with the effect of a sweet and melancholy smile. I felt as if spirits were there –or as if these shrubs had a spiritual life– in short, the impression was undefinable; and after gazing and musing a good while, I retraced my steps through the Irish hamlet, and plodded on along a wood-path. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

ship Nordic Prince, and a cruise to Catalina and then Ensenada on its sister ship Viking Serenade, and headlines the idea that Thoreau Didn’t Invent This Celebrated Body of Water. Years Before He Moved There, Another Noted Writer Enjoyed Its Charms.

Following such an egregious headline, the article in the L.A. Times inserts anonymous remarks in italic type:

Sometimes the footsteps of the famous overlap. When Henry David Thoreau built his cabin in 1845 at Walden Pond, near Concord, Mass., the pond itself and the surrounding woods were already well-known to his contemporaries. Ralph Waldo Emerson owned the land on which the pond stood, and Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the writer and editor Margaret Fuller and other literary lights of the time frequented the area. In the edited excerpt below, Hawthorne (1804-1864) –who had not yet written THE SCARLET LETTER, THE HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES, THE MARBLE FAUN and the other books by which he is remembered– describes a stroll through the autumn-bright woods and a visit to the pond in the early 1840s. The most surprising aspect of the account, which was written in 1843, is the author’s discovery of a small settlement of environmentally sensitive Irish railroad workers living at the edge of the pond.

Well, one shouldn’t come down too hard on the efforts of some newspaper peckerwood, who is obviously merely attempting to draw a paycheck by devising some sort of “news-hook” for a freebie citation from public- HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

domain 19th Century sources, intended merely as another page-filler between the pretty travel ads. –But who, in the first place, is it, specifically, by name, who has had this idea that is here headlined, that Thoreau did “Invent” Walden Pond, that “Celebrated Body of Water”? And why precisely is it, that we should now be temporizing about the First Literary Appreciation of a body of water that has existed in that precise spot since the melting of the buried blocks of ice left behind by the latest glacial era, something like 18 millennia ago? And how is it that this news maven has created the perception that before Thoreau went out to Walden Pond to build his shanty in late March of the following spring season, it was “literary lights of the time” such as Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller who had “frequented the area”? Presumably this newsie is unaware that Henry Thoreau was “frequenting” that pond and those woods as a little child as much as two decades before Hawthorne had ever even visited Concord:

and presumably this newsie is likewise unaware that it was the adult surveyor of woodlots Thoreau who had in fact recommended to Emerson that he purchase these several woodlots with some frontage on Walden Pond,43 and is likewise unaware that Thoreau had had his little homemade boat Red Jacket on Walden Pond for some years and had, long before, taken literary light Fuller for a row on this pond in this boat, and is likewise oblivious to the fact that Thoreau had written about his experiences at Walden Pond many, many times in his journal before the Hawthornes ever considered moving to Concord for the cheap rent at the vacant Old Manse,44 and writing about his daily experiences in his own unpublished journal, not to speak of the fact that at the juncture at which Hawthorne witnessed these oh-so-picturesque shacks for the first time, these families of “railroad workers” which they had sheltered from the elements were needing –quite unbeknownst to the self-centered Hawthorne– to abandon their habitations and shoulder what of their scant possessions they could carry upon their backs, and trudge on down the American tracks which they had helped to construct and beneath which some of them in fact lay buried — because the heavy work in this area had been completed and they were all by that time without steady work and, if they had elected to remain there in bucolic Walden Woods next to bucolic Walden Pond, beyond the Concord Alms House and Poor Farm to which they were of course not eligible to have recourse, they would have eventually starved or frozen (whichever came first). Perhaps the newshawks are also innocent of an understanding that, as Thoreau most carefully described in 43. Not, incidentally, “the land on which the pond stood,” a phrase which is quite remarkable not only as an impoverished simplification but also as an impoverished metaphor. In point of fact, the place on the pond where Thoreau kept his Red Jacket, and engaged in his morning baptisms, and dipped his drinking water, was on the adjacent woodlot belonging to Cyrus Hubbard rather than on Emerson’s woodlot. One reason for locating the shanty so far back from the shoreline would have been to position it within one of the surviving clumps of pine trees, the terrain not having been at that time so packed with trees as it now is, but another reason would have been to keep it within the margins of the Emerson property. And anyway, Emerson did not begin to purchase these woodlots with money from his dead wife’s estate until about a year after this initial visit by Nathaniel Hawthorne, so here again our hapless news flack has gotten his or her chronology back-assward. 44. Not all of which he bothered to pay, by the way. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, one of these shanties Hawthorne saw, the one pertaining to the departing James Collins family, would be purchased by Thoreau for its construction materials to use in the creation of his own anti-desperation shanty, on the hill-edge down on Bay Henry, etc., etc.

A 19th-Century Irish shanty in the Merrimack Valley

Such analyses seem entirely to avoid the fact that one object of Thoreau’s constructing this shanty was to demonstrate that it was possible, with care, to construct a healthful and clean and comfortable abode at an expense that anyone might afford, and thus to furnish these impoverished refugees of the potato famine with an inspirational model for imitation.45 And if “the surrounding woods were already well-known to his [Henry Thoreau’s] contemporaries” then we are left with an interesting “how-cum” about Hawthorne getting himself so turned around and lost in these surrounding woods at the end of this quoted piece from his AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS that, as the newspaper confesses, he had to ask for directions and had to be offered a lift back home to civilization! Just precisely how compatible is that with such terminology as “already well- known”? –Face it, most members of the Brahmin overcaste of “literary lights of the time,” with which Thoreau the offspring of a peasant or tradesfamily had to deal, wouldn’t have been able to find their own asses had they been privileged to hunt for them with both hands. Over and above all that, we may marvel at the casualness of the newspaper’s characterization of these desperately poor families of refugees of a foreign famine, forced to attempt to live on this sandy, virtually barren soil among the pines in dark Walden Woods where they could not conceivably have created productive cottage gardens, while their men had labored for like $0.73 the day for 18 hours of exhausting and quite dangerous rude labor, as, now get this, “environmentally sensitive.” Come on, newspaper people, “environmentally sensitive,” that’s for proper WASPs whose lives are not at constant risk, people who suppose that they can save the planet by sorting out their green empties from their clear empties — people like the ones who purchase your cruise tickets on the Viking Serenade and the Nordic Prince and the Love Boat! While one is at this sort of historical redactionism one might as well characterize the nigger-hating, nigger-baiting “Plug Ugly” Irish mob actions of the Boston urban hub of this period as having been, in actuality, mere prototype protests against the wickedness of chattel slavery! As a retort to this sort of newspaper-PC rewriting of history, a retort which might also be able to pass

45. In fact Waldo Emerson eventually sold Thoreau’s empty shanty to one of them, his drunken Irish gardener Hugh Whelan, to shelter this man’s family. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

muster as an attempt at good humor, we might mention that among these “environmentally sensitive” Irishmen it was little Johnny Riordan of Concord’s Riordan Family who was the most environmentally sensitive of all — because in the New England turn of seasons it was getting cold and his little toes were turning blue.46 If one perceives anything at all about “sensitivity” in the quoted passage from Hawthorne’s literary notebook, it is not sensitivity but insensitivity which one perceives — originally, we can here perceive very starkly that author’s notorious insensitivity to the problems of others, and, now, we are given an opportunity to perceive this news person’s utter insensitivity to Hawthorne’s having chosen to depict the plight of these refugees as merely picturesque.47

And in fair days as well as foul we walked up the country — until from Merrimack it became the Pemigewasset that leaped by our side — and when we had passed its fountain-head the wild Amonoosuck whose puny channel we crossed at a stride guiding us to its distant source among the mountains until without its guidance we reached the summit of agiocochook. But why should we take the reader who may have been tenderly nurtured — through that rude country — where the crags are steep and the inns none of the best, and many a rude blast would have to be encountered on the mountain side. (FD 82-83)

We don’t know precisely how many people have starved to death or, weakened by starvation, succumbed to diarrhea and fever or to cholera in Ireland during the ensuing period, but we do know that the first great die-

46. Refer to Thoreau’s poem about Johnny’s plight during the early winter of 1850 and to his carrying a cloak to Johnny in the late winter of 1851-1852: “I found that the shanty was warmed by the simple social relations of the Irish.” Thoreau’s good attitude of compassion and involvement contrasts sufficiently with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s attitude of aestheticism and disengagement to remind one of the following distinction which Simone Weil drew during WWII in her New York notebook:

Natural piety consists in helping someone in misfortune so as not to be obliged to think about him any more, or for the pleasure of feeling the distance between him and oneself. It is a form of cruelty which is contrary only in its outward effects to cruelty in the ordinary sense. Such, no doubt, was the clemency of Caesar. Compassion consists in paying attention to an afflicted man and identifying oneself with him in thought. It then follows that one feeds him automatically if he is hungry, just as one feeds oneself. Bread given in this way is the effect and the sign of compassion.

47. Professor Walter Roy Harding considered that Thoreau, in WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, wrote disparagingly of the Irish, although, as he got to know them personally, he changed his mind about them and became their defender. He commented that why Thoreau did not then excise his disparaging remarks is not known. So the question would be, did Thoreau in fact write disparagingly of the fugitives from this ecological disaster, the Irish Potato Famine? Or was Harding quite mistaken here, misconstruing for derogation what in fact was mere frank description? And, was the impact of this episode in our human history the direct result of the ecological disaster, the late blight, or was it instead the direct result of a mean and contemptible English social policy — and was Thoreau aware of and contemptuous of this political causation? HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

off would occur during the winter of 1846-1847. A table prepared after the fact by Census Commissioners,

presented here, in all probability under-estimates the mortality because of the manner in which they collected data: for a family all of whose members succumbed zero deaths would be tabulated. Of the total number of deaths, which would be between 500,000 and 1,500,000, the percentage of that total which would occur in each year probably worked out to something like this (the figures shown for 1849 are the result of a cholera HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

epidemic in Connacht, Leinster, and Munster, as well as of the general starvation):

Mortality, expressed as %ages of the 1841 Population Year %

1842 5.1%

1843 5.2%

1844 5.6%

1845 6.4%

1846 9.1%

1847 18.5%

1848 15.4%

1849 17.9%

1850 12.2% HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1844

April 30, Tuesday: In a letter of this date from Waldo Emerson to Samuel Gray Ward of Lenox, Massachusetts, we learn that “Mr Thoreau is building himself a solitary house by Walden Pond.” TIMELINE OF WALDEN

At approximately 1PM on this day, however, cooking their noon meal of freshly caught fish during one of the most serious droughts that Concord had experienced, Henry Thoreau and Edward Sherman Hoar, Harvard senior and scion of Concord’s “royal family,” set a cooking fire in a stump on the bank of a stream that set fire to dry grass that caused a forest fire to go roaring up into Walden Woods. Over a hundred acres would be burnt over on this day, including the totality of Fair Haven Hill. The Hoars would eventually reimburse the owners of the wood for their share of the damages that had been done, the Thoreaus would not. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

The loss Thoreau had helped cause was on the order of $2,000.00, which at that time was approximately the value of two really fine new houses facing Concord common. And the Hoar family seems to have made a cash payment to the financially injured parties –the Hubbard brothers Cyrus and Darius, and A.H. Wheeler– while we know that the Thoreaus instead elected to conspicuously, promptly, and locally spend their surplus money by embarking on the construction of a new home. The “Texas” house cost the family $25.00 for the lot, $475.00 for construction materials, and $600.00 for labor. FIRE

It would not be until June 1850 that Thoreau would be able to deal with his responsibility for this forest HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

fire.48 HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

SETTING FIRE TO THE WOODS (WRITTEN IN 1850) I once set fire to the woods. Having set out, one April day, to go to the sources of Concord River in a boat with a single companion, meaning to camp on the bank at night or seek a lodging in some neighboring country inn or farmhouse, we took fishing tackle with us that we might fitly procure our food from the stream, Indian-like. At the shoemaker’s near the river, we obtained a match, which we had forgotten. Though it was thus early in the spring, the river was low, for there had not been much rain, and we succeeded in catching a mess of fish sufficient for our dinner before we had left the town, and by the shores of Fair Haven Pond we proceeded to cook them. The earth was uncommonly dry, and our fire, kindled far from the woods in a sunny recess in the hillside on the east of the pond, suddenly caught the dry grass of the previous year which grew about the stump on which it was kindled. We sprang to extinguish it at first with our hands and feet, and then we fought it with a board obtained from the boat, but in a few minutes it was beyond our reach; being on the side of a hill, it spread rapidly upward, through the long, dry, wiry grass interspersed with bushes. “Well, where will this end?” asked my companion. I saw that it might be bounded by Well Meadow Brook on one side, but would, perchance, go to the village side of the brook. “It will go to town,” I answered. While my companion took the boat back down the river, I set out through the woods to inform the owners and to raise the town. The fire had already spread a dozen rods on every side and went leaping and crackling wildly and irreclaimably toward the wood. That way went the flames with wild delight, and we felt that we had no control over the demonic creature to which we had given birth. We had kindled many fires in the woods before, burning a clear space in the grass, without ever kindling such a fire as this. As I ran toward the town through the woods, I could see the smoke over the woods behind me marking the spot and the progress of the flames. The first farmer whom I met driving a team, after leaving the woods, inquired the cause of the smoke. I told him. 48. This was the illustration used by Edmund A. Schofield in the Thoreau Research Newsletter 2, 3 of July 1991 to show the extent of the forest fire Thoreau and Edward Sherman Hoar caused in April 1844.

Consider also Wang Yufeng, an 18-year-old transient laborer in the national forest whose carelessness with his brush cutter would set off the enormous Black Dragon fire in northern Manchuria in 1987 – a fire far larger than the two-thousand-square-mile fire of 1918 near Duluth, Minnesota which would take nearly 400 lives. Wang would be shown on television at his trial, sitting in a little wood-barred cage with his hands manacled. For refueling the machine before it had cooled off, and thus starting a fire which consumed an area, along the border between China and Russia, the size of Ireland, he would serve six and a half years in prison. (Salisbury, Harrison E., 1989, THE GREAT BLACK DRAGON FIRE: A CHINESE INFERNO, Little, Brown, Boston.)

We might usefully compare Thoreau’s reaction to his having set this forest fire with the feelings of guilt that Samuel Langhorn Clemens (Mark Twain) was experiencing during the same timeframe, after a jailed tramp set his prison cell on fire, burning himself to death. Sam had given him the matches! He “remembered” this hoosegow in his writings only as a place of truth and heroism, as the place where Tom Sawyer saved Muff by testifying against the real murderer, Injun Joe. When he would revisit this spot on a quiet Sunday morning in the spring of 1882, he would be already 47 years old. You can read about his reaction to this return to an early scene of importance in THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN, written at the end of his life and published in 1917. AUTOBIOGRAPHY HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

“Well,” said he, “it is none of my stuff,” and drove along. The next I met was the owner in his field, with whom I returned at once to the woods, running all the way. I had already run two miles. When at length we got into the neighborhood of the flames, we met a carpenter who had been hewing timber, an infirm man who had been driven off by the fire, fleeing with his axe. The farmer returned to hasten more assistance. I, who was spent with running, remained. What could I do alone against a front of flame half a mile wide? I walked slowly through the wood to Fair Haven Cliff, climbed to the highest rock, and sat down upon it to observe the progress of the flames, which were rapidly approaching me, now about a mile distant from the spot where the fire was kindled. Presently I heard the sound of the distant bell giving the alarm, and I knew that the town was on its way to the scene. Hitherto I had felt like a guilty person, — nothing but shame and regret. But now I settled the matter with myself shortly. I said to myself: “Who are these men who are said to be the owners of these woods, and how am I related to them? I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it. These flames are but consuming their natural food.” (It has never troubled me from that day to this more than if the lightning had done it. The trivial fishing was all that disturbed me and disturbs me still.) So shortly I settled it with myself and stood to watch the approaching flames. It was a glorious spectacle, and I was the only one there to enjoy it. The fire now reached the base of the cliff and then rushed up its sides. The squirrels ran before it in blind haste, and three pigeons dashed into the midst of the smoke. The flames flashed up the pines to their tops, as if they were powder.When I found I was about to be surrounded by the fire, I retreated and joined the forces now arriving from the town. It took us several hours to surround the flames with our hoes and shovels and by back fires subdue them. In the midst of all I saw the farmer whom I first met, who had turned indifferently away saying it was none of his stuff, striving earnestly to save his corded wood, his stuff, which the fire had already seized and which it after all consumed. It burned over a hundred acres or more and destroyed much young wood. When I returned home late in the day, with others of my townsmen, I could not help noticing that the crowd who were so ready to condemn the individual who had kindled the fire did not sympathize with the owners of the wood, but were in fact highly elate and as it were thankful for the opportunity which had afforded them so much sport; and it was only half a dozen owners, so called, though not all of them, who looked sour or grieved, and I felt that I had a deeper interest in the woods, knew them better and should feel their loss more, than any or all of them. The farmer whom I had first conducted to the woods was obliged to ask me the shortest way back, through his own lot. Why, then, should the half-dozen owners and the individuals who set the fire alone feel sorrow for the loss of the wood, HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

while the rest of the town have their spirits raised? Some of the owners, however, bore their loss like men, but other some declared behind my back that I was a “damned rascal;” and a flibbertigibbet or two, who crowed like the old cock, shouted some reminiscences of “burnt woods” from safe recesses for some years after. I have had nothing to say to any of them. The locomotive engine has since burned over nearly all the same ground and more, and in some measure blotted out the memory of the previous fire. For a long time after I had learned this lesson I marvelled that while matches and tinder were contemporaries the world was not consumed; why the houses that have hearths were not burned before another day; if the flames were not as hungry now as when I waked them. I at once ceased to regard the owners and my own fault, —if fault there was any in the matter, —and attended to the phenomenon before me, determined to make the most of it. To be sure, I felt a little ashamed when I reflected on what a trivial occasion this had happened, that at the time I was no better employed than my townsmen. That night I watched the fire, where some stumps still flamed at midnight in the midst of the blackened waste, wandering through the woods by myself; and far in the night I threaded my way to the spot where the fire had taken, and discovered the now broiled fish, —which had been dressed, —scattered over the burnt grass. The only thing that heated their homes in winter, was this wood from these woodlots. The wood standing as growing trees had value. The wood stored in cords at various places in these woodlots, that had not yet been carted to the woodsheds of the houses in Concord, had value. This wood equaled warmth in winter, it equaled not only the comfort but also the health of their families, it equaled security. And, a whole lot of wood equaled a whole lot of money. One way to understand this woodland carelessness and destruction, therefore is the economic way. Thoreau destroyed value and then made no attempt to compensate the victims. That, quite frankly, is a tort. However, I wonder whether there might not be another way to understand this event. For many, many years our national policy, in our national forests, has been exceedingly simplistic. Four legs good, two legs bad: Smoky the Bear prevents forest fires. The end result of this protectionism has been, that our national forests have become tinderboxes, ready to succumb in massive conflagration after massive conflagration caused by random strikes of lightning. Because all fire is suppressed all the time, there is so much undergrowth and so much dead wood lying around on the forest floor that when a forest fire occurs, of necessity it burns hot. In these hot fires, everything is destroyed. It didn’t use to be like that. In the old days the native Americans kept these woodlands under control by constantly setting fires and burning off the undergrowth and dead wood. Very simply, open woodland was immensely more productive of game animals than dense woodland, and was easier to move through, and setting these fires was not a whole lot of work — so from the native American standpoint, this practice made a whole lot of practical sense. In consequence of such management practice by the native Americans, when a fire occurred, whether the fire was man-set or a random natural event, it moved rapidly through the forest at a comparatively low heat, leaving the trunks of the major trees protected by their thick bark and often not reaching into the canopy of leaves far overhead. Then came the white man whose mind was possessed of a different sort of greed, and the result has been, as we now understand, a whole lot of foolishness. The white man had the simplistic notion was that wealth was good and fire was destructive of wealth. The white man created the tinderbox. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

So, in the Concord woodlots in Thoreau’s florut, as a direct result of this incompetent white management practice, it was all danger all the time. Anyone who moved through the forest was liable “carelessly” to start something, the impact of which would inevitably be severe. –Therefore private property! –Therefore no trespassing! –Therefore this may look like nature, but what it is is, this is asset! Yada yada yada. My conclusion is that Thoreau was prescient in protesting such a foolish arrangement. It was not his fault that the forests around Concord had been transformed insanely into this unsustainable tinderbox. Yes, his carelessness had set the match — but that release of destruction might just as well have come from a random strike of lightning. You flibbertigibbets of Concord, if you want to shout “Woods Burner!” at Henry’s back as he walks down the town street, then for consistency you should be prepared also to shout “Woods Burner!” at God in the heavens, whenever you hear a roll of thunder in the distance or see a white flash on the horizon.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project in Concord MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

July 10, Wednesday: Lidian gave birth to another boy, and Waldo bought some Concord property adjacent to Walden Pond and wrote Thomas Carlyle about a woodlot he had bought: TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Edward we call him, and my wife calls him Edward Waldo. And when shall I show you a pretty pasture and woodlot which I bought last week on the borders of a lake which is the chief ornament of this town, called Walden Pond?

LIDIAN EMERSON WALDO EMERSON DR.EDWARD WALDO EMERSON

WALDO’S RELATIVES HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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

This structure, and the shanty Thoreau would build on Walden Pond in the spring, summer, and fall of 1845: were they traditionally framed or were they “balloon” framed? 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. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

REPLICA OF CABIN

THOREAU RESIDENCES 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

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Late September: Late in the month Waldo Emerson paid $8.10 per acre for Thomas Wyman’s farmed-out pasture of “eleven acres more or less” behind the poorfarm on the road to Walden Pond. The pasture, which had been logged over but had not been farmed for sixteen years, was overgrown but was more or less level.49 There wasn’t, of course, a whole lot of shade — the area was relatively open. According to a letter written by Waldo to his brother William on October 4th, he had paid $8.10 an acre for this 11-acre plot near Walden Pond when he had met some men walking in the woods (I suppose the similarity between the name “Waldo” and the name “Walden” cannot have been overlooked by Waldo, however little he knew about the history of religious dissent on the European subcontinent). The next day he had gone back, he told his brother, with some “well beloved gossips” and they persuaded him to pay $125.00 for about 3 more acres of pine grove from Heartwell Bigelow to protect his investment by preventing these nearby trees from being logged. This became, of course, the land on which Henry Thoreau built his shanty when he made his agreement to clear the pasture of brambles and turn it into a beanfield, but at the time its owner had other plans for it:50

... so am landlord and waterlord of 14 acres, more or less, on the shore of Walden, & can raise my own blackberries.... I may build me a cabin or a turret there high as the treetops and spend my nights as well as my days in the midst of a beauty which never fades for me.

THE BEANFIELD TIMELINE OF WALDEN Brad Dean indicated that “Sometime later that month Thoreau apparently negotiated with Emerson for the right to squat on the Wyman lot and there conduct his ‘experiment of living.’ Emerson’s permission was apparently attended with two provisos: that the small house Thoreau planned to build would become Emerson’s after Thoreau’s tenancy, and that Thoreau would clear and plant the cultivatable portion of the lot.”

49. This land is now near the intersection of Route 2 and Route 126. 50. Later, when Emerson wrote a will, he had willed this woodlot to Thoreau, but since Thoreau was already twenty years dead by the time Emerson died, the property was retained in the family. Eventually, in 1922, the family would sign the lot on the pond over to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1845

This is presumably the sort of telegraph-line insulator they were putting up in 1845, as the line-men proceeded past Walden Pond (well, anyway, it is the first type of which we now have any record, dating not to 1845 but to 1847):

TELEGRAPHY

Here is an illustration from George Prescott’s ELECTRICITY AND THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH,51 indicating how these little blocks of glass had been being installed:

51. This is not the George Prescott who lived in Concord contemporary with Thoreau. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Spring: The “Texas” House the Thoreau family had built in the fall of 1844, and the shanty Henry Thoreau was building on Walden Pond beginning in this spring, and continuing through the summer and fall: were they traditionally framed or were they “balloon” framed? 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. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

REPLICA OF CABIN

EMERSON’S SHANTY Digging his shanty’s cellar hole so soon after digging the cellar hole for the Thoreau family home in the “Texas” district of Concord near the RR station, Thoreau began at a point at which a woodchuck had loosened the sandy soil, and dug the hole six feet square and seven feet deep with sloping sides.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

During a heavy thundershower either of the spring or of the fall (Thoreau does not specify which),

WALDEN: In one heavy thunder shower the lightning struck a large pitch-pine across the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches wide, as you would groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding that mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

April 30, Wednesday: The Ellery Channings had agreed to pay the Browns of Concord $600.00 for 20 acres of woods and fields on the slope of Ponkawtasset Hill, a mile out of Concord on the Carlisle road, and was shopping for a laborer to construct a cottage and barn on this land for them. Waldo Emerson recorded “Ellery has just bought his land. Mr. Thoreau is building himself a solitary house by Walden Pond.”

EMERSON’S SHANTY TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Brigham Young “got married with” Emmeline Free. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Two uncles and his father having died leaving him as their heir, William Chapman Hewitson suddenly found himself with significant wealth (he would take up residence at Hampstead and devote himself to scientific research, and three years later would be in residence in a home specially designed for him by the architect John Dobson in Oatlands in Surrey near the Thames River leading into London).

An Elizabethan royal palace had been nearby the home Hewitson would have constructed for him at Oatlands, although due to demolitions and fires over the centuries, other smaller houses had taken the place of the regal structure that had been depicted on this 1825 meat platter: HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Early May: Henry Thoreau hired a horse and pulled stumps in Waldo Emerson’s 11-acre plot, for firewood as well as to clear it, and then plowed 21/2 acres to plant in Phaseolus vulgaris var. humilis common small navy pea bush white beans.52 This clearing of the exhausted farmland beyond the Concord Alms House and Poor Farm, which had been timbered some time before and had lain fallow for some seventeen years partly restoring its fertility, was Thoreau’s deal with Emerson by which he would be allowed to build a cabin for his occupancy in Emerson’s woodlot where it touched on Walden Pond. Thoreau then bought the shanty of a departing family

of impoverished Irish immigrants, the James Collinses who were moving on at the completion of work on the railway, standing near the new tracks, for its materials, tore it apart, and hauled the recovered boards some rods

52. Brad Dean has calculated that to plant seven miles of rows, each row fifteen rods in length, spaced three feet apart, the dimensions of the beanfield would have been 247.5 by 447 feet or 110,632.5 square feet, and that this amounts to 2.534 acres or slightly over one hectare.

These are beans that ripen prior to harvest and are threshed dry from the pods. Only the ripe seeds reach market. Four main types are grown as follows: (1) the Pea or Navy which Henry was growing; (2) Medium type, which includes Pinto, Great Northern, Sutter, Pink Bayo, and Small Red or Mexican Red; (3) Kidney; and (4) Marrow. Seeds vary in size from about 1/3-inch long in Thoreau’s pea or navy bean to 3/4-inch in the Kidney. All these plants are of bush type. They are usually cut or pulled when most pods are ripe, and then vines and pods are allowed to dry before threshing. This is a bean thought to have originated in Central America from southern Mexico to Guatemala and Honduras. Evidence of the common bean has been found in two widely separated places. Large seeded common beans were found at Callejon de Hualylas in Peru, and small seeded common beans were found in the Tehuacan Valley in Mexico, with both finds carbon-dating as earlier than 5,000 BCE. This crop is associated with the maize and squash culture which predominated in pre-Columbian tropical America. In our post-Columbian era this bean has come to be grown in all areas of the world.

However, that’s only the literal bean, not the metaphorical or literary bean, and once upon a time in Europe, there had been a form of commercial counting in use very much like the abacus of the East, in which beans were used. In those days to “know how many beans make up five” was to be commercially numerate. –Sort of like today knowing how to count one’s change. It might be suggested therefore that Thoreau’s determination to know beans was a play upon this archaic usage in which not knowing one’s beans amounted to innumeracy, and in addition a play upon the common accusation “You don’t know beans about xxxxx!” It might also be suggested that this is scatological humor similar to Shakespeare’s — the following is from his “Comedy of Errors”: A man may break a word with you sir; and words are but wind; Ay, and break it in your face, so he break it not behind. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

along the hilltop and down to Walden Pond on a hand-cart of some sort, to dry in the sun:

A 19th-Century Irish shanty in the Merrimack Valley TIMELINE OF WALDEN THE BEANFIELD

WALDEN: At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some PEOPLE OF of my acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for WALDEN neighborliness than from any necessity, I set up the frame of my house. No man was ever more honored in the character of his raisers than I. They are destined, I trust, to assist at the raising of loftier structures one day. I began to occupy my house on the 4th of July, as soon as it was boarded and roofed, for the boards were carefully feather-edged and lapped, so that it was perfectly impervious to rain; but before boarding I laid the foundation of a chimney at one end, bringing two cartloads of stones up the hill from the pond in my arms. I built the chimney after my hoeing in the fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing my cooking in the mean while out of doors on the ground, early in the morning; which mode I still think is in some respects more convenient and agreeable than the usual one. When it stormed before my bread was baked, I fixed a few boards over the fire, and sat under them to watch my loaf, and passed some pleasant hours in that way. In those days, when my hands were much employed, I read but little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad.

BRONSON ALCOTT WALDO EMERSON ELLERY CHANNING BURRILL CURTIS GEORGE W. CURTIS The “acquaintances” who participated in this rustic “raising”53 ceremony on the Walden Pond shore were: HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

• Bronson Alcott • Ellery Channing • Waldo Emerson • Edmund Hosmer • Hosmer’s three sons Edmund Hosmer, Jr., John Hosmer, and Andrew Hosmer • the brothers George William Curtis and James Burrill Curtis

53.“No man was ever more honored in the character of his raisers than I.” I would maintain that WALDEN is chock-full of references to the gallows, references that nowadays we don’t “get” simply because we no longer live in the sort of culture, in which public execution is an unchallenged holiday convention. For instance, I would maintain that this particular paragraph, apparently so innocent, includes an implicit reference to being hanged. While the raisers of a house frame are the friends and neighbors who push with poles and pull with ropes as a frame is being lifted from its temporary horizontal position to its permanent vertical position, the raisers of a person may by extension be the outraged citizens who are pulling on the rope that elevates a criminal by the neck toward the extending horizontal branch of a tree. This is not the sort of gallows humor which would have gone unnoticed in the first half of the 19th Century, not in America it wouldn’t. This is an implicit reference to Thoreau’s Huguenot ancestors of honored memory, who rather than tugging together upon the indecent public end of that hanging rope, in la belle France, had sometimes found themselves tugging alone upon the noose at the decent end. But there is more on this topic at:

GALLOWS HUMOR HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Emerson of course resided in the Coolidge mansion just on the other side of the poorhouse farm (Gleason F7) and was the owner of the woodlot in which this shanty was being erected, and would be the owner of that shanty, and the Curtis brothers, having come from Brook Farm to Ponkawtasset Hill (Gleason D7) a year earlier, and the Alcotts, having only recently returned to Concord from their Fruitlands near Harvard, Massachusetts to reside near the Edmund Hosmer home on a road leading toward Lincoln (Gleason G9/66), were of course quite conveniently situated to come over to the pond for this neighborly little ceremony. Index to the Text

Index to the Subtext

End of May:As Henry Thoreau would later report, by the end of May: TIMELINE OF WALDEN

WALDEN: My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the edge of the larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and hickories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow footpath led down the hill. In my front yard grew the strawberry, blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and golden-rod, shrub-oaks and sand-cherry, blueberry and ground-nut. Near the end of May, the sand-cherry, Cerasus pumila, adorned the sides of the path with its delicate flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically about its short stems, which last, in the fall, weighed down with good sized and handsome cherries, fell over in wreaths like rays on every side. I tasted them out of compliment to Nature, though they were scarcely palatable. The sumach, Rhus glabra, grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing up through the embankment which I had made, and growing five or six feet the first season. Its broad pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to look on. The large buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks which had seemed to be dead, developed themselves as by magic into graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and sometimes, as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow and tax their weak joints, I heard a fresh and tender bough suddenly fall like a fan to the ground, when there was not a break of air stirring, broken off by its own weight. In August, the large masses of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue, and by their weight again bent down and broke the tender limbs. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

We should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and friendliness. We should not meet thus in haste. Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy about their beans. We would not deal with a man thus plodding ever, leaning on a hoe or a spade as a staff between his work, not as a mushroom, but partially risen out of the earth, something more than erect, like swallows alighted and walking on the ground.– “And as he spake, his wings would now and then Spread, as he meant to fly, then close again,” so that we should suspect that we might be conversing with an angel. Bread may not always nourish us; but it always does us good, it even takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy. Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely. We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our Cattle-shows and so called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber. Cato says that the profits of agriculture are particularly pious or just, (maximeque pius quæstus,) and according to Varro the old Romans “called the same earth Mother and Ceres, and thought that they who cultivated it led a pious and useful life, and that they alone were left of the race of King Saturn.” We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction. They all reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden. Therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity. What though I value the seed of these beans, and harvest that in the fall of the year? This broad field which I have looked at so long looks not to me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial to it, which water and make it green. These beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for woodchucks partly? The ear of wheat, (in Latin spica,” obsoletely speca, from spe, hope,) should not be the only hope of the husbandman; its kernel or grain (granum, from gerendo, bearing,) is not all that it bears. How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds? It matters little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer’s barns. The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear l HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

WALDEN: It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and threshing, and picking over, and selling them, –the last was the hardest of all,– I might add eating, for I did taste. I was determined to know beans. When they were growing, I used to hoe from five o’clock in the morning till noon, and commonly spent the rest of the day about other affairs. Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds, –it will bear some iteration in the account, for there was no little iteration in the labor,– disturbing their delicate organizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously cultivating another. That’s Roman wormwood, –that’s pigweed, –that’s sorrel, –that’s piper-grass, –have at him, chop him up, turn his roots upward to the sun, don’t let him have a fibre in the shade, if you do he’ll turn himself t’other side up and be as green as a leek in two days. A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest-waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust. Those summer days which some of my contemporaries devoted to the fine arts in Boston or Rome, and others to contemplation in India, and others to trade in London or New York, I thus, with the other farmers of New England, devoted to husbandry. Not that I wanted beans to eat, for I am by nature a Pythagorean, so as far as beans are concerned, whether they mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them for rice; but, perchance, as some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day. It was on the whole a rare amusement, which, continued too long, might have become a dissipation. Though I gave them no manure, and did not hoe them all once, I hoed them unusually well as far as I went, and was paid for it in the end, “there being in truth,” as Evelyn says, “no compost or lætation whatsoever comparable to this continual motion, repastination, and turning of the mould with the spade.” “The earth,” he adds elsewhere, “especially if fresh, has a certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us; all dungings and other sordid temperings being but the vicars succedaneous to this improvement.” Moreover, this being one of those “worn-out and exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath,” had perchance, as Sir Kenelm Digby thinks likely, attracted “vital spirits” from the air. I harvested twelve bushels of beans. But to be more particular; for it is complained that Mr. Colman has reported chiefly the expensive experiments of gentlemen farmers; my outgoes were,– For a hoe, ...... $0 54 Ploughing, harrowing, and furrowing, ...7 50,Too much. 1 Beans for seed, ...... 3 12 /2 Potatoes “ ...... 1 33 Peas “ ...... 0 40 HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Horse cultivator and boy three hours, ...1 00 Horse and cart to get crop, ...... 0 75 ------1 In all, ...... $14 72 /2 My income was, (patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet,) from Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold,$16 94 Five “ large potatoes, ...... 2 50 Nine “ small “ ...... 2 25 Grass, ...... 1 00 Stalks, ...... 0 75 ------In all, ...... $23 44 1 Leaving a pecuniary profit, as I have elsewhere said, of $8 71 /2. This is the result of my experience in raising beans. Plant the common small white bush bean about the first of June, in rows three feet by eighteen inches apart, being careful to select fresh round and unmixed seed. First look out for worms, and supply vacancies by planting anew. Then look out for woodchucks, if it is an exposed place, for they will nibble off the earliest tender leaves almost clean as they go; and again, when the young tendrils make their appearance, they have notice of it, and will shear them off with both buds and young pods, sitting erect like a squirrel. but above all harvest as early as possible, if you would escape frosts and have a fair and saleable crop; you may save much loss by this means. This further experience also I gained. I said to myself, I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me, for surely it has not been exhausted for these crops. Alas! I said this to myself; but now another summer is gone, and another, and another, and I am obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds which I planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues, were wormeaten or had lost their vitality, and so did not come up. Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid. This generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each new year precisely as the Indians did centuries ago and taught the first settlers to do, as if there were a fate in it. I saw an old man the other day, to my astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for the seventieth time at least, and not for himself to lie down in! But why should not the New Englander try new adventures, and not lay so much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and his orchards? –raise other crops than these? Why concern ourselves so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men? We should really be fed and cheered if when we met a man we were sure to see that some of the qualities which I have named, which we all prize more than those other productions, but which are for the most part broadcast and floating in the air, had taken root and grown in him. Here comes such a subtile and ineffable quality, for instance, as truth or justice, though the slightest amount or new variety of it, along the road. Our ambassadors should be instructed to send ho e such seeds as these and Congress hel to HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

To Thoreau, the underground tubers of the ground-nut tasted better boiled than roasted. Here is an example of the flower of the foliage, vine, flower, and leguminous seedpod of the plant as it grew in Thoreau’s “front yard” by the pond: HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

The ground-nut Apios americana Medic. is probably the most famous edible wild plant of eastern North America. For native Americans from Ontario and Québec in the north to the Gulf of Mexico and from the prairies to the Atlantic coast it was a major food resource, and these legumes can still be found growing at village sites. European intrusives also often depended upon the ground-nut, so in the 1580s the colonists of Sir Walter Raleigh’s settlement on Roanoke Island off the coast of Virginia sent samples of the plant to Queen Elizabeth I. In 1607, Captain John Smith wrote of the plant’s utility. The settlers at Plymouth survived on ground-nut tubers in 1623 when their corn supply was exhausted. Ground-nut was so important to the whites along the Connecticut River that in 1654, the town of Southampton decreed that native Americans who attempted to dig ground-nut on “English-Lands” were to be put in the stocks, and for a repeat offense, were to be publicly whipped. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Summer: Initial public mention in America of the phrase “manifest destiny”:

“There is only one way to accept America and that is in hate; one must be close to one’s land, passionately close in some way or other, and the only way to be close to America is to hate it; it is the only way to love America.” — Lionel Trilling HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

This first known use of the phrase “Manifest Destiny” occurred in an article by John L. O’Sullivan in his The United States Magazine and Democratic Review. O’Sullivan returned to his perennial theme of American white (actually, less inclusive than merely American, less inclusive than merely white, “Anglo-Saxon”) exceptionalism in an article in which he advocated continued territorial expansion of a nation dominated by this subclass of whites in a generally westward direction, a generally continental direction which definitely did not exclude great expansion southwestward (Texas) as well.

[I am] in favor of now elevating this question of the reception of Texas into the Union ... up to its proper level of a high and broad nationality, it surely is to be found, found abundantly, in the manner in which other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves into it ... in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.... It is wholly untrue, and unjust to ourselves, the pretense that the Annexation [of Texas] has been a measure of spoliation, unrightful and unrighteous — of military conquest ... — of aggrandizement at the expense of justice.... This view of the question is wholly unfounded.... California will, probably, next fall away from [the Federation of Mexico].... Imbecile and distracted, Mexico never can exert any real governmental authority over such a country.... The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on [California’s] borders. Already the advance guard of the irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armed with the plow and the rifle, and marking its trail with schools and colleges, courts and representative halls, mills and meetinghouses.... [All this will happen] in the natural flow of events, the spontaneous workings of principles.... And [the Californians] will have a right to independence — to self-government — to the possession of the homes conquered from the wilderness by their own labors and dangers, sufferings and sacrifices — a better and a truer right than the artificial title of sovereignty in Mexico a thousand miles away.... The day is not distant when the Empires of the Atlantic and the Pacific would again flow together into one....

DEMOCRATIC REVIEW AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

“A too confident sense of justice always leads to injustice.” — Reinhold Niebuhr, THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952, Chapter 7 READ THE FULL TEXT

Summer: Toward the end of this summer, it would appear, Ellery Channing would be sleeping not in his own rental cottage on Punkatasset Hill but under Henry’s cot in Thoreau’s (Emerson’s) shanty at Walden Pond:54

WALDEN: I took a poet to board for a fortnight about those times, PEOPLE OF which caused me to be put to it for room. He brought his own WALDEN knife, though I had two, and we used to scour them by thrusting them into the earth. He shared with me the labors of cooking. I was pleased to see my work rising so square and solid by degrees, and reflected, that, if it proceeded slowly, it was calculated to endure a long time. The chimney is to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground and rising through the house to the heavens; even after the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent. This was toward the end of summer. It was now November.

ELLERY CHANNING

54. Thoreau’s shanty measured but 10’ x 15’. Is that big enough for two people? In 1620, when the English settlers constructed their initial post-and-beam homes at Plymouth, these family dwellings commonly consisted of one room with a loft, and commonly measured 12’ x 14’. In 1770, when Thomas Jefferson began the 13-year building project of his mansion at Monticello, he first had his slaves construct a 14’ x 15’ brick building in which he would live while supervising the construction. During his 5-year stay in the house, he had his slaves prepare a 2nd floor bedroom and then brought his new bride to live there. After the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 the US Army built 5,610 tiny redwood and fir “Relief Houses” as homes for nearly 20,000 refugees. The refugee shacks, as they came to be known, were available in three sizes, the most common being 10’ x 14’. (By late 1908, most of the refugees had been relocated and the shacks were being carted by horse to locations around the city and converted into rental cottages, garages, storage spaces, and shops.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

The furniture of the shanty, some of which Henry Thoreau made himself, consisted of: •bed • 3-legged table •desk • three chairs • looking-glass three inches in diameter • pair of tongs and andirons •kettle •skillet • frying-pan • dipper • wash-bowl • two knives and forks • three plates • one cup • one spoon • jug for oil • jug for molasses • japanned lamp TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Dwight MacKerron has made an attempt to reformat some of the mentions in WALDEN, as poetry: When I return to my house I find that visitors have been there and left their cards, a bunch of flowers, a wreath of evergreen, a name in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or a chip. They who come rarely to the woods take some little piece of the forest HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

into their hands to play with by the way. One has peeled a willow wand, woven it into a ring, and dropped it on my table. I could always tell if visitors had called in my absence, either by the bended twigs or grass, or the print of their shoes, some slight trace left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked and thrown away, even as far off as the railroad.

Here is another such attempt by Dwight to render the prose of WALDEN into poetry: Evening Song In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing the flute, and saw the perch, which I seemed to have charmed, hovering around me, and the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, strewed with the wrecks of the forest. Formerly I had come to this pond, from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a companion, and making a fire close to the water’s edge, which we thought attracted the fishes, we caught pouts with a bunch of worms strung on a thread; and when we had done, far in the night, threw the burning brands high into the air like skyrockets, which, coming down into the pond, were quenched with a loud hissing, and we were suddenly groping in total darkness. Through this, whistling a tune, we took our way to the haunts of men again. But now I had made my home by the shore. Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day’s dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. Anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

along it, some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element which was scarcely more dense. ...Two fishes as it were with one hook.

Amy Belding Brown has also constructed a poem out of this material: Evening Song Warm evenings when I played my flute to charm the perch and track the silent moon past ribbed pond bottoms from my boat, I recalled other times and old companions, dark summer nights beside a fire by water’s edge. We believed it drew the fish, and so we caught fat pouts with worms strung on a thread. When done, we threw the burning brands high in the air. Like rockets, they fell into the pond and hissed out, so we groped again through dark. Sometimes, after sitting in a parlor in the town until the family had retired, I went back to woods and spent the midnight hours fishing, serenaded by the fox and owl and some bird creaking in a nearby tree. In moonlight, thirty rods from shore, I watched perch and shiners dimple surface with their silver tails and, with a line, spoke to mystery fish forty feet below. I drifted, waiting for the tug of talk, the slight vibration of life prowling in dull uncertain blundering intent. At length I raised some horned pout in squeaking squirm to upper air. How strange, when my thoughts wandered, to feel this faint tug back to Nature. It seemed as if I might the next time cast my line both upward, to the air, and down into the element of water, and therein catch two kinds of fish with but a single hook. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

November 29, Saturday: Waldo Emerson paid Abel Moore and John Hosmer $1,239.56 for a little more than 41 acres of woodland on Walden Pond, and Henry Thoreau signed the deed as principal witness to the transaction.55 I, too, have a new plaything, the best I ever had — a wood-lot.... I bought a piece of more than forty acres, on the border of a little lake half a mile wide and more, called Walden Pond.

Emerson would have Thoreau divide the 41 acres into 35 woodlots in the winter of 1849-1850. He would sell one acre to the new Fitchburg Railroad and, according to page 33 of Emerson’s manuscript journal fragment “Trees,” when the railroad wanted more land he would hold out for $100.00 an acre.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

55. The border between this enlarged woodlot and another man’s land would cause constant problems, and Emerson finally sued this landowner for chopping down his trees but lost and was forced to pay damages. Whether this other landowner was in the right or in the wrong is not now any easier to determine than it was then. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

December 22, Monday: From WALDEN, we know that Walden Pond froze on the night of the 22d:

FLINT’S POND WALDEN: In 1845 Walden froze entirely over for the first time on the night of the 22nd of December, Flint’s and other shallower ponds and the river having been frozen ten days or more; in ’46, the 16th; in ’49, about the 31st; and in ’50, about the 27th of December; in ’52, the 5th of January; in ’53, the 31st of December. The snow had already covered the ground since the 25th of November, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast. My employment out of doors now was to collect the dead wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or sometimes trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. An old forest fence which had seen its best days was a great haul for me. I sacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was past serving the god Terminus.

Winter 1845-1846 December 22

Winter 1846-1847 December 16

Winter 1847-1848

Winter 1848-1849

Winter 1849-1850 December 31

Winter 1850-1851 December 27

Winter 1851-1852

Winter 1852-1853 January 5

Winter 1853-1854 December 31

Winter 1854-1855

Winter 1855-1856

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project in Concord MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1846

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

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

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

There’s an interesting little factoid about this survey being tipped into the WALDEN volume. It wasn’t all that usual, in this time period, for books to be illustrated in such a manner! Such an inclusion, in the period, amounted to “multimedia high tech”! –Take a moment and think about that!56 Most of the works published by Ticknor and Fields during the 1840s and 1850s were not illustrated in any way, but illustrations did play an important role in some. Two groups of publications from the 1850s are especially notable for their illustrations — juvenile works and literary works by the firm’s most respected authors. The more lavishly illustrated were juvenile works, which might contain as many as twelve relief wood engravings, while many literary works were regularly issued with an expensive intaglio steel-engraved frontispiece portrait. The illustrations in juveniles were usually based on the text and made the work more vivid and appealing to a young audience, whereas the portrait frontispieces in the second group served to dignify and assert the literary merit of the works 56. Winship, Michael. AMERICAN LITERARY PUBLISHING IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY: THE BUSINESS OF TICKNOR AND FIELDS. Cambridge, England; NY: Cambridge UP, 1995. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/137.htm

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

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

January 20, Tuesday: The United States of America having just declared war upon Mexico, in the issue of this day the Concord Freeman not only crowed with delight that the steamship Hibernia had made it from Liverpool to Boston in merely 19 days including a stopover in the port of Halifax, but also fulminated in opposition to the pernicious attitudes of pacifism:

We have had enough cant and nonsense from peace societies and their advocates about the expense of our army and navy and the needlessness of fortifications.

Our Perennial Quest to Do Harm So Good Will Come

Extermination of the Pequot Tribe 1634-1637 “King Phillip’s” Race War 1675-1676 The War of 1812 1812-1815 The Revolution of the Texians 1835-1836 War on Mejico 1846-1848 The War for the Union 1862-1865 War to End War 1916-1919 Stopping Hitler 1940-1945 The Korean Police Action 1950-1953 Helping South Vietnam be Free 1959-1975 Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Miss Prudence Ward wrote a letter to someone which included a remark about Henry Thoreau’s activities out at Walden Pond: Henry T has built him a house of one room a little distance from Walden pond & in view of the public road. There he lives cooks, eats, studies & sleeps & is quite happy. He has many visitors, whom he receives with pleasure & does his best to entertain. We talk of passing the day with him soon. TIMELINE OF WALDEN Fiddler’s Green has provided a “cabin cutout” to be downloaded over the Internet57 and cut out of hard cardstock: EMERSON’S SHANTY

February 4, Wednesday: A large party of Mormons left Nauvoo, Illinois for resettlement in the far west.

57. http://www.fiddlersgreen.net/buildings/new-england/thoreau/cabin.htm HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Lecture58

DATE PLACE TOPIC

March 25, Tuesday, 1845, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “Concord River” February 4, Wednesday, 1846, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “The Writings and Style of Thomas Car- lyle” January 19, Tuesday, 1847, at 7PM Lincoln MA; Brick or Centre School House “A History of Myself” (?)

58. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Narrative of Event: In a January 1846 letter to Charles Lane, Bronson Alcott wrote, “Emerson will read these Lectures [Representative Men] to the Concord Lyceum, and Thoreau has a Lecture on Carlyle.”59 The lecture referred to was the tenth in a course of twenty-two and is noted as follows in the records of the Concord Lyceum: “Concord Feb 4, 1846. A lecture was read before the Society by Mr Henry D. Thoreau of Concord. Subject: THE WRITINGS & STYLE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. Adjourned. Cyrus Stow Secretary.”60

Henry Thoreau had begun making notes on Carlyle’s works in 1842 but probably did not shape them into an essay until after he began living at Walden Pond. In the midst of journal passages on Carlyle written that summer of 1845, Thoreau inserted his well-known comment about his organic process of composition: “From all points of the compass from the earth beneath and the heavens above have come these inspirations and been entered duly in such order as they came in the Journal. Thereafter when the time arrived they were winnowed into Lectures — and again in due time from Lectures into Essays” (JOURNAL 1, 1837-1844, ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell et al. [1981], page 205). This was, indeed, the path that he took with the Carlyle piece, finally publishing it, after some difficulty, in Graham’s American Monthly Magazine in the spring of 1847.61

Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: A journal entry by Thoreau, written in preparation for his next Concord Lyceum lecture, suggests that his February 1846 auditors, whatever they had learned about Thomas Carlyle, were left with an unfulfilled curiosity about their neighbor Henry Thoreau and his unusual life at Walden Pond:62 I expect of any lecturer that he will read me a more or less simple & sincere account of his life — of what he has done & thought. Not so much what he has read or heard of other mens lives — and actions …. Yet incredible mistakes are made — I have heard an Owl lecture with a perverse show of learning upon the solar microscope — and chanticlere upon nebulous stars When both ought to have been sound asleep in a hollow tree — or upon a hen roost. When I lectured here before this winter I heard that some of my towns men had expected of me some account of my life at the pond — this I will endeavor to give tonight Thoreau had anticipated giving this account of his life at the pond later, in the same season he delivered his Carlyle lecture. As events transpired, however, he did not lecture again in Concord until 10 February 1847, when he delivered “A History of Myself” to his still curious neighbors (see lecture 10 below).

Description of Topic: Like many of Thoreau’s other lectures, he delivered this one and almost immediately began moving it toward publication. Nevertheless, he probably revised the lecture text between the time he delivered the lecture and the date he submitted the essay for publication. In this instance, judging from its size, the essay appears to be simply a slightly revised and expanded version of the lecture.

59. THE LETTERS OF A. BRONSON ALCOTT, ed. Richard L. Herrnstadt (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1969), pages 125- 26. 60. Cameron, Kenneth Walter. THE MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM DURING THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. Hartford CT: Transcendental Books, 1969, page 161. 61. Graham’s American Monthly Magazine 30 (March 1847): 145-52, and 30 (April 1847): 238-45. See EARLY ESSAYS AND MISCELLANIES, pages 406-409, for an account of the difficulties Thoreau experienced in getting the essay published and in getting paid for the publication. 62.JOURNAL 2, 1842-1848, ed. Robert Sattelmeyer [1984], pages 141-142. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

March 25, Wednesday: The ice on Walden Pond was completely melted:

March 26, Thursday: Henry Thoreau wrote in WALDEN that “One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in.” In WALDEN, when he describes the spring coming in, his journal reveals to us that what he was describing was precisely the late afternoon of March 26, 1846:

The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. It is seemingly instantaneous at last. Suddenly an influx of light filled my house, though the evening was at hand, and the clouds of winter still overhung it, and the eaves were dripping with sleety rain. I looked out the window, and lo! where yesterday was cold gray ice there lay the transparent pond already calm and full of hope as on a summer evening, reflecting a summer evening sky in its bosom, though none was visible overhead, as if it had intelligence with some remote horizon. I heard a robin in the distance, the first I had heard for many a thousand years, methought, whose note I shall not forget for many a thousand more, –the same sweet and powerful song of yore. O the evening robin, at the end of a New England summer day!

March 26th 1846 The change from foul weather to fair from danck sluggish hours to serene elastic ones is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. The change from foulness to serenity is instantaneous. Suddenly an influx of light though it was late filled my room– I looked out and saw that the pond was already calm and full of hope as on a summer evening –though the ice was dissolved by yesterday– There seemed to be some intelligence in the pond which responded to the unseen serenity in a distant horizon I heard a robin in the distance the first I had heard this spring repeating the assurance The green pitch suddenly looked brighter and more erect as if now entirely washed & cleansed by the rain. I knew it would not rain any more. A serene summer evening sky seemed darkly reflected in the pond –though the clear sky was no where visible over head. It was no longer the end of the season but the beginning– The pines & shrub oaks which had before drooped and cowered the winter through with myself –now recovered their several characters and in the landscape revived the expression of an immortal beauty– Trees seemed all at once to be fitly grouped –to sustain new relations to men & to oneanother – There was somewhat cosmical in the arrangement of nature. O the evening robin –at the close of a new England day– If I could ever find the twig he sits upon. Where does the minstrel really roost. We perceive it is not the bird of the ornithologist that is heard –the turdus HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

migratoria? The signs of fair weather are seen in the bosom of ponds before they are recognised in the heavens It is easy to tell by looking at any twig of the forest whether its winter is past –or not. We forget how the sun looks on our fields as on the forests & the prairies –as they reflect or absorb his ray. It matters not whether we stand in Italy or on the prairies of the west, in the eye of the sun the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden –and yields to the wave of an irresistible civilization. My beans this brod field which I have looked on so long looks not to me as the farmer– These beans have results which are not harvested in the autumn of the year. Our grain fields make part of a beautiful picture which the sun beholds in his daily course– And it matters little comparatively whether they fill the barns of the husbandman The true husbandman will cease from anxiety & labor with every day and relinquish all claim to the produce of his fields. The avaricious man would fain plant by himself– A flock of geese have just got in late from the Canada line, now in the dark flying low over the pond They came on, indulging at last like weary travellers in complaint & consolations, or like some creaking Evening mail late lumbering in with regular anserine clangor I stood at my door and could hear their wings when they suddenly spied my light & ceasing their noise wheeled to the East and apparently settled in the pond.

May 3, Sunday: The Mexican army surrounded a fort in Texas.

Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott sauntered to Walden Pond and stood on the higher hill on the opposite side of the pond from Henry Thoreau’s shanty, at the site which Emerson had set aside for his writerly tower, their magisterial gaze thus encompassing not only that little home but also Mount Monadnock and Mount Wachusett.

Monte Video, Seat of Daniel Wadsworth, Esq.

“HUCKLEBERRIES”: Botanists, on the look out for what they thought a respectable descent, have long been inclined to trace this family backward to Mount Ida. Tourneforte does not hesitate to give it the ancient name of Vine of Mount Ida. The common English Raspberry also is called Rubus Idaea or the Mount Ida bramble — from the old Greek name. The truth of it seems to be that blueberries and raspberries flourish best in cool and airy situations, on hills and mountains, and I can easily believe that something like these at least grows on Mount Ida. But Mount Monadnoc is as good as Mount Ida, and probably better for blueberries, though its name is said to mean Bad Rock. But the worst rocks are the best for poets’ uses. Let us then exchange that oriental uncertainty for this western certainty. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

At this point Giles Waldo, in the Hawaiian Islands, was negotiating with the King of the Sandwich Islands for a land grant to be awarded to Bronson Alcott, which –if such a deal had gone down– would have radically altered the context in which we now peruse Louisa May Alcott’s LITTLE WOMEN and its many sequels.

Sunday May 3d, 1856: I heard the whippoorwill last night for the first time. THOMAS CARLYLE Carlyle’s books are not to be studied but ready with a swift satisfaction –rather– Their flavor & charm –their HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

gust is like the froth of wine which can only be tasted once & that hastily. On a review I never can find the pages I had read– The book has done its work when once I have reached the conclusion, and will never inspire me again. They are calculated to make one strong and lively impression –and entertain us for the while more entirely than any –but that is the last we shall know of them They have not that stereotyped success & accomplishment which we name classic– It is an easy and inexpensive entertainment –and we are not pained by the author’s straining & impoverishing himself to feed his readers. It is plain that the reviewers and politicians do not know how to dispose of him– They take it too easily & must try again a loftier pitch– They speak of him within the passing hour as if he too were one other ephemeral man of letters about town who lives under Mr. Somebody’s administration. Who will not vex the world after burial– But he does not depend on the favor of reviewers –nor the honesty of booksellers –nor on popularity– He has more to impart than to receive from his generation He is a strong & finished journeyman in his craft –& reminds us oftener of Samuel Johnsson than of any other. So few writers are respectable –ever get out of their apprenticeship– As the man said that as for composition it killed him he did’nt know which thought to put down first –that his hand writing was not a very good one –& then there was spelling to be attended to– So if our able stock writer can take care of his periods & spelling –and keep within the limits of a few proprieties –he forgets that there is still originality & wisdom to be attended to, and these would kill him. There is always a more impressive and simpler statement possible than consists with any victorious comparisons. We prize the good faith & valor of soberness & gravity when we are to have dealings with a man If this is his playful mood we desire so much the more to be admitted to his serious mood. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

May 14, Thursday: Waldo Emerson wrote to Thomas Carlyle about his “new plaything, the best I ever had — a woodlot” and described his plans for a writerly tower atop the hill overlooking Walden Pond: I, too, have a new plaything, the best I ever had — a wood-lot. Last Fall I bought a piece of more than forty acres, on the border of a little lake half a mile wide and more, called Walden Pond.... In these May days, when maples, poplars, oaks, birches, walnut, pine are in their spring glory, I go thither every afternoon, and cut with my hatchet an Indian path through the thicket all along the bold shore, and open the finest pictures. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

Monte Video, Seat of Daniel Wadsworth, Esq. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

July 23, Thursday or 24, Friday: Henry Thoreau provoked Sheriff Sam Staples, who was under contract as the

Concord tax farmer, into taking him illegally to the Middlesex County Prison63and spent the night there, for having for several years (up to perhaps 9), following the example of Bronson Alcott, refused to pay certain taxes as useful for the perpetuation of domestic slavery and foreign wars.64

“RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT”: It was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor debtor came out of jail, for his acquaintances to salute him, looking through their fingers, which were crossed to represent the grating of a jail window, “How do ye do?” My neighbors did not thus salute me, but first looked at me, and then at one another, as if I had returned from a long journey. I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker’s to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour — for the horse was soon tackled — was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen. This is the whole history of “My Prisons.” I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject; and as for supporting schools, I am doing my part to educate my fellow-countrymen now. It is for no particular item in the tax- bill that I refuse to pay it.

63. The usual penalty for failure to pay the Massachusetts poll tax was property seizure and auction upon failure to display a stamped tax receipt, and was most certainly never imprisonment, but young Thoreau possessed few auctionable items and probably did not use a bank account. 64. During the one year 1845, in Massachusetts, the “poll tax” had been being reckoned as if it were a state tax, although in all other years it had been and would be reckoned as a municipality or county tax. As a town tax, and as a county tax, of course, it could hardly be considered to be in support of slavecatching or of foreign wars, since neither the Massachusetts towns nor the Massachusetts counties engaged in either slavecatching or the raising of armies. Also, even in the one year 1845, while this tax was being considered as a state tax, under the law no part of this revenue was to be used for the catching of fugitive slaves, and no foreign war was going on at the moment (the march upon Mexico had not yet fairly begun). Thoreau, therefore, in declining to pay voluntarily this tax bill, actually was not refusing to acknowledge slavery, as alleged, or a war effort, as alleged, but was refusing to recognize any political organization whatever. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Walter Harding has tracked down what may well be the origin of the often-told but utterly spurious story, that Waldo Emerson came to visit Thoreau in his prison cell and expressed concern: he found a “Bringing Up Father” cartoon strip in the newspaper, in which Paddy was in jail for drunkenness, and when Jiggs asks him how come he was in jail Paddy retorts “How come you’re not?” Alcott has reported that Emerson’s reaction to the news of this was to find Thoreau’s stand to have been “mean and skulking, and in bad taste.” Therefore, is this not the point at which we can profitably ask, was Thoreau merely running away from his social responsibilities, as has been so often alleged, when he went out to live at Walden Pond? Let’s attach the humorous title “DECAMPING TO WALDEN POND: A GENDER 65 ANALYSIS BY MARTHA SAXTON” to the following quotation:

It seems, from exaggerated nineteenth-century sex definitions, that Victorians were afraid men and women might not be able to distinguish gender. So women were trussed, corseted, and bustled into immobility while men posed in musclebound attitudes of emotionless strength. this suppression of tenderness, warmth, and most expressions of feelings produced the male equivalent of the vapors. Louisa [May Alcott]’s teacher and secret love, Henry David Thoreau, decamped to Walden Pond rather than confront social demands that he be conventionally “male.”

Another member of the Thoreau family, we don’t know who, paid the tax for him, as the tax had previously been paid by Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar when Alcott had almost been jailed on January 17, 1843. Although Emerson was irritated no end by such unseemly conduct, on the part of an associate, as failure to pay one’s share of the general tax burden, to his credit he did continue to press for publication of Thoreau’s WEEK manuscript. However, at that time Thoreau was still preparing additions to the second draft.66

65. On page 226 of her LOUISA MAY: A MODERN BIOGRAPHY OF LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, Saxton accused Thoreau of “unrelenting misogyny” as her way of elaborating on Bronson Alcott’s remark of November 5, 1858 that Thoreau was “better poised and more nearly self-sufficient than other men.” This caused me to look back to her title page and inspect the date of publication and say to myself, “Yeah, this thing was published back in 1977, the bad old days when we thought we had to combat male sexism by nurturing prejudice against anyone with a penis.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

66. Lawrence, Jerome (1915-2004) and Robert Edwin Lee (1918-1994), THE NIGHT THOREAU SPENT IN JAIL: A PLAY. NY: Hill and Wang, 1971, Spotlight Dramabook #1223, c1970, c1972 HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

I should make reference here to a snide remark that Albert J. von Frank has included at page 202 of his 1 AN EMERSON CHRONOLOGY. The sentence is as follows, in its entirety: “Henry Thoreau expressed his own anti-politics a month later by spending a night in jail for tax evasion, an act that drew Emerson’s quick disapproval, thought the principles behind the act, as Thoreau explained in ‘Civil Disobedience,’ had more in common with Emerson’s own position than he then suspected.” Now here are the things that I suppose to be quite wrongheaded about von Frank’s assertion, which would seem on its face simply to be praising Thoreau against Emerson: •“anti-politics” Thoreau’s act was not an act of anti-politics but an act of politics. To privilege assent over dissent in such a manner constitutes an unconscionable expression of mere partisanship. •“tax evasion” Thoreau’s act was not the act of a tax evader. A tax evader is a cheater, who is trying through secrecy or deception to get away with something. Thoreau’s act was the deliberate public act of a man who would rather be imprisoned than assist in ongoing killing, and thus is in an entirely separate category from such cheating. To conflate two such separate categories, one of self-service and the other of self-abnegation, into a single category, in such manner, is, again, an unconscionable expression of prejudicial politics. •“had more in common” The implication here is that Emerson’s attitudes constitute the baseline for evaluation of Thoreau’s attitudes, so that Thoreau may be condescendingly praised for imitating Emerson whenever the two thinkers can be made to seem in agreement, while preserving the option of condemning him as a resistor or worse whenever these contemporaries seem at loggerheads. –But this is unconscionable.

Albert J. von Frank. AN EMERSON CHRONOLOGY. NY: G.K. Hall & Co. and Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1994 HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Emerson to his journal:

These rabble at Washington are really better than the snivelling opposition. They have a sort of genius of a bold & manly cast, though Satanic. They see, against the unanimous expression of the people, how much a little well directed effrontery can achieve, how much crime the people will bear, & they proceed from step to step & it seems they have calculated but too justly upon your Excellency, O Governor Briggs. Mr Webster told them how much the war cost, that was his protest, but voted the war, & sends his son to it. They calculated rightly on Mr Webster. My friend Mr Thoreau has gone to jail rather than pay his tax. On him they could not calculate. The abolitionists denounce the war & give much time to it, but they pay the tax. The State is a poor good beast who means the best: it means friendly. A poor cow who does well by you — do not grudge it its hay. It cannot eat bread as you can, let it have without grudge a little grass for its four stomachs. It will not stint to yield you milk from its teat. You who are a man walking cleanly on two feet will not pick a quarrel with a poor cow. Take this handful of clover & welcome. But if you go to hook me when I walk in the fields, then, poor cow, I will cut your throat.

DANIEL WEBSTER We now understand that Sheriff Sam was considerably twisting the law under which he confined Thoreau for nonpayment of that $5 or $6 arrears of poll tax, and for his own convenience. For what the law of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts required him to do in regard to such a tax resistor, prior to debt imprisonment, was to attempt to seize and sell some of Thoreau’s assets, such as the books he had in storage in his parents’ boardinghouse in Concord. Sheriff Staples hadn’t been inclined to do this and at this point didn’t have time because he was leaving office — and the sad fact of the matter is that, since he was merely under contract as a “tax farmer,” had he vacated his position without collecting this money from the Thoreau family, Massachusetts would simply have deducted the sum from his final paycheck (bottom line, The Man always takes his cut). For here is that law, and it simply offers no support whatever for what Sheriff Staples did to put pressure on Thoreau: HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Section 7. If any person shall refuse or neglect to pay his [poll] tax, the collector shall levy the same by distress and sale of his goods, excepting the good following, namely: • The tools or implements necessary for his trade or occupation; • beasts of the plow necessary for the cultivation of his improved lands; • military arms, utensils for house keeping necessary for upholding life, and bedding and apparel necessary for himself and family. Section 8. The collector shall keep the goods distrained, at the expense of the owner, for the space of four days, at the least, and shall, within seven days after the seizure, sell the same by public auction, for the payment of the tax and the charges of keeping and of the sale, having given notice of such sale, by posting up a notification thereof, in some public place in the town, forty eight hours at least before the sale. Section 11. If the collector cannot find sufficient goods, upon which it may be levied, he may take the body of such person and commit him to prison, there to remain, until he shall pay the tax and charges of commitment and imprisonment, or shall be discharged by order of law.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

After July 24: In my short experience of human life I have found that the outward obstacles which stood in my way were not living men –but dead institutions It has been unspeakably grateful & refreshing to make my way through the crowd of this latest generation honest & dishonest virtuous & vicious as through the dewy grass –men are as innocent as the morning to the early riser –and unsuspicious pilgrim and many an early traveller which he met on his way v poetry –but the institutions as church –state –the school property &c are grim and ghostly phantoms like Moloch & Juggernaut because of the blind reverence paid to them. When I have indulged a poets dream of a terrestrial paradise I have not foreseen that any cossack or Chipeway –would disturb it –but some monster institution would swallow it– The only highway man I ever met was the state itself– When I have refused to pay the tax which it demanded for that protection I did not want itself has robbed me– When I have asserted the freedom it declared it has imprisoned me. I love mankind I hate the institutions of their forefathers– What are the sermons of the church but the Dudleian lectures –against long extinct perhaps always imaginary evils, which he dead generations have willed and so the bell still tolls to call us to the funeral service which a generation can rightly demand but once. It is singular that not the Devil himself –has been in my way but these cobwebs –which tradition says were originally spun to obstruct the fiend. If I will not fight –if I will not pray –if I will not be taxed –if I will not bury the unsettled prairie –my neighbor will still tolerate me nd sometimes even sustains me –but not the state. And should our piety derive its origin still from that exploit of pius Aenaeus who bore his father Anchises on his shoulders from the ruins of Troy Not thieves & highwaymen but Constables & judges –not sinners but priests –not the ignorant but pedants & pedagogues –not foreign foes but standing armies –not pirates but men of war. Not free malevolence –but organized benevolence. For instance the jailer or constable as a mere man and neighbor –with life in him intended for this particular 3 score years & ten –may be a right worthy man with a thought in the brain of him –but as the officer & tool of the state he has no more understanding or heart than his prison key or his staff– This is what is saddest that men HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

should voluntarily assume the character & office of brute nature.– Certainly there are modes enough by which a man may put bread into his mouth which will not prejudice him as a companion & neighbor. There are stones enough in the path of the traveller with out a man’s adding his own body to the number. There probably never were worse crimes committed since time began than in the present Mexican war –to take a single instance– And yet I have not yet learned the name or residence and probably never should of the reckless vilain who should father them– all concerned –from the political contriver to the latest recruit possess an average share of virtue & of vice the vilainy is in the readiness with which men, doing outrage to their proper natures –lend themselves to perform the office of inferior & brutal ones. The stern command is –move or ye shall be moved –be the master of your own action –or you shall unawares become the tool of the meanest slave. Any can command him who doth not command himself. Let men be men & stones be stones and we shall see if majorities do rule. Countless reforms are called for because society is not animated or instinct enough with life, but like snakes I have seen in early spring –with alternate portions torpid & flexible –so that they could wriggle neither way. All men more or less are buried partially in the grave of custom, and of some we see only a few hairs upon the crown above ground. Better are the physically dead for they more lively rot. Those who have stolen estate to be defended slaves to be kept in service –who would pause with the last inspiration & perpetuate it –require the aid of institutions –the stereotyped and petrified will of the past But they who are something to defend –who are not to be enslaved themselves – –who are up with their time – ask no such hinderance THOMAS CARLYLE Carlyle’s is not the most lasting words nor the loftiest wisdom –but for his genius it was reserved at last to furnish expression for the thoughts that were throbbing in a million breasts– It has plucked the ripest fruit in the public garden– But this fruit now least concerned the tree that bore it –which was rather perfecting the bud at the foot of the leaf stalk. Carlyle is wonderfully true to the impressions on his own mind, but not to the simple facts themselves. He portrays the former so freshly and vividly –that his words reawaken and appeal to our whole Experience But when reinforced by this terrible critic we return to his page his words are found not to be coincident with the thing and inadequate and there is no host worthy to entertain the guest he has invited. On this remote shore we adventurously landed unknown to any of the human inhabitants to this day – But we still remember well the gnarled and hospitable oaks, which were not strangers to us, the lone horse in his pasture and the patient ruminating herd whose path to the river so judiciously chosen to overcome the difficulty of the ascent we followed and disturbed their repose in the shade. And the cool free aspect of the wild apple trees, generously proffering their fruit to the wayfarers though still green and crude. The hard round glossy fruit which if not ripe –still is not poison but New English –brought hither its ancestor by our ancestors once. And up the rocky channel of a brook we scrambled which had long served nature for the sluice in these parts leaping from rock –through tangled woods at the bottom of a ravine, darker and darker it grew and more hoarse, the murmur of the stream –until we reached the ruins of a mill where now the ivy grew and the trout glanced through the raceway and the flume. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

And the dreams and speculations of some early settler was our theme

But now “no war nor battle’s sound” Invades this peaceful battle ground but waves of Concord murmuring by With sweetly fluent harmony. But since we sailed, some things have failed And many a dream gone down the stream Here then a venerable shepherd dwellt ...... The Reverend Ezra Ripley Who to his flock his substance dealt And ruled them with a vigorous crook By precept of the sacred Book. But he the pierless bridge passed o’er And now the solitary shore Knoweth his trembling steps no more. Anon a youthful pastor came ...... Nathaniel Hawthorne Whose crook was not unknown to fame His lambs he viewed with gentle glance Dispersed o’er a wide expanse, And fed with “mosses from the Manse” We view the rocky shore where late With soothed and patient ear we sat Under our Hawthorne in the dale And listened to his Twice told Tale. It comes on murmuring to itself by the base of stately and retired mountains –through dark primitive woods – whose juices it receives and where the bear still drinks it– Where the cabins of settlers are still fresh and far between, and there are few that cross its stream. Enjoying still its cascades unknown to fame perhaps unseen as yet by man –alone by itself –by the long ranges of the mountains of Sandwich and of Squam with sometimes MT. KEARSARGE the peak of Moose hillock the Haystack & Kearsarge reflected in its waters. Where the maple and the raspberry that lover of the mountains flourish amid temperate dews. Flowing as long and mysterious and untranslateable as its name Pemigewasset. By many a pastured Pielion and Ossa where unnamed muses haunt, and receiving the tribute of many an untasted Helicon Not all these hills does it lave but I have experienced that to see the sun set behind them avails as much as to have travelled to them. From where the old Man of the Mountain overlooks one of its head waters –in the Franconia Notch, taking the basin and the Flume in its way –washing the sites of future villages –not impatient. For every mountain stream is more than Helicon, tended by oreads dryads Naiads, and such a pure and fresh inspirit draught gift of the gods as it will take a newer than this New England to know the flavor of.

Such water do the gods distill And pour down hill For their new England men. A draught of this wild water bring And I will never taste the spring Of Helicon again. But yesterday in dew it fell This morn its streams began to swell And with the sun it downward flowed So fresh it hardly knew its road. Falling all the way, not discouraged by the lowest fall –for it intends to rise again. There are earth air fire & water –very well, this is water. down it comes that is the way with it. It was already water of Squam and Newfound lake and Winnipiseogee, and White mountain snow dissolved on which we were floating –and Smith’s and Bakers and Mad rivers and Nashua and Souhegan and Piscataquoag –and Suncook & Soucook & Contoocook –mingled in incalculable proportions –still fluid yellowish restless all with an inclination seaward but boyant. Here then we will leave them to saw and grind and spin for a season, and I fear there will be no vacation at low water for they are said to have Squam and Newfound lake and Winipiseogee for their mill ponds. By the law of its birth never to become stagnant for it has come out of the clouds, and down the sides of precipices worn in the flood through beaver dams broke loose not splitting but splicing and mending itself until it found a breatheing plaace in this lowland– No danger now that the sun will steal it back to heaven again HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

before it reach the sea for it has a warrant even to recover its own dews into its bosom again with every eve We wandered on by the side and over the brows of hoar hills and mountains –& through notches which the stream had made –looking down one sunday morning over Bethlehem amid the bleating of sheep, and hearing as we walked the loud spoken prayers of the inhabitants –like crusaders strolled out from the camp in Palestine–67 And looking in to learning’s little tenement by the way –where some literate swain earns his ten dollars by the month –after the harvest –with rows of slates and well cut benches round –as well cut as farther south –not noticing the herd of swine which had poured in at the open door, and made a congregation– So we went on over hill and dale through the stumpy rocky –woody –bepastured country –until we crossed a rude wooden bridge over the Amonnoosuck and breathed the free air of the Unappropriated Land. Now we were in a country where inns begin– And we too now began to have our ins and outs– Some sweet retired house whose sign only availed to creak but bore no Phoenix nor golden eagle but such as the sun and rain had painted there – –a demi public demi private house –where each apartment seems too private for your use –too public for your hosts. One I remember where Landlord and lady hung painted as if retired from active life –upon the wall –remarkable one might almost say –if he knew not the allowed degrees of consanguinity for a family likeness –a singular deflexion of the nose turned each to each –so that the total variation could not have been better represented than in the picture. –But here at any rate the cream rose thick upon the milk –and there was refreshment One “Tilton’s Inn” tooo sheltered us which it were well worth remembering, in Thornton it was where towns begin to serve as gores only to hold the world together –reached late in the evening and left before the sun rose. But the remembrance of an entertainment still remains and among publicans Tiltons name still stands conspicuous in our diary. But where we took our ease was not Canterbury street, no Four corners nor Five points –no trivial place where 3 roads meet but hardly one road held together– A dank forest path –more like an otter’s or a marten’s trail or where a beaver had dragged his trap than where the wheels of travel ever raised a dust. The pigeon sat secure above our heads high on the dead limbs of the pine reduced to robins size– The very yard of our hostelries was inclined upon the skirts of mountains and as we passed we looked up at angle at the stems of maples waving in the clouds –and late at evening we heard the drear bleating of innumerable flocks upon the mountains sides seeming to hold unequal parley with the bears Shuddered through the Franconia where the thermometer is spliced for winter use, saw the blue earth heaved into mountain waves from Agiocochook, and where the Umbagog Ossipee and Squam gleamed like dewy cobwebs in the sun– And like bright ribbons the streamlets of Connecticut Saco & adroscoggin “take up their mountain march– Went on our way silent & humble through the Notch –heard the lambs bleat in Bartlett on the mountains late at night –looked back on Conway peak –threaded the woods of Norway pine –and saw the Great Spirit smile in Winnipiseogee68 Varro advises to plant in Quincunx order in order not to “obstruct the beneficial effects of the sun and moon and air,” and adds “nuts, when they are whole, which you might comprize in one modius, because nature confines the kernels in their proper places, when they are broken, can hardly be held in a measure of a modius and a half.” Vines thus planted produce more fruit “more must and oil, and of greater value”. I read in Varro that “Caesar Vopiscus AEdilicius, when he pleaded before the Censors, said that the grounds of Rosea were the gardens [(sedes)] of Italy, in which a pole being left would not be visible the day after, on account of the growth of the herbage.” This soil was not remarkably fertile yet I was so well contented with myself it may be & with my entertainment –that I was really remind of this anecdote. In speaking of “the dignity of the herd” Varro suggests that the object of the Argonautic expedition was a ram’s fleece the gold apples of the Hesperides were by the ambiguity of language [] goats and sheep which 67. We wandered on (by the side and over the brows of hoar hills and mountains — & through notches which the stream had with awe made — looking down ^one sunday morning over Bethlehem amid the bleating of sheep, and hearing as we walked the loud spoken prayers of the inhabi- where every house seemd to us a holy sepulchre tants — like crusaders strolled out from Richards as if we were the camp in Palestine — (T 74) HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Hercules imported –the stars and signs bear their names the AEgean sea has its name from the goat and mountains and straits have hence their names –sic. The Bosphorus Piso makes Italy to be from Vitulis– The Romans were shepherds “Does not the fine [mulcta, a mulgendo] that was by ancient custom paid in kind refer to this?” The oldest coins bore the figures of cattle and the Roman names Porcius –Ovinus Caprilius & the surnames Equitius, Taurus, Capra Vitulus. Vide Cato “Of purchasing an Estate –” “How an estate is to be planted –” &c in Lat & Eng.

I will insert here some commentary on this early draft of material that would wind up in the “Monday” chapter of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS:

A WEEK: If, for instance, a man asserts the value of individual liberty over the merely political commonweal, his neighbor still tolerates him, that is he who is living near him, sometimes even sustains him, but never the State. Its officer, as a living man, may have human virtues and a thought in his brain, but as the tool of an institution, a jailer or constable it may be, he is not a whit superior to his prison key or his staff. Herein is the tragedy; that men doing outrage to their proper natures, even those called wise and good, lend themselves to perform the office of inferior and brutal ones. Hence come war and slavery in; and what else may not come in by this opening? But certainly there are modes by which a man may put bread into his mouth which will not prejudice him as a companion and neighbor.

The following is, if I recall correctly and can trust my notes, from William Bronk’s THE BROTHER IN ELYSIUM: IDEAS OF FRIENDSHIP AND SOCIETY IN THE UNITED STATES (1980), pages 104-106: The crux of the matter is that Thoreau believed that all evil did come in through the opening formed when any man might so betray his own nature as to lend himself to perform an inhuman office. While it might be contended that good and evil are something to be done at will and according to will, without reference to our own constitutions, — that we are of indifferent 68. our way Shuddered ^through that Fran- conia where the thermometer is spliced for winter use, saw the blue earth heaved into mountain waves from Agioco- chook, and where the Umbagog Ossipee and Squam gleamed like dewy cobwebs in the sun — And like bright ribbons the streamlets of Connecticut Saco & adroscoggin “take up their mountain march — Went on our way ^silent & humble through the Notch ^— heard the lambs bleat in Bartlett on the mountains holding unequal parley with the wolves & bears late at night — ^looked back on Conway peak — threaded the woods of Norway pine — and saw the Great Spirit smile ^in Winnipiseogee (T 76-77) HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

or irrelevant moral quality ourselves, and are able to choose between a good act and an evil one and so determine by the excess of one kind of action over the other our own moral quality and the moral quality of the world, yet it was Thoreau’s contention that the process by which good and evil came into being was more exacting and natural, less arbitrary than this. He believed that it was always necessary to make the choice between good and evil whenever such a choice was presented, but he also believed that in most cases, the choice was not presented, and that evil resulted in some mysterious way without anyone’s willing it, or being aware of it, and even to everyone’s surprise and chagrin. Thoreau accounted for this phenomenon by saying that being is more important and more effective than doing. Anything therefore might happen to us which was consistent with the nature we took for ourselves, even though the process by which the happening came about was so subtle or so complicated that we missed the apprehension of it, even after its end. If. as Thoreau said, we do outrage to our proper nature, — if we take our identity from the state, then we become liable to the evils of the state, and have no defense against war and slavery, since it has none. It is only by refusing to do the office of inferior and brutal natures that we can hope to escape, on our own part, treatment which in its brutality is suited to inferior natures. We must be treated according to the nature which we determine shall be ours. We can win or lose, or act in any other way, only in accordance with terms we set for ourselves. The identity which Thoreau wished us to find, which left no opening for the evil we claimed to deplore, was most certainly not to be found in the state; and neither was it to be found in any other external form, for its essence was personal. It was to be found only through that steady communion with one’s deepest desires and insights, which was called silence. He found no evil and little that was ambiguous in silence. It is easier to see now, of course, why Thoreau rejected philanthropy and reform, since to find one’s identity, to become personal, was truly to ennoble one’s being; it was to enjoy those moments of serene and self-confident life which were better than whole campaigns of daring; it was to combat evil directly by leaving no opening by which it could enter. Philanthropy’s method was less direct. It offered the goodness of actions as an excuse and substitute for being. Reform was an attempt to avoid a change in true form by changing the surface only. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Winter: Henry Youle Hind emigrated to Toronto, Canada by way of the USA. He would be lecturing at Trinity College there.

This illustration is of the cutting of ice on Rockland Lake during this winter: HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Here is a description of the William Tudor firm’s cutting and stacking of the ice on Walden Pond during this winter:

WALDEN: In the winter of ’46-7 there came a hundred men of Hyperborean extraction swoop down on to our pond one morning, with many car-loads of ungainly-looking farming tools, sleds, ploughs drill-barrows, turf-knives, spades, saws, rakes, and each man was armed with a double-pointed pike-staff, such as is not described in New-England Farmer or the Cultivator. I did not know whether they had come to sow a crop of winter rye, or some other kind of grain recently introduced from Iceland. As I saw no manure, I judged that they meant to skim the land, as I had done, thinking the soil was deep and had lain fallow long enough. They said that a gentleman farmer, who was behind the scenes, wanted to double his money, which, as I understood, amounted to half a million already; but in order to cover each one of his dollars with another, he took off the only coat, ay, the skin itself, of Walden Pond in the midst of a hard winter. They went to work at once, ploughing, harrowing, rolling, furrowing, in admirable order, as if they were bent on making this a model farm; but when I was looking sharp to see what kind of seed they dropped into the furrow, a gang of fellows by my side suddenly began to hook up the virgin mould itself, with a peculiar jerk, clean down to the sand, or rather the water, –for it was a very springy soil,– indeed all the terra firma there was, and haul it away on sleds, and then I guessed that they must be cutting peat in a bog. So they came and went every day, with a peculiar shriek from the locomotive, from and to some point of the polar regions, as it seemed to me, like a flock of arctic snow-birds. But sometimes Squaw Walden had her revenge, and a hired man, walking behind his team. slipped through a crack in the ground down toward Tartarus, and he who was so brave before suddenly became but the ninth part of a man, almost gave up his animal heat, and was glad to take refuge in my house, and acknowledge that there was some virtue in a stove; or sometimes the frozen soil took a piece of steel out of a ploughshare, or a plough got set in the furrow and had to be cut out.

COOLNESS WILLIAM TUDOR HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

To speak literally, a hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers, came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice. They divided it into cakes, by methods too well known to require description, and these, being sledded to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many barrels of flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds. They told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre. Deep ruts and “cradle holes” were worn in the ice, as on terra firma, by the passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horses invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out like buckets. They stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile thirty- five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air; for when the wind, though never so cold, finds a passage though, it will wear large cavities, leaving slight supports or studs only here and there, and finally topple it down. At first it looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla; but when they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices, and this became covered with rime and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss-grown and hoary ruin, built of azure-tinted marble, and abode of Winter, that old man we see in the almanac, –his shanty, as if he had a design to estivate with us. They calculated that not twenty-five per cent. of this would reach its destination, and that two or three per cent, would be wasted in the cars. However, a still greater part of this heap had a different destiny from what was intended; for, either because the ice was found not to keep so well as was expected, containing more air than usual, or for some other reason, it never got to market. This heap, made in the winter of ’46-7 and estimated to contain ten thousand tons, was finally covered with hay and boards; and though it was unroofed the following July, and a part of it carried off, the rest remaining exposed to the sun, it stood over that summer and the next winter, and was not quite melted till September 1848. Thus the pond recovered the greater part. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

December 2, Wednesday: A deed of sale was witnessed by Henry Thoreau, for purchase for $1,239.56 of 41 acres at Walden Pond by Waldo Emerson.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN By this point in time Thoreau had finished his draft account of his visit to Maine, the one into which his readings in Herman Melville’s TYPEE had been interpolated. Eventually this reading would show up in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

published WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, in masked form as follows:

WALDEN: The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin- deep and unalterable. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Dec 2nd 23 geese in the pond this morn. flew over my house about 10 ’oclock in morn within gun shot. The ground has been covered with snow since Nov. 25th {Three-fourths page missing} {leaf missing} add lest one ray more than usual come into our eyes –a little information from the western heavens –and where are we?– ubique gentium sumus!– where are we as it is? Who shall say what is? He can only say how he sees. One man sees 100 stars in the heavens –another sees 1000– There is no doubt of it –but why should they turn their backs on one another, & join different sects– As for the reality no man sees it –but some see more and some less– what ground then is there to quarrel on? No man lives in that world which I inhabit –or ever came rambling into it– Nor did I ever journey in any other man’s– Our differences have frequently such foundation VENUS as if venus should roll quite near to the orbit of the earth one day –and two inhabitants of the respective planets should take the opportunity to lecture one another I have noticed that if a man thinks he needs 1000 dollars & cant be convinced that he does not –he will be found to have it. If he lives & thinks a thousand dollars will be forthcoming –though it be to by shoe-strings –they have got to come. 1000 mills will be just as hard to come to one who finds it equally hard to convince himself that he needs them. — — Of Emerson’s Essays I should say that they were not poetry –that they were not written exactly at the right crisis though inconceivably near to it. Poetry is simply a miracle & we only recognize it receding from us not coming toward us– It yields only tints & hues of thought like the clouds which reflect the sun –& not distinct propositions– In poetry the sentence is as one word –whose syllables are words– They do not convey thoughts but some of the health which he had inspired– It does not deal in thoughts –they are indifferent to it– A poem is one undivided unimpeded expression –fallen ripe into literature The poet has opened his heart and still lives– And it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured –but mortal eye can never dissect it– while it sees it is blinded. The wisest man –though he should get all the academies in the world to help him cannot add to or subtract one syllable from the line of poetry. If you can speak what you {Three leaves missing} and crownings. As the youth studies minutely the order and the degrees in the imperial procession and suffered none of its effect to be lost on him –so the man at last secured a rank in society which satisfied his notion of fitness & respectability He was defrauded of so much which the savage boy enjoys. Indeed he himself has occasion to say in this very autobiography, when at last he escapes into the woods without the gates –“Thus much is certain, that only the undefinable, wide-expanding feelings of youth and of uncultivated nations are adapted to the sublime, which, whenever it may be excited in us through external objects, since it is either formless, or else moulded into forms which are incomprehensible, must surround us with a grandeur which we find above our reach.” He was even too well-bred to be thoroughly bred. He says that he had had no intercourse with the lowest class of his townsmen– The child should have the full advantage of ignorance as well as of knowledge –& is fortunate if he gets his share of neglect and exposure. “The law of nature break the rules of art” He further says of himself “I had lived among painters from my childhood, and had accustomed myself to look at objects, as they did, with reference to art.” This was his peculiarity in after years. His writings are not the inspiration of nature into his soul –but his own observations rather.”

After December 2: When I am stimulated by reading the biographies of literary men to adopt some method of educating myself and directing my studies –I can only resolve to keep unimpaired the freedom & wakefulness of my genius. I will not seek to accomplish much in breadth and bulk and loose my self in industry but keep my celestial relations fresh. No method or discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert– What is a course of History –no matter how well selected –or the most admirable routine of life –and fairest relation to society –when one is reminded that he may be a Seer that to keep his eye constantly on the true and real is a discipline that will absorb every other. How can he appear or be seen to be well employed to the mass of men whose profession it is to climb resolutely the heights of life –and never lose a step he has taken Let the youth seize upon the finest and most memorable experience in his life –that which most reconciled him to his unknown destiny –and seek to discover in it his future path. Let him be sure that that way is his only true HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

and worthy career. Every mortal sent into this world has a star in the heavens appointed to guide him– Its ray he cannot mistake– It has sent its beam to him either through clouds and mists faintly or through a serene heaven– He knows better than to seek advice of any. This world is no place for the exercise of what is called common sense. This world would be denied. Of how much improvement a man is susceptible –and what are the methods? When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion or say rather like a comet –for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and that direction it will ever revisit this system –its steam-cloud like a banner streaming behind like such a fleecy cloud as I have seen in a summer’s day –high in the heavens unfolding its wreathed masses to the light –as if this travelling and aspiring man would ere long take the sunset sky for his train in livery when he travelled – When I have heard the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth –with his feet and breathing fire and smoke– It seems to me that the earth has got a race now that deserves to inhabit it. If all were as it seems, and men made the elements their servants for noble ends. If the cloud that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroes or as innocent and beneficent an omen as that which hovers over the parched fields of the farmer. If the elements did not have to lament their time wasted in accompanying men on their errands. If this enterprise were as noble as it seems. The stabler was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars to fodder and harness his steed –fire was awakened too to get him off– If the enterprise were as innocent as it is early– For all the day he flies over the country stopping only that his master may rest– If the enterprise were as disinterested as it is unwearied.– And I am awakened by its tramp and defiant snort at midnight while in some far glen it fronts the elements encased in ice and snow and will only reach its stall to start once more If the enterprise were as important as it is protracted. No doubt there is to follow a moral advantage proportionate to this physical one Astronomy is that department of physics which answers to Prophesy the Seer’s or Poets calling It is a mild a patient deliberate and contemplative science. To see more with the physical eye than man has yet seen to see farther, and off the planet –into the system. Shall a man stay on this globe without learning something –without adding to his knowledge –merely sustaining his body and with morbid anxiety saving his soul. This world is not a place for him who does not discover its laws. Dull Despairing and brutish generations have left the race where they found it or in deeper obscurity and night –impatient and restless ones have wasted their lives in seeking after the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life– These are indeed within the reach of science –but only of a universal and wise science to which an enlightened generation may one day attain. The wise will bring to the task patience humility (serenity) –joy – resolute labor and undying faith.I had come over the hills on foot and alone in serene summer days travelling early in the morning and resting at noon in the shade by the side of some stream and resuming my journey in the cool of the evening– With a knapsack on my back which held a few books and a change of clothing, and a stout staff in my hand. I had looked down from Hoosack mountain where the road crosses it upon the village of North Adams in the valley 3 miles away under my feet –showing how uneven the earth sometimes is and making us wonder that it should ever be level and convenient for man, or any other creatures than birds. As the mountain which now rose before me in the Southwest so blue and cloudy was my goal I did not stop long in this village but buying a little rice and sugar which I put into my knapsack and a pint tin dipper I began to ascend the mt whose summit was 7 or 8 miles distant by the path. My rout lay up a long and spacious valley sloping up to the very clouds, between the principle ridge and a lower elevation called the Bellows. There were a few farms scattered along at different elevations each commanding a noble prospect of the mountains to the north, and a stream ran down the middle of the valley, on which near the head there was a mill It seemed a very fit rout for the pilgrim to enter upon who is climbing to the gates of heaven– now I crossed a hay field, and now over the brook upon a slight bridge still gradually ascending all the while with a sort of awe and filled with indefinable expectations as to what kind of inhabitants and what kind of nature I should come to at last– And now it seemed some advantage that the earth was uneven, for you could not imagine a more noble position for a farm and farm house than this vale afforded farther or nearer from its head, from all the seclusion of the deepest glen overlooking the country from a great elevation –between these two mountain walls. It reminded me of the homesteads on Staten Island, on the coast of New Jersey– This island which is about 18 miles in length, and rises gradually to the height of 3 or 400 feet in the centre, commands fine views in every direction, whether on the side of the continent or the ocean –and southward it looks over the outer bay of New York to Sandy Hook and the Highlands of Neversink, and over long island quite to the open sea toward the shore of europe. HUGUENOTS There are sloping valleys penetrating the island in various directions gradually narrowing and rising to the central table land and at the head of these the Hugenots the first settlers placed their houses quite in the land in HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

healthy and sheltered places from which they looked out serenely through a widening vista over a distant salt prairie and then over miles of the Atlantic –to some faint vessel in the horizon almost a days sail on her voyage to Europe whence they had come. From these quiet nooks they looked out with equal security on calm and storm on fleets which were spell bound and loitering on the coast for want of wind and on tempest & shipwreck. I have been walking in the interior seven or eight miles from the shore, in the midst of rural scenery where there was as little to remind me of the ocean as amid these N H hills when suddenly through a gap in the hills –a cleft or “Clove road”, as the Dutch settlers called it I caught sight of a ship under full sail over a corn field 20 or thirty miles at sea. The effect was similar to seeing the objects in a magic lantern, passed back and forth by day-light since I had no means of measuring distance.

December 16, Wednesday: After the weather cleared, the snowshoers, later dubbed the “Forlorn Hope,” set out: Stanton, Luis, and Salvador; Franklin Ward Graves, his daughters Mary and Sarah, and Sarah’s husband Jay Fosdick; William and Sarah Foster, Sarah’s sister, Harriet Pike, and their two younger brothers, Lemuel and William Murphy; Amanda McCutchen; William Eddy; Patrick Dolan; Antonio the teamster; “Dutch Charley” Burger. William Murphy and Burger turned back the first day, but the 15 others continued. They were weak from hunger and had few provisions.

From WALDEN, we know that Walden Pond froze on the night of the 16th:

Winter 1845-1846 December 22

Winter 1846-1847 December 16

Winter 1847-1848

Winter 1848-1849

Winter 1849-1850 December 31

Winter 1850-1851 December 27

Winter 1851-1852

Winter 1852-1853 January 5

Winter 1853-1854 December 31 HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Winter 1854-1855

Winter 1855-1856

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1847

February 10, Wednesday: Brigham Young “got married with” Jane Terry.

Lecture 1069

DATE PLACE TOPIC

February 3, Wednesday, 1847 Concord (?) February 10, Wednesday, 1847, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “A History of Myself” (I) February 17, Wednesday, 1847, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “A History of Myself” (II)

69. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Narrative of Event: As discussed in the entry on lecture 8 above, at least some of Henry Thoreau’s neighbors on the evening of 4 February 1846 were more interested in hearing about his life at Walden Pond than about Thomas Carlyle’s graces as a writer. Thus, in a preliminary journal draft of this 10 February 1847 lecture, he remarked, “When I lectured here before [last] winter I heard that some of my towns men had expected of me some account of my life at the pond — this I will endeavor to give tonight” (JOURNAL 1, 1837-1844, ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell et al. [1981], page 142). The Concord Lyceum’s record of the event is typically brief: “Concord Feb 10 1847 A lecture was delivered by H. D. Thoreau of Concord. Subject — HISTORY OF HIMSELF. A. G. Fay Sec[retary].”70 His lecture was the eleventh of sixteen at the Concord Lyceum that season (MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM, page 162).

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

70.Cameron, Kenneth Walter. THE MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM DURING THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. Hartford CT: Transcendental Books, 1969, page 162. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: Professor Walter Roy Harding says that this lecture “was received so well that, quite out of keeping with the regular practice of the lyceum, he was asked to repeat it a week later for those who had missed it” (THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU: A BIOGRAPHY, page 187). Indeed, Miss Prudence Ward reported in a letter later that month,

“Henry repeated his lecture to a very full audience …. It was an uncommonly excellent lecture — tho, of course few would adopt his notions — I mean as they are shown forth in his life. Yet it was a very useful lecture, and much needed” (quoted in THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU, pages 187-88). Thoreau did, in fact, give a lecture on the same topic one week later, on 17 February 1847. Whether it was a repetition of the first lecture or a continuation of the topic in a different lecture is not clear. Although Ward’s remark would appear to support the notion that the first early WALDEN lecture was simply repeated, Thoreau almost certainly had in hand by this date the second of what was already or what was soon to become his three-lecture “Walden; or, Life in the Woods” course. If he did not deliver that second lecture on 17 February 1847, he did not deliver it to his fellow townspeople at all. Yet he refers directly to “we inhabitants of Concord” in the surviving manuscript of the second lecture.71 We conjecture, therefore, that Harding’s remark about Thoreau being asked to repeat the first lecture was extrapolated solely from Ward’s remark but that Ward misspoke and actually meant that Thoreau delivered a lecture on the same topic as he had the previous week: his life in the woods. In any event, it appears that both lectures were well received. Description of Topic: See entry to lecture 9 above.

71.Shanley, THE MAKING OF WALDEN, WITH THE TEXT OF THE FIRST VERSION, page 155. Also, see the quotation cited in note 4 of lecture 11 below. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Lecture 1172

DATE PLACE TOPIC

February 10, Wednesday, 1847, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “A History of Myself” (I) February 17, Wednesday, 1847, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “A History of Myself” (II) January 3, Monday, 1848, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “An Excursion to Ktaadn”

72. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Narrative of Event: The records of the Concord Lyceum state, “Concord Feb 17 1847 A lecture was delivered by Henry D Thoreau of Concord. Subject — Same as last week. A. G. Fay Sec[retary]”73 The lecture was the twelfth of the season’s sixteen offerings.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: See lecture 10 for a discussion of Miss Prudence Ward’s favorable comments on this lecture, which she reported, perhaps erroneously, to be a repetition of Thoreau’s lecture of the previous week. Lyceums very rarely allowed repeat performances, and at this time Henry Thoreau almost certainly had a draft of the 2d of his 3 early WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS lectures. But whether Prudence was right or wrong about the duplication, this second lecture attracted “a very full audience,” as Ward reported (quoted in Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU, page 187), and was well received.

Two other letters, one by Waldo Emerson and one by Bronson Alcott, ambiguously refer to one or another of these lecture performances, with a slight favoring of the 17 February possibility. In a 28 February 1847 letter to Margaret Fuller, Emerson comments, “Mrs Ripley [Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley] & other members of the opposition came down the other night to hear Henry’s Account of his housekeeping at Walden Pond, which he

73.Cameron, Kenneth Walter. THE MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM DURING THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. Hartford CT: Transcendental Books, 1969, page 162. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

read as a lecture, and were charmed with the witty wisdom which ran through it all.”74 The Alcott letter, to his daughter Anna Alcott, was penned on a “Wednesday Night” in February 1847, the day of one of the two lectures. In a response to Anna’s query about how she might help her mother and father through the family’s present difficult circumstances, Alcott assures her that self-improvement guided by her own conscience is the path to follow. He concludes with a tantalizingly cryptic endorsement of the lecture she would hear that evening. His apparent familiarity with what Thoreau will say suggests that he either had had private access to the material or had already heard it delivered, either as a private reading or a public lecture. If the latter, his opportunities would have been in Lincoln on 19 January, assuming that Thoreau gave his “History of Myself” lecture then, or in Concord on 10 February, assuming the unusual: that Thoreau did deliver the same lecture on both the 10th and 17th. Alcott’s letter to Anna reads in part:75 Your Note was the first thing I saw this morning, when I came in to make my study fire: and I was glad to find, all I knew, of your earnest desire to help us in these times of trial, confirmed in your own handwriting. You wish me to tell you what you can do to lighten your mother’s cares, and give your father a still deeper enjoyment in yourself, and your sisters .... Life is a lesson we best learn and almost solely too, by living. The Conscience within is the best, and, in the end, the only Counseller .... Tis that first of all duties[,] Self-improvement, to which end life, and the world, and your friends are all given. I think I speak truly when I say that you wish this most of all things .... As for me, and my thoughts — Great is my Peace, if in going at night to my Pillow, I have the sense of having earned my faculties, or limbs even, by thinking One Thought, speaking one word, doing one deed, that my task master approves, or the nearest or remotest Person or Time shall adopt, repeat, or enjoy. — Dear Anna, this from your thoughtful, yet careful-minded Father. For the rest, our friend Henry shall answer and explain in the Lecture you hear this evening.

Description of Topic: Very likely the 2d of Thoreau’s two earliest “Walden; or, Life in the Woods” lectures, the text of this lecture is, for the most part, the second fifty-odd pages (paged “1” through “53” using Thoreau’s pagination on the manuscript leaves) of “the text of the first version” of WALDEN recovered by J. Lyndon Shanley.76 The following sentence suggests the sense of immediacy the lecture likely created among Thoreau’s auditors: “I trust that none of my hearers will be so uncharitable as to look into my house now — after hearing this, at the end of an unusually dirty winter, with critical housewife’s eyes, for I intend to celebrate the first bright & unquestionable spring morning by scrubbing my house with sand until it is as white as a lily — or, at any rate, as the washer-woman said of her clothes, as white as a ‘wiolet.’”77 As with the first of his two lectures, Thoreau continued to revise this text and published it seven-and-a-half years later as the second chapter of WALDEN, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” although several paragraphs of the lecture text consist of passages published in the “Reading” and “Sounds” chapters.

74.THE LETTERS OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 9 volumes to date, ed. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939; 1990), 3:377-78. 75.THE LETTERS OF A. BRONSON ALCOTT, pages 128-29. 76.Shanley, THE MAKING OF WALDEN, WITH THE TEXT OF THE FIRST VERSION, pages 137-57. 77.Shanley, THE MAKING OF WALDEN, page 153. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

February 19, Friday: An undated letter from Margaret Fuller on the sights she was seeing in Europe and the public people78 she was meeting was printed as a column by the New-York Tribune: ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

According to The Concord Freeman, “Ice King” Frederic Tudor’s work crew was harvesting between 800 and 1,000 tons of ice per day from the surface of Walden Pond.

On one or another morning Waldo Emerson mused about the prospect of profiting from Walden Pond (not very realistically, since no part of the surface of said pond was within the plotlines of his abutting woodlot):

I woke up this morning & find the ice in my pond promised to be a revenue. It was as if somebody had proposed to buy the air that blew over my field.

April 8, Thursday: The ice on Walden Pond was completely melted:

During this month Boston vessels would be offloading ice (and watermelons as well, although I have no idea where they might have been mature during this season) at Veracruz, Mexico in support of our expeditionary troops. The price of ice there would be one dollar the pound. Some of this ice might very well have been from Walden Pond! MEXICAN WAR

After April 8: {Twelve pages missing} but it was all gone out of the river –and he dropped down without obstruction from Sudbury where he lived –to Fair Haven pond –which he found unexpectedly was a firm field of ice– It was a very warm spring day and he was astonished to see such a body of {Four-fifths page missing} Saw a woodchuck out 30 March snow fell 8 inches deep next day. heard a hyla Ap. 6th pond ice melted Ap 8th 1847 —— On the 15th March 142 years before this compelled her to rise from childbed –time to put on one shoe –dashed

78. The term “celebrities” would not be first used, by Emerson, until the following year. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

out the {Four-fifths page missing}{Leaves missing}

I Robin Hood ballads, for instance, which I can recommend to travel by. Sweavens are swift, sayd lyttle John, As the wind blows over the hill; For if it be never so loud this night, To-morrow it may be still.” And so it went up hill & down till a stone interrupted the line, when a new verse was chosen. His shoote it was but loosely shot, Yet flewe not the arrowe in vaine, For it met one of the sheriffe’s men, And William-a-Trent was slaine.” There is, however, this consolation to the most way worn traveller, upon the dustiest road, that the path his feet describe is so perfectly symbolical of human life –now climbing the hills, now descending into the vales. From the summits he beholds the heavens and the horizon. from the vales he looks up to the heights again. He is treading his old lessons still, & though he may be very wary & travel worn, it is yet sincere experience. Thus we went on our way passing through Still river village –at sundown –seen from whence the Wachusett was already lost once more amid the blue fabulous mts in the horizon.– Listening to the evening song of the robin in the orchards –& contrasting the equanimity of nature with the bustle & impatience of man– His words & actions presume always a crisis near at hand, but she is forever silent & unpretending.– Without stopping to tell all o our adventures let it suffice to say that we reached the banks of the Concord on the third morning after our departure –before the sun had climbed many degrees into the heavens And now when we look again Westward from the hills of concord Wachusett and Monadnock have retreated once more among the blue & fabulous mts of the horizon –though our eyes rest on the very rocks where we boiled our hasty pudding amid the clouds. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

July: Daniel Foster was licensed as Congregationalist minister of Hopkinton, Massachusetts. (Of the Foster family’s nine children, all but three were ministers. –Need I specify that the one child of the nine who was female was one of the three who were not ordained?)

With the second redraft of the WEEK manuscript complete, Henry Thoreau resubmitted it to Wiley & Putnam.

Part of the “vast blue fort or Valhalla” of ice that the Irish laborers had stacked beside Walden Pond during the previous winter was carried off while the remainder was left uncovered and exposed to the sun. It wasn’t worth loading onto railroad cars, there not being a market for that much of it. COOLNESS HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

COOLNESS WILLIAM TUDOR HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Our national birthday, the 4th of July:79 William Johnson of Natchez, a free black man who was himself a slavemaster (!) as well as being a barber and a successful businessman, kept a diary of short entries, hardly missing a day between 1836 and 1851. This diary has seen publication as William Johnson’s NATCHEZ, THE ANTE-BELLUM DIARY OF A FREE NEGRO, ed. William Ransom Hogan and Edwin Adams Davis (1951, 1979, and a Louisiana State UP paperback in 1993). Here is one of a series of Johnson’s 4th-of-July entries: “Nothing going on very Lively to day altho tis the 4th. Old Roan and the Sorril mare wran off from the Commons to day Some time.” CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY

The Boston Daily Evening Transcript notified its readers that in the mornings since June 16th, the local Fitchburg RR passenger train had been making two morning back-and-forth runs, an afternoon back-and-forth run and an evening back-and-forth run between Concord and Charlestown. It had been choo-chooing off from Concord at 6:25AM in the morning and turning back toward Concord at 7AM, and setting off from Concord again at 8AM and heading back toward Concord at 11AM. Likewise, in the afternoons and evenings, it had been setting off from Concord for Charlestown at 12:30PM and heading back toward Concord at 5PM, and setting off from Concord for Charlestown again at 6PM and heading back toward Concord at 7PM. Its transits presumably took about half an hour. This local train and crew presumably was spending its nights in Concord. Also, passenger trains had been leaving Fitchburg for Charlestown via Concord at 1AM, 11AM, and 5PM, and leaving Charlestown for Fitchburg at 6:30AM, 11AM, and 4:30PM. All these trains stopped at Fresh Pond, Mount Auburn, the Arsenal, and Watertown Village. Apparently, not counting the freight traffic, one or another passenger train would be choo-chooing past Walden Pond fourteen times daily during this period: • 3AM (approximately) Fitchburg east toward Charlestown • 6:30AM Concord east toward Charlestown • 6:55AM Charlestown west toward Fitchburg • 7:25AM Charlestown west toward Concord • 8:05AM Concord east toward Charlestown • 11:25AM Charlestown west toward Concord, and Charlestown west toward Fitchburg (two trains, one of which is local, heading in the same westerly direction on the same tracks at the same time, presumably for safety in sight of each other or even linked together since trains at that time did not have any braking systems whatsoever and could only roll gradually to a stop) • 12:35PM Concord east toward Charlestown • 1PM (approximately) Fitchburg east toward Charlestown • 4:55PM Charlestown west toward Fitchburg • 5:25PM Charlestown west toward Concord • 6:05PM Concord east toward Charlestown • 7PM (approximately) Fitchburg east toward Charlestown • 7:25PM Charlestown west toward Concord

“[The railroad will] only encourage the common people to move about needlessly.” — Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington 79. This was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 43rd birthday. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

September 6, Monday: Henry Thoreau moved back to the Thoreau family boardinghouse, essentially abandoning the shanty by Walden Pond. EMERSON’S SHANTY TIMELINE OF WALDEN

The two-act playlet “Walden, the Ballad of Thoreau,” which has allegedly been performed to date at more than 6,700 colleges and schools (www.waldenplay.com), amounts to an invented conversation between Thoreau and Emerson set during the final two days Thoreau spent in his cabin before leaving Walden Pond.

On page 16 of his reconstruction of Thoreau’s attitude toward time and eternity, Dr. Alfred I. Tauber concludes that it was by this point that he had arrived at his Augustinian “mature understanding of time and his ‘place’ in nature.”80 When Thoreau left Walden Pond in September 1847, he had fully embraced his mature understanding of time and his “place” in nature. Specifically, Thoreau’s understanding of the full immediacy of the present is the most sensitive measure of his metaphysics of nature. I contrast his understanding of “time” HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

as restricted to the present (the Augustinian notion that past and future exist only in the mind) and serving as a human category of temporality with his notion of “eternity.” Thoreau’s recognition that nature’s flux is immediate and ever-present, existing in an eternal now, represents a crucial metaphysical insight, and his strategies for integrating the ceaseless evolution of the cosmos and himself revolve around efforts to “capture” time either in self-conscious understanding or in the total eclipse of mythical revelry. Time’s apprehension or suspension becomes the foundation of his own reckoning of his selfhood and thereby introduces the basic themes of this study. Imagining that Thoreau had moved directly into the Emerson household rather than moving home first, Russell Connor has fantasized a coffeetable nonbook which might perhaps be titled A BOOK OF MORNINGS AFTER and one of the “mornings-after” that he imagines is the morning after the day of September 6, 1847 in Concord MA:

“I lived there for two years and two months [and two days]. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.”

Here is Mr. Connor’s attempt at fabricating an entry for that morning of September 7th:

80. My suggestion would be that we should not read Tauber here, to be making an assertion that this particular point in Thoreau’s life was of greatest significance, or marked an essential transition point. He does not ever assert, or even suggest, that Thoreau had not, at an earlier moment, already arrived at this appreciation. His intent is merely to establish what Thoreau thought, rather than to establish precisely when it had been that he first thought it. Likewise, my suggestion would be that we should not read page 26 to be making an assertion that Thoreau had been influenced by Augustine, since he confesses elsewhere that he is fully aware that there is no preserved record that Thoreau had ever glimpsed Augustine’s CONFESSIONS, and his focus is not so much on deriving the provenance of Thoreau’s discovery as on specifying the nature of it: Thoreau recognizes, as Augustine fourteen centuries before him, that there is indeed no such division of time as the past, present, and future. In a phenomenological sense, indeed existentially, we are only in the present, because, strictly speaking, only the present exists. We live in the present moment, and while the past is recalled or witnessed as artifact, that witness is experienced only in the present. The future, like the past, exists only as a mental construct only in the present moment. And then the imbroglio: the present is never held on to; it is always slipping by into the past, flowing from a future never quite here. Dr. Alfred I. Tauber. HENRY DAVID THOREAU AND THE MORAL AGENCY OF KNOWING. Berkeley and Los Angeles CA; London, England: U of California P, 2001 HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

The day after returning to the household of Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord, following two years spent in a hut on Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau finds a note at breakfast. Dear Henry: We understand how you must miss the sounds that were the companions of your solitude. Even at 3 o’clock in the morning, we marveled at your mimicry of whippoorwills, the trill of a sparrow, the distant mooing of a cow, the trump of bullfrogs (my favorite). Lidian considers your hooting owl more tragic than King Lear. We do feel the performance could bear up handsomely without the passing train. We’re sleeping in. Welcome home,

Ralph.

September 25, Saturday: Aunt Maria Thoreau wrote to Miss Prudence Ward: HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Mr. Emerson is going to Europe soon to lecture there, and in consequence Henry has sold his house to him,81 and is going to reside in his family this winter.... Mr. Alcott’s going to Europe for the present seems to have blown over, he and H_____ is building an arbour for Mr. Emerson, but H_____ says, A_____ pulls down as fast as he builds up, (quite characteristic) but it is rather expensive [and] somewhat tedious to poor Henry, to say nothing of endangering life and limbs for if here had not been a comfortable haystack near that he availed himself of by jumping into, when the top rafter was knock’d off, it might have been rather a serious affair. I do not know but I exaggerate a little, but at any rate jump he had to, and I believe it was in a hay mow. I hope they will find as soft a landing place, one and all, when they drop from the clouds. WALDO EMERSON EMERSON’S SHANTY WALDEN POND

81. Aunt Maria was referring to the shanty that Thoreau built on Emerson’s woodlot at Walden Pond; therefore this is inaccurate. Thoreau had not “sold his house” to Emerson –no money changed hands– because that shanty, being on Emerson’s property, had from its origin been the property of Emerson and no other person. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Winter: Henry Thoreau watched the ice-cutters, mostly Irish, on Walden Pond.

The weather along the west coast of Ireland this winter was characterized as “one continuous storm.” The poorly nourished fishermen, due to famine weakness, were in general unable to row their frail curraghs through the breakers so as to fish offshore, although some, driven by desperation, drowned while attempting such maneuvers.

Some of the visitors to the cloisters of Westminster Abbey were not of the usual kind, but were instead naturalists. They were coming to inspect a large collection of madrepores and sea sponges kept in seawater inside glass cases in the drawing-room of Ashburnham House. This constituted the 1st marine aquarium in England. The exhibit had been created by Anna Thynne, the wife of the Reverend Lord John Thynne, Sub- Dean of the Abbey. This lady’s housemaid (possibly, but of course not necessarily, an impoverished Irish woman refugee of the great famine) would need to spend 30 to 45 minutes each day pouring six gallons of salt water backward and forward before an open window, in order to keep it fresh. (The result would become a mania of the 1850s.)

Having given up his dental practice in Connecticut, apparently after a fatality, Dr. Horace Wells relocated to New-York and became addicted to chloroform.

DENTISTRY HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1848

Daniel Wadsworth died,82 and made a bequest of the painting that he had commissioned in 1828, of his estate outside Hartford CT, “View of Monte Video, Seat of Daniel Wadsworth, Esq.” This painting is currently on display at the Wadsworth Atheneum:

The painting may assist us in understanding Emerson’s plan which finances never allowed him to implement, to have Henry Thoreau and Bronson Alcott construct for him a Philosopher’s Tower on Emerson’s Cliff just to the south of Walden Pond, and also Thoreau’s remarks in WALDEN about having a country seat from which one might be the master of all one surveyed. THe view in this painting is from the base of the 55-foot hexagonal wooden Waddsworth Tower, atop Talcott Mountain in Farmington (now Avon) CT, looking toward the south.

WALDEN: Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a house but a sedes, a seat? –better if a country seat.

82. In this year the artist Thomas Cole also died. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

September: The last of the Walden Pond ice that had been stacked by the Irish laborers during the winter of 1846/1847 by the William Tudor firm, uncovered from its protection of straw and boards, had at this point been re- liquefied by the sun, and all that remained was the mess of these waterlogged boards and straw.

(It would be worth our while for us to consider this as having been an unintentional and inadequate, but realistic, re-enactment of the origination of Walden Pond as the gradual melting of a buried glacier remnant at the end of the previous glacial episode of this current Ice Age. Refer to Professor of Geology Robert M. Thorson of the University of Connecticut’s 2013 WALDEN’S SHORE: HENRY DAVID THOREAU AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE.) “Both were greatly delayed in their melting by thick insulation.” “On the far side of the geo-chronology, varve dates indicate that [the burial of the block of glacial ice] took place roughly 17,000 years ago.” “We cannot know how long it took the Walden block to melt, but a millennium or two is quite realistic based on modern analogs and heat flux calculations.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

COOLNESS WILLIAM TUDOR

(Incidentally, it was during this year that Ferdinand Carré of France was 1st substituting ammonia for ether, as the volatile heat-carrying fluid to be condensed and then expanded for the manufacture of artificial ice. –Just so you’ll know.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Basal Expense of Shipping One Ton of Ice from Boston Harbor to US Coastal Cities, by Year from 1857 through 1863

$3.50

$3.00

$2.50

$2.00 $2.00 $1.75 WAR

1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Lecture83

DATE PLACE TOPIC

March 1848 (?) Lexington MA; Robbins Building (?) “Economy” (?) November 22, Wednesday, 1848, at 7:30PM Salem MA; Lyceum Hall “Student Life in New England, Its Economy” December 20, Wednesday, 1848, at 7:30PM Gloucester MA; Town Hall “Economy — Illustrated by the Life of a Student”

83. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Narrative of Event: On May 19, 1848, Henry Thoreau wrote a letter to his friend Horace Greeley, the editor of the widely read New-York Tribune (THE CORRESPONDENCE OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU, pages 223-25). In it he included a long paragraph on the economy of his life in the woods at Walden Pond, a paragraph that paraphrased portions of “Economy,” his first “Walden; or, Life in the Woods” lecture. Much impressed, Greeley printed the slightly revised passage in his newspaper, along with some of his own laudatory remarks, under the title “A Lesson for Young Poets.” [You will find Greeley’s 25 May 1848 article on the following screen.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

We are continually receiving letters from young gentlemen who deem themselves born to enlighten the world in some way — to “strike the sounding lyre,” or from the Editorial tripod dispense wisdom and guidance to an instructed and admiring world. These generally want to know why they cannot be employed in our establishment, or find a publisher for their poems, or a chance in some shape to astonish mankind and earn a livelihood by letters. — To this large and increasing class, we wish to propound one question: “Suppose all who desire to live by Literature or Trade could find places, who would hoe the needful corn or dig the indispensible potatoes?” — But we purposed in beginning to ask their attention to the following extract from a private letter we have just received from a very different sort of literary youth — a thorough classical scholar, true poet (though he rarely or never wrote verses,) and never sought to make a livelihood by his writings, though there are not six men in America who can surpass them. We feel indeed honored by his friendship, and in the course of a private letter we have just received from him he casually says: “For the last five years, I have supported myself solely by the labor of my hands. I have not received one cent from any other source; and this has cost me so little time — say, a month in the Spring and another in the Autumn — doing the coarsest work of all kinds, that I have probably enjoyed more leisure for literary pursuits than any contemporary. For more than two years past, I have lived alone in the woods, in a good plastered and shingled house entirely of my own building, earning only what I wanted, and sticking to my proper work. The fact is, Man need not live by the sweat of his brow — unless he sweats easier than I do — he needs so little. For two years and two months, all my expenses have amounted to but 27 cents a week, and I have fared gloriously in all respects. If a man must have money — and he needs but the smallest amount — the true and independent way to earn it is by day-labor with his “Scholars are apt to think themselves privileged to complain as if their lot were a peculiarly hard one. How much have we heard about the attainment of knowledge under difficulties — of poets starving in garrets — of literary men depending on the patronage of the wealthy, and finally dying mad! It is time that men sang another song. — There is no reason why the scholar, who professes to be a little wiser than the mass of men, should not do his work in the ditch occasionally, and, by means of his superior wisdom, make much less suffice for him. A wise man will not be unfortunate. How otherwise would you know that he was not a fool?” — We trust our friend will pardon the liberty we have taken in printing the foregoing, since we are sure of effecting signal good thereby. We have no idea of making a hero of him. Our object is simply to shame the herd of pusillanimous creatures who whine out their laziness in bad verses, and execrate the stupidity of publishers and readers who will not buy these maudlin effusions at the paternal estimate of their value, and thus spare them the dire necessity of doing something useful for a living. It is only their paltriness that elevates our independent friend above the level of ordinary manhood, and whenever they shall rise to the level of true self- respect, his course will no longer be remarkable. “What!” says one of them, “do you mean that every one must hoe corn or swing the sledge — that no life is useful or honorable but one of rude manual toil.” — No, Sir; we say no such thing. — If any one is sought out, required, demanded, for some vocation specially intellectual, let him embrace it and live by it. But the general rule is that Labor — that labor which produces food and clothes and shelter — is every man’s duty and destiny, for which he should be fitted, in which he should be willing to do his part manfully. But let him study, and meditate, and cultivate his nobler faculties as he shall find opportunity; and when ever a career of intellectual exertion shall open before him, let him embrace it if he be inclined and qualified. But to coin his thoughts into some marketable semblance, disdain useful labor of the hands because he had a facility of writing, and go crying his mental wares in the market, seeking to exchange them for bread and clothes — this is most degrading and despicable. Shall not the world outgrow such shabbiness? HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Greeley’s article attracted much national attention and comment (for discussion, see lecture 20 below). Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was living in Salem at the time, may have informed the managers of the local lyceum that Thoreau was the anonymous author of the paragraph in the Tribune and that the paragraph was part of a lecture Thoreau had written about his life in the Walden Woods. In any event, soon after the Tribune article appeared, the managers voted to invite Thoreau to deliver this lecture. The invitation, however, didn’t reach him until October, when Hawthorne himself, as the new corresponding secretary of the Salem Lyceum, sent the following letter on the twenty-first:84 The Managers of the Salem Lyceum, some time ago, voted that you should be requested to deliver a Lecture before that Institution, during the approaching season. I know not whether Mr Chever, the late corresponding Secretary, communicated the vote to you; at all events, no answer has been received, and, as Mr Chever’s succesor in office, I am instructed to repeat the invitation. Permit me to add my own earnest wishes that you will accept it — and also, laying aside my official dignity, to express my wife’s desire and my own that you will be our guest, if you do come. In case of your compliance, the Managers would be glad to know at what time it will best suit you to deliver the Lecture.

Hawthorne added in a postscript, “I live at No 14, Mall Street — where I shall be very happy to see you. The stated fee for Lectures is $20.” Very likely this was the first lecture Thoreau was actually paid to deliver.

After receiving Thoreau’s acceptance, Hawthorne wrote to him again on 20 November85 to request his almost immediate presence in Salem: I did not sooner write you, because there were pre-engagements for the two or three first lectures, so that I could not arrange matters to have you come during the present month. But, as it happens, the expected lectures have failed us; and we now depend on you to come this very next Wednesday. I shall announce you in the paper of tomorrow, so you must come. I regret that I could not give you longer notice. We shall expect you on Wednesday, at No 14 Mall. Street.

After his signature, Hawthorne added two more thoughts:86 If it is utterly impossible for you to come, pray write me a line so that I may get it Wednesday morning. But, by all means, come. This Secretaryship is an intolerable bore. I have travelled thirty miles, this wet day for no other business. Short notice notwithstanding, Thoreau answered Hawthorne’s call and, two days after the letter was penned, gave the second lecture in a course of twenty before the Salem Lyceum. Other lecturers that year included Daniel Webster, Louis Agassiz, Theodore Parker, Waldo Emerson, Charles Sumner, and Horace Mann, Sr. (THE MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM DURING THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE, page 19).

The day after his lecture, Thoreau accompanied Hawthorne to Craigie House, the Cambridge home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, where they dined with Longfellow and Ellery Channing II.

84.CORRESPONDENCE, pages 230-31. 85.CORRESPONDENCE, page 233. 86.CORRESPONDENCE, pages 233-34. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

On 21 November Hawthorne had written to Longfellow about Thoreau, remarking, “You would find him well worth knowing: he is a man of thought and originality; with a certain iron-poker-ishness, and uncompromising stiffness in his mental character, which is interesting, though it grows wearisome on close and frequent acquaintance.”87 Longfellow, however, had likely already formed his own impression of Thoreau, for the two men had dined together at Emerson’s house only a week earlier (Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU: A BIOGRAPHY, page 237).

Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: On the last day of October and throughout the first half of November 1848, the Salem Register, Salem Observer, and Salem Tri-Weekly Gazette announced a partial list of “eminent lecturers” who would appear in the course. Among them were Webster, Agassiz, Horace Mann, Sr., Emerson, and “Henry S. Thoreau, of Concord, N.H.” (For the Wednesday evening lectures, the “whole number of tickets has been limited to six hundred and thirty,” the Register reported.) Although Hawthorne had told Thoreau he would advertise Thoreau’s appearance at the Salem Lyceum in the local newspapers beginning on 21 November, we have been unable to locate any advertisements in Salem newspapers for that or the following day.

The Salem Observer on 25 November 1848 carried the following review, praising Thoreau’s lecture, identifying him as the reclusive scholar of New-York Tribune fame, and remarking — not uncharitably —

87.Samuel Longfellow, THE LIFE OF HENRY WORDSWORTH LONGFELLOW, 2 volumes (Boston: Ticknor, 1886), 2:136. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Thoreau’s likeness to Emerson: Mr. Thoreau, of Concord, gave his auditors a lecture on Wednesday evening, sufficiently Emersonian to have come from the great philosopher himself. We were reminded of Emerson continually. In thought, style & delivery, the similarity was equally obvious. There was the same keen philosophy running through him, the same jutting forth of “brilliant edges of meaning” as Gilfillan has it. Even in tone of voice, Emerson was brought strikingly to the ear; and in personal appearance also, we fancied some little resemblance. The close likeness between the two would almost justify a charge of plagiarism, were it not that Mr. Thoreau’s lecture furnished ample proof of being a native product, by affording all the charm of an original. Rather than an imitation of Emerson, it was the unfolding of a like mind with his; as if the two men had grown in the same soil and under the same culture. The reader may remember having recently seen an article from the N. Y. Tribune describing the recluse life led by a scholar, who supported himself by manual labor, and on a regime which cost only twenty seven cents a week, making it necessary to labor but six weeks to provide sufficient of the necessaries of life to serve the balance of the year. Mr. Thoreau is the hero of that story — although he claims no heroism, considering himself simply as an economist. The subject of this lecture was Economy, illustrated by the experiment mentioned. — This was done in an admirable manner, in a strain of exquisite humor, with a strong under current of delicate satire against the follies of the times. Then there were interspersed observations, speculations, and suggestions upon dress, fashions, food, dwellings, furniture, &c.&c., sufficiently queer to keep the audience in almost constant mirth, and sufficiently wise and new to afford many good practical hints and precepts. The performance has created “quite a sensation” amongst the Lyceum goers. Another newspaper review of sorts was the summary of the then-concluding lecture season in the area by a correspondent to the Boston Daily Evening Traveller. Without specifying which of Thoreau’s Salem lectures was intended — he had given another there on 28 February 1849 — the correspondent on 16 March 1849 cited “a delectable compound of oddity, wit and transcendentalism, from Mr. Thoreau, of Concord,” among a few other worthy presentations.

Notably, on the day of Thoreau’s second Salem lecture that season, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, in a letter to HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Mrs. Mary Peabody Mann, praised his earlier November delivery as follows:88 This evening Mr. Thoreau is going to lecture and will stay with us. His lecture before was so enchanting; such a revelation of nature in all its exquisite details of wood-thrushes, squirrels, sunshine, mists and shadows, fresh, vernal odors, pine-tree ocean melodies, that my ear rang with music, and I seemed to have been wandering through copse and dingle! Mr. Thoreau has risen above all his arrogance of manner, and is as gentle, simple, ruddy, and meek as all geniuses should be; and now his great blue eyes fairly outshine and put into shade a nose which I once thought must make him uncomely forever. Description of Topic: During the twenty-one months that had elapsed since Thoreau’s delivery of “History of Myself” in mid- February 1847, he had carefully revised his earlier “Walden; or, Life in the Woods” manuscript. As J. Lyndon Shanley points out, “The effect and apparent intention of his work … was to tidy up and to increase the clarity and force of the first version, which he had written at the pond.”89 Shanley also notes that the second version of the manuscript is not much longer than the first (both versions contained the text of three lectures, although Thoreau never delivered a third lecture from the earlier manuscript) and that Thoreau’s handwriting in the 90 second version “is the most clearly formed in the whole manuscript” of WALDEN. But because Shanley sees the WALDEN manuscript almost solely as an evolving book, he failed to consider why the earlier (Shanley’s “version I”) and later (his versions II and III) manuscripts are about the same length and why Thoreau wrote the later of the two manuscripts more carefully. The reason is not that Thoreau was simply revising a book manuscript but that he was using the earlier version of the manuscript, version I, as the basis for preparing the reading drafts for a course of three lectures, versions II and III. Once written, he apparently planned to keep those reading drafts intact as lectures so that he could read from them while continuing to expand the larger “Walden; or, Life in the Woods” manuscript into a book. If that was indeed his plan, it was well-founded, for the first lecture in that course, his early “Economy” lecture, shares with his early “Life without Principle” lecture the honor of being his most frequently delivered lecture, each being delivered nine times.

The lecture Thoreau delivered in Salem on this date is much shorter than but nonetheless quite similar to the “Economy” chapter of WALDEN. A small amount of material in the lecture was subsequently omitted from the published chapter. For example, a close summary of a later delivery of this same lecture text published in the Portland Transcript of 31 March 1849 (see lecture 20 below) includes the paraphrase, “Here we walked 88.Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, MEMORIES OF HAWTHORNE (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897), pages 92-93. 89.Shanley, THE MAKING OF WALDEN, page 28. 90.In THE MAKING OF WALDEN, page 28, Shanley makes what we regard as a misleading distinction between versions II and III of the WALDEN manuscript. After noting that Thoreau “revised [version II] and then wrote version III so close upon II that they almost seem one piece,” Shanley says, “It is certain, however, that there are two versions here and that Thoreau wrote III after II; not only are the ink and handwriting different, but also III contains revisions of parts of II” (p. 28). We submit that Thoreau wrote version II sequentially, from front to back, as three clear-text reading drafts for lecturing and that version III represents various types of revisions to those reading drafts. For instance, the first eight pages of version II are not extant, but the first five pages of version III are. Because the pin perforations in the center-left margins of the leaf containing version II, page 9, match exactly the pin perforations of the leaves containing version III, page 5, Thoreau clearly used both versions in a single text at one time, and we can surmise that he derived the text of version III, pages 1-5, from revising the text on the now non-extant pages 1-8 of version II. Generally speaking, Thoreau’s organic or incremental method of composition, by which we mean the way he added material to and suppressed material from his constantly evolving texts over time rather than simply rewrote his revised texts, renders misleading almost any description employing mechanical terms, such as “draft,” “stage,” or “version.” For descriptions and discussions of Thoreau’s method of composition, see William L. Howarth, THE LITERARY MANUSCRIPTS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), pages xxix-xxx; Bradley P. Dean, “Reconstructions of Thoreau’s Early ‘Life without Principle’ Lectures,” STUDIES IN THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE 1987, pages 288-91; and Dean, “The Sound of a Flail: Reconstructions of Thoreau’s Early ‘Life without Principle’ Lectures,” M.A. thesis, Eastern Washington University, 1984, pages 99-118. Copies of Dean’s thesis are available at WaChenE; CtU; the Thoreau Textual Center, CU-SB; and the Thoreau Society Archives, MCo. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

cautiously about the earth, but in Typee trees grew to the height of 60 feet, and the natives easily ran up to their tops.”

With just a few exceptions, the manuscript pages Thoreau read from in Salem are now housed at CSmH (HM 924). Many of those pages refer to the “audience” or those who “hear” the “lecture,” whereas in the published version of those passages in WALDEN the corresponding references are to “readers” or those who “read” the “book.” Thoreau also made a few minor changes for this lecture, or possibly a later delivery of this lecture, to accommodate his audience. For instance, where he had originally written “I have travelled a good deal in Concord,” he interlined over “Concord” in pencil “my native town”; and elsewhere in the manuscript he changed “this town” (Concord) to “this city” (either Salem or a later venue). TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1849

Lecture91

DATE PLACE TOPIC

December 20, Wednesday, 1848, at 7:30PM Gloucester MA; Town Hall “Economy — Illustrated by the Life of a Student” January 3, Wednesday, 1849, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “White Beans and Walden Pond” February 28, Wednesday, 1849, at 7:30PM Salem MA; Lyceum Hall “Student Life, Its Aims and Employments”

91. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Narrative of Event: According to the records of the Concord Lyceum, “Jany 3d 1849 Lecture by D. H. Thoreau Concord. Subject: WHITE BEANS & WALDEN POND” (THE MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM DURING THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE, page 163). Henry Thoreau’s lecture was the fifth in a course of nineteen, although, as Thomas Blanding has argued, Thoreau may have been “a last minute substitute.”92 The evidence for this conclusion is a journal entry by James Lorin Chapin of Lincoln, who on 3 January 1849 wrote, “I had calculated to have gone to the Lyceum but heard that the man who was expected could not come and so I did not go. Have spent most of the evening in reading, but feel so drowsy that I think I cannot sit up longer than nine o’clock.”93 Chapin could not have meant that he had planned to go to the Lincoln Lyceum because it met only on Tuesdays and, in fact, had met the previous evening, 2 January (MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM, page 218).

TIMELINE OF WALDEN Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: None known.

Description of Topic: With the exception of a few that have been lost or scattered, the manuscript pages Thoreau read from are at CSmH (HM 924) and contain passages that he later used in the “Sounds” and “The Bean-Field” chapters of WALDEN. Also see entries for lecture 15 above about the three-lecture “Walden; or, Life in the Woods” course and lecture 19 below about James Lorin Chapin’s journal entry after hearing a later delivery of this same lecture.

92.Blanding, “Thoreau’s Local Lectures,” 23. 93.Quoted in Blanding, “Thoreau’s Local Lectures,” 23. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Lecture94

DATE PLACE TOPIC

February 28, Wednesday, 1849, at 7:30PM Salem MA; Lyceum Hall “Student Life, Its Aims and Employments” March 6, Tuesday, 1849, at 6:30PM Lincoln MA; Centre School House “White Beans and Walden Pond” March 21, Wednesday, 1849, at 7:30PM Portland, Maine; Exchange Hall “Economy”

94. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Narrative of Event: Lincoln Lyceum records note that on 6 March 1849, “The Lyceum met according to Adjournment and was called to order by the President [Calvin Weston]. They then listened to a lecture from Mr. Henry Thoreau, of Concord, taken from his journal of a life in the woods. There was no discussion after the lecture. Adjourned for a week” (THE MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM DURING THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE, page 220). The lecture was the seventh of nine that season (THE MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM DURING THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE, pages 218-20). A series of journal entries by Lincoln resident James Lorin Chapin delineate the events leading to this presentation by Henry Thoreau.95 On 11 December 1848, Chapin wrote, “Another pleasant day. Came home in the morning stopping in town to see Mr. Henry D. Thoreau and see if he would go and lecture before the Lyceum at Lincoln to morrow evening. He could not go and gave as a reason ill health. Said he would go at some future time.” On 2 February 1849, he noted, “I came down to Mr. Thoreau’s to see if H.D. Thoreau would come and lecture before the Lincoln Lyceum next Tuesday evening. He said if nothing occurred more than he expected he would come.” Something must have occurred because the speaker for that evening was “the Rev. Mr. Hill, of Waltham” (MASSACHUSETTS LYCEUM, page 219). Finally, on 6 March, he entered, “This evening I have been to the Lyceum here in Lincoln and have listened to a curious lecture from Henry D. Thoreau of Concord. Subject, his reflections when hoeing beans when he lived alone in the woods near Waldron Pond in Concord.”

Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: Chapin’s entry of 6 March says of Thoreau’s lecture: He had a strange mixture of sense and folly[,] of poetry and halting prose, of science and fable, of physics and ethics. He touched on the pond[,] the woods, the rail road, the cars, the church bells, the distant roar of cannons, the sound of martial music, and the conversation of travellers on the highway, and more fully on the morals of ho[e]ing beans. I was very much interested with the lecture, perhaps not so much with the logic and beauty of the subject as the novelty of the style.

Description of Topic: See “White Beans...”.

May 3, Thursday: An anonymous article about Henry Thoreau’s lectures appeared in the Worcester Daily Spy: Thoreau’s Lectures The third lecture of this course will be given at Brinley Hall, this evening. Being absent from town on the evening when the first lecture was given, we did not have the good fortune to hear it—a circumstance we regretted, because the commendations we heard of it assure us that it would have been a source of enjoyment to us. Those commendations had possibly led us to expect too much, and we are free to say, that in hearing the second lecture, we were disappointed. We had looked for a bold, original thinker, who would give us the results of his observations and reflections, with a vigor, freshness, and independence, which would win our 95.For the relevant entries from Chapin’s journal, see Blanding, “Thoreau’s Local Lectures,” 21-26. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

respect and admiration, even though it might not convince us. We said that we were disappointed. This lecturer evidently is not deficient in ability, and might very probably attain to more than a respectable rank, if he were satisfied to be himself, Henry D. Thoreau, and not aim to be Ralph Waldo Emerson or any body else. But, so far as manner, at least was concerned, the lecture was a better imitation of Emerson than we should have thought possible, even with two year’s [sic] seclusion to practice in. In the ideas, too, there was less of originality than we had looked for, and recollections of Carlyle as well as of Emerson, were repeatedly forced upon the mind. The style was mostly Emersonian, with occasional interludes, in which the lecturer gave us glimpses of himself beneath the panoply in which he was enshrouded, and we are perverse enough to confess ourself better pleased with him as Thoreau than as Emerson, so far as these opportunities afforded us the means of judging. We are no admirers of the cynicism, whether real or affected, of the school to which we suppose the lecturer belongs. It strikes us that one who is capable of such high enjoyments, as they sometimes profess, from the contemplation of the works of creation in their lower manifestations, might, if his mind were rightly constituted, find increased pleasure in communion with the last, best, and highest subject of creative power, even though in most individual cases, it may fail to come up to the standard for which it was designed.... We hope our readers will go to the lecture, this evening, and hear for themselves. We would not miss of going on any consideration of an ordinary character. We are to have, among other things, the lecturer’s experience, during his two years’ seclusion from the world, in raising beans! Farmers and horticulturists will probably be elevated upon the philosophical influence of that avocation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Lecture96

DATE PLACE TOPIC

April 27, Friday, 1849, at 7:30PM Worcester’s Brinley Hall “Life in the Woods” (II) May 3, Thursday, 1849, at 7:30PM Worcester’s Brinley Hall “White Beans and Walden Pond” January 23, Wednesday, 1850, at 7PM Concord; Unitarian Church, Vestry “An Excursion to Cape Cod” (I)

96. From Bradley P. Dean and Ronald Wesley Hoag’s THOREAU’S LECTURES BEFORE WALDEN: AN ANNOTATED CALENDAR. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Narrative of Event: There is some confusion about Henry Thoreau’s 3d Worcester lecture in the spring of 1849. Specifically, the question arises, did he give a 3d lecture at all? We know he was supposed to give one, a talk at Brinley Hall dealing with raising beans at Walden Pond (see advertisement below). However, no specific reviews of this lecture have turned up, and, more importantly, in a May 28th, 1850 letter to H.G.O. Blake accepting an invitation to lecture again in Worcester, Thoreau cautions, “But I warn you that this is no better calculated for a promiscuous audience than the last two which I read to you” (THE CORRESPONDENCE OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU, page 260). Why, then, does Thoreau refer to only two lectures here when he was supposed to give —and is supposed to have given— a course of three? The answer may be that he regarded his first two lectures as a two-part “life in the woods” lecture while viewing his third lecture as separate and self-contained. Indeed, that Thoreau did expound on beans in Worcester seems clear. Some forty-one years after the event, Blake states in a letter to Samuel A. Jones, “You speak of Thoreau’s lecture on beans here [in Worcester]. I remember hearing it. It was, I suppose, substantially the same as the chapter on beans in Walden, & the ms. of Walden, (very likely the whole of it,) is in my possession.”97 And, much nearer the event itself, a letter published in the 9 May 1849 Worcester Daily Spy (see below) includes in its four paragraphs of almost inscrutable invective a single reference to “your Bean field,” the announced topic of the third lecture.

Advertisements, Reviews, and Responses: On 3 May 1849, the Worcester Daily Spy began and ended its review of Thoreau’s 27 April lecture with an invitation to hear him again that very evening: “The third lecture of this course will be given at Brinley Hall, this evening …. We hope our readers will go to the lecture, this evening, and hear for themselves. We would not miss of going on any consideration of an ordinary character. We are to have, among other things, the

97. TOWARD THE MAKING OF THOREAU’S MODERN REPUTATION, ed. Fritz Oehlschlaeger and George Hendrick (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979), page 84. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

lecturer’s experience, during his two years’ seclusion from the world, in raising beans! Farmers and horticulturists will probably be elevated upon the philosophical influence of that avocation.”

The closest thing to a review of this lecture is the incandescent gibberish of a letter from a self-described member of Worcester’s “sofa lolling literati,” presented on the following screen.

Description of Topic: See lecture 17 above. The reference above to “diagrams on Walden pond” suggests that during one of his lectures — probably the third — Thoreau may have help up for the audience to see a drawing of Walden Pond similar to the one he used in the book.

December 31, Monday: From WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, we know that Walden Pond froze about the 31st:

Winter 1845-1846 December 22

Winter 1846-1847 December 16

Winter 1847-1848

Winter 1848-1849

Winter 1849-1850 December 31

Winter 1850-1851 December 27

Winter 1851-1852

Winter 1852-1853 January 5

Winter 1853-1854 December 31

Winter 1854-1855 HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Henry D. Thoreau of Concord had better go home and ask his mother if she “knows he’s out.” Doubtless she, (Nature) will say she missed him who is the soul of Walden. Be satisfied, Thoreau, to be the soul of Walden-wood. To be frank with you, you are better as a woodman, or say, a woodpecker, than as a cockney philosopher, or a city parrot, to mimick the voices of canaries or cat owls, of Emersons, or Carlyles — or I beseech you if you must sing in cities, to warble only your “native wood notes wild.” And here a hint about the genteel lecture going world — come down from your place of instruction; they gather not before you to be instructed but to be amused; they come not to hear corroborating voice, urging them to penetrate to the reality of things; they want no new or better philosophy; but they are willing to have their sluggish intellects stirred up as with a long pole by some novelty. But look to it that there is novelty. Bring forth your new fangled Nondescript into the arena, plunge spears into his side rowel deep, and with the speed of wind circle the ten yards space, say twice, and vanish, behind the curtain while applause takes people’s eyes from you to each other, exultingly. Some then shall swear, you soared through the roof dragon-like, others shall magnify you into the very Job’s Unicorn! But stay, till your Nondescript has shown all his few graces, and in spite of spurs waddles heavy round the arena, weary people grow disgusted, and begin to look for the seams of his sheepskin covering; till the most moderate begin to mutter, good as a horse but poor as a Nondescript, while the immoderate, (which most are) cry — poor, and because poor, useless, turned to a Nondescript, if so be it might pay its way to Humbug. Therefore, Mr. Thoreau, henceforward I warn you to quit the arena while the novelty is on, for if your audience becomes fatigued, rely upon it they will find sheep skin seams, though you were a genuine original woolen horse from the Rocky Mountains. But to specialize, my dear Thoreau, how dared you seem to think like Emerson, how could you draw similar inferences, inspirations from your intercourse with Nature, to those of Emerson. Does Nature mean the same thing to any two persons. Impossible! We, the Worcester sofa lolling literati think that she would be more original. Thoreau, the youth who writes this has implicit faith in your power of drawing inspirations from nature, in your thorough enjoyment of “Forest Life,” in your ear for the eternal melodies that nature sounds forever, for the inner soul’s tympanum, if we will but remove the cotton wading which deadens and excludes them. But he has not faith in your ability to become an effective prophet and priest of this true worship, of the Divine in Nature, of the simply true you found us, (some dozens) clogged with custom, with the aggregated results of human contact, which may have been forced down to us, and upon us, through the centuries: for a moment as you came before us there seemed a glimpse to open (out of those clogging “clothes,” Carlyle, you know) into a lovely forest-land, where dwelt primitive simplicity, with the purest culture, intellectual and practical. Ah, Thoreau, if you had left us with that hint, that one, it had been a suggestion to the advantage of our should [souls?]. But after, the crowd says (that is the same dozen say) that you winged but a stupid flight, on wings of Carlyle, or Emerson, through formless mist-clouds or smoke of burning brush- heaps, where snapped and crackled, wit or nonsense, as the case may be, and I am certain that you dropped us amid diagrams on Walden Pond, upon that patch of cleared ground, barren to my apprehension of witty product, your Bean field — A as [sic] Thoreau, I’ve got the blues this morning. How is transcendentalism chop fallen. Simplicity, rurality is a drug on the market. Mechanism exults in the clank of machinery, on every back street mocks the mortified poet-philosopher. Routine triumphs; fine houses and furniture put on an elegantly impudent aspect; a philosopher having flatted out, philosophy may step into the back-ground. We return with new zest to the “surface of things” and idly float on it [in] our light leasant gondola not di ing again for earl HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Winter 1855-1856

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1850

In this year, Henry Thoreau recorded in his journal, the water level in Walden Pond was high.

Donald G. Mitchell’s REVERIES OF A BACHELOR, OR A BOOK OF THE HEART, written under the pseudonym “Ik Marvel.” Here is the beginning, which of course will remind us immediately of the public reaction to Thoreau’s bachelorhood at the pond: Over a Wood Fire I HAVE got a quiet farmhouse in the country, a very humble place to be sure, tenanted by a worthy enough man, of the old New- England stamp, where I sometimes go for a day or two in the winter, to look over the farm-accounts, and to see how the stock is thriving on the winter’s keep. One side the door, as you enter from the porch, is a little parlor, scarce twelve feet by ten, with a cozy looking fireplace—a heavy oak floor, a couple of armchairs and a brown table with carved lions feet. Out of this room opens a little cabinet, only big enough for a broad bachelor bedstead, where I sleep upon feathers, and wake in the morning, with my eye upon a saucy colored, lithographic print of some fancy “Bessy.” It happens to be the only house in the world, of which I am a bona-fide owner; and I take a vast deal of comfort in treating it just as I choose. I manage to break some article of furniture, almost every time I pay it a visit; and if I cannot open the window readily of a morning to breathe the fresh air, I knock out a pane or two of glass with my boot. I lean against the walls in a very old armchair there is on the premises, and scarce ever fail to worry such a hole in the plastering, as would set me down for a round charge for damages in town, or make a prim housewife fret herself into a raging fever. I laugh out loud with myself, in my big armchair, when I think that I am neither afraid of one nor the other. As for the fire, I keep the little hearth so hot, as to warm half the cellar below, and the whole space between the jambs, roars for hours together, with white flame. To be sure the windows are not very tight, between broken panes, and bad joints, so that the fire, large as it is, is by no means an extravagant comfort. As night approaches, I have a huge pile of oak and hickory placed beside the hearth; I put out the tallow candle on the mantel (using the family snuffers, with one leg broken) then, drawing my chair directly in front of the blazing wood, and setting one foot on each of the old iron fire-dogs (until they grow too warm), I dispose myself for an evening of such sober, and thoughtful quietude, as I believe, on my soul, that very few of my fellowmen have the good fortune to enjoy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

My tenant meantime, in the other room I can hear now and then— though there is a thick stone chimney, and broad entry between— multiplying contrivances with his wife, to put two babies to sleep. This occupies them, I should say, usually an hour; though my only measure of time (for I never carry a watch into the country), is the blaze of my fire. By ten, or thereabouts, my stock of wood is nearly exhausted; I pile upon the hot coals what remains, and sit watching how it kindles, and blazes, and goes out—even like our joys! and then, slip by the light of the embers into my bed, where I luxuriate in such sound, and healthful slumber, as only such rattling window frames, and country air, can supply. But to return, the other evening—it happened to be on my last visit to my farmhouse—when I had exhausted all the ordinary rural topics of thought, had formed all sorts of conjectures as to the income of the year; had planned a new wall around one lot, and the clearing up of another, now covered with patriarchal wood; and wondered if the little rickety house would not be after all a snug enough box, to live and to die in—I fell on a sudden into such an unprecedented line of thought, which took such a deep hold of my sympathies—sometimes even starting tears—that I determined, the next day, to set as much of it as I could recall, on paper. Something — it may have been the home — looking blaze (I am a bachelor of — say six and twenty), or possibly a plaintive cry of the baby in my tenant’s room, had suggested to me the thought of Marriage. I piled upon the heated fire-dogs, the last armful of my wood; and now, said I, bracing myself courageously between the arms of my chair—I’ll not flinch; I’ll pursue the thought wherever it leads, though it lead me to the d____ (I am apt to be hasty) at least—continued I, softening—until my fire is out. The wood was green, and at first showed no disposition to blaze. It smoked furiously. Smoke, thought I, always goes before blaze; and so does doubt go before decision: and my reverie, from that very, starting point, slipped into this shape: SMOKE — SIGNIFYING DOUBT. A WIFE? thought I; yes, a wife! And why! And pray, my dear sir, why not—why? Why not doubt; why not hesitate; why not tremble? Does a man buy a ticket in a lottery—a poor man, whose whole earnings go in to secure the ticket — without trembling, hesitating, and doubting? Can a man stake his bachelor respectability, his independence, and comfort, upon the die of absorbing, unchanging, relentless marriage, without trembling at the venture? Shall a man who has been free to chase his fancies over the wide world, without let or hindrance, shut himself up to HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

marriageship, within four walls called home, that are to claim him, his time, his trouble, and his tears, thenceforward forever more, without doubts thick, and thick-coming as smoke? Shall he who has been hitherto a mere observer of other men’s cares and business, moving off where they made him sick of heart, approaching whenever and wherever they made him gleeful — shall he now undertake administration of just such cares and business without qualms? Shall he, whose whole life has been but a nimble succession of escapes from trifling difficulties, now broach without doubtings — that matrimony, where if difficulty beset him there is no escape? Shall this brain of mine, careless- working, never tired with idleness, feeding on long vagaries, and high, gigantic castles, dreaming out beatitudes hour by hour—turn itself at length to such dull task-work, as thinking out a livelihood for wife and children? Where thenceforward will be those sunny dreams, in which I have warmed my fancies, and my heart, and lighted my eye with crystal? This very marriage, which a brilliant working imagination has invested time and again with brightness, and delight, can serve no longer as a mine for teeming fancy: all, alas, will be gone — reduced to the dull standard of the actual! No more room for intrepid forays of imagination — no more gorgeous realm-making all will be over! Why not, I thought, go on dreaming? Can any wife be prettier than an after dinner fancy, idle and yet vivid, can paint for you? Can any children make less noise, than the little rosy-cheeked ones, who have no existence, except in the omnium gatherum of your own brain? Can any housewife be more unexceptionable than she who goes sweeping daintily the cobwebs that gather in your dreams? Can any domestic larder be better stocked, than the private larder of your head dozing on a cushioned chair-back at Delmonico’s? Can any family purse be better filled than the exceeding plump one you dream of, after reading such pleasant books as Munchausen, or Typee? But if, after all, it must be — duty, or what-not, making provocation—what then? And I clapped my feet hard against the fire-dogs, and leaned back, and turned, my face to the ceiling, as much as to say: And where on earth, then, shall a poor devil look for a wife? Somebody says, Lyttleton or Shaftesbury, I think, that, “marriages would be happier if they were all arranged by the lord chancellor.” Unfortunately, we have no lord chancellor to make this commutation of our misery. Shall a man, then, scour the country on a mule’s back, like Honest Gil Blas, of Santillane; or shall he make application to some such intervening providence as Madame St. Marc, who, as I see by the Presse, manages these matters to one’s hand, for. some five per cent on the fortunes of the parties? I have trouted, when the brook was so low, and the sky so hot, HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

that I might as well have thrown my fly upon the turnpike; and I have hunted hare at noon, and woodcock in snow-time — never despairing, scarce doubting; but for a poor hunter of his kind, without traps or snares, or any aid of police or constabulary, to traverse the world, where are swarming, on a moderate computation, some three hundred and odd millions of unmarried women, for a single capture — irremediable, unchangeable — and yet a captive which by strange metonymy, not laid down in the books, is very apt to turn captor into captive, and make game of hunter — all this, surely, surely may make a man shrug with doubt! Then — again — there are the plaguey wife’s-relations. Who knows how many third, fourth, or fifth cousins will appear at careless, complimentary intervals long after you had settled into the placid belief that all congratulatory visits were at an end? How many twisted-headed brothers will be putting in their advice, as a friend to Peggy? How many maiden aunts will come to spend a month or two with their “dear Peggy,” and want to know every tea-time, “if she isn’t a dear love of a wife?” Then, dear father-in-law will beg, (taking dear Peggy’s hand in his) to give a little wholesome counsel; and will be very sure to advise just the contrary of what you had determined to undertake. And dear mamma-in-law must set her nose into Peggy’s cupboard, and insist upon having the, key to your own private locker in the wainscot. Then, perhaps, there is a little bevy of dirty-nosed nephews who come to spend the holidays, and eat up your East India sweetmeats; and who are forever tramping over your head or raising the old Harry below, while you are busy with your clients. Last, and worst, is some fidgety old uncle, forever too cold or too hot, who vexes you with his patronizing airs, and impudently kisses his little Peggy! —That could be borne, however: for perhaps he has promised his fortune to Peggy. Peggy, then, will be rich (and the thought made me rub my shins, which were now getting comfortably warm upon the firedogs). Then, she will be forever talking of her fortune; and pleasantly reminding you on occasion, of a favorite purchase —how lucky that she had the means; and dropping hints about economy; and buying very extravagant Paisleys. She will annoy you by looking over the stock-list at breakfast time; and mention quite carelessly to your clients, that she is interested in such, or such a speculation. She will be provokingly silent when you hint to a tradesman, that you have not the money by you, for his small bill—in short, she will tear the life out of you, making you pay in righteous retribution of annoyance, grief, vexation, shame, and sickness of heart, for the superlative folly of “marrying rich.” —But if not rich, then poor. Bah! the thought made me stir the coals; but there was still no blaze. The paltry earnings you are HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

able to wring out of clients by the sweat of your brow, will now be all our income; you will be pestered for pin-money, and pestered with your poor wife’s relations. Ten to one, she will stickle about taste — “Sir Visto’s”— and want to make this so pretty, and that so charming, if she only had the means; and is sure Paul (a kiss) can’t deny his little Peggy such a trifling sum, and all for the common benefit. Then she, for one, means that her children shan’t go a-begging for clothes — and another pull at the purse. Trust a poor mother to dress her children in finery! Perhaps she is ugly—not noticeable at first; but growing on her, and (what is worse) growing faster on you. You wonder why you didn’t see that vulgar nose long ago: and that lip—it is very strange, you think, that you ever thought it pretty. And then — to come to breakfast, with her hair looking as it does, and you, not so much as daring to say—”Peggy, do brush your hair!” Her foot, too—not very bad when decently chaussee—but now, since she’s married, she does wear such infernal slippers! And yet, for all this, to be prigging up for an hour, when any of my old chums come to dine with me! “Bless your kind hearts! my dear fellows,” said 1, thrusting the tongs into the coals, and speaking out loud, as if my voice could reach from Virginia to Paris— “not married yet!” Perhaps Peggy is pretty enough — only shrewish. —No matter for cold coffee; you should have been up before. What sad, thin, poorly cooked chops, to eat with your rolls! —She thinks they are very good, and wonders how you can set such an example to your children. The butter is nauseating. —She has no other, and hopes you’ll not raise a storm about butter a little turned. I think I see myself —ruminated I— sitting meekly at table, scarce daring to lift up, my eyes, utterly fagged out with some quarrel of yesterday, choking down detestably sour muffins, that my wife thinks are “delicious “— slipping in dried mouthfuls of burned ham off the side of my fork tines — slipping off my chair side-ways at the end, and slipping out with my hat between my knees, to business, and never feeling myself a competent, sound-minded man, till the oak door is between me and Peggy! “Ha, ha — not yet!” said I; and in so earnest a tone, that my dog started to his feet—cocked his eye to have a good look into my face — met my smile of triumph with an amiable wag of the tail, and curled up again in the corner. Again, Peggy is rich enough, well enough, mild enough, only she doesn’t care a fig for you. She has married you because father, or grandfather thought the match eligible, and because she didn’t wish to disoblige them. Besides, she didn’t positively HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

hate you, and thought you were a respectable enough young person; she has told you so repeatedly at dinner. She wonders you like to read poetry; she wishes you would buy her a good cookbook; and insists upon you making your will at the birth of the first baby. She thinks Captain So-and-So a splendid looking fellow, and wishes you would trim up a little, were it only for appearance’ sake. You need not hurry up from the office so early at night: she, bless her dear heart! does not feel lonely. You read to her a love tale; she interrupts the pathetic parts with directions to her seamstress. You read of marriages: she sighs and asks if Captain So-and-So has left town! She hates to be mewed up in a cottage, or between brick walls; she does so love the Springs! But, again, Peggy loves you; at least she swears it, with her hand on the Sorrows of Werter. She has pin-money which she spends for the Literary World and the friends in council. She is not bad looking, save a bit too much of forehead; nor is she sluttish, unless a neglige till three o’clock, and an ink stain on the forefinger be sluttish; but then she is such a sad blue! You never fancied when you saw her buried in a three volumed novel, that it was anything more than a girlish vagary; and when she quoted Latin, you thought innocently, that she had a capital memory for her samplers. But to be bored eternally about Divine Dante and funny Goldoni, is too bad. Your copy of Tasso, a treasure print of 1680, is all bethumbed and dog’s-eared, and spotted with baby gruel. Even your Seneca —an Elzevir— is all sweaty with handling. She adores La Fontaine, reads Balzac with a kind of artist-scowl, and will not let Greek alone. Yon hint at broken rest and an aching head at breakfast, and she will fling you a scrap of anthology — in lieu of the camphor bottle—or chant the aiai aiai of tragic chorus. —The nurse is getting dinner; you are holding the baby; Peggy is reading Bruyere. The fire smoked thick as pitch, and puffed out little clouds over the chimney piece. I gave the fork-stick a kick, at the thought of Peggy, baby and Bruyere. —Suddenly the flame flickered bluely athwart the smoke — caught at a twig below — rolled round the mossy oak-stick-twined among the crackling tree-limbs—mounted—lit up the whole body of smoke, and blazed out cheerily and bright. Doubt vanished with Smoke, and Hope began with Flame.

December 27, day: Henry Thoreau was written to by Dr. Samuel Cabot in Boston: HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

{No MS — printed copy FL, 1894}

[December 27, 1850]

“with all the honores, privilegia, etc. ad gradum tuum pertinentia, without the formality of paying any entrance fee, or annual subscription. Your duties in return are to advance the interests of the Society by communications or otherwise, as shall seem good.

Thoreau checked out again, from Harvard Library, Samuel de Champlain’s VOYAGES DE LA NOUVELLE FRANCE OCCIDENTALE, DICTE CANADA; FAITS POUR LE SR DE CHAMPLAIN XAINCTOGEOIS, CAPITAINE POUR LE ROY ET LA MARINE DU PONANT, & TOUTES LES DESCOUUERTES QU’IL A FAITES EN CE PAIS DEPUIS L’AN 1603; JUSQUES EN L’AN 1629... (Paris: C. Collet, 1632). SAMVEL CHAMPLAIN

“There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away” — Emily Dickinson

Dr. Bradley P. Dean has recently recovered, from between the pages of a book in that library, the original holograph of a previously uncollected Thoreau letter addressed to the Librarian of Harvard University, Dr. Thaddeus William Harris, Harvard Library:98 Concord Dec 27th 1850 Dear Sir, I return herewith Quartier’s and Champlain’s Voyages. Will you please send me, by the bearer, the other (Collet’s?) edition of Champlain’s Voyages? I shall want it but a short time. You will find the sentence to which I referred, when I saw you, near the bottom of the 86th page of the Quebec volume. Possibly you have not observed the note V. at the bottom of the 107th page of the same volume; which may serve to explain the name R du gas in Champlain’s map. Yrs H.D. Thoreau.

98. The person we now call “Jacques Cartier” was being referred to at that time as “Quartier.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

From WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, we know that Walden Pond froze about the 27th:

Winter 1845-1846 December 22

Winter 1846-1847 December 16

Winter 1847-1848

Winter 1848-1849

Winter 1849-1850 December 31

Winter 1850-1851 December 27

Winter 1851-1852

Winter 1852-1853 January 5

Winter 1853-1854 December 31

Winter 1854-1855

Winter 1855-1856

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1851

February 17, day: Henry Thoreau made an outline map of White Pond, which he considered a very beautiful spot and far less crowded than Walden Pond.

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

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_surveys/148.htm

March 28, day: The ice on Walden Pond was completely melted:

Orestes Augustus Brownson wrote to the Reverend I. Th. Hecker (Isaac Hecker). HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1852

January 5, Monday: Walden Pond froze.

January 5, Monday: To-day the trees are white with snow–I mean their stems & branches and have the true wintry look–on the storm-side–not till this has the winter come to the forest. They look like the small frost work in the path & on the windows now–. especially the oak woods at a distance, & you see better the form which their branches take. That is a picture of winter & now you may put a cottage under them and roof it with snow drifts.– & let the smoke curl up amid the boughs in the morning. Sitting on the Cliffs, I see plainly for the first time, that the island in Fair Haven is the triangular point of a hill cut off–and 40 or 50 rods west on the mainland I see the still almost raw & shelving edge of the bank the raw sand scar as if sodded over the past summer–as a man cuts off a piece of pudding on his plate–as if the intermediate portion of the hill had sunk and left a cranberry meadow. It is with singular emotions that I stand on this Cliff & reflect in what age of the world this revolution the evidence of which is of today–was eviddenced by a raw & shelving sand-bank. After this revolution how long came the settlers out of England to Musketaquid–came our political revolution & concord fight–after the natural elements were quiet perchance. It was a dark day the heavens shut out with dense snow clouds & the trees wetting me with the melting snow– when I went through Brown’s wood on Fair Haven which they are cutting off–& suddenly looking through the woods between the stems of the trees–I thought I saw an extensive fire in the western horizon– It was a bright coppery yellow fair weather cloud along the edge of the horizon. Gold with some alloy of copper– In such contrast with the remaining clouds as to suggest nothing less than fire. On that side the clouds which covered our day–low in the horizon with a dun & smoke like edge were rolled up like a curtain with heavy folds– revealing this further bright curtain beyond.

April 18, Sunday: Going for a walk in the afternoon with Ellery Channing through S. Dennis’s field near the Sudbury River, Henry Thoreau noted that Walden Pond was clear of ice:

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Thoreau worked on Gilpin and the scientific treatises of the Harvard College botanist Asa Gray.

H. Daniel Peck claims that Thoreau’s conversion experience in regard to time and eternity occurred at this point, as he first conceptualized time as a circle and thus brought memory and anticipation together “as a single timeless dimension of experience.”99 I would have to say of Peck’s attitude toward Thoreau’s attitude toward temporality, what William Blake once said of Bible-reading: “thou readst black where I read white.”100 How about you, reader, do you sense something here that was not detectable in, say, the jottings of the year 1851?

April 18: For the first time I perceive this spring that the year is a circle – I see distinctly the spring arc thus far. It is drawn with a firm line. Every incident is a parable of the great teacher. The cranberries washed up in the meadows & into the road on the causeways now yields a pleasant acid.

99. THOREAU’S MORNING WORK, pages 46-7. Professor Tauber’s later treatise seriously examines Peck’s contribution: Dr. Alfred I. Tauber. HENRY DAVID THOREAU AND THE MORAL AGENCY OF KNOWING. Berkeley and Los Angeles CA; London, England: U of California P, 2001

100. This remark is to be found at the end of Blake’s “The Everlasting Gospel.” See BLAKE’S POETRY AND DESIGNS, Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant (Eds.), NY: Norton, 1979, page 372. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

My own analysis of this is that 1.) this is a whole lot of freight for Peck to impute to a phrase “For the first time” which is not all that unusual in Thoreau’s writing and which may be nothing more than a contraction for “For the first time this year,” that 2.) the excerpts quoted and chronologized in this file offer no support whatever to the idea that there was some radical break in Thoreau’s sensitivities just at this point in time, but instead very much to the contrary offer much support to the idea that there was no radical break in his sensitivities just at this point in time, and that 3.) Peck has not supplied the sort of penetrating analyses on other Thoreauvian topics which would lead anyone to defer judgment and suspect that here again he may be perceiving something in the material which as yet I have been spiritually unprepared to perceive — but has instead supplied to us a stream of off-the-cuff analyses of the general type which I tend to attribute to careerist educators who need to publish yet another insightful book in order to qualify, under some academic rule of thumb, for a raise in salary. Harsh, huh?

April 18, Sunday: The ground is now generally bare of snow – though it lies along walls & on the north sides of vallies in the woods – pretty deep – We have had a great deal of foul weather this season – scarcely two fair days together. Gray refers the cone-like excrescences on the ends of willow twigs to the punctures of insects. I think that both these & the galls of the oak &c are to be regarded as something more normal than this implies. Though it is impossible to draw the line between disease & health at last Day before yesterday I brought home some twigs of that earliest large oval catkinned willow just over Hubbards Bridge on the right-hand – a male tree. The anthers just beginning to show themselves (not quite so forward as those above the Dea. Hosmer House which I have thought to be the same.) They looked much the worse for the rain. Catkins about 1 inch long. not being (much expanded yet) opening a little below the apex 2 stamens to a scale. There are smaller female bushes further on on the left – catkins about the same size with greenish ovaries, stalked & rather small & slightly reddish stigmas. 4 divided. I thought this the other sex of the same tree. There is also the very gray-hard-wood-like willow at the bars just beyond Hubbards brook with long cylindrical caterpillar like catkins – which do not yet show their yellow – And 3dly opposite the 1st name i.e. the other side the way a smaller catkined willow not yet showing its yellow – – 4thly near the Conantum swamp sterile catkins 1 in blossom on a bush willow 1 /4 inches long – more forward than any – but the stamens 1 to a bract or scale & bifid or trifid or quatrifid toward the top!! 5thly what I should think the S. humilis i.e. of Muhl. shows its small catkins now – but not yet blossoms. I still feel stiff places in the swamps where there is ice still. Saw yesterday on an apple tree in company with the fringilla hiemalis an olivaceous backed – yellow throated & yellow-brown spotted breast about the same size or a little less than they. – the first of the late coming or passing – or the summer birds? When we have got to these colors the olivaceous & yellow – then the sun is high in the sky. The fringilla hiemalis is the most common bird at present. Was pleased to observe yesterday in the woods a new method (to me) which the wood chopper had invented to keep up his corded wood – where he could not drive a stake on account of the frost. He had set up the stake on the surface – then looped several large birch withes once about it – resting the wood on their ends – as he carried up the pile – or else he used a forked stick – thus –

2 Pm to River: A driving rain i.e. a rain with Easterly wind & driving mists. River higher than before this season ELLERY CHANNING – about 18 inches of the highest arch of the stone arch above water. Going through Dennis’ field with C. saw a flock of geese [Canada Goose Branta canadensis] on E. side of river near willows. 12 great birds on the troubled surface of the meadow delayed by the storm. We lay on the ground behind an oak & our umbrella 80 rods off & watched them. Soon we heard a gun go off but could see no smoke in the mist & rain. & the whole flock rose spreading their great wings & flew with clangor a few rods & lit in the water again – then swam swiftly toward our shore – with outstretched necks. I knew them first from ducks by their long necks. Soon appeared the man running toward the shore in vain in his great coat. But he soon retired in vain. We remained close under our umbrella by the tree – ever and anon looking through a peep hole between the umbrella & the tree at the birds – on they came, sometimes in 2 sometimes in 3 squads – warily – till we could see the steel blue HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

& green reflections from their necks. We held the dog close the while C lying on his back in the rain had him in his arms – and thus we gradually edged round on the ground in this cold wet windy storm keeping our feet to the tree & the great calf of a dog with his eyes shut in our arms. We laughed well at our adventure. They swam DOG fast. & warily – seeing our umbrella, occasionally one expanded a grey wing. They showed white on breasts. And not till after half an hour – sitting cramped & cold & wet on the ground did we leave them. Ducks also were on the meadow. I have seen more ducks within a few days than ever before. They are apparently delayed here by the backwardness of the season. Yesterday the river was full of them. It proves a serious storm The point of pines left by Britton on Hubbard’s meadow. looks very dark in the mist. We cannot see more than 80 rods before as we walk. Saw a sizeable hawk in the meadow at N meadow crossing with a white rump – – (the hen- harrier (?)) The catkins of the Alnus incana at Jennie’s are longer than ever – 3 or 4 inches. Somebody keeps his minnows there in a barrel – Observed a thistle just springing up in the meadow – a disk of green a few inches in diameter in the midst of the old decayed leaves – which now being covered with rain drops beaded – & edged the close packed leaves with purple made a very rich sight – The green leaves of the thistle in a dense disk edged with purple & covered with bead-like rain drops – just springing from the meadow It reminded me of some delicious fruit – all ripe – quite flat. – We sought the desert it is so agreeable to cross the sand in wet weather. You might dig into the sand for dryness. I saw where somebody appeared to have dug there for turtles eggs. The catkins of some willows – silvery & not yet blossomed – covered with rain – like dew look like snow or frost – sleet adhereing to the twigs. The andromeda in Tarbells swamp – does not look so fresh – nor red now – Does it require a sunny day? The buds of the balm of gilead coated with a gummy substance – mahogany (?) colored have already a fragrant odor – Heard the cackling of geese from over the ministerial swamp & soon appeared 28 geese [Canada Goose Branta canadensis] that flew over our heads toward the other river we had left – we now near the Black birches. With these great birds in it the air seems for the first time inhabited. We detect holes in their wings. Their Clank expresses anxiety. The most interesting fact perhaps at present is these few tender yellow blossoms these half expanded sterile aments of the willow – seen through the rain & cold signs of the advancing year – pledges of the sun’s return. Anything so delicate both in structure in color & in fragrance contrasts strangely with surrounding nature & feeds the faith of man. The fields are acquiring a greenish tinge. The birds which I see & hear in the midst of the storm are robins – song sparrows [Melospiza melodia] blackbirds and crows [American Crow Corvus Brachyrhynchos] occasionally. This is the spring of the year – Birds are migrating northward to their breeding places; the melted snows are escaping to the sea. We have now the unspeakable rain of the Greek winter. The element of water prevails. The river has far overflown its channel. What a conspicuous place nature has assigned to the skunk cabbage – first flower to show itself above the bare ground! What occult relation is implied between this plant & man? Most buds have expanded perceptibly – show some greenness or yellowness. Universally nature relaxes somewhat of her rigidity – yields to the influence of heat. Each day the grass springs & is greener. The skunk cabbage is inclosed in its spathe but the willow catkin expands its bright yellow blossoms without fear at the end of its twigs. & the fertile flower of the hazel – has elevated its almost invisible crimson star of stigmas above the sober & barren earth. The sight of the sucker floating on the meadow at this season affects me singularly. as if it were a fabulous or mythological fish – realizing my idea of a fish – It reminds me of pictures of dolphins or of proteus. I see it for what it is – not an actual terrene fish – but the fair symbol of a divine idea – the design of an artist – its color & form – its gills & fins & scales – are perfectly beautiful – because they completely express to my mind what they were intended to express – It is as little fishy as a fossil fish. Such a form as is sculptured on ancient monuments and will be to the end of time. – made to point a moral. I am serene & satisfied when the birds fly & the fishes swim as in fable, for the moral is not far off. When the migration of the goose is significant and has a moral to it. When the events of the day have a mythological character & the most trivial is symbolical. For the first time I perceive this spring that the year is a circle – I see distinctly the spring arc thus far. It is drawn with a firm line. Every incident is a parable of the great teacher. The cranberries washed up in the meadows & into the road on the causeways now yields a pleasant acid. Why should just these sights & sounds accompany our life? Why should I hear the chattering of blackbirds – why smell the skunk each year? I would fain explore the mysterious relation between myself & these things. I would at least know what these things unavoidably are – – make a chart of our life – know how its shores trend – that butterflies reappear & when – know why just this circle of creatures completes the world. Can I not by expectation affect the revolutions of nature – make a day to bring forth something new? As Cawley loved a garden, so I a forest. Observe all kinds of coincidences – as what kinds of birds come with what flowers. An East Wind, I hear the clock strike plainly 10 or 11. Pm. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Would this have been the “Dea. Hosmer House” of which Thoreau wrote? HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

July 24, Saturday: As an experiment, Henry Thoreau waded out onto the sandbar at the neck of his cove on Walden Pond, to see how much deeper the pond had become this year than it had been during his memorable pic nic and chowder kettle on the sandbar at the age of seven in 1823. What he found was that the pond was roughly six feet fuller than this lowest stage that he had known. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

He made an entry in his journal that he was later to copy into his early lecture “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” as: HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

[Paragraph 31] Most men would feel insulted, if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now. For instance: just after sunrise, one summer morning, I noticed Hayden1 walking beside his team, which was slowly drawing a heavy hewn stone swung under the axle, surrounded by an atmosphere of industry,—his day’s work begun,—his brow commenced to sweat,—a reproach to all sluggards and idlers,—pausing abreast the shoulders of his oxen, and half turning round with a flourish of his merciful whip, while they gained their length on him. And I thought, Such is the labor which the American Congress exists to protect,—honest, manly toil,—honest as the day is long,—that makes his bread taste sweet, and keeps society sweet,—which all men respect and have consecrated: one of the sacred band, doing the needful, but irksome drudgery. Indeed, I felt a slight reproach, because I observed this from the window, and was not abroad and stirring about a similar business. The day went by, and at evening I passed a rich man’s yard,2 who keeps many servants, and spends much money foolishly, while he adds nothing to the common stock, and there I saw Hayden’s stone3 lying beside a whimsical structure intended to adorn this Lord Timothy Dexter’s premises,4 and the dignity forthwith departed from Hayden’s labor,5 in my eyes. In my opinion, the sun was made to light worthier toil than this. [Paragraph 32] There is a coarse and boisterous money-making fellow in the north part6 of our town, who is going to build a bank-wall under the hill along the edge of his meadow. The powers have put this into his head to keep him out of mischief, and he wishes me to spend three weeks digging there with him. The result will be that he will perhaps get some more money to hoard, and leave for his heirs to spend foolishly. If I do this, most will commend me as an industrious and hard-working man; but if I choose to devote myself to certain labors which yield more real profit, though but little money, they may be inclined to look on me as an idler. Nevertheless, as I do not need the police of meaningless labor to regulate me, and do not see anything absolutely praiseworthy in this fellow’s undertaking, any more than in many an enterprise of our own or foreign governments, however amusing it may be to him or them, I prefer to finish my education at a different school.

1.It is odd that Thoreau uses Eldridge G. Hayden’s last name in the lecture, for his usual practice was to preserve the anonymity of individuals. It is clear from the Nantucket Inquirer report of the lecture, however, that Thoreau read either the form “H.”—which is the form in the Inquirer—or “Hayden.” My [Bradley P. Dean] decision to emend the essay copy-text from “one of my neighbors’ to “Hayden” is based on the assumption that Thoreau would not have read “H.” in his lecture. 2.Bradley P. Dean has emended the essay copy-text from “the yard of another neighbor” to “a rich man’s yard” on authority of the Nantucket Inquirer summary of the lecture. The rich man was Samuel G. Wheeler [See JOURNAL 5:95 and the last sentence in“LIFE MISSPENT” 6; Wheeler “ran off” in December 1856 after borrowing money from, among others perhaps, Captain Elwell, who “was obliged to take [Wheeler’s] farm to save himself.” (JOURNAL 9:203)] 3.Bradley P. Dean has emended the essay copy-text from “the stone of the morning” to “Hayden’s stone” on authority of the Nantucket Inquirer summary, which reads “H.’s stone.” 4.Timothy Dexter (1747-1806) was a wealthy merchant and self-proclaimed “Lord” who lived in Newburyport MA. According to THE NATIONAL CYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY (New York: James T. White, 1929), 6:226, “In [Dexter’s] garden was a group of forty enormous columns, surrounded with mammoth statues of the world’s great men, himself included among the number, with the modest inscription, ‘I am the greatest man in the East.’” 5.Bradley P. Dean has emended the essay copy-text from “the teamster’s labor” to “Hayden’s labor” on authority of the Nantucket Inquirer, which reads “H.’s labor.” 6.Bradley P. Dean has emended the essay copy-text from “outskirts of our town” to the journal form, “north part of our town” (JOURNAL 4:252), on the assumption that Thoreau used the journal form until he dropped“What Shall It Profit?” 18, the first sentence of which contains the word “outskirts.” The “money-making fellow” Thoreau mentions has not been identified. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

He also made an entry that he would copy into “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” in combination with an entry made on May 27, 1851 and an entry made on August 7, 1853 as:

[Paragraph 34] The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself. If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly. Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man. The State does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet-laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine;1 and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe. As for my own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is the most correct.

1.From 1630 to 1790, the reigning British monarch annually bestowed a butt of canary wine on the poet laureate.

July 24, Saturday: The Cardinal flower probably open today. The quails are heard whistling this morning near the village INDIA It would be well if the false preacher of Christianity were always met and balked by a superior –more living and elastic faith in his audience; just as some missionaries in India are balked by the easiness with which the Hindoos believe every word of the miracles & prophecies, being only surprised “that they are so much less wonderful than those of their own scripture which also they implicitly believe.”

3 1/2 Pm to Goose Pond. Is that slender narrow-leaved weed which is just coming into flower everywhere the Erigeron Canadense – which has spread so far and wide? Not only blue-curls but wormwood –both aromatic herbs are seen preparing for their reign –the former a few inches high now over all fields –which has reserved itself so long & most do not recognize it but you stoop & pluckit and are thankful for the reminiscence of autumn which its aroma affords –the latter still larger shows itself on all compost heaps & in all gardens –where the Chenopodium & Amaranth are already rank. I sympathize with weeds perhaps more than with the crop they choke –they express so much vigor –they are the truer crop which the earth more willingly bears– The ground is very dry –the berries are drying up –it is long since we have had any rain to speak of. Gardeners use the watering pot. The sere & fallen leaves of the birches in many places redden the ground;– This heat & drouth has the effect of autumn to some extent– The smooth sumac berries are red. However there is a short fresh green on the shorn fields –the aftermath. When the first crop of grass is off & the aftermath springs –the year has passed its culmination

7 Pm to the hills by Abel Hosmers. How dusty the roads –wagons –chaises –loads of barrels &c all drive into the dust & are lost. The dust now, looking toward the sun, is white & handsome like a vapor in the morning –curling round the head & load of the teamster –while his dogwalks obscured in it under the wagon– Even this dust is to one at a distance an agreeable object. I heard this afternoon the cool water twitter of the goldfinch & saw the bird. They come with the springing aftermath. It is refreshing as a cup of cold water to a thirsty man to hear them, now only one at a time. Walden has fallen about 6 inches from where it was a month or so ago. I found by wading out on the bar that – it had been about 6 feet higher than the lowest stage I have known. Just after sunrise this morning I noticed Haden walking beside his team which was slowly drawing a heavy hewn stone swung under the axle – surrounded by an atmosphere of industry. His days work begun– Honest peaceful industry –conserving the world –which all men –respect –which society has consecrated. A reproach to all sluggards & idlers. Pausing HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

abreast the shoulders of his oxen & half turning round with a flourish of his merciful whip while they gained their length on him. And I thought such is the labor which the American congress exists to protect –honest manly toil– His brow has commenced to sweat. Honest as the day is long. One of the sacred band doing the needful but irksome drudgery. Toil that makes his bread taste sweet –& keeps society sweet. The day went by and at evening I passed a rich man’s yard who keeps many servants and foolishly spends much money while he adds nothing to the common stock. and there I saw Haden’s stone lying beside a whimsical structure intended to adorn this Lord Timothy Dexter’s mansion –and the dignity forthwith departed from Haden’s labor –in my eyes– I am frequently invited to survey farms in a rude manner a very and insignificant labor –though I manage to get more out of it than my employers –but I am never invited by the community to do anything quite worth the while to do. The industry of the poor traced to the end is found to be subserving some rich man’s foolish enterprise. There is a coarse boisterous money-making fellow –in the N part of the town who is going to build a bank wall under the hill along the edge of his meadow –the powers have put this into his head to keep him out of mischief –and he wishes me to spend three weeks digging there with him– The result will be that he will perchance get a little more money to hoard or leave for his heirs to spend foolishly when he is dead– Now if I do this the community will commend me as an industrious & hard-working man –but as I choose to devote myself to labors which yield more real profit though but little money they regard me as a loafer– But as I do not need this police of meaningless labor to regulate me and do not see any thing absolutely praiseworthy in his undertaking however amusing it may be to him, I prefer to finish my education at a different school.

The corn now forms solid phalanxes –though the ears have not set –& the sun going down the shadows even of corn-fields fall long over the meadows –& a sweetness comes up from the shaven grass. & the crickets creak more loud in the new springing grass– Just after sunset I notice that a thin veil of clouds far in the E –beyond the nearer & heavier dark grey masses –glows a fine rose color –like the inner bark or lining of some evergreens. The clear solemn western sky till far into night –was framed by a dark line of of clouds with a heavy edge – curving across the NW sky at a considerable height –separating the region of day from that of night. Lay on a lichen covered hill which looked white in the moon-light

August 27, Friday: Henry Thoreau reminisced while he was out at Walden Pond, about the various levels at which he had seen the water. He had seen it 4 or 5 feet higher than when he had done his two years, two months, and two days in the shanty — and he had also seen it 1 or 2 feet lower.

That night, in the garret of the Thoreau boardinghouse, Thoreau was reading in Lieutenant Sherard Osborn (1822-1875)’s STRAY LEAVES FROM AN ARCTIC JOURNAL, OR, EIGHTEEN MONTHS IN THE POLAR REGIONS, IN SEARCH OF SIR JOHN FRANKLIN’S EXPEDITION, IN THE YEARS 1850-51 / BY LIEUT. SHERARD OSBORN, COMMANDING H. M. S. VESSEL, “PIONEER” (this had been published in 1852 by George P. Putnam’s in New- York, and he had checked it out from the Concord Town Library). He wrote in his journal about being “struck by the ease and simplicity with which an Englishman expresses a sentiment of reverence for the author and ruler of the universe. It is very manly — and appears to some extent to characterize the nation. Osborn in his Arctic Journal prints with such simplicity a prayer which has been prepared for the Arctic expedition.” Here, from that book, courtesy of the research of Dr. Brad Dean at the Concord Free Public Library, is the full text of the prayer which Thoreau was so admiring: A PRAYER FOR THE ARCTIC EXPEDITION. “O Lord God, our Heavenly Father, who teachest man knowledge, and givest him skill and power to accomplish his designs, we desire continually to wait, and call, and depend upon Thee. Thy way is in the sea, and Thy paths in the great waters. Thou rulest and commandest all things. We therefore draw nigh unto Thee for help in the great work which we now have to do. “Leave us not, we beseech Thee, to our own counsel, nor to the imaginations of our own foolish and deceitful hearts: but lead us by the way wherein we should go, that discretion may preserve HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

us, and understanding may keep us. Do Thou, O Lord, make our way prosperous, and give us Thy blessing and good success. Bring all needful things to our remembrance; and where we have not the presence of mind, nor the ability, to perform Thy will, magnify Thy power in our weakness. Let Thy good provenance be our aid and protection, and Thy Holy Spirit our Guide and Comforter, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul. Endue us with such strength and patience as may carry us through every toil and danger, whether by sea or land; and, if it be Thy good pleasure, vouchsafe to us a safe return to our families and homes. “And, as Thy Holy Word teaches us to pray for others, as well as for ourselves, we most humbly beseech Thee, of Thy goodness, O Lord, to comfort and succour all those who are in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity, especially such as may now be exposed to the dangers of the deep, or afflicted with cold and hunger. Bestow upon them Thy rich mercies, according to their several wants and necessities, and deliver them out of their distress. They are known to Thee by name, let them be known of Thee as the children of Thy grace and love. Bless us all with Thy favour, in which is life, and with all spiritual blessings in Christ Jesus; and grant us so to pass the waves of this troublesome world, that finally we may come unto Thy everlasting kingdom. Grant this, for Thy dear Son’s sake, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

[This may be viewed at http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer- idx?c=moa;cc=moa;sid=e027d63631404e3584910fc77aaa2478;q1=A%20PRAYER%20FOR%20TH E%20ARCTIC;rgn=full%20text;idno=AFK7237.0001.001;view=image;seq=00000161] HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1853

January 5, Wednesday: From WALDEN, we know that Walden Pond froze:

Winter 1845-1846 December 22

Winter 1846-1847 December 16

Winter 1847-1848

Winter 1848-1849

Winter 1849-1850 December 31

Winter 1850-1851 December 27

Winter 1851-1852

Winter 1852-1853 January 5

Winter 1853-1854 December 31

Winter 1854-1855

Winter 1855-1856

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

January 5th: To Kibbe Place swamp. I see where probably a red squirrel has scratched along over the snow, and in one place a very perfect & delicate print of his feet. His 5 toes in separate sharp triangles distinctly raying off– or often only 4 visible. In one place I find a beaten track from a hole in the ground to walnut a rod distant up which they have gone for nuts, which still hang on it. The whole print of the foot &c is about 1 3/4 inches long a part of the leg being impressed. 2 of the tracks when they are running apparently the 2 foremost are wider apart and perhaps with one pair they often make 5 marks with the other 4. Where there is a deep furrow in a chestnut tree between two swelling muscles, in 2 instances the squirrels knowing it to be hollow have gnawed a hole enlarging the crack between 2 cheeks and so made themselves a retreat. In one instance they have commenced to gnaw between the cheeks though no cavity appears, but I have no doubt the tree is hollow. A large yellow birch or black–has the main stem very short & branches very long nearly from one centre– There was a fine rosy sky in the west after sunset. And later an amber colored horizon in which a single tree top showed finely

March 23, Wednesday: Marietta Alboni opened in Don Pasquale at Nible’s Theater on Manhattan.

Henry Thoreau made an interesting comment in his journal about the purpose for the study of the products of normal science: “One studies books of science merely to learn the language of naturalists — to be able to communicate with them—”

March 23: Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her. To look at her is fatal as to look at the head of Medusa. It turns the HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

man of science to stone.101

He also made an entry that he was later to copy into his early lecture “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT?” . It would be combined with an entry made on January 27, 1854 and an entry made on April 8, 1854 to form the following:

[Paragraph3] At a lyceum, not long since, I felt that the lecturer had chosen a theme too foreign to himself, and so failed to interest me as much as he might have done.1 He described things not in or near to his heart, but toward his Brad Dean’s extremities and superficies. There was, in this sense, no truly central or Commentary centralizing thought in the lecture. I would have had him deal with his privatest experience, as the poet does. The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer. I am surprised, as well as delighted, when this happens, it is such a rare use he would make of me, as if he were acquainted with the tool. Commonly, if men want anything of me, it is only to know how many acres I make of their land,—since I am a surveyor,—or, at most, what trivial news I have burdened myself with. They never will go to law for my meat; they prefer the shell. A man once came a considerable distance to ask me to lecture on Slavery; but on conversing with him, I found that he and his clique expected seven-eighths of the lecture to be theirs, and only one-eighth mine; so I declined. I take it for granted, when I am invited to lecture anywhere, that there is a desire to hear what I think on some subject, though I may be the greatest fool in the country,—and not that I should say pleasant things merely, or such as the audience will assent to; and I resolve, accordingly, that I will give you a strong dose of myself.2 You have sent for me, and engaged to pay for me, and I am determined that you shall have me, though I bore you beyond all precedent.3

1. Thoreau drew this and the following three sentences from his journal entry of 8 April 1854. Three days earlier Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum on the “foreign” subject of “France.” 2. On authority of the Nantucket Island Inquirer, Bradley P. Dean has emended the essay copy-text by omitting ‘—for I have had a little experience in that business,—’, which follows ‘lecture anywhere,’; and by changing ‘them’ to ‘you’. 3. On authority of the Inquirer, Dean also emended the essay copy-text by changing the three plural pronouns in this sentence from the 3rd to the 2nd person.

101.The poet W.H. Auden has in 1962 brought forward this day’s entry:

THE VIKING BOOK OF APHORISMS, A PERSONAL SELECTION BY W.H. AUDEN…

Pg Topic Aphorism Selected by Auden out of Thoreau

Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at nature directly, but only with the side 262 Science of his eye. He must look through her and beyond her. To look at her is as fatal as to look at the head of Medusa. It turns the man of science to stone. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Also, on this day, Thoreau noted that Walden Pond had become clear of ice:

December 31, Saturday: From WALDEN, we know that Walden Pond froze on the night of the 31st:

Winter 1845-1846 December 22

Winter 1846-1847 December 16

Winter 1847-1848

Winter 1848-1849

Winter 1849-1850 December 31

Winter 1850-1851 December 27

Winter 1851-1852

Winter 1852-1853 January 5

Winter 1853-1854 December 31

Winter 1854-1855

Winter 1855-1856 HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

December 31, Saturday: There are a few sounds still which never fail to affect me. The notes of the wood thrush [Catharus mustelina] and the sound of a vibrating chord, these affect me as many sounds once did often, and as almost all should. The strains of the aeolian harp and of the wood thrush are the truest and loftiest preachers that I know now left on earth. I know of no missionaries to us heathen comparable to them. AEOLIAN HARP They, as it were, lift us up in spite of ourselves. They intoxicate, they charm us. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1854

This was Henry Thoreau’s signature:

Thoreau noted in his journal that, as in the previous year, the water level in Walden Pond was dropping.

Here is the analysis made by Robert Milder in his REIMAGINING THOREAU (NY: Cambridge UP, 1995, page 119), of the revisions being made by Thoreau, during this 1852-1853-1854 timeframe, to drafts B and C of the WALDEN manuscript which had been laid by since 1849:

Unlike drafts B and C of 1849, which expand the initial manuscript written at the pond without substantively changing it, the revisions of 1852-1854 differ both from the 1849 WALDEN and, in subtle but important ways, from each other, though with considerable overlap. In draft D, for example, Thoreau elaborated his critique of getting and spending in “Economy,” as he did at every stage of composition, but he also broke new ground in “The Ponds,” which drafts E and F would develop with emphases peculiar to each of those stages. Sattelmeyer finds WALDEN the work of two Thoreaus, corresponding to its two phases of composition (1846-1849 and 1853-1854), with “an earlier self subsumed but still present, as it were, within the latter.” I would divide the second period into identifiable substages and discriminate among three kinds of additions belonging to each: “dominant,” “residual,” and “emergent.” “Dominant” refers to the pattern of the seasons that governed Thoreau’s sense of structure and proportion throughout the period; “residual,” to the amplification of existing chapters according to their original spirit; and “emergent,” to those new and unforeseen elements reflective of Thoreau’s development that intruded upon and modified his book within the framework of its seasonal plan.

In Boston, William Ticknor’s publishing house became Ticknor & Fields by the addition of James T. Fields (1817-1881). HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

The fusion of frog sperm and egg was observed under a microscope. For the first time we were getting a clue, as to just how it is that male and female share in the reproductive process.

The first “stereotypes” came into use in newspaper presses. That is, the type itself was no longer mounted upon the rotating cylinder of the press, but instead a cast replica of the type, termed a “stereotype,” was mounted. This achieved two efficiencies, it prevented type from working loose and flying into the press, and it freed up the type so that the setting of type for tomorrow’s newspaper could begin early. Another word for this semicircle of metal was “boilerplate.” (The use of the terms “stereotype” and “boilerplate” to refer, respectively, to hackneyed communication and to standardized communication, would develop in a later timeframe.)

“Among all the manufactures which –for the mental and mechanical skill required in their prosecution, the remarkable steps by which they have attained their present rank, and the influence which they exert on society generally– claim our attention and admiration, none perhaps is more striking than the manufacture of a book.” — George Dodd’s DAYS AT THE FACTORIES

HISTORY OF THE BOOK

HISTORY OF THE PRESS HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Speaking of stereotypes: Evidently there had been no cross-dressing in the “The Institute of 1770” predecessor of the Hasty Pudding club while Thoreau had been a member prior to 1837. For the cross-dressing which occurred in this year was evidently being considered an innovation:

The wearing of women’s clothes continued to be explicitly forbidden through at least 1816; by 1825, with the list of infractions growing yearly longer, the prohibition in dress was characterized merely as “indecency in language, dress, or behaviour,” and this phrase recurs in the regulations for 1848. Conflict with the law, both university and civil, was probably inevitable for an undergraduate theater group whose increasing focus was on female impersonation. And, as we will see, in two specific instances the club’s ambivalent attitude toward gender bending came to the fore. As early as 1854 some members of the Hasty Pudding had begun to specialize in female impersonation; Horace Furness ’54 [who would later edit the Shakespeare Variorum] was the club’s first diva, “The unparallelled Signorina Furness”; Charles Eliot Furness ’63 kept up the family tradition.

Sometime during this year or the previous year, Thoreau made a fair copy of the penciled last part of his parable of the artist of Kouroo and made the final condensations and changes that would constitute the print H version. His parable of the unreality of temporality and of the unworthiness of the consequentialist attitude HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

was complete:

There was an artist who lived in the city of Kouroo who was truly disposed to strive after perfection. One day F it came into his mind to make a staff. Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, It shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in all my life. He proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it should not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in their works and died, but still he grew not older by a moment. His singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth. As he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him. Before he had found a stock in all respects suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Before he had given it the proper shape the dynasty of the Candahars was at an end, and with the point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that race in the sand, and then resumed his work. By the time he had smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa was no longer the pole-star; and ere he had put on the ferule and the head adorned with precious stones, Brahma had awoke and slumbered many times. But why do I stay to mention these things? When the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new universe ^system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions; in which, though the old cities and dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places. And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal brain. The material was pure, and his art was pure; how could the result be otherwise than wonderful? HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

April 7, Friday: At 6 AM, Henry Thoreau walked down the railroad tracks to the Cliffs. He did not note the condition of the ice on Walden Pond. At some point before the end of this day, the ice would be completely melted:

April 9, Sunday: Henry Thoreau was surprised to note that Walden Pond was completely clear of ice. Checking around, at first he reasoned that it must have opened sometime between the 6th and 9th, but he finally decided that the critical date must have been around the 7th:

April 9. Saw several more yellow redpolls [Palm Warbler Dendroica palmarum] with their rich, glowing yellow breasts by the causeway sides. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

The steamer carrying Hinton Rowan Helper, the Star of the West, arrived in New-York harbor, and our stone racist began his trek back to North Carolina and what he hoped was going to turn out to be literary fame — from the publication of some really informative and amusing and chauvinist crowd-pleasing California journals.

HINTON ROWAN HELPER HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

April 27, Thursday: Waldo Emerson had offered to read a paper in Moncure Daniel Conway’s room at Harvard Divinity School, and Conway had sent out invitations. The authorities had been perplexed for some time at this student’s closeness to the heretic of Concord, and when this latest thing came to their attention, they went into a panic of sorts. Conway would be challenged by Harvard’s Professor of Christian Morals with the possibility that this represented a “decline of Christian morals” in Divinity Hall. Two of the professors would visit student Conway in his room and give voice to their fears that there was being organized “a school within the school,” amounting to an “Emersonian cult.” But the meeting in question, on this date, had in fact gone off without incident, the group having moved because of its size to a public room and Emerson having merely read his paper on “Poetry” to an audience that included Professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and faculty spouse Fanny Appleton Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Professor Charles Eliot Norton, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and Arthur Hugh Clough. We are left wondering why on earth all these authority figures were getting so exercised.102

Meanwhile, out at Walden Pond, Henry Thoreau was hypothesizing that the level of water in the pond ought to become very low again during the period 1866-1869 (amazingly, this anticipation would prove to have been accurate).

April 27. 7 A.M. –To Cliffs. ... The wood thrush [Hermit Thrush Catharus guttatus] afar, –so superior a strain to that of other birds. I was doubting if it would affect me as of yore, but it did measurably. I did not believe there could be such differences. This is the gospel according to the wood thrush. He makes a sabbath out of a week-day — I could go to hear him—could buy a pew in his church— Did he ever practice pulpit eloquence? He is right about the slavery question— ... Forbes says that the guides who crossed the alps with him lost the skin of their faces — (Ap from the reflections from the snow.) It is remarkable that the rise & fall of Walden though unsteady & whether periodical or merely occasional are not completed but after many years. I have observed one rise & part of 2 falls. It attains its maximum slowly & surely though unsteadily. It is remarkable that this fluctuation, whether periodical or not, requires many years for its accomplishment — and I expect that a dozen or 15 years hence it will again be as low as I have ever known it.

102. It wasn’t the fact that Waldo Emerson talked about “arrested and progressive development” in this paper on poetry which had gotten the faculty all excited, even though later it would be proposed, by some folks who demonstrably knew nothing whatever of evolutionary theory, that Emerson had here been anticipating Charles Darwin’s theory. What Emerson had said was simply “The electric word pronounced by [Doctor] John Hunter [1728-1793] a hundred years ago, — arrested and progressive development — indicating the way upward from the invisible protoplasm to the highest organism, — gave the poetic key to natural science, — of which the theories of Geoffroy St. Hilaire, of Lorenz Oken [1779-1851], of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [1749-1832], of Louis Agassiz [1807-1873], and [Sir] Richard Owen [1804-1892] and [Doctor] Erasmus Darwin [1731-1802] in zoölogy and botany, are the fruits, — a hint whose power is not exhausted, showing unity and perfect order in physics.” –Which is not Darwinism, but the obsolete mental universe of hierarchy and superiority, of Naturphilosophie, the great ladder of being, all of which amounted to the wanna-believe bullshit that Charles Darwin would be struggling to supersede. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

May 26, Friday: An annular solar eclipse (#7298) was visible (local weather conditions permitting) in a path from Washington state along the Canadian border and across New England and Nova Scotia:

ASTRONOMY In Boston, the solar eclipse was precluded by clouds and rain. However, in Roxbury, Caroline Barrett White got a view and was able to mark down the totality as occurring precisely at 5:40 PM. In Cambridge, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his journal that “Yesterday a fugitive slave was arrested in Boston! To-day there is an eclipse of the sun. ‘Hung be the heavens in black!’”

At 5:30 AM Henry Thoreau visited the climbing ivy, and in the afternoon he went to Walden Pond. Presumably he caught no glimpse of the eclipse through the clouds. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Moncure Daniel Conway heard the Reverend Theodore Parker’s incendiary oration at Faneuil Hall:

There is a means, and there is an end; liberty is the end, and sometimes peace is not the means toward it.

Hey, that’s not bad, coming from a white man who believed his own Caucasian race to be uniquely humane, civilized, and progressive, never enslaved because able to conquer by use of the head as well as by use of the hand. (Yeah, that’s just about a quote unquote, for the Reverend Parker besides being a warmonger was also a racist.) Let’s have a war so that superior and inferior races can live together in harmony!

The lawyer Seth Webb, Jr. managed to persuade Judge Daniel Wells of Boston’s Court of Common Pleas to issue to Boston’s coroner, Charles Smith, a writ of personal replevin according to which US Marshal Watson Freeman was to surrender “the body of Anthony Burns.” Freeman, however, refused to comply with this writ. Meanwhile, there were maneuvers to raise $1,200 to purchase the escaped slave in order directly to manumit him.103 MANUMISSION

This Anthony Burns affair made Conway (among others) into an abolitionist, by forcing him to choose sides. As the industrialist Amos Lawrence of the Secret “Six” conspiracy commented,

We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.

103. It would have been at best problematic, for such a sale of Burns to the abolitionists for $1,200 to have gone through. Under Massachusetts law, the sale of a slave within the Commonwealth would have been a criminal offense committed by the seller and punishable by a fine of $1,000 plus ten years in prison. Even if Mr. Charles Francis Suttle were to carefully phrase the transaction as a manumission financed by others rather than as a financial transaction for gain, he very well knew that this would provide his enemies with a pretext for indefinite legal harassment — a pretext upon which in the utter absence of all good will they would be quite likely to act. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Bronson Alcott took the train from Boston for Worcester on a mission for the Boston Vigilance Committee. He was to attract the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had organized the guerrilla action of 1851 which had failed to rescue Thomas Simms (Sims), to head the Vigilance Committee and to take action in regard to the kidnapping of Burns.104

July 19: Henry Thoreau walked to Beck Stow’s and to Walden Pond.

104. For the attempt at rescuing Anthony Burns, see the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898). HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

September 7, Thursday: Augustus Sabin Chase got married with Martha Starkweather in Waterville, Ohio. The union would produce three sons and three daughters.

Senator Charles Sumner spoke on the slavery question at the Massachusetts state political convention in Worcester.

In the afternoon Henry Thoreau went to J.B. Moore’s swamp (Gleason E8) and Walden Pond. Just after sunset,

by the light of an almost-full moon that had been full on the previous night, he and Ellery Channing paddled to Baker Farm (Gleason K7) and walked up to the old Baker house. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Sarah Peel and her friends were homeless no longer. Seven trailers were quickly set up on the Hugh Cargill land, the ISBN 0-670-84260-5 — PS3562.A515G58

JAMES BAKER

WALDEN: O Baker Farm! “Landscape where the richest element Is a little sunshine innocent.” * * “No one runs to revel On thy rail-fenced lea.” * * “Debate with no man hast thou, With questions art never perplexed, As tame at the first sight as now, In thy plain russet gabardine dressed.” * * “Come ye who love, And ye who hate, Children of the Holy Dove, And Guy Faux of the state, And hang conspiracies From the tough rafters of the trees!” HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Sept. 7. Thursday. The rain of last night has brought down more leaves of elms and buttonwoods. DOG P. M. - To Moore's Swamp and Walden. See some hips of the moss rose, very large and handsome, bright- scarlet, very much flattened globular. On the Walden road heard a somewhat robin-like clicking note. Looked round and saw one of those small slatecolored, black-tipped, white-rumped hawks skimming over the meadows with head down, at first. thirty feet high, then low till he appeared to drop into the grass. It was quite a loud clicketing sound. Paddled to Baker Farm just after sundown, by full moon. I suppose this is the Harvest Moon, since the sun must be in Virgo, enters Libra the 23d inst. The wind has gone down, and it is a still, warm night, and no mist. It is just after sundown. The moon not yet risen, one star, Jupiter (?), visible, and many bats over and about our heads, and small skaters creating a myriad dimples on the evening waters. We see a muskrat crossing, and pass a white cat on the shore. There are many clouds about and a beautiful sunset sky, a yellowish (dunnish?) golden sky, between them in the horizon, looking up the river. All this is reflected in the water. The beauty of the sunset is doubled by the reflection. Being on the water we have double the amount of lit and dun-colored sky above and beneath. An elm in the yellow twilight loops very rich, as if moss- or ivy-clad, and a dark-blue cloud extends into the dun-golden sky, on which there is a little fantastic cloud like a chicken walking up the point of it, with its neck outstretched. The reflected sky is more dun and richer than the real one. Take a glorious sunset sky and double it, so that it shall extend downward beneath the horizon as much as above it, blotting out the earth, and [let] the lowest half be of the deepest tint, and every beauty more than before insisted on, and you seem withal to be floating directly into it. This seems the first autumnal sunset. The small skaters seem more active than by day, or their slight dimpling CAT is more obvious in the lit twilight. A stray white cat sits on the shore looking over the water. This is her hour. A nighthawk dashes past, low over the water. This is what we had. It was in harmony with this fair evening that we were not walking or riding with dust and noise through it, but moved by a paddle without a jar over the liquid and almost invisible surface, floating directly toward those islands of the blessed which we call clouds in the sunset sky. I thought of the Indian, who so many similar evenings had paddled up this stream, with what advantage he beheld the twilight sky. So we advanced without dust or sound, by gentle influences, as the twilight gradually faded away. The height of the railroad bridge, already high (more than twenty feet to the top of the rail), was doubled by the reflection, equalling that of a Roman aqueduct, for we could not possibly see where the reflection began, and the piers appeared to rise from the lowest part of the reflection to the rail above, about fifty feet. We floated directly under it, between the piers, as if in mid-air, not being able to distinguish the surface of the water, and looked down more than twenty feet to the reflected flooring through whose intervals we saw the starlit sky. The ghostly piers stretched downward on all sides, and only the angle made by their meeting the real ones betrayed where was the water surface. The twilight had now paled (lost its red and dun) and faintly illumined the high bank. I observed no firefly this evening, nor the 4th. The moon had not yet risen and there was a half-hour of dusk, in which, however, we saw the reflections of the trees. Any peculiarity in the form of a tree or other object –if it leans one side or has a pointed top, for instance– is revealed in the reflection by being doubled and so insisted on. We detected thus distant maples, pines, and oaks, and they were seen to be related to the river as mountains in the horizon are by day. Night is the time to hear; our senses took in every sound from the meadows and the village. At first we were disturbed by the screeching of the locomotive and rumbling of the cars, but soon were left to the fainter natural sounds, — the creaking of the crickets, and the little Rana palustris mole cricket (I am not sure that I heard it the latter part of the evening), and the shrilling of other crickets (?), the occasional faint lowing of a cow and the distant barking of dogs, as in a whisper. Our ears drank in every sound. I heard once or twice a dumping frog. This was while we lay off Nut Meadow Brook waiting for the moon to rise. She burned her way slowly through the small but thick clouds, and, as fast as she triumphed over them and rose over them, they appeared pale and shrunken, like the ghosts of their former selves. Meanwhile we measured the breadth of the clear cope over our heads, which she would ere long traverse, and, while she was concealed, looked up to the few faint stars in the zenith which is ever lighted. C. thought that these few faint lights in the ever-lit sky, whose inconceivable distance was enhanced by a few downy wisps of cloud, surpassed any scene that earth could show. When the moon was behind those small black clouds in the horizon, they had a splendid silver edging. At length she rose above them and shone aslant, like a ball of fire over the woods. It was remarkably clear to- night, and the water was not so remarkably broad therefore, and Fair Haven was not clothed with that blue veil like a mountain, which it wore on the 4th, but it was not till we had passed the bridge that the first sheen was HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

reflected from the pads. The reflected shadow of the Hill was black as night, and we seemed to be paddling directly into it a rod or two before us, but we never reached it at all. The trees and hills were distinctly black between us and the moon, and the water black or gleaming accordingly. It was quite dry and warm. Above the Cliffs we heard only one or two owls at a distance, a hooting owl and a screech owl, and several whip-poor- wills. The delicious fragrance of ripe grapes was wafted to us by the night air, as we paddled by, from every fertile vine on the shore, and thus its locality was revealed more surely than by daylight. You might have thought you had reached the confines of Elysium. A slight zephyr wafted us almost imperceptibly into the middle of Fair Haven Pond, while we lay watching and listening. The sheen of the moon extended quite across the pond to us in a long and narrow triangle, or rather with concave sides like a very narrow Eddystone Lighthouse, with its base in the southwest shore, and we heard the distant sound of the wind through the pines on the hilltop. Or, if we listened closely, we heard still the faint and distant barking of dogs. They rule the night. Near the south shore disturbed some ducks in the water, which slowly flew away to seek a new resting-place, uttering a distinct and alarmed quack something like a goose. We walked up to the old Baker house. in the bright moonlight the character of the ground under our feet was not easy to detect, and we did not know at first but we were walking on sod and not on a field laid down and harrowed. From the upland the pond in the moonlight looked looked blue, — as much so as the sky. We sat on the window-sill of the old house, thought of its former inhabitants, saw our bandit shadows down the cellar-way (C. had on a red flannel shirt over his thin coat, –since he expected it would be cold and damp,– and looked like one), listened to each sound, and observed each ray of moonlight through the cracks. Heard an apple fall in the little orchard close lay, while a whip-poor-will was heard in the pines. Returning to the boat, saw a glow-worm in the damp path in the low ground. Returning later, we experienced better the weird-like character of the night, especially perceived the fragrance of the grapes and admired the fair smooth fields in the bright moonlight. There being no mist, the reflections were wonderfully distinct; the whole of Bittern Cliff with its grove was seen beneath the waves.

November 2, Thursday: Franklin Benjamin Sanborn was presented by Waldo Emerson with a copy of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS105 and these two quite elevated gentlemen (6 foot 5; 6 foot 0) walked to Walden Pond. On their walk they encountered a 3rd quite elevated gentleman, Thomas Cholmondeley.106 One may wonder how the wandering conversations might have turned, had this Brit colonialist Thomas Cholmondeley tried out on Emerson and Sanborn an idea such as this one on race from his ULTIMA THULE; OR, THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY A RESIDENCE IN NEW ZEALAND published in this year: Race is one of the chiefest elements of national greatness which can be conceived, for we all know that there is no making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Educate the Negro, the Esquimaux, or even the Calmuc, to the highest degree, you never can make him the equal of the Englishman. In this respect the British colonies have been highly favoured. They have been peopled from some of the best races which the world contains. Would Emerson and Sanborn have been horrified at this sort of race attitude, or would they have thrilled at the altitude of such an attitude?

105. Emerson was encouraging Sanborn to start a school in Concord. 106. We may be forgiven for presuming in the absence of any record, that the Thomas Cholmondeley of the 19th Century was in all likelihood approximately of the altitude of the 21st Century’s Thomas Cholmondeley, Lord Delamere, which is to say, the bloke was very approximately six foot six. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Table of Altitudes

Yoda 2 ' 0 '' Lavinia Warren 2 ' 8 '' Tom Thumb, Jr. 3 ' 4 '' Lucy (Australopithecus Afarensis) 3 ' 8 '' Hervé Villechaize (“Fantasy Island”) 3 ' 11'' Charles Proteus Steinmetz 4 ' 0 '' Mary Moody Emerson per FBS (1) 4 ' 3 '' Alexander Pope 4 ' 6 '' Benjamin Lay 4 ' 7 '' Gary Coleman (“Arnold Jackson”) 4 ' 8 '' Queen Victoria with osteoporosis 4 ' 8 '' Queen Victoria as adult 4 ' 10 '' Margaret Mitchell 4 ' 10 '' length of newer military musket 4 ' 10'' Charlotte Brontë 4 ' 10-11'' Harriet Beecher Stowe 4 ' 11'' Laura Ingalls Wilder 4 ' 11'' a rather tall adult Pygmy male 4 ' 11'' John Keats 5 ' 0 '' Clara Barton 5 ' 0 '' Isambard Kingdom Brunel 5 ' 0 '' Andrew Carnegie 5 ' 0 '' Thomas de Quincey 5 ' 0 '' Stephen A. Douglas 5 ' 0 '' Danny DeVito 5 ' 0 '' Immanuel Kant 5 ' 0 '' William Wilberforce 5 ' 0 '' Mae West 5 ' 0 '' Mother Teresa 5 ' 0 '' Deng Xiaoping 5 ' 0 '' Dred Scott 5 ' 0 '' (±) Captain William Bligh of HMS Bounty 5 ' 0 '' (±) Harriet Tubman 5 ' 0 '' (±) Mary Moody Emerson per FBS (2) 5 ' 0 '' (±) John Brown of Providence, Rhode Island 5 ' 0 '' (+) HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Bette Midler 5 ' 1 '' Jemmy Button 5 ' 2 '' Margaret Mead 5 ' 2 '' R. Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller 5 ' 2 '' Yuri Gagarin the astronaut 5 ' 2 '' William Walker 5 ' 2 '' Horatio Alger, Jr. 5 ' 2 '' length of older military musket 5 ' 2 '' 1 the artist formerly known as Prince 5 ' 2 /2'' 1 typical female of Thoreau's period 5 ' 2 /2'' Francis of Assisi 5 ' 3 '' Vol ta i re 5 ' 3 '' Mohandas Gandhi 5 ' 3 '' Sammy Davis, Jr. 5 ' 3 '' Kahlil Gibran 5 ' 3 '' Friend Daniel Ricketson 5 ' 3 '' The Reverend Gilbert White 5 ' 3 '' Nikita Khrushchev 5 ' 3 '' Sammy Davis, Jr. 5 ' 3 '' Truman Capote 5 ' 3 '' Kim Jong Il (North Korea) 5 ' 3 '' Stephen A. “Little Giant” Douglas 5 ' 4 '' Francisco Franco 5 ' 4 '' President James Madison 5 ' 4 '' Iosef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili “Stalin” 5 ' 4 '' Alan Ladd 5 ' 4 '' Pablo Picasso 5 ' 4 '' Truman Capote 5 ' 4 '' Queen Elizabeth 5 ' 4 '' Ludwig van Beethoven 5 ' 4 '' Typical Homo Erectus 5 ' 4 '' 1 typical Neanderthal adult male 5 ' 4 /2'' 1 Alan Ladd 5 ' 4 /2'' comte de Buffon 5 ' 5 '' (-) Captain Nathaniel Gordon 5 ' 5 '' Charles Manson 5 ' 5 '' Audie Murphy 5 ' 5 '' Harry Houdini 5 ' 5 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Hung Hsiu-ch'üan 5 ' 5 '' 1 Marilyn Monroe 5 ' 5 /2'' 1 T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia” 5 ' 5 /2'' average runaway male American slave 5 ' 5-6 '' Charles Dickens 5 ' 6? '' President Benjamin Harrison 5 ' 6 '' President Martin Van Buren 5 ' 6 '' James Smithson 5 ' 6 '' Louisa May Alcott 5 ' 6 '' 1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 5 ' 6 /2'' 1 Napoleon Bonaparte 5 ' 6 /2'' Emily Brontë 5 ' 6-7 '' Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 5 ' ? '' average height, seaman of 1812 5 ' 6.85 '' Oliver Reed Smoot, Jr. 5 ' 7 '' minimum height, British soldier 5 ' 7 '' President John Adams 5 ' 7 '' President John Quincy Adams 5 ' 7 '' President William McKinley 5 ' 7 '' “Charley” Parkhurst (a female) 5 ' 7 '' Ulysses S. Grant 5 ' 7 '' Henry Thoreau 5 ' 7 '' 1 the average male of Thoreau's period 5 ' 7 /2 '' Edgar Allan Poe 5 ' 8 '' President Ulysses S. Grant 5 ' 8 '' President William H. Harrison 5 ' 8 '' President James Polk 5 ' 8 '' President Zachary Taylor 5 ' 8 '' average height, soldier of 1812 5 ' 8.35 '' 1 President Rutherford B. Hayes 5 ' 8 /2'' President Millard Fillmore 5 ' 9 '' President Harry S Truman 5 ' 9 '' 1 President Jimmy Carter 5 ' 9 /2'' 3 Herman Melville 5 ' 9 /4'' Calvin Coolidge 5 ' 10'' Andrew Johnson 5 ' 10'' Theodore Roosevelt 5 ' 10'' Thomas Paine 5 ' 10'' HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Franklin Pierce 5 ' 10'' Abby May Alcott 5 ' 10'' Reverend Henry C. Wright 5 ' 10'' 1 Nathaniel Hawthorne 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 Louis “Deerfoot” Bennett 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 Friend John Greenleaf Whittier 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 President Dwight D. Eisenhower 5 ' 10 /2'' Sojourner Truth 5 ' 11'' President Grover Cleveland 5 ' 11'' President Herbert Hoover 5 ' 11'' President Woodrow Wilson 5 ' 11'' President Jefferson Davis 5 ' 11'' 1 President Richard M. Nixon 5 ' 11 /2'' Robert Voorhis the hermit of Rhode Island < 6 ' Frederick Douglass 6 ' (-) Anthony Burns 6 ' 0 '' Waldo Emerson 6 ' 0 '' Joseph Smith, Jr. 6 ' 0 '' David Walker 6 ' 0 '' Sarah F. Wakefield 6 ' 0 '' Thomas Wentworth Higginson 6 ' 0 '' President James Buchanan 6 ' 0 '' President Gerald R. Ford 6 ' 0 '' President James Garfield 6 ' 0 '' President Warren Harding 6 ' 0 '' President John F. Kennedy 6 ' 0 '' President James Monroe 6 ' 0 '' President William H. Taft 6 ' 0 '' President John Tyler 6 ' 0 '' John Brown 6 ' 0 (+)'' President Andrew Jackson 6 ' 1'' Alfred Russel Wallace 6 ' 1'' President Ronald Reagan 6 ' 1'' 1 Venture Smith 6 ' 1 /2'' John Camel Heenan 6 ' 2 '' Crispus Attucks 6 ' 2 '' President Chester A. Arthur 6 ' 2 '' President George Bush, Senior 6 ' 2 '' HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

President Franklin D. Roosevelt 6 ' 2 '' President George Washington 6 ' 2 '' Gabriel Prosser 6 ' 2 '' Dangerfield Newby 6 ' 2 '' Charles Augustus Lindbergh 6 ' 2 '' 1 President Bill Clinton 6 ' 2 /2'' 1 President Thomas Jefferson 6 ' 2 /2'' President Lyndon B. Johnson 6 ' 3 '' Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 6 ' 3 '' 1 Richard “King Dick” Seaver 6 ' 3 /4'' President Abraham Lincoln 6 ' 4 '' Marion Morrison (AKA John Wayne) 6 ' 4 '' Elisha Reynolds Potter, Senior 6 ' 4 '' Thomas Cholmondeley 6 ' 4 '' (?) Franklin Benjamin Sanborn 6 ' 5 '' Peter the Great of Russia 6 ' 7 '' Giovanni Battista Belzoni 6 ' 7 '' Thomas Jefferson (the statue) 7 ' 6'' Jefferson Davis (the statue) 7 ' 7'' 1 Martin Van Buren Bates 7 ' 11 /2'' M. Bihin, a Belgian exhibited in Boston in 1840 8 ' Anna Haining Swan 8 ' 1'' HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

December 18, Monday: In the afternoon Henry Thoreau walked down the Fitchburg Railroad tracks and reached the Sudbury River by way of Andromeda or Cassandra Ponds:

Walden Pond froze.

Just at this point in time for the holidays Phineas Taylor Barnum’s autobiography THE LIFE OF P.T. B ARNUM, WRITTEN BY HIMSELF was being brought onto the market, despite the fact that it had gone through the press bearing the date 1855. Incidentally, this author neither wrote, not to anyone’s memory ever spoke, any expression such as the infamous

One a minute.

In this book, having a pretty close estimate of what would make a book sell, Barnum supplied a rather detailed woodcut of the famed “Feejee Mermaid” which he had used to carry around with him on his temperance lectures: HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS was reviewed on page 3 of the National Anti-slavery Standard, presumably by Lydia Maria Child, who described Thoreau as “one man whose aim manifestly is to live”:

WALDEN Print H HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Reprinted in CRITICAL ESSAYS ON HENRY DAVID THOREAU'S WALDEN, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1988), pages 37-9. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1855

March 31, day: Charlotte Brontë died in Haworth, Yorkshire. At the age of 8, in 1824, she had been trundled off to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire for ten months of a poor sort of education. Later this had been an occasion for vengeance, in her JANE EYRE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. After the vengeful author was safely decomposing, in the summer of 1857, a long string of old girls would take to the newspapers in defense of their own better memories of their alma mater.107

Walden Pond was open.

107. See The Halifax Guardian, June through August 1857. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

March 31. I see through the window that it is a very fine day, the first really -warm one. I did not know the whole till I came out at 3 P. M. and walked to the Cliffs. The slight haze of yesterday has become very thick, with a southwest wind, concealing the mountains. I can see it in the air within two or three rods, as I look against the bushes. The fuzzy gnats are in the air, and bluebirds, whose warble is thawed out. I am uncomfortably warm, gradually unbutton both my coats, and wish that I had left the outside one at home. I go listening for the croak of the first frog, or peep of a hylodes. It is suddenly warm, and this amelioration of the weather is incomparably the most important fact in this vicinity. It is incredible what a revolution in our feelings and in the aspect of nature this warmer air alone has produced. Yesterday the earth was simple to barrenness, and dead, — bound out. Out-of-doors there was nothing but the wind and the withered grass and the cold though sparkling blue water, and you were driven in upon yourself. Now you would think that there was a sudden awakening in the very crust of the earth, as if flowers were expanding and leaves putting forth; but not so; I listen in vain to hear a frog or a new bird as yet; only the frozen ground is melting a little deeper, and the water is trickling down the hills in some places. No, the change is mainly in us. We feel as if we had obtained a new lease of life. Some juniper (repens) berries are blue now. Looking from the Cliffs I see that Walden is open to-day first, and Fair Haven Pond will open by day after to-morrow [No. Vide Apr. 4th.].

December 30, Sunday: Walden Pond froze.

December 30: He who would study birds’ nests must look for them in November and in winter as well as in midsummer, for then the trees are bare and he can see them, and the swamps and streams are frozen, and he can approach new kinds. He will often be surprised to find how many have haunted where he little suspected, and will receive many hints accordingly, which he can act upon in the summer. I am surprised to find many new ones (i.e. not new species) in groves which I had examined several times with particular care in the summer. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1856

April 16: The Newburyport, Massachusetts Herald opinioned the Emersonian opinion that: Men succeed or fail ... not from accident or external surroundings [but from] possessing or wanting the elements in themselves.

April 16. The robins [American Robin Turdus migratorius] sing with a will now. What a burst of melody! It gurgles out of all conduits now; they are choked with it. There is such a tide and rush of song as when a river is straightened between two rocky walls. It seems as if the morning’s throat were not large enough to emit all this sound. The robin sings most before 6 o’clock now. I note where some suddenly cease their song, making a quite remarkable vacuum. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

June 22, Sunday: Friend Daniel Ricketson spent the forenoon in Henry Thoreau’s room copying titles of books, etc. The Reverend Convers Francis was preaching in Concord that morning, and his prooftext was Colossians 1:27

and his topic “Christ in Us the Hope of Glory.” The thermometer reaching 95 at 3PM. At 4PM Ricketson and Thoreau went over to the Emerson home for tea by prior invitation, stopping by on the way to call on Mrs. Mary Merrick Brooks. Then he, Thoreau, and Emerson went with the Emerson children to Walden Pond.

Thoreau walked back from the pond with Ellen Emerson and Edith Emerson while Ricketson, Waldo Emerson, and 12-year-old Edward Waldo Emerson “bathed” and discussed the birds and flowers that they had met on the way. Upon return to the Emersons, Ricketson had a chance to meet Mrs. Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley with Miss Ripley, Mrs. Marsten Goodwin, and the Reverend Francis. They visited until 9, and Ricketson was in bed back at the Thoreaus’ at 10. He had found the day very satisfactory and mused to his journal about Concord’s opportunity of becoming the famous-author tourist trap it is today: HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

My ideas of Mr. Emerson, with whom I had my second interview last night, are that he is a kind, gentle-natured man, even loving, but not what is usually termed warm-hearted. His mind does not strike me as being so great and strong as good in quality; it appears to me also limited as to its power. I should think he could rarely surprise one with any outburst of inspiration — his genius, for what he undoubtedly has, is sui generis. He is thoughtful, original, and only Emerson, and the founder of his race. It does not appear to me that he is even indebted to Carlyle, although the latter has recognized him as a kindred spirit. Emerson’s strength appears to me to lie in his honesty with himself; by his honesty he has produced a genuine article in the way of thought. He is an intelligent philosopher, a recipient of the divine cordial in doses rather homœopathic, but effectual specifics for those seeking a purer and better draught than what the schools afford. He is a blessing to the age. I am much interested in Concord, and should prefer it for a residence to almost any other place. The scenery is very picturesque in and about the village, and all appears quiet and peaceful, none of the stir and bustle of New Bedford. The Concord, or Musketaquid or grass-grown river, as my friend H.D.T. has learned its meaning from the Indians, runs along the edge of the village, which is chiefly on one street, although there are several others. It is a fine stream, and remarkable for its gentle current. With Thoreau I rowed up the river several miles, and had many pleasant views from different points. Walden Pond, by the shore where Thoreau built him a little house and there lived two years, is a small but delightful little lake, surrounded by woods. It is very deep and clear, a kind of well of nature. Concord has been for a long time the home or place of temporary abode for many of our most intellectual men and women, — commencing, so far as I am informed, with Dr. Ripley, then Emerson, Margaret Fuller for a short time as a visitor, Hawthorne, G.W. Curtis, H.D. Thoreau, the true Concord aborigine, William E. Channing, 2d, poet, Hon. Samuel Hoar, and his son, ex-Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar. It is also the home of Mrs. Brooks, a true and stirring abolitionist. Concord has a large number of fine old houses, and the old parsonage, once the home of Dr. Ripley and near the battle-ground, is one of the finest old homes in this county. WALDO EMERSON NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS ELLERY CHANNING SAMUEL HOAR EBENEZER ROCKWOOD HOAR EZRA RIPLEY MARGARET FULLER THOMAS CARLYLE

December 19, day: Walden Pond froze. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1857

Waldo Emerson’s ENGLISH TRAITS, again. ENGLISH TRAITS

This was the year in which Henry Thoreau and Waldo the landowner walked in the area from which Thoreau had cleared stumps and brush in order to plant it to beans in 1845, as part of his deal with Emerson that had allowed him to squat on his woodlot property near Walden Pond.

At this time Thoreau offered to reforest the barren area and thus return it to the highest use which would match the poverty of its sandy soil, but it would be 1859 before his 400 white pines, as well as oaks, birches, and larches, would be planted and a picnic grove begun. This was the area of Concord which would be partly burned over in 1872, in which most of the remaining isolated mature trees standing in the sandy soil would be upset by the winds of a great hurricane in 1938.

WALDEN: I planted about two acres and a half of upland; and as it was only about fifteen years since the land was cleared, and I myself had got out two or three cords of stumps, I did not give it any manure; but in the course of the summer it appeared by the arrowheads which I turned up in hoeing, that an extinct nation had anciently dwelt here and planted corn and beans ere white men came to clear the land, and so, to some extent, had exhausted the soil for this very crop.

THE BEANFIELD

March 29, day: Walden Pond thawed.

Henry Thoreau was being written to by Friend Daniel Ricketson in New Bedford. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

New Bedford Sunday A.M 2[9] March '57 Dear Thoreau, I have just rect your note of the 28th at my brothers HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

and hasten a reply for the P.O. before I leave for Brooklawn. Nothing would give me more pleasure than a visit from you at any time. It will be perfectly agreeable to myself and family at this present time, and I shall duly expect you on Wednesday or Thursday. Should this reach you in time for an answer I will be at Tarkiln Hill Station to meet you — if not, make your appearance as early as you wish. [You] can leave your baggage at the depot, and I will send for it if you do not find me or our carriage in waiting.

Page 2 As Channing did not make his usual appearance yesterday p.m. I conclude[,] that he is with you to day, and if he leaves before Wednesday or [T] you may like to have his Company herewards We are getting on very nicely together. The early birds are daily [C]oming[—] Song sparrows Blue Birds, Robins, Meadow[ ] larks, Blackbirds (“Gen Abercrombies”) are already here— Frogs croaking, but not piping yet. And the Spring quite genial. My historical sketches have kept me quite busy, but agreeably so during the past Winter. They are quite to my surprise very popular. I should have hardly supposed that my homely habits & homelier style of composition would [have] suited many. Should Channing be in Concord HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Page 3 and in the humour, he can report my home affairs more fully, if you wish. Remember me to your parents & sister and other Concord friends, particularly the Emersons. I write at my brothers an in the midst of conversation in which I am participating You will perceive this is not a Shanty letter. but I am none the less cordially Yours— D. Ricketson P.S. You need not answer this if you wish to come before Thurs.- day. I have had a little rheumatism about my head & shoulders, but am getting over it.— My spirits are not over good (consequently) HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

November 30, Monday-December 3: Henry Thoreau surveyed, for Waldo Emerson, some woodlots at Goose Pond and Walden Pond belonging to John Richardson. His sketch showed the road leading from Lincoln to Concord Meeting (now Route 126) as it was in 1797 when the land of Duncan Ingraham, “one of the Squires of the village,” was sold to Richardson for $533.33. The land on the east side of that road had belonged to a farmer named Brister, and Thoreau wrote “Brister Lot, now the state’s because the owner, Brister, was a foreigner.”108 The sketch pinpoints Emerson’s land between Richardson’s and John Potter’s along the “Road to Wayland,” the present Walden Street. Thoreau copied a second survey of Emerson’s land made in December 1848 by Cyrus Hubbard and, at the bottom, noted that in 1791 this land had belonged to William Savage.

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

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/137.htm

November 30, Monday: A still, warm, cloudy, rain-threatening day. Surveying the J. Richardson lot. The air is full of geese [Canada Goose Branta canadensis]. I saw five flocks within an hour, about 10 A.M., containing from thirty to fifty each, and afterward two more flocks, making in all from two hundred and fifty to three hundred at least, all flying southeast over Goose and Walden Ponds. The former was apparently well named Goose Pond. You first hear a faint honking from one or two in the northeast and think there are but a few wandering there, but, looking up, see forty or fifty coming on in a more or less broken harrow, wedging their way southwest. I suspect they honk more, at any rate they are more broken and alarmed, when passing over a village, and are seen falling into their ranks again, assuming the perfect harrow form. Hearing only one or two honking, even for the seventh time, you think there are but few till you see them. According to my calculation a thousand or fifteen hundred may have gone over Concord to-day. When they fly low and near, they look very black against the sky.109 Northwest of Little Goose Pond, on the edge of Mrs. Bigelow’s wood-lot, are several hornbeams (Carpinus). Looking into a cleft in one of them about three feet from the ground, which I thought might be the scar of a blazing, I found some broken kernels of corn, probably placed there by a crow or jay. This was about half a mile from a corn-field.

Just at the end of this November, in Lawrence in the Kansas Territory, Richard Realf, published poet and a correspondent for the Illinois State Gazette, was being introduced to John Brown. John E. Cook, a member of Brown’s sacred squad, would persuade this Englishman to sign on for the holy crusade. 108. Would this be the very land on which recently they tried to erect a humongous office building, until they were stopped by the collection of money at rock concerts? Goose Pond actually was two tiny ponds, one of which has now been filled in by the Concord Town Dump:

WALDEN: Goose Pond, of small extent, is on my way to Flint’s....

GOOSE POND

109.I hear that one was killed by Lee in the Corner about this time. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

December: Henry Thoreau surveyed woodlots in Concord and Lincoln for Waldo Emerson. He surveyed a lot by Walden Pond amounting to 13 acres 80 rods. This is the land on which Thoreau built a shanty. Cyrus Hubbard had surveyed this land for Emerson on December 16, 1848. According to a letter written by Emerson to his brother William Emerson on October 4, 1844, he had bought the land from some men he met while walking in the woods. The next day he went back with some “well beloved gossips” and they persuaded him to buy about 3 more acres from Heartwell Bigelow to protect his investment. Thoreau also surveyed Ebenezer Hubbard’s woodlot, between Walden Street and the Cambridge Turnpike, that would become part of Fairyland in 1935. The survey of Hubbard’s woodlot showed the neighbors as Josh Jones, the Ministerial Lot, John Richardson, Francis Jarvis, Cyrus Warren, N.J., (?) Haywood, Abel Brooks, Reuben Rice, Brister [Brister Freeman] and the Poor Farm on Walden Street. On unspecified days, Thoreau surveyed woodlots for Abel Moore and John Hosmer, lotting off some of the land for firewood. He copied from Cyrus Hubbard’s survey of 1842. His plan shows the Pond Hole, Darius Hubbard’s land, Ephraim Wheeler’s land, and Isaac Brook’s land. Abel Moore’s son John inherited the land.

Here is a portrait of the Waldo Emerson for whom Thoreau was doing so much surveying:

Emerson by Rowse in 1857

December 3, Thursday: Documentation of the international slave trade, per W.E.Burghardt Du Bois: “Report of the Secretary of the Navy.” –HOUSE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 35 Cong. 1 sess. II. pt. 3, No. 2, pt. 3, p. 576.

December 3, Thursday: Surveying the Richardson lot, which bounds on Walden Pond, I turned up a rock near the pond to make a bound with, and found under it, attached to it, a collection of black ants (say a HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

quarter of an inch long) an inch in diameter, collected around one monster black ant as big as four or five at least, and a small parcel of yellowish eggs (?). The large ant had no wings and was probably their queen. The ants were quite lively, though but little way under the edge of the rock. The eggs (?) adhered to the rock when turned up.

December 14, Monday: Henry Thoreau repeated his survey of March 1850 in “Samuel Heywood’s pasture” south of Walden Pond in Lincoln, a plot of 13 acres 80 rods, to adjust the woodlot lines between Waldo Emerson and Charles Bartlett who owned land east of his. SAMUEL HEYWOOD

(Cyrus Hubbard had surveyed this land for Emerson on December 16, 1848. According to a letter written by Emerson to his brother William Emerson on October 4, 1844, he had bought the land from some men whom he met while walking in the woods. The next day he went back with some “well beloved gossips” and they persuaded him to buy about 3 more acres from Heartwell Bigelow to protect his investment. This is the land on which Thoreau built his house. Thoreau may also have done some surveying for Warren Nixon, of Lincoln land near the Emerson-Bartlett land.)

View Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys (but not this one) courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.net/scollect/Thoreau_surveys/Thoreau_surveys.htm

In the District of Columbia, home of our nation’s puzzle palace, an idea reached its completion that had begun process ’way back on December 26, 1849: Know all men by these presents that I, Mary Watts of Saint Mary's County and State of Maryland for and in consideration of the sum of seven hundred dollars current money, to me in hand paid by Thomas Sumerville F.B. of the county and state aforesaid, at and before the sealing and delivery hereof, the receipt whereof I do hereby acknowledge; have granted, bargained and sold, and by these presents, do, grant, bargain and sell unto the said Thomas Sumerville F.B. his executors, administrators and assigns, one Negro woman Maria aged twenty five years, one Negro child named Sarah Ann ages six years, one Negro child named Thomas Randolph aged three years, and one other Negro child named Mary Ellen aged one year, all which Negroes are slaves for life. To have and hold the said described Negroes above bargained and sold to the said Thomas Somerville F.B. his executors, administrators and assigns, forever unto his and their only proper use and benefit, and I, the said Mary Watts for myself, my executors and administrators, shall and will warrant, and forever defend by these presents to the said Thomas Somerville F.B. his executors, administrators and assigns, the said described Negroes, against my executors and administrators, and against and all every other person or persons whomsoever I administer the same or any part thereof. In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and affixed my seal the twenty sixth HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

day of December Eighteen Hundred and Forty Nine. Signed, sealed and delivered in the presence of } Mary Watts {seal} N. Furck

Received of Thomas Sumerville F.B. the sum of seven hundred dollars in the full of the consideration specified to be paid in the above Bill of sale. 26th December 1849 Mary Watts State of Maryland, St. Mary's County, J.P. On this 26th day of December 1849 before one of the justices of the peace of the state of Maryland in and for said county, personally appeared Mary Watts and acknowledges the foregoing bill of sale or instrument of writing to be her act and deeds according to the purport true intent and meaning thereof-And at the same time and place also appeared before me Thomas Somerville F.B. the grantee oath that the consideration set forth in the said Bill of sale is true and bona fide as therein set forth. Acknowledged & sworn before N. Furck, J.P. {seal}

Jany. 3rd 1850. Recd. of Thomas Sumerville the sum of one dollar the stamp duty required by law on this Bill of sale. Wm. T. Maddox St. Mary's Cnty.

Saint Marys County to wit Thereby certify that the aforegoing is truly taken from the original field in my office on the 3rd Jany. 1850. In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and affixed the seal of my office this 12th day of March eighteen hundred and fifty. Wm. Maddox St. Mry’s. Cnty. Clk.

Deed of manumission District of Columbia, County of Washington To all whom it may concern. Be it known that I, Thomas Sumerville of the city of Washington in the district of Columbia for divers good causes and considerations, me thereunto moving have released from slavery, liberated, manumitted and set free and by means presents do hereby release from slavery, liberate, manumit and set free my wife Maria being of the age of thirty four years and able to work and gain a sufficient livelihood and maintenance and she the said Negro slave named Maria Somerville I do declare to be henceforth free, manumitted, discharged from all manner of service or servitude to me, my executors and administrators forever. In witness whereof I have this fourteenth day of December in the year of our Lord One Thousand Eight Hundred and Fifty Seven set my hand and seal. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Thomas (X) Sumerville {seal} Signed Sealed and delivered in presence of Witness Jas. Cull ?Alexander Cull

District of Columbia, Washington County On this 14th day of December 1857 before me the subscriber a Justice of the Peace for the County aforesaid personally appeared Thomas Sumerville and acknowledged the above Deed of manumission to be his act and deed for the purpose set forth. Jas. Cull, J.P. {seal}

December 15, Tuesday: In our nation’s idea palace, somebody had a decent idea: Know all men by these presents that I, John B. Grayson of the County of Prince William and State of Maryland for certain good and lawful causes one thereto moving and in consideration of the payment to me of the sum of one thousand two hundred dollars by William Wright of the State of New Jersey the receipts whereof is hereby acknowledged do hereby emancipate and set free the following slaves to me belonging: that is to say: woman Mary-- -aged about 31 years (thirty-one)---the wife of Washington Wood and the two children of said Washington and Mary named respectively Martha about eight years old and Marallina about four years old and do forever discharge the same from servitude to me and my heirs forever. In witness whereof I have and do hereby set my hand and affix my seal this 15 December 1857. Signed Sealed and Delivered in presence of I.H. Goddard F.I. Mumphery J.B. Grayson {seal}

District of Columbia, Washington County to wit I, I. H. Goddard a Justice in & for the county and district aforesaid do hereby certify that John B. Grayson a party to a certain deed bearing date the 15th day of December in the year 1857 and hereto annexed personally appeared before me in my said county being proved to my satisfaction as the person who executed the said deed and acknowledged the same to be his act and deed. Given under my hand & seal this 15th day of December in the year 1857. I.H. Goddard J.P. {seal} MANUMISSION HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

December 28, Monday: Walden Pond froze.

Henry Thoreau surveyed a white pine woodlot by Dugan Desert, and a “partly oak” woodlot north of the road, belonging to Cyrus Hosmer, that would be cut on January 21, 1858 for wood for use by Mr. Warner in the pail factory. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1858

Henry Thoreau recorded in his journal that the water level in Walden Pond was low. However, he noted, the sandbar at the neck of his cove was not exposed.

March 28, Sunday: Walden Pond thawed.

March 28. From Wheeler’s plowed field on the top of Fair Haven Hill, I look toward Fair Haven Pond, now quite smooth. There is not a duck nor a gull to be seen on it. I can hardly believe that it was so alive with them [Common Merganser Mergus merganser] yesterday. Apparently they improve this warm and pleasant day, with little or no wind, to continue their journey northward. The strong and cold north-west wind of about a week past has probably detained them. Knowing that the meadows and ponds were swarming with ducks yesterday, you go forth this particularly pleasant and still day to see them at your leisure, but find that they are all gone. No doubt there are some left, and many more will soon come with the April rains. It is a wild life that is associated with stormy and blustering weather. When the invalid comes forth on his cane, and misses improve the pleasant air to look for signs of vegetation, that wild life has withdrawn itself. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

May 10, Monday: Henry Thoreau and Waldo Emerson walked to Walden Pond. To Thoreau’s talk about a hermit living in Maine, Emerson retorted that “man was not made to live in a swamp.”

At the Commercial Convention in Montgomery, Alabama, the possibility and the desirability of the resumption of American participation in the international slave trade was a prime topic of consideration. This was a desideratum, even if it turned out to require the dissolution of the federal union. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: The first piece of regular business that came before the Commercial Convention at Knoxville, Tennessee, August 10, 1857, was a proposal to recommend the abrogation of the 8th Article of the Treaty of Washington, on the slave-trade. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

An amendment offered by Sneed of Tennessee, declaring it inexpedient and against settled policy to reopen the trade, was voted down, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia refusing to agree to it. The original motion then passed; and the radicals, satisfied with their success in the first skirmish, again secured the appointment of a committee to report at the next meeting on the subject of reopening the slave-trade.110 This next meeting assembled May 10, 1858, in a Gulf State, Alabama, in the city of Montgomery. Spratt of South Carolina, the slave-trade champion, presented an elaborate majority report from the committee, and recommended the following resolutions: — 1. Resolved, That slavery is right, and that being right, there can be no wrong in the natural means to its formation. 2. Resolved, That it is expedient and proper that the foreign slave trade should be re-opened, and that this Convention will lend its influence to any legitimate measure to that end. 3. Resolved, That a committee, consisting of one from each slave State, be appointed to consider of the means, consistent with the duty and obligations of these States, for re-opening the foreign slave-trade, and that they report their plan to the next meeting of this Convention. Yancey, from the same committee, presented a minority report, which, though it demanded the repeal of the national prohibitory laws, did not advocate the reopening of the trade by the States. Much debate ensued. Pryor of Virginia declared the majority report “a proposition to dissolve the Union.” Yancey declared that “he was for disunion now. [Applause.]” He defended the principle of the slave-trade, and said: “If it is right to buy slaves in Virginia and carry them to New Orleans, why is it not right to buy them in Cuba, Brazil, or Africa, and carry them there?” The opposing speeches made little attempt to meet this uncomfortable logic; but, nevertheless, opposition enough was developed to lay the report on the table until the next convention, with orders that it be printed, in the mean time, as a radical campaign document. Finally the convention passed a resolution: — That it is inexpedient for any State, or its citizens, to attempt to re-open the African slave-trade while that State is one of the United States of America.111 W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: This record of the Commercial Conventions probably gives a true reflection of the development of extreme opinion on the question of reopening the slave-trade. First, it is noticeable that on this point there was a distinct divergence of opinion and interest between the Gulf and the 110. De Bow’s Review, XXIII. 298-320. A motion to table the motion on the 8th article was supported only by Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Maryland. Those voting for Sneed’s motion were Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, and Tennessee. The appointment of a slave-trade committee was at first defeated by a vote of 48 to 44. Finally a similar motion was passed, 52 to 40. 111. De Bow’s Review, XXIV. 473-491, 579-605. The Louisiana delegation alone did not vote for the last resolution, the vote of her delegation being evenly divided. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Border States, and it was this more than any moral repugnance that checked the radicals. The whole movement represented the economic revolt of the slave-consuming cotton-belt against their base of labor supply. This revolt was only prevented from gaining its ultimate end by the fact that the Gulf States could not get on without the active political co-operation of the Border States. Thus, although such hot-heads as Spratt were not able, even as late as 1859, to carry a substantial majority of the South with them in an attempt to reopen the trade at all hazards, yet the agitation did succeed in sweeping away nearly all theoretical opposition to the trade, and left the majority of Southern people in an attitude which regarded the reopening of the African slave-trade as merely a question of expediency. This growth of Southern opinion is clearly to be followed in the newspapers and pamphlets of the day, in Congress, and in many significant movements. The Charleston Standard in a series of articles strongly advocated the reopening of the trade; the Richmond Examiner, though opposing the scheme as a Virginia paper should, was brought to “acknowledge that the laws which condemn the Slave-trade imply an aspersion upon the character of the South.112 In March, 1859, the National Era said: “There can be no doubt that the idea of reviving the African Slave Trade is gaining ground in the South. Some two months ago we could quote strong articles from ultra Southern journals against the traffic; but of late we have been sorry to observe in the same journals an ominous silence upon the subject, while the advocates of ‘free trade in negroes’ are earnest and active.”113 The Savannah Republican, which at first declared the movement to be of no serious intent, conceded, in 1859, that it was gaining favor, and that nine-tenths of the Democratic Congressional Convention favored it, and that even those who did not advocate a revival demanded the abolition of the laws.114 A correspondent from South Carolina writes, December 18, 1859: “The nefarious project of opening it [i.e., the slave trade] has been started here in that prurient temper of the times which manifests itself in disunion schemes.... My State is strangely and terribly infected with all this sort of thing.... One feeling that gives a countenance to the opening of the slave trade is, that it will be a sort of spite to the North and defiance of their opinions.”115 The New Orleans Delta declared that those who voted for the slave-trade in Congress were men “whose names will be honored hereafter for the unflinching manner in which they stood up for principle, for truth, and consistency, as well as the vital interests of the South.”116

112. Quoted in 24TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 54. 113. Quoted in 26TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, page 43. 114. 27TH REPORT OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, pages 19-20. 115. Letter of W.C. Preston, in the National Intelligencer, April 3, 1863. Also published in the pamphlet, THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE: THE SECRET PURPOSE, etc., page 26. 116. Quoted in Etheridge’s speech: CONGRESSIONAL GLOBE, 34th Congress, 3d session, Appendix, page 366. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

May 11, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson recorded the conversation of the previous day, with Henry Thoreau at Walden Pond, in his journal:

Yesterday with Henry T. at the pond ... I hear the account of the man who lives in the wilderness of Maine with respect, but with despair.... Henry’s hermit, 45 miles from the nearest house, [is not] important, until we know what he is now, what he thinks of it on his return, & after a year. Perhaps he has found it foolish & wasteful to spend a tenth or a twentieth of his active life with a muskrat & fried fishes.

My dear Henry, A frog was made to live in a swamp, but a man was not made to live in a swamp. Yours ever, R.

HERMITS HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

One of the children of Alexander William Doniphan had already died from accidentally ingesting a poison. The other of his children, 17-year-old Alexander William Doniphan, Jr., a student at Bethany College in West Virginia, at this point drowned in a flood-swollen river.

John Mitchel, who after his fight with the Catholic hierarchy in New-York had relocated to Knoxville, Tennessee where he had tried to become a farmer and had then begun a newspaper named the Southern Citizen, was admitted to the Montgomery Commercial Convention. He was admitted over the objection of Edmund Ruffin, apparently because Ruffin had encountered Mitchel only as a Northerner and had not yet been made sufficiently aware of this Irish gentleman’s one redeeming feature, his intense racism.)

According to Noel Ignatiev’s HOW THE IRISH BECAME WHITE, “To be acknowledged as white, it was not enough for the Irish to have a competitive advantage over Afro- Americans in the labor market; in order for them to avoid the taint of blackness it was necessary that no Negro be allowed to work in occupations where Irish were to be found.”

According to the jokes that were going the rounds in those days among non-Irish white racists (the bulk of the population, actually), the Irish were “Negroes turned inside out” while the American free blacks were “smoked Irish.”

It has been well said, that inside the charmed Caucasian chalk circle it is the sum of what you are not –not Indian, not Negro, not a Jew, not Irish, etc.– that make you what you are. And, that’s as true now as it was then. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

December 25, Christmas Day: The shift from family members working the farm together to the father and older children leaving home for work while the mother rears the young ones occurred in the beginning of the 19th Century. At the same time, the home and family came to be seen as havens in a cruel world, and children as qualitatively different from adults, and deserving of nurturing. Christmas celebrated the wonders of family life. 19th-Century diaries tend to mention more visiting during December than in any other month. The diary of Miss Lindsley of Downsville, New York, for example, describes Christmas visits in 1858: Saturday 25 [1858] Came to father’s, where I spend most of my time this winter, last evening. Chauncey & Calista started after Emma. They came to downsville & bro’t Lilla with them. They then turned back & came home. Emma & Ephraim came to father’s about dark last evening. Watched with Peter last night. Saturday Dec. 25. 1858 Accepted an invitation to dine at Mr. Beare’s with others. Emma went with Eph., who was on this way to Franklin. Sra & Calista went to Walton village, & reached Mr. Beare’s about 5 P. M. Miss Emma Berray accompanied them. J’as. W. Holmes & Amy, with Willie & Little Alice, Came to father’s about 1 P. M. Chauncey & I Started for Mr. Beares about 2 P. M., & arrived there at 3.20 P. M.. The whole Stayed all night. We had an interesting visit (Lindsley 1858).

Lindsley spent her Christmas visiting with friends and family, enjoying a Christmas dinner and spending the whole night at the host house, along with all the other visitors. As it was recorded, this visit seems to be both secular and conventional, as it did not involve a church service and was recorded as a habitual December action.117 In the diary of Nathaniel Arbuckle, a farmer of Delhi, New York for whom Christmas has always been just another workday (except that it was the day on which his taxes fell due), we can see that the holiday was changing for his children. The reason why the holiday was changing for his children was, they were getting a Christmas Break from school — because their teacher was observing the holiday: 24 Still Continues to Snow a little but it Don’t Gain much nay School this Day the teacher being absent till the 27th Keeping the Hall a days to Morrow is Christmas which he Claims 25 This is Christmas went to Delhi in the Sleigh Paid our tax $7.63, Militia tax 50 Cents $8.23 in all Fine Day Sleighing not very Good

Walden Pond froze. John Goodwin told Thoreau that once a partridge had struck a twig or limb in the woods as it flew away from him, so that it fell and he was able to secure it.

December 25: P. M. – Up river on ice to Fair Haven Pond and across to Walden. The ground is still for the most part bare. Such a December is at least as hard a month to get through as November. You come near eating your heart now. There is a good deal of brown or straw-color in the landscape now, especially in the meadows, where the ranker 117. Baker, Lisa B. CHRISTIANITY, SECULARIZATION, AND CHRISTMAS IN THE UNITED STATES 1850 AND TODAY. Religious Studies/Sociology Senior Thesis for Professors Gary Herion and Ed Ambrose, May 1999 HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

grasses, many of them uncut, still stand. They are bleached a shade or two lighter. Looking from the sun, there is a good deal of warm sunlight in them. I see where one farmer has been getting this withered sedge on the ice within a day or two for litter, in a meadow which had not been cut. Of course he could not cut very close. The ice on the river is about half covered with light snow, it being drifted thus, as usual, by the wind. (On Walden, however, which is more sheltered, the ice is uniformly covered and white.) I go running and sliding from one such snow-patch to another. It is easiest walking on the snow, which gives a hold to my feet, but I walk feebly on the ice. It is so rough that it is but poor sliding withal. I see, in the thin snow along by the button-bushes and willows just this side of the Hubbard bridge, a new track to me, looking even somewhat as if made by a row of large rain-drops, but it is the track of some small animal. The separate tracks are at most five eighths of an inch in diameter, nearly round, and one and three quarters to two inches apart, varying perhaps half an inch from a straight line, thus:

Sometimes they are three or four inches apart. The size is but little larger than that of a mouse, but it is never thus, or like a mouse. Goodwin, to whom I described it, did not know what it could be. The sun getting low now, say at 3.30, I see the ice green, southeast. Goodwin says that he once had a partridge [Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus (Partridge)] strike a twig or limb in the woods as she flew, so that she fell and he secured her. Going across to Walden, I see that the fuzzy purple wool-grass is now bleached to a dark straw-color without any purple. I notice that a fox has taken pretty much my own course along the Andromeda Ponds. The sedge which grows in tufts eighteen or twenty inches high there is generally recurving, thus:–

I see that the shiners which Goodwin is using for bait to-day have no longitudinal dark bar or line on their sides, such as those minnows of the 11th and 18th had. Yet I thought that by the position of their fins, etc., the latter could not be the banded minnow. Walden at length skimmed over last night, i. e. the two holes that remained open. One was very near the middle and deepest part, the other between that and the railroad. Now that the sun is setting, all its light seems to glance over the snow-clad pond and strike the rocky shore under the pitch pines at the northeast end. Though the bare rocky shore there is only a foot or a foot and a half high as I look, it reflects so much light that the rocks are singularly distinct, as if the pond showed its teeth. I stayed later to hear the pond crack, but it did not much. How full of soft, pure light the western sky now, after sunset! I love to see the outlines of the pines against it. Unless you watch it, you do not know when the sun goes down. It is like a candle extinguished without smoke. A moment ago you saw that glittering orb amid the dry oak leaves in the horizon, and now you can detect no trace of it. In a pensive mood I enjoy the complexion of the winter sky at this hour. Those small sphagnous mountains in the Andromeda Ponds are grotesque things. Being frozen, they bear me up like moss-clad rocks and make it easy getting through the water-brush. But for all voice in that serene hour I hear an owl hoot. How glad I am to hear him rather than the most eloquent man of the age! I saw a few days ago the ground under a swamp white oak in the river meadow quite strewn with brown dry galls about as big as a pea and quite round, like a small fruit which had fallen from it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1859

The large mansion on the Lee farm, on the site of the Simon Willard house, that had been occupied by Harvard College in 1776, was burnt (it would seem that this must have been an intentional removal of a valueless structure, since there would be no mention of any such conflagration in the annual report of the Concord Fire Department).

This was the year in which Henry Thoreau began his effort to reforest the sandy and barren and exhausted area from which he had cleared stumps and brush for its owner Waldo Emerson in order to plant Phaseolus vulgaris var. humilis common small navy pea bush white beans in 1845 during his residency on Walden Pond. He would

plant a total of 400 eastern white pines Pinus strobus, L., as well as oaks, birchs, and larches, and begin a picnic grove. This is the area which would be partly burned over in 1872, in which most of the remaining isolated mature trees standing in the sandy soil would be upset by the winds of a great hurricane in 1938.

THE BEANFIELD HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

As you walk out to the pond from Concord center, on the road that leads past the pond, this is a nondescript area grown up into trees that is to your right after you cross the turnpike (to your left is the old town landfill):

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. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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

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.

January 10, Monday: In the morning Henry Thoreau returned Jesse’s GLEANINGS IN NATURAL HISTORY, SECOND SERIES and Thompson’s HISTORY OF VERMONT to the Boston Society of Natural History.

In the afternoon the Reverend George Luther Stearns and Waldo Emerson skated with Thoreau on Walden Pond.

January 10: P.M.– Up Assabet to Sam Barrett’s Pond. Cold weather at last; –8 this forenoon. This is much the coldest afternoon to bear as yet, but, cold as it is, –four or five below at 3 P.M., –I see, as I go round the Island, much vapor blowing from a bare space in the river just below, twenty rods off. I see, in the Island wood, where squirrels have dug up acorns in the snow, and frequently where they have eaten them on the trees and dropped the shells about on the snow. Hemlock is still falling on the snow, like the pitch pine. The swamp white oaks apparently have fewer leaves – are less likely to have any leaves, even the small ones – than any oaks except the chinquapin, methinks. Here is a whole wood of them above Pinxter Swamp, which you may call bare. Even the tawny (?) recent shoots of the black willow, when seen thickly and in the sun along the river, are a warm and interesting sight. These gleaming birch and alder and other twigs are a phenomenon still perfect,– that gossamer or cobweb-like reflection. The middle of the river where narrow, as south side Willow Island, is lifted up into a ridge considerably higher than on the sides and cracked broadly. The alder is one of the prettiest of trees and shrubs in the winter, it is evidently so full of life, with its conspicuous pretty red catkins dangling from it on all sides. It seems to dread the winter less than other plants. It has a certain heyday and cheery look, and less stiff than most, with more of the flexible grace of summer. With those dangling clusters of red catkins which it switches in the face of winter, it brags for all vegetation. It is not daunted by the cold, but hangs gracefully still over the frozen stream. At Sam Barrett’s Pond, where Joe Brown is now getting his ice, I think I see about ten different freezings in ice some fifteen or more inches thick. Perhaps the successive cold nights might be discovered recorded in each cake of ice. See, returning, amid the Roman wormwood in front of the Monroe place by the river, half a dozen goldfinches feeding just like the sparrows. How warm their yellow breasts look! They utter the goldfinches’ watery twitter still. I come across to the road south of the hill to see the pink on the snow-clad hill at sunset. About half an hour before sunset this intensely clear cold evening (thermometer at five –6), I observe all the HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

sheets of ice (and they abound everywhere now in the fields), when I look from one side about at right angles with the sun’s rays, reflect a green light. This is the case even when they are in the shade. I walk back and forth in the road waiting to see the pink. The windows on the skirts of the village reflect the setting sun with intense brilliancy, a dazzling glitter, it is so cold. Standing thus on one side of the hill, I begin to see a pink light reflected from the snow there about fifteen minutes before the sun sets. This gradually deepens to purple and violet in some places, and the pink is very distinct, especially when, after looking at the simply white snow on other sides, you turn your eyes to the hill. Even after all direct sunlight is withdrawn from the hilltop, as well as from the valley in which you stand, you see, if you are prepared to discern it, a faint and delicate tinge of purple or violet there. This was in a very clear and cold evening when the thermometer was –6. This is one of the phenomena of the winter sunset, this distinct pink light reflected from the brows of snow-clad hills on one side of you as you are facing the sun. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

The cold rapidly increases; it is –14in the evening. I hear the ground crack with a very loud sound and a great jar in the evening and in the course of the night several times. It is once as loud and heavy as the explosion of the Acton powder-mills. This cracking is heard all over New England, at least, this night.

March 29, Tuesday: Walden Pond thawed.

William Andrus Alcott died in Auburndale, Massachusetts, the author of some one hundred books (during this year a 2d edition to his 1849 volume on vegetarianism would be published). VIEW THE PAGE IMAGES

Julia Dent Grant, the wife of Ulysses S. Grant, along with the other Dent daughters, had been “given” slaves as presents by their father while they were children (although presumably the titles to this property would have remained in the name of their father Fred Dent, Sr.). A year or two before, Ulysses S. Grant had either purchased William Jones, a 5'7" mulatto born in about 1825, or –we aren’t sure which– he had been gifted with Jones by Fred Dent. On the slave market in this year, a middle-aged male like Jones might have been worth between $800 and $1,000, depending on health and skills. In early 1860 the Grants would be moving from White Haven, Missouri to Galena, Illinois, and any slaves that the Grant family took along with them on their journey from Missouri to Illinois would at their destination of course be considered free. On this day (therefore?) Grant manumitted Jones.

March 29. Driving rain and southeast wind, etc. Walden is first clear after to-day. Garfield says he saw a woodcock about a fortnight ago. Minott thinks the middle of March is as early as they GEORGE MINOTT come and that they do not then begin to lay.

December 25, Christmas Day: Walden Pond had frozen during the night.

A memorial service for John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Shields Green was held at First Church in Oberlin, Ohio.

We find the following indication of the tension between the sacred and the secular observation of Christmas in two diary entries of Miss E.W. Lindsley of Downsville, New York: Sunday 25 A.M. Heard Mr. Hearnel lecture to the Children on Missions P.M. — Evening — He preached from Deut. 4.5 — a very pointed discourse against frivolity and dancing December Tuesday 27 1859 Attended the Masonic festival, with Julia, at H.A. Williams — Addresses by Dr Meerwin & Rev. L. Learicom — Had a Ball in the evening — Felt very much grieved at Mr. Beares dancing, after what Mr. Harnel Said Sabbath evening.

December 25: To Carlisle Bridge on river and meadow. Standing by the side of the river at Eleazer Davis’s Hill, –prepared to pace across it,– I hear a sharp fine screep from some bird, which at length I detect amid the button-bushes and willows. The screep was a note of recognition meant for me. I saw that it was a novel bird to me. Watching it a long time, with my glass and without it, I at length made out these marks: It was HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

slate-colored above and dirty-white beneath, with a broad and very conspicuous bright-orange crown, which in some lights was red-orange, along the middle of the head; this was bounded on each side by a black segment, beneath which was a yellow or whitish line. There was also some yellow and a black spot on the middle of the closed wings, and yellow within the tail-feathers. The ends of the wings and the tail above were dusky, and the tail forked. It was so very active that I could not get a steady view of it. It kept drifting about behind the stems of the button- bushes, etc., half the time on the ice, and again on the lower twigs, busily looking for its prey, turning its body this way and that with great restlessness, appearing to hide from me behind the stems of the button-bush and the withered coarse grass. When I came nearest it would utter its peculiar screep, or screep screep, or even screep screep screep. Yet it was unwilling to leave the spot, and when I cornered it, it hopped back within ten feet of me. However, I could see its brilliant crown, even between the twigs of the button-bush and through the withered grass, when I could detect no other part. It was evidently the golden-crested wren [Golden-crowned Kinglet Regulus satrapa], which I have not made out before. This little creature was contentedly seeking its food here alone this cold winter day on the shore of our frozen river. If it does not visit us often it is strange that it should choose such a season.

December 25: The last our coldest night, as yet. No doubt Walden froze over last night entirely.

P.M.–To Carlisle Bridge on river and meadow. I now notice a great many flat, annular, glow-worm-like worms frozen in the ice of the Great Meadow, which were evidently washed out of the meadow-grass lately; but they are almost all within the ice, inaccessible to birds; are only in certain parts of the meadow. especially about that island in it, where it is shallow. It is as if they were created only to be frozen, for this must be their annual fate. I see one which seems to be a true glow- worm. [No. I compare it with description September 16, 1857, and find it is not the glow-worm, though somewhat like it.] The transparent ice is specked black with them, as if they were cranberry leaves in it. You can hardly get one out now without breaking it, they are so brittle. The snow buntings are about, as usual, but I do not think that they were after these insects the other day. Standing by the side of the river at Eleazer Davis’s Hill, –prepared to pace across it,– I hear a sharp fine screep from some bird, which at length I detect amid the button-bushes and willows. The screep was a note of recognition meant for me. I saw that it was a novel bird to me. Watching it a long time, with my glass and without it, I at length made out these marks: It was slate-colored above and dirty-white beneath, with a broad and very conspicuous bright-orange crown, which in some lights was red-orange, along the middle of the head; this was bounded on each side by a black segment, beneath which was a yellow or whitish line. There was also some yellow and a black spot on the middle of the closed wings, and yellow within the tail-feathers. The ends of the wings and the tail above were dusky, and the tail forked. It was so very active that I could not get a steady view of it. It kept drifting about behind the stems of the button- bushes, etc., half the time on the ice, and again on the lower twigs, busily looking for its prey, turning its body this way and that with great restlessness, appearing to hide from me behind the stems of the button-bush and the withered coarse grass. When I came nearest it would utter its peculiar screep, or screep screep, or even screep screep screep. Yet it was unwilling to leave the spot, and when I cornered it, it hopped back within ten feet of me. However, I could see its brilliant crown, even between the twigs of the button-bush and through the withered grass, when I could detect no other part. It was evidently the golden-crested wren [Golden-crowned Kinglet Regulus satrapa ], which I have not made out before. This little creature was contentedly seeking its food here alone this cold winter day on the shore of our frozen river. If it does not visit us often it is strange that it should choose such a season. I see that the strong wind of yesterday has blown off quite a number of white pine cones, which lie on the ice opposite E. Davis’s Hill. As I crossed Flint’s about 4 P. M. yesterday on my way home, when it was bitter cold, the ice cracked with an exceedingly brittle shiver, as if all the pond’s crockery had gone to smash, suggesting a high degree of tension, even of dryness,–such as you hear only in very cold weather,–right under my feet, as if I had helped to crack it. It is the report of the artillery which the frost foe has discharged at me. As you arc swiftly pacing homeward, taking your way across the pond, with your mittened hands in your pocket and your cap drawn down over your ears, the pond loves to give a rousing crack right under your feet, and you hear the whole pond titter at your surprise. It is bracing its nerves against the unheard-of cold that is at hand, and it snaps some of them. You hear this best where there is considerable depth and breadth of water,–on ponds rather than on the river and meadow. The cold strains it up so tight that some of the strings snap. On hearing that sound you redouble your haste HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

toward home, where vestal virgins keep alive a little fire still. In the same manner the very surface of the earth cracks in frosty weather. To-night, when I get just below Davis’s Hill the ice displays its green flag and fires its evening gun as a warning to all walkers to return home. Consider how the pickerel-fisher lives. G., whom I saw at Flint’s Pond on the 22d, had been there all day, eaten all the dinner he had brought, and caught only four little fish, hardly enough for his supper, if he should cook them. His companion swore that he would not go a-fishing again for ten years. But G. said nothing of that sort. The next day I found him five miles from here on the other side of the town, with his lines set in the bay of the river off Ball’s Hill. There, too, he had been tramping about from hole to hole,–this time alone,–and he had done a trifle better than the day before, for he had caught three little fish and one great one. But instead of giving up here, he concluded to leave his lines in overnight,–since his bait would die if he took them off,–and return the next morning. The next was a bitter cold day, but I hear that Goodwin had some fish to dispose of. Probably not more than a dollar’s worth, however. You may think that you need take no care to preserve your woodland, but every tree comes either from the stump of another tree or from a seed. With the present management, will there always be a fresh stump, or a nut in the soil, think you? Will not the nobler kinds of trees, which bear comparatively few seeds, grow more and more scarce? What is become of our chestnut wood? There are but few stumps for sprouts to spring from, and, as for the chestnuts, there are not enough for the squirrels, and nobody is planting them. The sweet-gale rises above the ice of the meadow on each side of the river, with its brown clusters of little aments (some of its seeds begun to fall) amid its very dark colored twigs. There is an abundance of bright- yellow resin between its seeds, and the aments, being crushed between the fingers, yield an odoriferous, perhaps terebinthine (piney) fragrance and stain the fingers yellow. It is worth the while, at this season especially, when most plants are inexpressive, to meet with one so pronounced. I see the now withered spikes of the chelone here and there, in which (when diseased?) a few of its fiat winged seeds are still found. How different are men and women, even in respect to the adornment of their heads! Do you ever see an old or jammed bonnet on the head of a woman at a public meeting? But look at any assembly of men with their hats on; how large a proportion of the hats will be old, weather-beaten, and indented, but I think so much the more picturesque and interesting! One farmer rides by my door in a hat which it does me good to see, there is so much character in it,–so much independence to begin with, and then affection for his old friends, etc., etc. I should not wonder if there were lichens on it. Think of painting a hero in a bran-new hat! The chief recommendation of the Kossuth hat is that it looks old to start with, and almost as good as new to end with. Indeed, it is generally conceded that a man does not look the worse for a somewhat dilapidated hat. But go to a lyceum and look at the bonnets and various other headgear of the women and girls,–who, by the way, keep their hats on, it being too dangerous and expensive to take them off!! Why,every one looks as fragile as a butterfly’s wings, having just come out of a bandbox,–as it will go into a bandbox again when the lyceum is over. Men wear their hats for use; women theirs for ornament. I have seen the greatest philosopher in the town with what the traders would call "a shocking bad hat" on, but the woman whose bonnet does not come up to the mark is at best a "bluestocking." The man is not particularly proud of his beaver and musquash, but the woman flaunts her ostrich and sable in your face. Ladies are in haste to dress as if it were cold or as if it were warm,–though it may not yet be so,–merely to display a new dress. Again, what an ado women make about trifles! Here is one tells me that she cannot possibly wear india-rubber hoots in sloshy weather, because they have heels. Men have been wearing boots with heels from time immemorial; little boys soon learn the art, and are eager to try the experiment. The woodchoppers and teamsters, and the merchants and lawyers, go and come quietly the livelong day, and though they may meet with many accidents, I do not remember any that originated in the heels of their boots. But not so with women; they bolt at once, recklessly as runaway horses, the moment they get the boots on, before they have learned the wonderful art of wearing them. My informant tells me of a friend who has got a white swelling from coming down-stairs imprudently in boots, and of another seriously injured on the meeting-house steps,–for when you deal with steps, then comes the rub,–and of a third who involuntarily dashed down the front stairs, knocked a hat- tree,through the side-lights, and broke I do not know how many ribs. Indeed, that quarter-inch obstruction about the heels seems to be an insuperable one to the women. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1860

Henry Thoreau noted in his journal that, after recovering somewhat during 1859 from the low water level of 1858, Walden Pond was again low.

It was in approximately this period that the Tonawanda Guard Lock was removed when its portion of the Erie Canal was enlarged.

A sign of the times: the New York canal town of Canal was renamed Memphis. During this year the Grand Trunk railroad line was opened between Québec and Rivière du Loup. The railroad seemed triumphant over the canal and over the toll road. During this year, as an early step toward the development of an internal combustion engine, Jean-Étienne Lenoir devised a mechanism in which a carburetor mixed liquid hydrocarbons (illuminating gas) with air and then detonated the resultant by means of a spark of electricity. It did not occur to anyone at this point, to compress the mixture prior to ignition.

During the 1860s and 1870s most of the locomotives introduced in the Boston vicinity were being constructed in Taunton by the design team of William Mason and W.F. Fairbanks. They were diamond-stack eight- wheelers. But what sort of locomotives had been being used on the Boston to Fitchburg railroad that ran past Walden Pond, while Henry Thoreau lived in his cabin there? Does anyone know?

This is the sort of telegraph insulator they had begun putting up in 1860 (at right), compared with the type the line-men had presumably been putting up initially in 1845 as they proceeded past Walden Pond: HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

March 15, Thursday: Walden Pond thawed.

On the eve of his execution, Albert Hazlett wrote to Mrs. Rebecca B. Spring: “Your letter gave me great comfort to know that my body would be taken from this land of chains.... I am willing to die in the cause of liberty, if I had ten thousand lives I would willingly lay them all down for the same cause.”

Green Copeland Hazlett

March 15: A hen-hawk [Red-tailed Hawk Buteo jamaicensis] sails away from the wood southward. I get a very fair sight of it sailing overhead. What a perfectly regular and neat outline it presents! an easily recognized figure anywhere. Yet I never see it represented in any books. The exact correspondence of the marks on one side to those on the other, as the black or dark tip of one wing to the other, and the dark line midway the wing. I have no idea that one can get as correct an idea of the form and color of the under sides of a hen-hawk’s wings by spreading those of a dead specimen in his study as by looking up at a free and living hawk soaring above him in the fields. The penalty for obtaining a petty knowledge thus dishonestly is that it is less interesting to men generally, as it is less significant. Some, seeing and admiring the neat figure of the hawk sailing two or three hundred feet above their heads, wish to get nearer and hold it in their hands, perchance, not realizing that they can see it best at this distance, better now, perhaps, than ever they will again. What is an eagle in captivity! – screaming in a courtyard! I am not the wiser respecting eagles for having seen one there. I do not wish to know the length of its entrails. How neat and all compact this hawk! Its wings and body are all one piece, the wings apparently the greater part, HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

while its body is a mere fullness or protuberance between its wings, an inconspicuous pouch hung there. It suggests no insatiable maw, no corpulence, but looks like a larger moth, with little body in proportion to its wings, its body naturally etherealized as it soars higher. These hawks, as usual, began to be common about the first of March, showing that they were returning from their winter quarters. Cruickshank commentary

March 15. I hear that there was about one acre of ice only at the southwest corner (by the road) of Flint’s Pond on the 13th. It will probably, then, open entirely to-day, with Walden. Though it is pretty dry and settled travelling on open roads, it is very muddy still in some roads through woods, as the Marlborough road or Second Division road.

2 P. M.—To Lee’s Cliff. Thermometer 50°. On the whole the finest day yet (the thermometer was equally high the 3d [2d and 8th. Vide next page.]), considering the condition of the earth as well as the temperature of the air. Yet I think I feel the heat as much if not more than I did on the 23d of February, when the thermometer rose to 58°. Is it because there was more snow lying about then? The comparative stillness, as well as the absence of snow, has an effect on our imaginations, I have no doubt. Our cold and blustering days this month, thus far, have averaged about 40°. Here is the first fair, and at the same time calm and warm, day. Looking over my Journal, I find that the— 1st of March was rainy. 2 at 2 P. M. 56° 3 50 4 44 5 (probably as low) 6 at 3 P. M. 44 7 " " " " 34 8 2 P. M. 50 9 " " " 41 10 30 11 40 12 40 13 36 14 39 15 50 The temperature has been as high on three days this month, and on the 3d [sic] considerably higher, and yet this has seemed the warmest and most summer-like, evidently owing to the calmness and greater absence of snow. How admirable in our memory lies a calm warm day amid a series of cold and blustering ones! The 11th was cold and blustering at 40; to-day delightfully warm and pleasant (being calm) at 50°. I see those devil’s-needle-like larvae in the warm pool south of Hubbard’s Grove (with two tails) swimming about and rising to the top. What a difference it makes whether a pool lies open to the sun or is within a wood,—affecting its breaking-up. This pool has been open at least a week, while that three or four rods from it in the woods is still completely closed and dead. It is very warm under the south edge of the wood there, and the ground, as for some time,—since snow went off,—is seen all strewn with the great white pine cones which have been blown off during the winter,—part of the great crop of last fall,—of which apparently as many, at least, still remain on the trees. A hen-hawk sails away from the wood southward. I get a very fair sight of it sailing overhead. What a perfectly regular and neat outline it presents! an easily recognized figure anywhere. Yet I never see it represented in any books. The exact correspondence of the marks on one side to those on the other, as the black or dark tip of one wing to the other, and the dark line midway the wing. I have no idea that one can get as correct an idea of the form and color of the under sides of a hen-hawk’s wings by spreading those of a dead specimen in his study as by looking up at a free and living hawk soaring above him in the fields. The penalty for obtaining a petty HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

knowledge thus dishonestly is that it is less interesting to men generally, as it is less significant. Some, seeing and admiring the neat figure of the hawk sailing two or three hundred feet above their heads, wish to get nearer and hold it in their hands, perchance, not realizing that they can see it best at this distance, better now, perhaps, than ever they will again. What is an eagle in captivity!—screaming in a courtyard! I am not the wiser respecting eagles for having seen one there. I do not wish to know the length of its entrails. How neat and all compact this hawk! Its wings and body are all one piece, the wings apparently the greater part, while its body is a mere fullness or protuberance between its wings, an inconspicuous pouch hung there. It suggests no insatiable maw, no corpulence, but looks like a larger moth, with little body in proportion to its wings, its body naturally more etherealized as it soars higher. These hawks, as usual, began to be common about the first of March, showing that they were returning from their winter quarters. I see a little ice still under water on the bottom of the meadows by the Hubbard’s Bridge causeway. The frost is by no means out in grass upland. I see to-day in two places, in mud and in snow, what I have no doubt is the track of the woodchuck that has lately been out, with peculiarly spread toes like a little hand. Am surprised to hear, from the pool behind Lee’s Cliff, the croaking of the wood frog. It is all alive with them, and I see them spread out on the surface. Their note is somewhat in harmony with the rustling of the now drier leaves. It is more like the note of the classical frog, as described by Aristophanes, etc. How suddenly they awake! yesterday, as it were, asleep and dormant, to-day as lively as ever they are. The awakening of the leafy woodland pools. They must awake in good condition. As Walden opens eight days earlier than I have known it, so this frog croaks about as much earlier. Many large fuzzy gnats and other insects in air. It is remarkable how little certain knowledge even old and weather-wise men have of the comparative earliness of the year. They will speak of the passing spring as earlier or later than they ever knew, when perchance the third spring before it was equally early or late, as I have known.

April 30, Monday: Fort Defiance was besieged by some thousand red warriors. Defy this, white man!

Henry Thoreau made a quick sketch for Waldo Emerson of the 5 acres 56 rods on the south edge of Walden Pond that burned “last March.” His sketch shows the railroad and “fence” to the west of the pond.

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

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/36.htm

April 30. Cattle begin to go up-country, and every week day, especially Mondays, to this time [SIC] May 7th [And 14th; thereafter few.], at least, the greatest droves to-day. Methinks they will find slender picking up there for a while. Now many a farmer’s boy makes his first journey, and sees something to tell of,—makes acquaintance with those hills which are mere blue warts in his horizon, finds them solid and terra firma, after all, and inhabited by herdsmen, partially be fenced and measurable by the acre, with cool springs where you may quench your thirst after a dusty day’s walk. Surveying Emerson’s wood-lot to see how much was burned near the end of March, I find that what I anticipated is exactly true,—that the fire did not burn hard on the northern slopes, there being then frost in the ground, and where the bank was very steep, say at angle of forty-five degrees, which was the case with more than a quarter of an acre, it did not run down at all, though no man hindered it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

That fire in the woods in Groton on the 27th, which was seen so far, so very dun and extensive the smoke, so that you looked to see the flames too, proves what slight burnings it is, comparatively, that we commonly see making these cloud-like or bluish smokes in the horizon, and also how very far off they may often be. Those whitish columns of smoke which we see from the hills, and count so many of at once, are probably often fifty or sixty miles off or more. I can now believe what I have read of a traveller making such a signal on the slope of the Rocky Mountains a hundred miles off, to save coming back to his party. Yet, strange to say, I did not see the smoke of the still larger fire between Concord and Acton in March at all, I being in Lincoln and outdoors all the time. This Groton fire did not seem much further off than a fire in Walden Woods, and, as I believe and hear, in each town the inhabitants supposed it to be in the outskirts of their own township.

December 16, Sunday: According to Ellery Channing, Walden Pond froze. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1861

December 29, day: Walden Pond froze. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1862

April 1, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson walked across Walden Pond on the ice and then reported this to Henry Thoreau, who commented that he had known the ice to hold on the pond until April 18th.118

Alfred Russel Wallace arrived back in England.

Documentation of the international slave trade, per W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: “Letter of the Secretary of the Interior ... in relation to the slave vessel the Bark Augusta.” –SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 37 Cong. 2 sess. V. No. 40.

118. In 1852, and again in 1856. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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 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

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1864

September 1, Thursday: The Portsmouth, New Hampshire Daily Chronicle related that “Walden Pond, in Concord, is said to have shown recently some of the eccentricity of Thoreau, who lived for years upon its banks. During the recent long protracted drought it has steadily risen, and when the recent rains came they found Walden with more water in its bosom than it had at any time before for seven years!”

October 1, Saturday: The Portsmouth, New Hampshire Daily Chronicle described a trip that someone had made into the Boston area: “Moving on toward Concord we stopped at Walden Pond, the beautiful little sheet of water which Henry Thoreau, the hermit author, has brought so prominently before the public. Small, entirely surrounded by hills, and having a maximum depth of 102 feet, its waters are very cool and clear, and from great depth appear as blue as the ocean.”

(Leaving aside this newspaper flack’s presumption that Henry had been a hermit, what nobody knew at that time –didn’t know even if they didn’t work for a newspaper– was that were one to burrow down through about a dozen feet of muck, at the floor of the pond at that deepest point, and were one to persist down through perhaps a couple of feet of gravelly sand detritus left over from the latest glaciation of this present Ice Age, what one would arrive at would be bedrock — a smooth surface of Andover granite. Point d’appui.) “Glacial polish, grooves, and striations are almost certainly present.” THE WISCONSONIAN GLACIATION HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1866

The Fitchburg Railroad bought a piece of land at Walden Pond near the tracks, set up a place to picnic on the shore at Ice Fort Cove, and added sand for a bathing beach near the tracks (opposite where the beach is now). Concord’s Walden Woods area would soon be further developed to include swings, bathing houses, pavilions, dancing platforms, and other attractions. There were paths around the pond and through the woods and boats on the pond, there were football and baseball fields, and a cinder racetrack in the vicinity would make the pond a popular destination for a day trip from Boston via the train (and a money-maker for the railroad in the summer). This cinder track for foot and bicycle races consisted of a straight run of 120 yards culminating in a 220-yard circle, and was in the woods opposite the tracks from the pond. Traces of the cinders can be found there to this day. They built a wooden bridge for people to cross the tracks, and this bridge is visible in a period painting of Walden that is in the Concord Free Public Library Art Collection. This excursion park on the railroad would be destroyed by fire in 1902. SPORTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1869

Edmond Stuart Hotham obtained Waldo Emerson’s permission and built a habitation near Thoreau’s site on Walden Pond (he was an ascetic rather than a writer).119

In the town of Quincy in this year, the 1st “schoolbus” of the sort that picks children up and brings them to school (except that this was a wagon rather than a bus, and was not yellow).

119. Refer to Kenneth Walter Cameron’s “Thoreau’s Disciple at Walden,” Emerson Society Quarterly 26 (1962): 34-45. The person in question was a tall, quiet theology student from New York, and his reading of the book WALDEN was so superficial as to cause him to seek to distinguish himself by outdistancing its author in economy and in asceticism. Bronson Alcott described him as serious, sensible, and unassuming but without “light of idealism.” After Emerson allowed him the use of his famous woodlot by the pond, he dug in November into a slope in front of where the shanty had been situated to create a habitation half the size of Thoreau’s. It was “not unlike a pile of dirt with a hole in its front ... built of rough boards and boughs, faced by a small glass window and a glass and wood door, and banked up nearly to the top, except in front, by earth and turf.” Ellery Channing recorded it as dug into the bank of the pond. Covered with vines on the outside and tree branches on the inside, it must have been more than a little like the original dirt homes the white people who came to Concord during the early 17th Century had made in the banks of the river. There was a camp bed, a stove, a table, two shelves, two stools, and a waffle iron to make corn waffles. He drank pond water and ate Graham biscuits, wheat bread, dried apples, and corn. Harassed in his hermit existence by the steady stream of visitors to the pond, including reporters looking for a story, he departed on May 18, 1870. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1872

The area near Walden Pond from which Henry Thoreau had cleared stumps and brush in order to experiment with a beanfield, and had later reforested as a picnic grove for its owner Waldo Emerson with some 400 white pines, plus oaks, birchs, and larches, was in this year partly burned over. Most of the remaining isolated mature trees standing in the sandy soil would be upset by the winds of a great hurricane in 1938.

THE BEANFIELD HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1874

August 27, Thursday: Calvin H. Greene visited Walden Pond and made a record that mentions the foundation of Emerson’s (Thoreau’s) shanty, “they can’t move away this foundation” — so evidently the foundation, or at least the hole in the ground or perhaps the base of the fireplace, was at this time still apparent. He commented that the farmhouse that had stood on Baker Farm had disappeared since his visit 11 years earlier but that from the Cliffs the “vale, lake & river running through it, & Hallowell Place,” looked much the same. He mentioned that in the interval between the 1863 visit and this 1874 visit, the Thoreau family graves had been relocated onto Authors’ Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and that the family’s headstones had been replaced with “neat, plain, brown” ones (the cemetery association now keeps spare gravestones for Henry’s grave in a shed somewhere, as these memorabilia do seem from time to time to wander away).

DIGGING UP THE DEAD HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1879

Our national birthday, Friday the 4th of July: Frederick Douglass addressed the citizens of Frederick, Maryland.

At Sunbury, Pennsylvania, Governor Hoyt unveiled a statue of Colonel James Cameron, one of the Civil War fallen.

In Charleston, South Carolina, the Lafayette Artillery, “a white militia company,” fired its 1st artillery salute since 1860.

Although Jefferson Davis was at the bedside of Sarah Ellis Dorsey in New Orleans when she was dying on this day (she was deeding to him her plantation Beauvoir near Biloxi, Mississippi), a letter from him was being read aloud at the public 4th-of-July celebration in Montgomery, Alabama.

At Walden Pond there was a “grand temperance celebration.” The orator was the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1881

September 17, day: Walt Whitman, age 62, visited Concord, staying at Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s home, and among other things visited Walden Pond and the grave of his friend Henry Thoreau in Sleepy Hollow cemetery. According to W. Barksdale Maynard’s WALDEN POND, A HISTORY, “An illustrious group gathered for tea — those two plus Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, and Emerson. Bronson was struck by Whitman’s ‘ruff of beard and open-bosom collar, folded shirt-cuffs — he standing full six feet in his skirtless blue coat, supporting himself with his staff and stooping a little.’ They talked of Margaret Fuller and Thoreau, the conversation ranging back to heady days of 1840s transcendentalism. Whitman studied Emerson intently, concluding that the great man’s mind was slipping.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

“Specimen Days”

Next Day. — Several hours at E.’s house, and dinner there. An old familiar house, (he has been in it thirty-five years,) with surroundings, furnishment, roominess, and plain elegance and fullness, signifying democratic ease, sufficient opulence, and an admirable old-fashioned simplicity — modern luxury, with its mere sumptuousness and affection, either touch’d lightly upon or ignored altogether. Dinner the same. Of course the best of the occasion (Sunday, September 18, ’81) was the sight of E. himself. As just said, a healthy color in the cheeks, and good light in the eyes, cheery expression, and just the amount of talking that best suited, namely, a word or short phrase only where needed, and almost always with a smile. Besides Emerson himself, Mrs. E., with their daughter Ellen, the son Edward and his wife, with my friend F.S. and Mrs. S., and others, relatives and intimates. Mrs. Emerson, resuming the subject of the evening before, (I sat next to her,) gave me further and fuller information about Thoreau, who, years ago, during Mr. E.’s absence in Europe, had lived for some time in the family, by invitation.

OTHER CONCORD NOTATIONS Though the evening at Mr. and Mrs. Sanborn’s, and the memorable family dinner at Mr. and Mrs. Emerson’s, have [Page 914] most pleasantly and permanently fill’d my memory, I must not slight other notations of Concord. I went to the old Manse, walk’d through the ancient garden, enter’d the rooms, noted the quaintness, the unkempt grass and bushes, the little panes in the windows, the low ceilings, the spicy smell, the creepers embowering the light. Went to the Concord battle ground, which is close by, scann’d French’s statue, “the Minute Man,” read Emerson’s poetic inscription on the base, linger’d a long while on the bridge, and stopp’d by the grave of the unnamed British soldiers buried there the day after the fight in April ’75. Then riding on, (thanks to my friend Miss M. and her spirited white ponies, she driving them,) 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. Then to Walden Pond, that beautifully embower’d sheet of water, and spent over an hour there. On the spot in the woods where Thoreau had his solitary house is now quite a cairn of stones, to mark the place; I too carried one and deposited on the heap. As we drove back, saw the “School of Philosophy,” but it was shut up, and I would not have it open’d for me. Near by stopp’d at the house of W.T. Harris, the Hegelian, who came out, and we had a pleasant chat while I sat in the wagon. I shall not soon forget those Concord drives, and especially that charming Sunday forenoon one with my friend Miss M. [Horace Mann, Sr.’s daughter], and the white ponies.

THOREAU’S CAIRN HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1895

This year was an exceedingly dry one, so it is possible that this was the low-water point for Walden Pond at which Fred Hosmer snapped a photo that is labeled “Walden, Showing the Sand Bar,” a photograph in which the sandbar at the neck of the cove is exposed and boards are littering the cove itself.

July: Hector Waylen’s “A Visit to Walden Pond” appeared in the publication Natural Food of Rowerdenan, Merton Park, Surrey, England: Mr. Bartlett told me one story of Thoreau which I have not seen in print.... A number of loafers jeered at him as he passed one day, and said: “Halloo, Thoreau, and don’t you really ever shoot a bird then when you want to study it?” “Do you think,” replied Thoreau, “that I should shoot you if I wanted to study you?” GEORGE BRADFORD BARTLETT HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

An illustrated 2-volume set of WALDEN by Henry D. Thoreau was dated on its title page M DCCC XCVII.

This year’s English edition was being touted by Houghton Mifflin and Company, Boston and New York/The Cambridge Press, Cambridge as “a book for the individual soul against the world,” no less. Also, this year marked the 1st publication of WALDEN in a language other than English — a partial translation by Emmerich into German, which appeared in München. TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Here is Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau’s famous drawing: HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Here is Charles H, Overly’s version of Sister Sophia’s drawing:

Rose Hawthorne Lathrop had separated from her alcoholic husband George Parsons Lathrop, moved to New- York, and trained as a nurse specializing in terminal care of cancer victims.

At this point Rose wrote MEMORIES OF HAWTHORNE, and she would use the net proceeds of this publication effort to open her refuge for cancer victims on New-York’s Lower East Side (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, pages 420-1): Another peculiar spirit now and then haunted us, usually sad as a pine-tree — Thoreau. His enormous eyes, tame with religious intellect and wild with the loose rein, making a steady flash in this strange unit son of forces, frightened me dreadfully at first. The unanswerable argument which he unwittingly made to soften my heart towards him was to fall desperately ill. During his long illness my mother lent him our sweet old music-box, to which she had danced as it warbled at the Old Manse, in the first year of her marriage, and which now softly dreamed forth its tunes in a time-mellowed tone. When he died, it seemed as if an HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

anemone, more lovely than any other, had been carried from the borders of a wood into its silent depths, and dropped, in solitude and shadow, among the recluse ferns and mosses which are so seldom disturbed by passing feet. Son of freedom and opportunity that he was, he touched the heart by going to nature’s peacefulness like the saints, and girding upon his American sovereignty the hair-shirt of service to self-denial. He was happy in his intense discipline of the flesh, as all men are when they have once tasted power — if it is the power which awakens perception of the highest concerns. His countenance had an April pensiveness about it; you would never have guessed that he could write of owls so jocosely. His manner was such as to suggest that he could mope and weep with them. I never crossed an airy hill or broad field in Concord, without thinking of him who had been the companion of space as well as of delicacy; the lover of the wood-thrush, as well as of the Indian. Walden woods rustled the name of Thoreau whenever we walked in them. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Here is Professor Lawrence Buell on pages 321-2 of THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION: THOREAU, NATURE WRITING, AND THE FORMATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE: During Henry Thoreau’s life and for some time thereafter, Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne were the great literary figures one came to see or track. They and the lure of Concord’s Revolutionary fame kept the tourist’s or pilgrim’s interests focused more on the village than on the woods. Even as late as the turn of the century, some tourist guidebooks made no mention, or scant mention, of Walden Pond (“too far from the center of town for the average tourist to visit,” judged one in 1895), though they inevitably cited Thoreau as a local author. A typical promotion piece, issued on the occasion of the Emerson Centenary (1903), placed Emerson first (as probably “the best known of anyone who has ever lived here”) followed by Hawthorne. In 1904, the decade’s most famous literary pilgrim, Henry James, Jr., strayed as far from the village center as the Concord River but, while paying Thoreau tribute in a hasty parenthetical phrase, insisted on associating even the sylvan places of Concord with Emerson’s genius: “not a russet leaf fell for me, while I was there, but fell with an Emersonian drop.” But Thoreau’s disciples had already begun to predict in the 1890s that “Thoreau will continue to grow, while Emerson will become more and more of a back number.” Franklin Benjamin Sanborn –the last surviving member of the antebellum Concord transcendentalist group, and its most officious memorializer– had begun prudently to tip the scales of his praise so as to give Thoreau more play, Emerson less. In 1897, a villager in the literary souvenir business told a visitor that Thoreau items were selling better than Emerson and Hawthorne memorabilia. [Emphasis added] In 1898, Thomas Wentworth Higginson observed that Thoreau’s manuscript letters were fetching the same as Hawthorne’s ($17.50) and nearly four times Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s. In 1904, an enterprising Concordian advertised in a Boston paper that he owned some of the remaining timbers of Thoreau’s cabin, presumably displayable at a price. In 1906 Good Housekeeping noted that Thoreau hatpins, made from the nuts of a tree he supposedly once sowed, were being sold in Concord. More important, that same year Thoreau became the first American man of letters to have his private journal published in full — with a few judicious deletions, of course. Reappraising Concord culture in 1919, forty years after having been a student in the Concord School of Philosophy, Henry Beers of Yale University confessed that Thoreau was interesting him more and more, Emerson less, and registered little surprise at Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s recently quoted statement that Thoreau was the Concordian most likely to endure. These signs of the times coincided with the more conventional mark of literary canonization: Thoreau’s promotion, by 1900, to major figure status in the majority of surveys of American literature.

TIMELINE OF JOURNAL HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1902

The Fitchburg Railroad had, in 1866, bought a piece of land at Walden Pond near the railroad tracks, set up a place to picnic on its shore at Ice Fort Cove, and added sand for a bathing beach near the tracks (that’s exactly opposite where the beach is now). They had “improved” the Walden Woods area to include swings, bathing houses, pavilions, dancing platforms, etc. There were boats on the pond and paths around it and through the woods, there were football and baseball fields, there was even a racetrack for foot and bicycle races — anything and everything to make this pond a popular destination for a summer day trip from Boston via buying a ticket on their train. They had even put in a wooden bridge for people to cross the tracks, which is visible in a period painting of the pond in the Concord Free Public Library Art Collection. SPORTS

In this year, however, this excursion park on the railroad was destroyed by fire. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1904

Louis Comfort Tiffany built himself a mansion on Paumanok Long Island’s Oyster Bay.

What else can I tell you about the Year of Our Lord 1904? It was a fairly rancid year. It wasn’t rancid so much because of the development in this year of the Binet-Simon intelligence test, that established that different races had vastly different Intelligence Quotients — IQ-testing has, at least, some pretense to be based upon Science! However, it was in this year that 1.) George Bernard Shaw declared in England that nothing but a “eugenic religion” could save our civilization and, 2.) in Germany, Dr. Alfred Ploetz founded the Archiv fur Rassen- und Gessellschaftsbiologie, and meanwhile, 3.) in America, land of the free and home of the brave, on Paumanok Long Island, the infamous biologist Charles Davenport established the infamous Cold Spring Harbor laboratory for “eugenics research,” and 4.) the Reverend Alfred Sereno Hudson published about the history of Concord, with gratuitous racist eugenicist asides:

“It is the rule in history that a superior race supplants the weaker.” — Pages 433-4

Alfred S. Hudson. COLONIAL CONCORD: MIDDLESEX COUNTY MASSACHUSETTS. C MA: Erudite Press, 1904 Alfred S. Hudson. THE HISTORY OF CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS, VOLUME I. Concord Erudite Press, 1904 (only Volume I of this was published) He confidently described Emerson’s (Thoreau’s) shanty, many years after it had ceased to exist, as:

The building which was ten feet wide and fifteen feet long stood upon slightly rising ground about twenty rods from a small cove. It had a garret, a closet, a large window on each side, a door at the end and a brick fireplace. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

(Clearly, he overlooked the fact that out at Walden Pond, before the 2d winter in the shanty, Thoreau had installed a more energy-efficient metal stove, presumably at the same time closing off his fireplace to transform it into a mere brick chimney.)

The Reverend local historian and eugenicist condescended to notice, on pages 314-5, of the “weaker” races of the human species, that: There are in ... the New England townships districts now abandoned to a wild vegetable growth, which may once have resounded with the activities of busy life. Illustrative of this is what Thoreau says of Walden pond. He informs us that in that vicinity were dwellings which in his day were nearly obliterated. Among those who lived there as he gives them were Cato Ingraham, Zilpha, Brister, Freeman, Stratton, Breed, Gondibert, Nutting, Le Grosse and Hugh Quoil. Of the homes in which they lived he says: HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

WALDEN: Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings, with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimbles-berries, hazel- bushes, and sumachs, growing in the sunny sward there; some pitch-pine or gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney nook, and a sweet-scented black-birch, perhaps, waves where the door-stone was. Sometimes the well dent is visible, where once a spring oozed; now dry and tearless grass; or it was covered deep, –not to be discovered till some late day,– with a flat stone under the sod, when the last of the race departed. What a sorrowful act must that be, –the covering up of wells! coincident with the opening of wells of tears. These cellar dents, like deserted fox burrows, old holes, are all that is left where once were the stir and bustle of human life, and “fate, freewill, foreknowledge absolute,” in some form and dialect or other were by turns discussed. But all I can learn of their conclusions amounts to just this, that “Cato and Brister pulled wool;” which is about as edifying as the history of more famous schools of philosophy. Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once by children’s hands, in front-yard plots, –now standing by wall-sides in retired pastures, and giving place to new-rising forests;– the last of that stirp, sole survivor of the family. Little did the dusky children think that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the house and daily watered, would root itself so, and outlive them and house itself in the rear that shaded it, and grown man’s garden and orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lone wanderer a half century after they had grown up and died, –blossoming as fair, and smelling as sweet, as in that first spring. I mark its still tender, civil, cheerful, lilac colors. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1905

James Walter Goldthwait’s “The Sand Plains of Glacial Lake Sudbury” appeared in Volume XLII of Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.

GLACIAL LAKE SUDBURY

The above materials were simultaneously presented (in a form more suitable for a lay audience) as an extremely lengthy footnote/appendix within Charles Francis Adams’s AN ACCOUNT OF THE CELEBRATION By THE TOWN of LINCOLN, MASStts April 23RD, 1904, OF THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF ITS INCORPORATION, 1754-1904 (LINCOLN, MASStts PRINTED FOR THE TOWN). The materials were printed along with the address of the Orator of the day, which the Hon. Charles Francis Adams had entitled “A Milestone Planted” and which had been delivered from the podium within the span of one hour and fifteen HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

minutes but then “revised” along with incorporation of “portions omitted in delivery.” TOWN OF LINCOLN’S 150TH

A Milestone Planted And this day shall be unto you for a memorial; and ye shall keep it a feast to the Lord throughout your generational ye shall keep it a feast by an ordinance for ever. - Exodus xi, 14. Why are we here gathered? Why, old and young, have we left plow and counter and desk, - the furrow, the school and the office, - proclaiming high holiday in Lincoln, and thus - men, women and children - met under a common roof-tree? The answer to this question, put at the threshold of the day’s observances, will give its character to my address, and upon it impose limitations. It is Lincoln’s birthday! - the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its existence as a town. We have met to commemorate the event. We are here to plant a milestone, - a memorial for other times and subsequent generations. It will mark the ending of one cycle in our existence as a community, and the beginning of another. A dozen years ago I was called upon, where I then lived, to bear the burden of the day, so far as the preparation of the conventional address was concerned, on a like occasion. It was at Quincy, not my own birthplace, but where I and mine originated, where - bone of its bone, flesh of its flesh - we for two hundred and fifty years had lived, and, dying, gone back to the soil. Responding, though with extreme reluctance, to the call thus made upon me, I took occasion to comment on the character of such commemorations, -their sameness of tone, their self-laudation and lack of individuality, only exceeded in weariness by their constant succession. The historical deliverances customary in such cases, I not untruly asserted, were made up largely of ancestor worship, combined with the ill- considered laudation of a state of things, social, material and educational, which, if brought back and imposed upon us now, would be pronounced unendurable. Of those deceptive, as well as imaginary, portrayals, I declared I had both heard and read more than enough. Like most conventional observances, they at one time had served a purpose, and a useful purpose; for in them, unconsciously quite as much as with intent, was recorded much of historical worth, which otherwise would probably have perished, - not only local traditions, personal memories, the story of the quickly forgotten past, its friendships, its feuds, its great aspirations and its small accomplishment, but phases of thought and expression. Records of the’ time gone by, those discourses and addresses were also mirrors of what was then in vogue. This, however, was in another age of the world, - the days which knew not newspapers or periodicals, the town history or the historical society. But, though that period is gone, the HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

commemoration address abides; and so the old straw is everlastingly threshed over, though few indeed are the grains of wheat resultant therefrom. Each age has, or ought to have, some mode of expression peculiar to itself. The occasional historical discourse and the formal memorial address were of an age that is past. Let them go with it. He, I admit, would be over bold who, standing, in this year 1904, on the threshold of a century, should undertake to forecast the form of expression, to which the century will, in its full maturity, addict itself; but I do not think it will be platform oratory. That was characteristic of the nineteenth century, as pulpit deliverance was characteristic of the eighteenth; and, speaking frankly as well as honestly, though not without study of both, I do not know which of the two modes of expression, taken as wholes, was the drearier and the emptier. The theological literature of the eighteenth century is vast, and, in largest part, devoid both of interest and value; but, on the other hand, retrospect reveals a shallowness and affectation of thought, combined with a tinsel of rhetoric, about the platform oratory of the nineteenth century, which goes far in a comparative way to a rehabilitation of what went before. Thus I felt then, so I feel now; and so, twelve years ago, I argued to a friend of mine, - one of the antique Quincy stock. He, however, took a different view of the subject. Picking me up at once, and assenting to much of my criticism, he refused to accept my conclusions, arguing that it was wholly inexpedient on these occasions to dispense with the time-honored address. It was he who then made use of that milestone simile. In Quincy, and along the old Coast-road, as it was once called, running from Salem through Boston to Plymouth, we had a number of those landmarks, bearing upon their faces eighteenth century distances, dates and initials; and, with them, my friend and I were familiar. Those old colonial way-metes, rough-hewn at the beginning and now furrowed and gnawed by the tooth of time, - as they stood there aslant at the roadside, with inscriptions no longer wholly legible through moss growth and weather stain, - had marked for generations of travellers the distances traversed. And so the printed pages to which I so slightingly alluded told for all future time of some point a community had reached in a journey knowing no end. Here those composing that community had paused for a space, and, resting in their march, cast a glance backward over the road by which they had come, and forward over that yet to be traversed. “At such a time,” myoid friend, now become my mentor, went on, “we are, or ought to be, a world unto ourselves. Why take thought, on this our birthday, of other people, or their kindred observances, or burden ourselves because of posterity? What matters it who are looking on, or what to-morrow’s (Times’ or (Herald’ may have to say of that now taking place? Those after us here dwelling will, to remote generations even, give heed to the utterances of to-day; its record will, by them, not be forgotten. Let that suffice.120 This is our anniversary. Thus far HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

have we got in our journey; and, throwing off our burdens for the moment, we here raise a memorial such as it is, which to those - be they many or few - who care to observe, will tell them that here we rested as we passed a centennial.” On consideration I had to admit that my friend had the best of the argument. His was the saner, the more sensible view. So I helped plant that Quincy milestone;121 and, recalling the lesson then received, I am here to plant the Lincoln milestone to-day. But the circumstances are not the same. Then I spoke as one to the manner born, - I was, as I always had been, part of the halted column. Of the town family, its names, its localities, its traditions, were familiar to me. It is not so here; it never can be so. I may be a useful citizen in Lincoln; and hereafter, as for ten years past, it may be my home. I hope it will be. But here I never can be other than a new-comer, - at most and best, a child of adoption. As such, I am conscious I speak to-day; and what I say needs must lack that insight, that sympathy, that absorption of the individual in the community possible only amid those surroundings where” Heaven,” as Wordsworth tells us, “lies about us in our infancy.” So I beseech your patience while, Dot wholly of Lincoln, I speak about Lincoln, to Lincoln. I shall indulge in no generalities or abstractions, much less attempt heights of eloquence. I propose to talk of Lincoln, and of Lincoln only; and that in simple fashion. But the audience I address is not here; so far from being here, it is remote, as yet unborn. The message framed to-day is to the Lincoln of the next century. At the earliest it is to the Lincoln of 1954, - those who will then gather on this hillside to celebrate the bi- centennial of the town. It is not often in these days of the printing-press and tumult of tongues that anyone can nourish even a hope, no matter how delusive, that what he says or puts on paper will be remembered to-morrow. Instant oblivion, as a rule, awaits. But the proceedings of to-day are exceptional; they will surely be recalled. The interest in what we say or do is not widespread, - indeed, it is confined to a very narrow circle; - and yet what we this day do and say will abide. Within that circle, the passage of time will make it more curious, more interesting, ever more permanent. It also will be the time- eaten, weather-stained inscription on a moss-covered milestone. The better to realize this, let us put ourselves in the place of those who are gone, - those we to-day commemorate. To dwellers in it the present is altogether commonplace, and its daily environment, as distinguished from its exceptional events, is deemed uninteresting. It was so in 1754; it is so in 1904; it will be so in 2054. What, in 1754, their vision dwelt on every day and all the time was so familiar that it never occurred to those then living here that a generation to which it would all be remote and strange and curiously quaint would presently people the soil. So they made no record. Yet what they did not 120. 121. The Centennial Milestone: an Address in Commemoration of the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Incorporation of Quincy, Massachusetts, delivered July 4, 1892. Concerning the friend “of the antique Quincy stock,” see p. 44 of the address above referred to. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

dream of, long since came to pass; and, to-day, there is for us no Lincoln starting- post! Vainly we seek even a vestige of the landmark. While we can send a message forward, we cannot send one back. But suppose for a moment we could, - suppose that our voice could reach Chambers Russell, John Hoar, Benjamin Brown and Stephen Weston, gathered at the house of Edward Flint, close to this spot, on the 26th of May, 1746, there and then holding the first precinct meeting, - what would our message be? If we can frame that message, we can probably form some idea of the similar message our descendants in 2054 would be likely to send back to us here. Unquestionably, we would say to Chambers Russell, and the rest, including the Rev. William Lawrence,-” Tell us of yourselves and of the Lincoln in which you lived. We do not care to listen to sermons on dead and forgotten theological issues, to disquisitions on the rights of man, or to your conception of the everlasting verities; - we want to know about you, and the locality in which you lived and had your being, - your homes and your meeting-house, your school, with its text-books, your church and its pastor, the roads, the means of conveyance, the clothes you wore, the social life you led, and the bones of contention amongst you! You once lived, and lived here! Of you and yours not a vestige remains save a few old houses, and the stones in the village burying-ground behind our new town han; not a garment, scarcely a utensil or book, hardly a printed record. What you thought the commonplace of every-day life the passage of years has made quaint. Tell us, then, of yourselves and of the old-time, the original Lincoln, - long since dead and buried and forgotten.” As it is with us, so, rest assured, will it be with our posterity. That fact dictates the character of the inscription to be cut on the milestone we now plant. And first of that forgotten past, - that remote heretofore with which there is no connection, whether telephonic or spiritual. To our posterity it will be even more shadowy than it is to us; and to try to revive it, - to inject such degree of life as is possible into those long-buried bones, a ray of animation into eyes for more than a century glazed and sightless, is part of the task to which I to-day must address myself. In the case of every Massachusetts town the past divides itself into two portions, the prehistoric and the historic, - the last a mere fringe hanging on the garment, yet in great degree conditioned on the first. Our records of Lincoln, - our traditions even, are but of yesterday. They go back only to 1744, or possibly a century or so more at most, - covering the lives of five, or, perhaps, eight, generations of children of the soil. Beyond and behind stretches the vast unknown, a very Sahara of time, to the historian forever a sealed book, and only in degree and through patient study explorable by the geologist. It reaches back to that remote ice age only in traces visible, but which gave to all the region hereabout the character it bears to-day, dictating in advance for each locality the products of its soil, the vocations of its people, and the lines of its HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

thoroughfares; - so, commerce was decreed for Boston, mills for Lowell and Lawrence, agriculture for Sudbury, Concord and Belmont, a railroad for the valley of the Charles, and forests of oak and pine for Lincoln. In our homes, our vocations and our journeyings, - in the field and on the road, in locating a way or a mill, or choosing a site for a house, we do but follow those lines, whether of least resistance, or of grace and beauty, - which were laid down for us here in New England long before the idea of the pyramids got a lodgment in the brains of the Pharaohs, or the legend of Eden assumed shape in the imagination of the pilgrims of Horeb. In his sketch of the history of Lincoln, Mr. Wheeler makes this statement: “The hill on which the [Lincoln] meeting-house stands is four hundred and seventy feet above high-water mark at Boston, and though there are other hills of greater magnitude, it is believed to be the highest land in [Middlesex] county whereon men have built themselves habitations.... Brooks which are tributaries to the Concord, Charles and Shawshine rise and flow out, but not a tubful of water comes into the town from any source except the rains and dews of heaven.” Here, in fewest possible words, is the whole secret told of the early settlement and slow development of Lincoln. They resulted from natural conditions; and, talking of the history of Lincoln, is it not startling as well as curious to reflect that, of the seventy or eighty centuries which have elapsed since the natural features of the township became exactly what we see them to-day, a little less than two cover the history which interests us and which we so minutely investigate, - the other sixty-eight or seventy- eight centuries, a few less or many more, are an absolute blank! Yet, through them all, Lincoln hill and Sandy Pond, the Walden woods and Fairhaven-bay, were as to-day they are. We men only are here as of yesterday! When Lincoln was incorporated, - in those days of Chambers Russell and William Lawrence, John Hoar and Edward Flint, - the word geology had no well-defined meaning. The scientific study of the earth, and of the physical changes it has undergone, had not begun. Indeed, the first chapter of the book of Genesis disposed of that matter, and disposed of it summarily. It was all delightfully simple. The earth was six thousand years old; it was created in six days, and in the form in which we now know it. To question this was impious. The deluge was accepted as an undeniable historic fact; but the actual occurrence of an ice age was a thing as yet undreamed of even by the most advanced and sceptical of scientists. Since 1754, and almost entirely within the last half of the period, the geologist has revealed a few facts which, while interesting in themselves, are still more interesting in the possibility of future discoveries they suggest. But upon the basis of what is already known, the remoter past may, for Lincoln as for other like dots on the globe’s surface, be to a degree restored. During that remoter period preceding the last ice age, a period to be measured by eons and cycles and not by centuries or millenaries even, all the region HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

hereabout, not Middlesex merely. but Massachusetts and. New England as well, were in the formative stage; - then the rocks were mixed and hardened below the surface; and the surface itself was slowly shaped by rain and the flow of rivers, until its general form was not greatly unlike that of to-day. Instead of being some sixteen miles from the ocean, Lincoln is supposed to have then been some sixty miles from it; while its altitude above the level of the sea was more than twice what it now is. The continental coast line seems to have then run well outside of what we call Cape Ann and Cape Cod. The site of present Boston was forty miles inland, and a very considerable river with its currents, the predecessor of the Merrimac, drained all the country hereabouts. Flowing down from the New Hampshire hills and across the present Middlesex watershed, it found an outlet, it is surmised, not where the Merrimac empties itself, but through the channels of what are now the Mystic or the Charles. Then came the long arctic cycle, with its sea of glacial ice. The dreary waste reached back to the very pole, - one unbroken area of frozen matter,- soil, gravel and ice, - its surface dotted by boulders, like an army moving forward, in New England, towards the southeast in silent, pitiless march. This vast and indescribable desolation was, it is supposed, a mile or more in solid depth, overtopping the summits of our hills by thousands of feet. When all this region, the crest of Mt. Washington even, was submerged by the sea of ice, Lincoln lay simply devoid of life.crushed and mute - under a superincumbent burden of to us inconceivable thickness and weight. Gradually, after a lapse of years concerning which we can form not even an estimate, - it is here all matter of guess-work, - climatic changes again came about, and the ice sheet began to melt away. At the time of its greatest development, its frontier had been some forty miles east of Nantucket and south of Cape Cod, - approximately, perhaps, - for certainty and exactness of measurement are, in this matter, as yet remote, - some 120 to 150 miles from Lincoln; and, as the grinding and excavating barrier, fold on fold and bit by bit, receded, the continent beneath it emerged, assuming as it did so a different contour and novel shapes. This may have been ten thousand years ago, more or less, - probably less rather than more, possibly six thousand only. And yet, in comparison with even six thousand years, how small a poor century and a half of municipal life appears, - the narrow fringe on an ample garment! When, however, this region, in process of time to be known as Lincoln by the descendants of a race not yet emerged from barbarism, again saw the sunlight, - like Hamlet’s father, revisited the glimpses of the moon, - when this slowly came about, the crust of the solid earth had been depressed some forty feet, - whether by the sheer weight imposed upon it, or by the cosmic conditions which led to the cyclic change; the watersheds were not as they had been, and the streams found new channels and outlets. Meanwhile the interior had become the seaboard; and the old seaboard marked the edge of what are known as deep-sea soundings. In the further interior HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

the whole aspect of the continent had undergone change, the former surface had been ground down or scraped away, the hills had been denuded, the valleys filled up. Everything movable in the region thereafter to be known as Lincoln had been displaced. When not gouged away, the soil had been bodily lifted up and carried over into what are now Norfolk and Plymouth counties, and there deposited; or, perhaps, borne still further on and, literally, cast into the sea. Thus, when Lincoln - the township we know - emerged from under the liquescent mass, it appeared not only in a new form, but with a soil in large degree alien, - a detritus from northern Massachusetts, and the mountains of New Hampshire. As the ice dissolved, moreover, fierce sub- glacial streams flowed to and fro, or made lakes against the barrier, seeking, through a strangely changed watershed, the easiest outlets. These streams also brought down with them vast deposits of soil, - gravel, clay and sand, spreading them over the denuded country or the face of yet unmelted ice, thus long held congealed. On an immensely large scale of space and time, it was the process we now see in little each recurring spring. The fields and roadsides are then boggy with water, brooklets in miniature run everywhere, the uplands are in movement towards the valleys, and every hollow in the fields becomes for a time a shallow lake. In certain spots, - recesses in the soil, - bodies of ice accumulate, and, becoming covered with soil, are shielded from atmospheric influence. Presently, the ice formation melts until finally a cavity is left, at the bottom of which lie the matters which had held the ice congealed. On a gigantic scale, multiplied in every case by many thousandfold, this familiar process then went on. Take an instance fresh in memory. The winter just ended was with us one of well-nigh unprecedented severity. They say we had a snowfall of some seventy inches; while, on more than thirty days, the mercury registered from thirty to sixty degrees of frost. The ice formation and snow deposit, when the season passed its climax, may have averaged two feet. They certainly did not average more. During that glacial period, as the result of which the Lincoln region assumed its present contour, the ice formation was, instead of two feet thick, perhaps five thousand; and, after lasting not three months but for centuries, it at length broke up through a period and from cosmic causes which the scientist has as yet failed to specify or explain. One thing only may safely be assumed. Every natural process we last month watched in little then proceeded on a scale at least two thousand times as large. Our gurgling roadside gutter stream was a rushing sub-glacial torrent; the cavities left by the ice bodies which lingered last became the beds of lakes; the soil and gravel and sand we saw washed down and left in the lowlands became those ridges of gravel and hard-pan, those deposits of light, sandy soil, those upland bogs and marshes, cold and treeless, with which Lincoln to-day abounds. Starting at this very hill on which Lincoln village stands, going out through yonder door and walking down by Sandy Pond, the geologist will to-day point out HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

the line of gravel deposit left by the glacier where its ice- concealed streams tore down to the Sudbury, which then found and formed the channel wherein now it flows. First, there is Sandy Pond, a mere hollow among the hills, partly rimmed by glacial rubbish; then there are the Concord woods, all ridged with glacial kames and knolls, between and among which lie yet other ponds; next, sixty feet below Sandy Pond, though not a mile away, is Walden, a deep ice-block cavity, among the gravels; finally, a succession of ridges, swamps, bogs, swales and hollows, - still freshly bearing the imprints of the glacier,- until we emerge on Fairhaven-bay, the shallow and confined residuum of what was once a lake of depth and compass. As the crow flies, Fairhaven-bay is but a short two hundred yards from Walden, and, measured centre to centre, two miles from Sandy Pond; but, under the mysterious workings of glacial force, there is a drop of sixty feet between Sandy Pond and Walden, and of an hundred between it and the Sudbury. And all the intermediate space is so fresh from the formative power, so clearly marked by it, that though we fail in our daily walks to note it, ‘a thousand years are there but as yesterday and as a watch in the night.’ So it was and is; and, because of it, the Lincoln of to-day is a Massachusetts hill region. In Mr. Wheeler’s forceful, if homely, words, “not a tubful of water” flows into the town, - every drop that filters through its soil or falls from the clouds upon it always has sought, and now seeks, an outlet from it. Hence its history. Originally, the backwoods, the outlying districts, “the Farms,” as such districts were then called, of several adjacent towns, out of them it was carved and made up. Concord and Lexington and Weston each contributed, even though grudgingly, a share. In fact, the tradition is that by those dwelling in the mother communities Lincoln was long known not by that name, but was somewhat derisively designated “Niptown,” being made up, it was alleged, of remnants bitten off, as it were, from each. But of the three territorial entities thus despoiled, one alone, Concord, can in the Massachusetts nomenclature be classed as a mother town. Settled, because of its well-watered site and broad bottom lands, in 1635, Concord was in the same year incorporated, thirteenth in seniority among Massachusetts towns. Cambridge and Watertown bordered it on the east; to the west was the unpeopled wilderness. What afterwards became Lexington was then known as Cambridge Farms, - the outlying back region of what a year later (1636) became the college town. But almost sixty years were to pass before an independent existence, as Lexington, was to be given that remote region, first (1691) as a precinct, then (1713) as a municipality. Watertown was in every sense of the term a Massachusetts mother town. Not until 1713 was Weston cut off from it. Thus, after 1713, Concord, Lexington and Weston - one mother and two daughter towns - adjoined each other, and where they met was the hill portion of each; - an outlying, then inaccessible and, consequently, undesirable region, somewhat elevated, not well drained, heavily wooded and with an inferior soil,- where not cold and boggy, HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

light and friable. In a word, it was a glacial detritus, and not an alluvial deposit. So, naturally enough, Lincoln, the hill tract of the three towns, was peopled last, nor thickly peopled at that. But at length the fulness of time came to it also. It is one of the commonplaces of our Massachusetts history that those who first established themselves here as families, - fathers, mothers and children, - and not as mere adventurers, came to Plymouth in 1610, or to Salem in 1618, or to Boston in 1630, to found a “plantation religious,” - church and town were one in the beginning, and thenceforth advanced hand in hand. The church represented and comprised not only the religious aspirations and spiritual existence, but the social life also; the town, the material, the educational and political. The meeting-house, as its name implied, was common ground; for in those days all was sanctified in away, and nothing was peculiarly sanctified. So, theology and religion permeating life, church and town met under one roof-tree. There was no consecrated church edifice, and no distinctive town-hall,- only the Meeting-house. Naturally, as the inhabitants occupying the back lands, - the Farms, - the common hill country of Concord and Lexington and Weston,-increased in number, they became more and more conscious of their isolation. It must have been great,- as we without much exaggeration would consider it, unbearable. So far as I have been able to discover, for there are no maps of that period, and the records are very scanty, after the incorporation of Weston (1713) and before that of Lincoln (1754) there were but two East and West roads running through all this region, with one North and South road. In the case of Concord, the earliest way opened, seems to have been from Watertown, through what is now Lexington, by the old Virginia road, so called, through Lincoln’s northern limits, to the junction of the Sudbury and Assabet rivers, beyond.122 Speaking generally, in those times the bridle path followed the Indian trail; the farmway the bridle path; the road, then, was developed out of what had been the farm-way; and, in due time, the thoroughfare, or highway, followed. The railroad, when at last it came, was, as a general thing, apt to keep close to the original trail. From Boston the settlement of Massachusetts radiated; and, in that settlement, Boston continued to be the centre of gravitation. But, at the time of the incorporation of Lincoln, and for two and forty years after that event, Boston was, and remained, strictly a peninsula. We to-day, as our fathers before us, are so accustomed to reach the city’s centre by a direct route, road or rail, through Arlington, or Waltham, and Cam bridge, that it is not easy to realize that this has not always been the line of intercourse, - that it is, in fact, a modern invention. Such, however, is the case; nor is it possible to get a clear idea of the origin and development of Lincoln’s system of roads without first ridding the mind of that to which it is accustomed as part of its daily life. Lincoln’s roads originated, and were developed, with an eye to. Boston: but, 122. See Albert E. Wood’s paper “The Plantation of Musketequid” (p. 20), in the publications of the Concord Antiquarian Society. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

until 1786, the only unbroken thoroughfare into Boston was through Roxbury, over the Neck, as it was called. The single other regular means of communication was the Charlestown ferry, provided in 1631; and, later, become a link in the great Coast- road of 1639, from Salem to Plymouth. Thus for one whole century and two thirds of another, following the settlement of Massachusetts, three fifths of the whole time since elapsed,- every vehicle that went out of Boston, or into Boston, except over the ice in winter, passed through Roxbury and along what is now Washington Street. Foot passengers, and, at a later day, those on horseback probably, were ferried over from Charlestown; but everything on wheels or runners, even from the Essex towns, found its roundabout way Boston-ward over the Neck. Until 1783, people passing between Boston and Cambridge even, unless they sailed or rowed over, went through Brookline. Thus Judge Sewell records how, on July 4, 17II, he “went to the Commencement by water in a sloop;” though, in 17’2.0, he drove out through Roxbury, but had a pleasant passage home by water, and “landed at the bottom of the Common.” When, fifty-five years later, the British troops marched through Lincoln to Concord, they were carried over from Boston by boats to what is now East Cambridge, and, on their return, they made their way to Charlestown. I have referred to Judge Sewell, and his Commencements at Cambridge. The Judge was a good deal of a traveller about Massachusetts, but he records one visit only to Concord. That was on Wednesday, May 14, 1712; and he went as a delegate from the church of Boston to the ordination of the Rev. John Whiting. He made the journey in a hired calash; and, starting from his house in Boston at five o’clock in the morning, he got to Concord at ten. Coming back, he left Concord at half after three, and “Return’d into my own House a very little before Nine. Laus Deo.” Boston being thus the great objective, it naturally followed that, as new roads or ways were opened in Lincoln, they almost uniformly tended towards either Charlestown or Roxbury, on the way to Boston, and not at all to Cambridge. The earliest map we have upon which the roads of the period anterior to 1800 are indicated, is an English military map of 1775. The original and subsequent lines of communication can thereon be traced. The north road in Lincoln then went by way of Prospect Hill to Charlestown; the south road ran through Weston to Watertown; there crossing the Charles, it passed through Brookline to Roxbury. A more direct road through Cambridge, and over Cam bridgeport bridge, was opened in 1793; while what was at the time referred to as that “gigantic undertaking the Mill Dam,” the extension of Beacon Street to Brookline, was not completed until 1820. So far as Lincoln was concerned, the Mill Dam, following West Boston bridge, at last did away with Charlestown and Roxbury as thoroughfares to Boston. In this comparatively remote region, lying between the two natural routes to Boston, - elevated, tree-grown and secluded, -a sparse population dwelt, and, somehow, extracted from a niggard soil the wherewithal on which to live. Needless to say HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

there were in those days no stage-coaches; no daily newspapers; no post-offices or mails; no places where men congregated; for Lincoln, - I am speaking of the period before 1750,-there was not even a corner grocery or a cross-road variety store. It was a workaday life in the woods all the year round for those whose lot was there cast, - with Boston, their nearest market-town, some twenty miles away. How they continued to exist, much more accumulate substance, I have found it difficult to make out. Wood they had for fuel; corn they grew, and from it made meal; the pork and beef barrels were in the storehouse; their cloth was home-spun; of groceries and West India goods they used but little, our necessities being luxuries with them; and, for household utensils, they depended on the passing peddler, or the occasional journey by cart or sleigh to Boston. In case of illness there was no near-by physician; for childbirth no nurse; the simplest drugs and medicines were hardly procurable. There were few books, and absolutely no libraries; no printing-press, much less a news stand. A surveyor by calling, who in 1821 published what he designated a topographical sketch of the country immediately about Boston, has left this description of Lincoln; and, be it remembered, it was written in the stage- coach period, nearly seventy years after the incorporation of the town, and when many additional public ways and turnpikes had been laid out: “The old road [Trapelo] leading to the town of Lincoln, for the last six miles, is crooked, narrow, and hilly, little travelled on and much neglected. The roads within the limits of the town are generally uneven and in bad repair. The soil is coarse and rocky, a great portion whereof is covered with wood, and not more than one third of the town under culture.”123 Certainly not an alluring description; yet at the time when it was written two generations of inhabitants had already passed away since the incorporation of Lincoln, and the War of Independence was as remote from the people then alive as the War of Secession is from us. The situation I have sought thus rapidly to picture had existed from the beginning. Custom made it endurable; but, as population increased, people became restive. A craving was felt. A full century before the incorporation of Lincoln was discussed, the Great and General Court of Massachusetts Bay had proclaimed it as their first “duty to provide that all places and people, within their gates, should be supplied with an able and faithful minister of God’s holy word;” and now, in August, 1744, divers of those residing in this, the easterly part of Concord, the northerly part of Weston and the westerly part of Lexington, represented to that same Great and General Court that they labored” under great difficulties and inconveniences by reason of their distance from their respective places of public worship in said towns, their families being many of them numerous, in the winter season more especially; and, accordingly, they petitioned to be set off as a separate precinct, to the end that “the public worship of God might, by them, be more comfortably, constantly and universally

123. J.G. Hales, SURVEY OF BOSTON AND VICINITY (1821), p. 68. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

attended upon.” The prayer was certainly reasonable; for, as the signers of it went on to assert, many of them lived “four, and some five miles distant from” their places of public worship; whereas, if the petition was granted, there would be “but few inhabitants two miles and a quarter from the center” of the proposed precinct. Circumstanced as we to-day are, we do not even remotely realize what all this meant; but, to those instructed, the words used are in their simplicity redundant of pathos. They reveal a community cut off from everything which to us makes life worth living. Essentially a simple, a moral and a religious race, the seclusion in which they perforce passed their lives bordered close on that solitude which leads to mental atrophy. They had, of course, their pleasures and pastimes, such as they were; for it was neither a gloomy nor a joyless race. There were the house- raisings, the pig-stickings and the cornhuskings; Thanksgiving’ came, as well as Fast-day: but, like his English forbears, the New Englander took this pleasure rather sadly. Into it also he carried an abiding sense of the obligations under which he drew breath, and the hereafter which awaited him. Thus the church to which he belonged, and the Sabbath concourse at the meeting- house were about all either social or aesthetic that existence had to offer. According to our ideas, it was not much; but, to them, it was everything. Thus it was with Lincoln, as it was with all the little New England civic communities, - the history of the church is the early history of the town. Not only were the two blended, hut the former absorbed theo latter. On the earliest plan of the township which has come down to us, that made by Samuel Hoar just forty years after its incorporation, the “meeting-house” is the one building designated; and when Hales, twenty-five years later made his surveys, he described the “principal settlements” as grouped around the meeting-house. Naturally enough, therefore, the church being its all, the first acts of the “distinct and separate Precinct,” eight years before the town came into being, related to the meeting-house, and the securing the services of “some meet person” therein “publicly to preach the word of God.” Of that earliest meeting-house, referred to in April, 1747, as “already built:’ no description has come down to us. It seems to have stood, and served its purpose, for over a century, indeed until 1857, or easily within the memory of those now living; but no sketch or picture of it taken on the spot and at the time is extant. In its latest form also it differed in all essential respects from the more primitive building of 1747, which appears to have been a sufficiently large, but somewhat barn-like structure, foursquare, two stories in height, and surmounted by a sloping ridge-pole roof. In the very early days, in fact immediately after the incorporation of 1754, provision was made for a belfry, and, subsequently, for a steeple; and for entrances and porches at the front, and on the two sides. The names, twenty-two in number, of those who contributed, whether HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

in money, material or labor, to the construction of the primitive building, have come down to us, - a species of original town roster. Headed by Benjamin Brown, in it is found the familiar Lincoln nomenclature from the first page of its records to that just written, - Munroe, Pierce, Brooks, Wheeler and Brown; though Farrar, Hartwell, Baker and Smith do not there appear. Curiously enough, and indicative of the prudential spirit of the period, in the conveyance to the precinct of the edifice, together with the land on which it stood, the “glass in said House” was specifically and carefully excepted. The windows and sashes apparently did not go with the site and structure; and the precinct forthwith voted to assess itself in the sum of £250, “in bills of credit of the new tenor:” to defray the necessary charges in further finishing “the edifice.” Eleven months later, the meeting-house meanwhile having apparently been improved and completed, Mr. William Lawrence was chosen as “gospel minister,” receiving twenty-two out of twenty-nine votes. His settlement was characteristic of the period. He was to have outright £800, “old tenor,” to garnish his establishment, and afterwards an annual salary of £400 “according to old tenor bills.” But those were the dreary days of provincial paper money. The currency was in process of readjustment on a hard money basis, and the bills in use circulated at a rate of about eleven paper to one silver. A livelihood of £400 “according to old tenor bills” represented, therefore, a somewhat precarious and uncertain support; and Mr. Lawrence not unnaturally stipulated that his salary should be regulated by the prices” of some of the necessaries of life.” The articles then enumerated tell us clearly what the eighteenth century population of the town produced, and upon what those composing it lived: - Indian corn was the staple, rated at fifteen shillings, old tenor, per bushel; rye, one pound, old tenor, per bushel; pork, one shilling and eight pence per pound; beef, one shilling per pound. The minister was also to have delivered to him “at his house, thirty cords of wood, annually, for his fire.” What do these figures mean, - £800, and £400 “according to old tenor bills;” Indian corn at fifteen shillings per bushel; rye at one pound per bushel, - wood thirty cords? This is history! Those figures carry us back directly into the homes of a people. With them under our eyes, we can sit down beneath the roof-trees; we stand at the hearthstones. Interpreting those first precinct votes in the language, and measuring them by the standards of our time, - for they are expressed in a familiar tongue but in forgotten terms, - doing this, we get down to the daily lives of our colonial period, - a period which in Lincoln lasted as long as its first meeting- house stood. But of this, more presently. First, however, to return for a moment to Lincoln town, successor to Concord second precinct. We observe its birth on the twenty-third day of April, and refer to the opening lines of the first page of the earliest volume of our records as authority for so doing. On the other hand, the act of incorporation passed both legislative bodies HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

April 19. This fact, only recently come to light, has led to further research among the archives of the Commonwealth, as a result whereof it appears that Lincoln was very directly connected with a not uninteresting incident in Massachusetts provincial history in a way which has heretofore escaped the notice of its historians. Space and time do not admit of full treatment here. Suffice it to say that between 1740 and 1760 the incorporation of towns, carrying with it the right of representation, was, for reasons of state, discouraged. During that period only four new towns were organized; in all other cases, some twenty-two in number, districts were created with all the powers and rights of towns, save name and representation. But the 1754 session of the General Court was in this respect exceptional, inasmuch as three new towns were then incorporated. Of the three Lincoln was one, Greenwich and Petersham being the other two. Governor Shirley had himself inaugurated what may be called the district policy; and, at his instance, instructions covering the case had in 1743 been sent out by the Lords of Trade. Subsequently, while Governor Shirley himself was in England, the matter was wrangled over between the Legislature and Lieutenant-Governor Phipps, who, in the absence of the governor, represented the Crown. Chambers Russell then took a hand in the matter. An energetic man, he had for some time been involved in a controversy with the people of Concord. He wanted a public way laid out through his estate; the present road from Concord to Weston, by Walden Pond. Concord opposed the laying out “tooth and nail.” So he threw his influence in with the inhabitants of the remoter parts of the three adjoining towns, seeking incorporation. The Russells were a power in the Province. Chambers’s father, Daniel Russell, was of the Council; his brother, James, was a member of the House of Representatives; he himself was a justice of the Superior Court of Judicature, as the highest legal tribunal of the Province was then denominated. In August, 1753, Governor Shirley had returned to Massachusetts after an absence of three years; and, meeting the General Court in December, was not successful in his dealings with it. Hutchinson says in his history that when he asked some allowance to be made him for the time he was away, the legislative body returned Ie an angry message, and not only refused to enlarge the grant, but gave this reason for it, that if his services and their payment since his appointment to the government could be fully stated, the balance would be in their favor.” Having measures of his own - a fort on the Kennebec, and instructed delegates to the Albany Convention then about to be held - much at heart, his excellency was in no position to oppose the wishes of the Assembly on matters of lesser consequence. The Great and General Court met on March 28, 1754, and the petition of Chambers Russell and others for the incorporation of Lincoln was that day presented. Somewhat in disregard of rule and precedent, the measure was immediately pushed through all the legislative stages; and, the opposition of the three towns curtailed of territory to the HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

contrary not-withstanding, the act, in face of sundry adverse petitions, passed both houses within three weeks of its presentation. This was on April 19. It then went to the governor. His instructions adverse to it were explicit; he himself had inspired them. There was, however, no help; so he chose the lesser of two evils. He seems to have held the measure some days under advisement; but apparently signed it on the 23d, and it then became a law. The original parchment has disappeared. It cannot be found on the files of the office of the secretary of the Commonwealth; but the first town-clerk of Lincoln, in opening his book of records, spread on it the certified copy of the act sent him by the deputy secretary, the act, as thus copied, bearing date “April the 23d, Anno Dom. 1754." No time was lost in organization. James Minot, of Concord, was a member of the Council. The legislative session closed on the 23d, and Mr. Minot seems to have carried the act home with him, the ink of the governor’s signature hardly dry upon it. The next day he issued his precept for a town-meeting. Two days later it was held; and the town organization of Lincoln thus dates from the 26th day of April, 1754. On the 26th of May, 1746, one month only lacking of eight full years before, the first meeting of Concord’s second precinct had been held at the house of Edward Flint. The evolution was now complete; the precinct had become a town: and, as was proper and in accordance with the custom of that time, the first town- meeting was held in the meeting-house. Judging by patronymics, the officers then selected might have been selected yesterday, - Ephraim Flint, Ephraim Hartwell, Samuel Farrar, John Hoar, John Garfield, Joshua Brooks, Benjamin Monroe, John Adams, Josiah Parks, Edmund Wheeler, John Billings. From that day to this, the continuity has been unbroken. I have just said that, in the case of Lincoln, the history of the church is the early history of the town, - the former absorbed the latter. The story of the Lincoln church has peen told, and well and sufficiently told. It has been told also in a scholarly way by men in every essential respect far better qualified for the task than am I. I do not propose to repeat what Mr. Richardson and Mr. Bradley and Mr. Porter have so recently set forth, and so graphically narrated. They have exhausted that field. I do, however, propose to picture, in so far as I can, the earlier life of the town as seen through its connection. with the church; for, only in that way, can it be reproduced and made visible. I begin, therefore, with the precinct’S earlier ministerial settlements. William Lawrence, the first minister of the Lincoln church, belonged to the widely-known family whose name is as deeply stamped on the map of Kansas as on that of Massachusetts. Born at Groton, in 17l3, he was graduated at Harvard in the class of 1743. On the 7th of December, 1748, he was ordained as the first settled minister of Lincoln and, a little more than a year later, on the 7th of February, 1750, he was, in his own quaint language, “married To a young Lady whose Name was Love Addams, Daughter of John & Love HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Addams.”124 Mr. Lawrence ministered here hard upon a third of a century, or more than five years over the church of the second Concord precinct, and, for the twenty-six years following those five, over this Lincoln congregation. He died in the odor of sanctity, and, it is said, of loyalty, in the midst of our revolutionary troubles, on the 11th of April, 1780. He left his widow, Love, with nine children, three sons and six daughters, the youngest of eight years. Mrs. Love Lawrence lived to an extreme age, and far into the following century, dying, January 3, 1820, here on Lincoln hill, to which she had come as a bride nearly seventy years before. In the early days of the town, Chambers Russell, we are told, was “the most distinguished resident of Lincoln,” as unquestionably he was the most well- to-do; for no one was wealthy in our sense of the term. His mansion still stands just south of the railroad, and in the fields about it are noble pasture oaks which even in his day must have been large! Next to Chambers Russell in consideration unquestionably came the minister, he also a Harvard graduate, reported to be “a good thinker, a vigorous writer, and an instructive preacher.” He was certainly an industrious writer, for it is recorded of him that he wrote on an average seventy sermons a year, and that he derived from the Gospel of St. Matthew texts for no less than 212 discourses, while the Gospels of Luke and John, and the First Epistle of Peter supplied him with 295 more. There is in this statement something pathetic and depressing; for it suggests an industry conscientious and sustained, and yet so exceedingly profitless. Here was a man, educated, and, presumably, refined in his way, -a student and a thinker, - but remote from the world and buried in colonial seclusion, cut off from any contact with living thought or access to current literature, spider-like, perpetually evolving sermons, not from stones but from his inner consciousness. Seventy sermons a year produced under such conditions! In the thought there is something distinctly appalling. Almost had it been better to have ground in Gaza’s prison-house! - but, as the Sabbath discourses were all they had, supplying the needs filled for us by theatres, lectures, concerts, newspapers and books, eighteenth century parishioners were, doubtless, exacting. So the unfortunate minister drudged along, eking out weekly his sermon and a half, till at last the end came. To the investigator of later times, however, living in a wholly different stage of development, there is also something exasperating, not to say irritating, in such fecundity of the commonplace. Why could it not have occurred to Mr. Lawrence to find tongues in trees, and books in the running brooks, so telling us something of Lincoln? I have not examined these discourses myself; life - at least my life - is not long enough to delve in eighteenth century pulpit utterances: but one who did dip to a moderate extent into the Lawrence manuscripts assures us that, though expressed in a somewhat conventional style, - how, under the circumstances of composition, could it have been otherwise? - they show “a 124. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

careful exegesis, a calm, logical method,” and” an earnest purpose;” but, and here comes in the irritating proviso, in them is found” no allusion to passing events.” They are Dead Sea apples,-” all ashes to the taste.” A single occasional discourse, descriptive to us of the preacher’s surroundings, his interests, his people and their. pursuits, would in value have far outweighed to us whole barrels of abstract discourses, though in them “the Beatitudes receive far more specific attention than the Decalogue.” Let us now turn to the minister’s home. Goldsmith, in his “Deserted Village,” tells us of the Auburn curate:-

“A man he was to all the country dear And passing rich with forty pounds year.”

Measured in “hard money,” or, as we phrase it, in specie, the settlement and annual stipend of the Rev. William Lawrence does not seem to have risen to even this modest competence. Those were days of a depreciated paper currency, - bills of the “old tenor,” bills of the “new tenor,” were outstanding, with, at the close, continental money. Some ten years after the settlement of Mr. Lawrence, the Massachusetts monetary system was reformed, and put on a stable basis, through the financial skill and strong business sense of the much, and unjustly, maligned Governor Thomas Hutchinson; and the bills of the “old tenor” were then called in, and redeemed, at about fourteen per cent. of their nominal value, - or, more exactly, at 7.5 to 1. The £800 voted Mr. Lawrence at his settlement in 1747 represented, therefore, approximately £115 in silver at $3.33 a pound, or an aggregate sum in our money of $365; while the annual stipend of £400 was reduced to about £55, Massachusetts, or, approximately, $185 a year. If these figures represent the real state of Mr. Lawrence’s financial resources, they are certainly suggestive. Computed in staples,- the market quotations of corn and rye, beef and pork furnishing the standards of value, -what, compared with the present, was the relative purchasing power of this annual stipend of $xxx85 “hard money”? Indian corn, for instance, seems to have been valued at about 30 cents a bushel, and rye at 45 cents; while pork was rated at about four cents a pound, and beef at three cents. As corn is now quoted at an average price of about 42 cents a bushel, and rye at 53 cents, while pork is 12 cents per pound, and beef 10 cents, the purchasing power of money, measured in food staples, compared with its present purchasing power, would seem to have been from half as much again to four and even five times as much.125 Clearly, then, the Rev. William Lawrence must have been what is now known as a forehanded man; though his helpmate, or, as he termed her, his “yokefellow,” may well have been a large factor in his prudential affairs. Indeed, she is portrayed to us as not only of “stately mien and benign countenance,” but also “a wife of uncommon wisdom and prudence.” The worldly outcome of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

pair was certainly suggestive.126 Something, it is true, came to Mr. Lawrenee in the way of inheritance; but it was not much, and consisted chiefly of farming land in Groton. Yet, “passing rich” on that salary of £60, Massachusetts, a year, he and his spouse Love lived, and obviously prospered; for they brought up, educated and married a family of nine children, six of whom were daughters. And when, a minister of one church for over thirty years, William Lawrence wrote himself to a death-bed, he breathed his last in his house here on Lincoln hill, the possessor of what is described as “a good farm of thirty-nine acres connected with the homestead, extending down to [Sandy] pond, besides eighteen acres known then as the ‘Oliver land’- since called the Lawrence pasture - seven acres of ‘mead land,’ and some ten acres of flint land: Considerable property was also left in Groton and Townsend.” The dwelling-house is thus described: “It was a low-studded two-story building ... a modest abode, with whitewashed walls and sanded floors and plain furniture. There was but one carpet in the house, and that was in the ‘west chamber,’” the chamber looking towards Concord. “The parlor contained a mahogany table, a walnut desk, a little round tea-table, six leathern seated chairs, a few books of divinity, and the family Bible.... The’ common room’ had an eight-day clock, a looking-glass, and a light-stand. ... The kitchen had the usual capacious fireplace, with its blazing light reflected from double rows of shining pewter.” From the parlor we pass into the minister’s study, - the work room in which the busy pen wrote out those seventy sermons in the average year. In it were some two hundred volumes, largely quartos and folios,-sermons, theology and commentaries; those forgotten gravestones of a buried past of which Hallam, the English historian, wrote” They belong no more to man, but to the worm, the moth, and the spider. Their dark and ribbed backs, their 125. When, after the death of Mr. Lawrence, the Rev. Charles Stearns was, in 1781, invited to succeed him, the sa1ary offered was £80, Massachusetts, a year, in “hard money,” or $266, and this was, presumably, an increase on the salary previously paid to Mr. Lawrence. The custom of paying the minister his salary on a standard of staple prices continued until the close of the eighteenth century. Thus the report of a committee appointed in 1797 to reach an understanding with Mr. Stearns contains the following:- “That from and after the 7th day of November inst: during the time that he [Mr. Stearns] shall remain our Gospel Minister, his Annual Salary continue to be Eighty pounds, at all times when the Current price of Indian Corn is at three shillings per Bushell, Rye at four shillings and Beef at twenty Shillings per hundred, and Pork at thirty-three Shillings and four pence per hundred w’t, all of Right good Quality — that the sum or amount of said Salary shall be increased or diminished as the Current price of those Articles shall rise or fall, from time to time, one fourth part of the Salary to be computed on each of those Articles. And that the Selectmen of the Town shall make the said Computation, with the said Charles Stearns, in the beginning of November annually. This being the contract of the Specie part of his the said Charles Stearns’ Salary, the Allowance of Wood [15 cords] remaining as heretofore allowed by the Town - And that the payment of the said Salary to the said Charles Stearns be made semi-annually by the Treasurer.” (Town Records, November 6, 1797.) Measured by purchasing power, the value of the money unit was then four to five times what it now is; measured by cost of living, a salary of $233 may have been, approximately, the equivalent of a salary of $1200 a year now; but life was much simpler generally. 126. The thrift and business instinct of the Rev. Mr. Lawrence and his spouse seem to have excited notice during his life; for, in his anniversary discourse (p. n) Mr. Bradley, the successor of Mr. Lawrence in the sixth remove, reports a legend to the following effect:. Toward the end of hi. ministry one of [Mr. Lawrence’s] flock, remarking upon hi. evident prosperity, asked him in a jesting way how it was that he got on 10 well. To which Mr. Lawrence replied, • By minding my own business, and letting yours alone.’ “The incident is apocryphal; but it is given u illustrating Mr. Lawrence’s “acnae of humor.” It may, however, perhaps be questioned “whether the member of his flock,” to whom the reply was addressed, saw at once the humorous aspect of the retort. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

yellow leaves, their thousand folio pages, do not more repel us than the unprofitableness of their substance.” Of general literature there was little. Poetry was represented by the wholly forgotten Blackmore, and the lighter prose by eight volumes of the “Spectator.” Of history there was little, the recently published” Massachusetts” of Thomas Hutchinson, and the ubiquitous Rollin, that also then a new work. But among the first Lincoln minister’s collections one searches in vain for the names of Shakespeare or Dryden or Bunyan or Pope or De Foe, or even for that of the Puritan laureate, John Milton. And now, having made the acquaintance of the minister and his wife in their dwelling, let us walk down the hill to the meeting- house, at the crossroads. However it may have been in the beginning and in precinct days, one of the first acts of Lincoln town was to provide for the “building a steeple for the hanging a bell for the town’s use.” “The old Meeting-house,” we are told, “was nearly square, and was entered by three porches, the front porch being on the southerly side. The [square] tower in which the hell was hung, and on which the spire stood, was at the westerly end, as the gables ran, and another porch at the easterly end, a part of which was occupied by the stocks, made of heavy oaken planks.”127 Inside, the body of the edifice was filled with long benches, - the women sitting on one side, the men on the other. On the outside of these, and against the walls, were pews, built by permission and at the cost of the owners thereof, - Chambers Russell being the first privileged “to choose a place for his pew in the meeting-house where he pleases, and build it when he pleases.” He selected the space on the right of the front entrance, nearest the door. From time to time permission was asked, and formally given, to construct windows at the cost and for the benefit of privileged pew owners, through which the proprietor, we are told, wearying with the discourse, would sometimes stand and view the outer world, his back to pulpit, sounding-board and minister. In the early days, when printed books were scarce, it was the custom, after the minister gave out the hymn, for him - or for the precentor, as he was designated in the Church of England hierarchy, here called chorister - to read the psalm line by line to the congregation, which then sang it. In Lincoln this practice was discontinued in 1789; but, eighteen years earlier, in 1771, forty-two persons” who had attained a good understanding in the rules of singing” were, by vote of the town, seated together as a choir on the lower floor. While the experiment apparently gave general satisfaction, to Mr. Lawrence’s successor, Dr. Charles Stearns, it was a source of special pleasure; for, among his other endowments, that faithful divine seems to have been blessed with an ear, as well as a soul, for music. On this topic he even warmed into eloquence; and, though it must be admitted extracts from sermons do not as a rule tend to enliven, there are passages in one discourse of his which throw such gleams of light on 127. Drake, in his OLD LANDMARKS OF BOSTON (p. 92), says “... In front of the old meeting-house stood the whipping- post, and probably the stocks. 0 0 0 Both were used as a means of enforcing attendance, or punishing offences against the church, and their location at its very portal served, no doubt, as a gentle reminder to the congregation.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

several points of interest that quotation at length is justified. The sermon in question was preached here in Lincoln, and on this site, upon the 19th of April, 1791 - as near as may be a century and twelve years since - at “An Exhibition of Sacred Music.” Not a soul then living in Lincoln now survives. Addressing the “brethren and sisters of the choir,” Mr. Stearns exclaimed, “With pleasure have we beheld your zeal, and the animated diligence of your teacher. We have often had our ears refreshed by your agreeable performances.... When sounds bold and strong have set forth the majesty, the power and eternity of God, when lofty notes celebrated his glories which transcend the sky: when menacing tones have shown the dangers of the wicked ‘on slippery rocks ready to fall into ruin,’ when tender and plaintive accents called our attention to ‘Jesus nailed to the tree’, when voices softer than the gentlest breeze expressed the care of Jesus over his flock, ‘hearing their prayers, and wiping their tears away’, such touches, so true to nature, could not fail. Mute attention, expressive features, and melting eyes declared the sensations of the assembly. To you we owe the revival of sacred music in this place, which had well-nigh slept in silence. So long had our harps hung upon the willows, that we began to fear that they would be wholly useless. But the songs of Zion are revived, and sweeter than before.” But in this same discourse of Mr. Stearns there are other passages of much significance. The worthy minister not only actually quotes familiar lines from the” Merchant of Venice,” - and apparently from memory, as he fails to quote correctly, - but he cites James Thomson’s now forgotten poem of “Summer” as evidence of the high estimation in which the bard of Avon was then held by all Britons:-

“Is not wild Shakespeare thine and Nature’s boast?”

It was Charles Lamb who in one of the “Essays of Elia” confessed to being wholly devoid of an ear for music, - to save his life, he could not have turned the most familiar of airs, - a not uncommon deficiency; and now Mr. Stearns, by nature tolerant, threw the veil of an all-enveloping charity even over Charles Lamb, and those in this respect his like. Finally, he flashes a gleam of suggestive light upon the manners and bearing of some who would seem even at that period to have attended the sanctuary in a spirit the reverse of devout edification. The passage is as delightful as it is quaint: “From the ease with which minds, susceptible of the pleasures of musick, receive moral and religious impressions, some have been led to consider insensibility to musick as the sign of a bad heart. Shakespeare, whom the people of Britain almost adore, and consider as an oracle in the knowledge of human nature,128 saith,-

‘He that hath no musick in himself, And is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds. 128. Vide Thomson’s Seasons, “Summer,” ver. 1563. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Is fit for treasons.’129

“Yet let us while we enjoy the pleasures of musick, be charitable to those who are deprived of them. Reason tells us that dullness to the charms of musick is no more evidence of a bad heart than to be deaf, blind, or dumb. In some cases it is a natural defect. In others, a habit of sedateness has quenched the fire of imagination. It is related of a German mathematician, that attending the King of Prussia’s opera, where musick was in its highest perfection, he busied himself in m.easuring the height and breadth of the room, and in calculating the distance to which the human voice might be distinctly heard. Then, when he had done this, finding nothing else entertaining for him, he left the audience abruptly. Such an instance, to the lovers of the Muse, will seem almost miraculous. “Yet this person behaved himself much better than many others, who, not less insensible, are yet less innocent. They disturb the most sublime performances, in honor of Christ and of God, by moving from place to place in the assembly, by jesting, laughing and tumult. If indeed it be, that such have no relish for sacred musick, they ought, in point of civility, not to disturb the holy pleasures of others To return to the choir-the forty-two persons “who had attained a good understanding in the rules of singing;. - these were at first assigned seats in the rear of the main floor, although galleries had already been built around three sides of the interior; but not until a later day were the ceilings under the floors of these galleries plastered. Occupied during the hours of Sabbath service, mostly by boys, or by the town poor, and its Africans, the galleries were looked upon as undesirable,-to sit in them was an indication of inferiority. So, not until after the town had been forty years incorporated, and the church had at last given a hesitating consent to the innovation of a bass viol to assist the singers, could the choir be reconciled to a place in the gallery, facing the pulpit. Shattuck, in his history of Concord, asserts that, in Lincoln, the reading of the Scriptures was first introduced as a part of the Sunday exercises by Mr. Lawrence, in 1763; and, in 1768, a short prayer before the reading. Later, and in the Stearns pastorate, the services were much the same as those with which we are familiar - the short and long prayers, the singing of the psalms, and a discourse by the pastor, the assigned limit of which last was, however, not thirty minutes, as now, but a full hour. Such were the meeting-house and the services; the audience,- all the inhabitants of the town! The Sabbath was the day of leisure, - the holiday of the week, though a very silent and solemn one, the single break in that life-long monotony. It is a thing of history now, remembered only by those in the decline of life; the Civil War is the dividing line: but no one who passed a childhood during the first half of the last century can fail to recall that Sunday stillness, - a quiet so intense, so unbroken, 129. The correct reading is, “The man that hath no music in himself, / Nor is not mov’d by concord of sweet sounds, / Is fit for tresons, stratagems and spoils.” — Merchant of Venice, Act. V, Sc 1. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

that even animal life seemed to observe it; so complete that it was actually audible. The bicycle, the carriage and the automobile have made of it a tradition; but it prevailed here in Lincoln for a whole century after incorporation, and, during that period, the meeting-house was for those then here dwelling all that the town-hall, the theatre, the lecture-room, the library, the Sunday paper and the periodical are to us of the world as it now is. Of the six hundred and ninety persons who composed the population of the town at its incorporation, probably five hundred usually gathered for worship. The old and the young, the rich and the poor, the bond and the free, the wise and the simple, the halt and the lame, the blind and the palsied, - all were at meeting. They came on foot and on horseback. There were no carriages in those days; but, summer and winter, farm wagons and rude country-side vehicles trooped in, laden with those of both sexes and all ages, the dog trotting demurely alongside, and, on rare occasions, to the huge delight of the boys in the gallery, indulging in unseemly fights, to the great disturbance of worshippers. To keep dogs out of the meeting-house during divine service was in this country, as in England, not infrequently made the function of a special officer. But, even on the Sabbath, “goin’ to meetin’” served other ends than worship. It was the time and place of social gathering. The old meeting-house was then the centre of a lively scene, people gathering in groups around the three porches, the sheds on both sides of the road would be full of vehicles while others were hitched to neighboring posts, and often the flanks of the hill were dotted with wagons. On rainy Sundays Dr. Stearns, they used to asseverate, could be depended upon to preach his best.130 Going to meeting, those dwelling more remotely shut up their houses, took with them their food, and made a day of it. These were those Sabbath “noonings” to which Mr. Bradley, in his anniversary discourse, properly and truly refers,131 as not the least important feature of the Lord’s day. It was “the only occasion during the week when the scattered neighbors had an opportunity of exchanging” greetings and news; and there is no sort of question that “this friendly hour had as much influence as any enactment of the State in securing the general attendance of all inhabitants at the meetinghouse from Sunday to Sunday.” In the case of Lincoln, moreover, it was this which decided the placing of the meeting- house, and, subsequently, the site of the village. Lincoln hill was not convenient; it was not on the line of least resistance for travel; it was not in the beginning accessible: but it was central; it was almost equidistant from the two great thoroughfares which crossed the precinct near its northern and southern limits. Even now, a century and a half after the town’s incorporation, there is not a single dwelling on either the Walden road or the Sandy Pond road for a space of a mile and a half between the westernmost dwellings of Lincoln and the easternmost of Concord. It was then much the same in the 130. Mr. Porter’s Discourse, Proceedings on the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary, p. 76. 131. Proceedings on the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary, p. 27. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

direction of Weston and Lexington. Thus the one great wish of that community was to fix on some common central spot where once a week they could congregate. This they found on the southern slope of Lincoln hill; and there they placed site. There was not, so far as I have been able to ascertain, a single established public way affording access to it. It could be reached only on sufferance and through farm lanes, and by private ways. This, of course, was soon remedied, and, ultimately, the village grew up at the cross-roads; but, unlike almost any other Massachusetts town in that respect, Lincoln village has no cause whatever for its being except the one forgotten fact that, a hundred and fifty years ago, it was a central point for the Sabbath gathering of a scattered population, few of whom lived more than” two miles and a quarter” therefrom. Here, then, they met in every season of the year, - spring and autumn, summer and winter. In the winter it could not have been otherwise than trying. The ways were bad and heavy; the meeting-house unwarmed; out-of-door movement was under embargo. Later, when air-tight stoves came into use, great pieces of peat were stowed away in them to keep a slow, safe fire in the deserted house till the return of the family, as the short winter day drew towards nightfall. How the congregation bore the deadly chilliness of the barn-like edifice it is not easy to understand. The introduction of stoves was agitated here in Lincoln during the earlier years of the last century, but Dr. Stearns, then pastor, set his face against the innovation. It might extend life and reduce the cases of lung fever, as pneumonia was called, but the fathers had not found any heating apparatus necessary, and the world got along very well then; so he hoped no appliances for heating would be introduced as long as he lived.132 During the winter, therefore, those who could not find a friendly shelter in the scattered dwellings about the hill, did nOt attend meeting, - they remained perforce at home; but it was otherwise during half the year at least. Then, in spring, summer, or autumn, weather permitting, all the youth of Lincoln meandered in parties along the roads and through the meadows, down by Sandy Pond and the brooklets, and there the young men met the maidens, and through generations the most momentous question of life was then wont to be put, and the answer to it given. By the older and more sedate, the news of the day was canvassed, and the issues of politics debated; on the porch and about the meeting-house - there, during the first year of the life of the town, the bloody defeat of Braddock was discussed; and, a little later, the events and vicissitudes of 132. Mr. Porter’s Discourse, p. 75. Dr. Stearns died July 26, 1826. The warrant for the next annual town-meeting bore date February 19, 1827. In it was the following:- “Article 7. To know the pleasure of the Town respecting the Stove lately put up in the Publick Meetinghouse - Whether the Town will Defray the Expense of the same, or any part thereof. or give leave to have it remain where it is, or adopt any measures respecting said stove, and provid wood for the same, also provid Storage for the wood in the Meetinghouse as the Town see fit and say how it sha1l be taken care of and by whom.... “Voted to have the Stove remain in the Publick Meetinghouse in Lincoln where it now is, and voted the Congregational or religious society in said Town pay the Expence of said Stove. Also voted the selectmen provide wood, and a place for the storage of the wood to be used or burnt when necessary to have fire in said Stove.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

the Seven Years’ War. Then, in 1757, the massacre of Fort George, and, in 1758, the repulse of Abercrombie at Ticonderoga spread a panic through Massachusetts, a thrill of which doubtless found expression at Lincoln; Wolfe’s death on the Plains of Abraham followed, with the fall of Quebec and the English conquest of Canada; and, at last, before the town was yet in its” teens,” came the close of the “old French War:’ Subsequently, in 1765, the Stamp Act was uppermost in mind, with that long succession of issues culminating for Lincoln with the 1 9th of April, 1775. Then, for the only time in its history as a town, the smoke of an enemy’s camp-fire curled up within Lincoln limits. In every way, that revolutionary period seems to have been one of sore tribulation for the town; and, as was always apt to be the case, the trouble centred on the meeting-house porch, and there found expression. It was a civil trouble; and, as was traditionally proper, the Church was divided against itself. The Rev. Mr. Lawrence was even suspected of insufficient patriotism. To such a ripeness did this suspicion grow, that, greatly to his indignation, his private letters were tampered with by the so- called Committee of Safety. A crisis seems· to have been reached during the autumn of 1774, -the months following the Boston tea- party, and the closing of the port of Boston. One Sabbath morning during that season, the Lincoln air, tense with excitement, was, it is said, full of rumors. The people gathered about the meeting-house at an unwonted hour, and there was talk of not allowing the minister to enter his pulpit. More neighborly and wiser counsels prevailed; but the closing years of the Lawrence pastorate were troubled. Indeed, the unhappy minister seems to have been worried into his grave; for, while he died in April, 1780, only a year previous he had been arraigned at three successive church meetings because of “a jealousy” that he had “not been friendly to his country in respect to the contest between Great Britain and America.” After much wrangling it had been decided” by a great majority” to “drop the affair in dispute,” the” circumstances and particular instances” alleged appearing on examination “trifling and insufficient.”133 That Mr. Lawrence was a Tory has been denied, and certainly was not proven: but it is clear that he was far from being an ardent patriot; and, at a time when his parishioners were thoroughly aroused by great events transpiring, he “halted for a time between two opinions, and allowed his trumpet to give an uncertain sound.” But, as I have said, the story of Lincoln church has been written; and for me now to repeat it would be but to tell once more an already twice-told tale. Yet Lincoln was first organized as a church precinct, and its political incorporation did not greatly alter the original purpose. For a whole century the history of its church was the history of 133. The One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary Proceedings, p. 23. The Rev. Micah Lawrence, a cousin of William Lawrence, a graduate of Harvard in the class of 1759, who taught school in Lincoln for a time shortly after graduation, was a pronounced loyalist. R.M. Lawrence’s Historical Sketches, p. 84. Chambers Russell was dead, but his nephew, Dr. Charles Russell, who had inherited his uncle’s place in Lincoln, practising here as a physician, was a pronounced Tory, and in 1775 went to Martinique. He left Lincoln on the 19th of April, 1775, — an extremely suggestive coincidence. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Lincoln; and, as contrasted with other and neighboring towns, its sisters of the Massachusetts family, - I cannot here find, after its first pastorate, anything distinctive. The initial period - the Lawrence regime, if it may be so termed - was individual, and more or less perturbed: but it carried the town practically through the revolutionary troubles, for the second pastor was not installed (November 7,1781) until a month after that momentous 19th of October which witnessed the surrender at Yorktown. Thenceforth, and for nearly ninety years, the life of Lincoln presented no features peculiar to itself. Its story is one of monotonous existence, - the slow development of a Massachusetts community, exclusively agricultural. It can be studied in the records of its town-meetings, its schools, and its churches; and, perhaps, most clearly of all, in the annual tax levy. In his poem entitled “The Deacon’s Masterpiece, or The Wonderful’ One-Hoss Shay,” - and that famous conveyance, let me in passing observe, was built, we are told, in the year (1755) following the incorporation of your town, - it and Lincoln thus came into organized being within nineteen months of each other, - in his well-known poem, I was saying, Dr. Holmes remarks, truly enough,-

“Little of all we value here Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year Without both feeling and looking queer;”

and so it is always interesting, and usually suggestive, to revert to an exact century since. This being 1904, what was Lincoln’s record in 1804? Let us hunt it up in the town-books. Lincoln then had a population of 740 souls; it now has 1100. Its entire annual appropriations in 1804, exclusive of the minister’s salary and the rent of his house, amounted to $1410, or $1.90 to each inhabitant; they last year aggregated $21,673, or $19.70 to each inhabitant, almost exactly a tenfold increase. The school system of the town then involved an annual outlay of $500; last year it cost $6500. For maintenance of its roads the town voted in 1804 the sum of $400; this year it calls for $4000, last year it cost $6000. Our poor and insane last year cost us $1000; in 1804 the sum of $500 was required. But of this item in town expenditure I shall have more to say presently. Meanwhile, looking over the lists of officials of the two years a century apart, it is curious to observe how the same names appear. In 1804 they had seven town-meetings; we last year got along with three. A century ago Samuel Hoar was, when present, the moderator; in his absence, Deacon Samuel Farrar. N one of the name of Hoar now live in Lincoln; but it is inseparably associated with the mother town, and the Samuel Hoar of the present generation was selected to address you today; only when he, after long deliberation and with strongly expressed regret, felt constrained to decline, did I assume the duty. It was well; for he has since fallen by the wayside. Ten days only have passed HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

since we witnessed his obsequies. Recurring to the record of 1804, a Wheeler was then town-clerk. A Brooks was a selectman; while among the other officials appear the names of Flint, Bemis, Baker, Hartwell, and Tarbell. Samuel Hoar that year represented the town in the General Court, having received twenty-seven votes as against thirteen thrown for Samuel Farrar, and two for Captain J. Hartwell. But 1804 was also the year of a national election, and Thomas Jefferson was chosen for a second term. Prior to 1804 the Massachusetts presidential electors had, as a rule, been named by the General Court, as was the early practice in most of the States; but, in 1804, they were chosen directly by the people. Throughout the troubled period of the Napoleonic wars, Lincoln seems to have been a strong Republican, or Anti-Federalist, town; so, this year, its vote was sixty-six for the Jefferson ticket, to eighteen for the electors pledged to vote for Charles C. Pinckney, the candidate of the Federalists. A hundred years ago no steps had yet been taken to separate church from state. As it had been from the beginning, so was it still- congregation and town were one; and, in 18°4, stimulated probably by the minister, there was in Lincoln, not a religious or political movement, but, much less open to question, a singing revival. At the same time the interior arrangements of the meeting-house were in question. So the two matters, taken up together, were dealt with comprehensively,-in a large way, as we would express it. In the first place, an appropriation was voted for the “incouragement of Church Music;. and, next, a special gallery was planned, “to convene the singers:’ The town was, however, thrifty; the period of municipal extravagance was still in the remote future, and it was planned that the alterations in the interior of the meeting-house were not only to pay for themselves, but should bring a handsome surplus into the treasury. The votes then passed in town-meeting, the reports made and the action taken, are curiously illustrative of the little republic, and the business-like way in which its affairs were managed. To-day, they constitute a study in polity. As a result of the simply planned meeting-house alterations, sixteen additional pews were provided, “twelve Pews in the Gallery in said House which are numbered and four Pews on the lower floor;” and all these it was ordered “shall be sold at publick Vendue to the highest bidder.” They were so sold, the town-meeting adjourning that the auction might take place. The financial outcome of the “Vendue” seems to have exceeded the most sanguine expectations. Mar 7, 1804: “Voted, to accommodate the Singing Society with convenient seats in the Front Gallery.” “To act on a Refer’d Article, which is to hear the report of their Committee Chosen by the Town, for the purpose of viewing the Meeting House in order that the Singers may be accommodated with convenient seats.” The Committee report as follows “We the Subscribers being Chosen a Committee at the last Town Meeting in order to see which is HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

the best way to finish the front gallery in order to convene the singers, and to take under consideration the lint article - beg leave to report as follows: - It is our opinion that it is best to Build a Porch in the front of the Meeting House 12 feet Square and 14 feet Posts, and to swell the front Gallery, and build two convenient seats for the Singers - and to Build a row of Pews round the Gallery, and to alter the porch Doors in the Gallery 10 u to have them in the center of the porches and to have an Alley to divide the Side Gallery - also to build four Pews below. We have calculated the probable expense will be 450 Dollars and it is probable the Pews will fetch 900 Dollars the Ballance in favor of the Town is 450 Dollars, all which is humbly submitted. “Voted, To accept the Report of their Committee. “Voted, To choose a Committee of Seven to carry into effect the subject matter of the above Report. We Made Choice of Sam’l Hoar. Esq., Dea’n Sam’l Farrar. Major Sam’l Hastings, Mr. Isaac Munro. Doct’r G. Tarbell, Mr. Abner Wheeler & Lt. Elijah Fiske.” It was, it must be admitted, a good deal like selling boxes in a modern city opera-house; but the demand for special Sabbath church privileges was, in the Lincoln of 1804, unquestionably brisk. The committee having the matter in charge had “calculated” the expense of the improvements at $450, and the receipts from the sale of new pews at $900; resulting in a “Ballance in favor of the Town OJ of $450. The transaction in fact, when the,. Vendue. finished, was found to have netted the town a profit of no less than $762.35. At the” Vendue,” Mr. Amos Bemis - a family name since associated in another and larger way with Lincoln’s public edifices seems to have become the owner of one of the pews in the gallery; for, the sale having taken place on the loth of September, the warrant for the next town meeting, called for the 5th of November, contained the following article: -” 4th. To see if the Town will give Liberty to Mr. Amos Bemis to put in a Window in his Pew in the Gallery in the Northwest corner of the Meetinghouse, agreeable to his request.” And presently the following vote was passed, and recorded: - “4th Article. Granted Mr. Amos Bemis Liberty to put a Window in his Pew in the Gallery as Requested.” Such were the questions which engaged the attention of the town an hundred years ago; such the scale of its expenditure. Nor, for a quarter of a century, did any change take place. At last, in 1829 the separation of state from church was effected, and thereafter the prudential affairs of the parish did not affect those of the town.· Accordingly, from 1830 to the present time, we have an unbroken record of the amounts annually raised by taxation. It is curious and suggestive. During the five years between 1834 and 1839 inclusive, the average annual levy was $1,878. S8. The first century of town life closed, unnoticed and uncommemorated, in 18 S4. During the five ensuing years (18S6-1860) the average annual levy was $4100. The increase of public expenditure during nearly the lifetime of a generation, on account of roads, schools and all the incidents of corporate existence, had been but $2.2.00 per annum. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Then came the Civil War with its continuous calls for men. It was an altogether exceptional period. Yet the money burden that terrible conflict imposed on Lincoln was not considerable,-it amounted in the aggregate to only $1 S,000, the average levy for the five years 1861 to 186S, inclusive, being $7,113.80, or $3000 more than during the previous similar period. Then, for the next ten years or so, town affairs resumed the even tenor of their ancient way, and not until 1870 is a change observable. Then, first in the history of the town whether in time of peace or in time of war, the annual tax levy passed the ten thousand dollar mark, not again to fall below it. The older and simpler existence had come to a natural close, though one gradually approached, and Lincoln entered on a new and more highly developed life. Let us for a moment recur to the first period, that anterior to 1870, and its annual tax levies. Very simple as compared with those of more recent years, they reveal a niggard expenditure and a most rigid scrutiny. The amounts are small; the accounting exact. Every item was jealously observed. The three great heads of outgo were the roads, the schools, and the support of the poor; and it is very noticeable how large a proportion, as compared with the present, the cost of maintaining the poor bore to the total outgo. It now constitutes one twenty-fifth part of it, or only 4 per cent.; in 1833, seventy years ago, it constituted 23 per cent.; and, in 186o, 8 per cent. How explain this?. Lincoln was a sparsely peopled town; but its people were homogeneous, thrifty, and fairly well-to-do. As such communities went, it was moral and temperate, - neither so moral nor so temperate as now, but in both respects probably above the average of the time. In its population was no appreciable foreign element;134 substantially, it was pure American stock. Whence then this pauperism? The answer is not far to seek; nor is the page which reveals it pleasant reading. It is a page now happily closed. In those times, as now, the demented were classed with the poor. I have already alluded to the fact that in its earliest period Lincoln was without any physician who would now rank as educated. Later, the estimable, as well as educated, Dr. Charles Russell served the little community in that capacity; he, however, was driven away as a Tory in April, 1775, and, five years later, died in exile. But, apart from physicians, surgeons or trained nurses, I have been unable to find any evidence of a drug-store in the eighteenth century Lincoln, much less of a hospital. The town was without an almshouse also; for, though provision for an almshouse was at one time made through the bequest of a public-spirited townsman, a mere two-room tenement was forthcoming; and this, after trial of the experiment, was discontinued. Needless then to say that Lincoln neither had an asylum for the insane within its limits, nor access to one elsewhere. There is a curious theory sometimes advanced that insanity is in New England steadily increasing; and, in support 134. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

of this disturbing contention, the statistics of former times are compared with those of the present. In point of fact there are no statistics of those former times. Now the insane are carefully gathered together, enumerated, and scientifically cared for; then, they were ignored or neglected, and often brutally abused. They were allowed, if harmless, to wander in the streets, - the village idiots; or they were herded in the almshouse, if there chanced to be an almshouse. Some years ago I found in the records of Braintree a vote appropriating money to one Samuel Spear to “build a little house seven foot long and five foot wide, and set it by his house to secure his sister, good wife Witty, being distracted, and provide for her.” The wretched lunatic was housed like a dog, in a kennel by her brother’s door. And again, by another town-record entry of a later day, Josiah Owen was voted “Twenty pounds money provided he gives bond under his hand to cleare the Towne forever of Ebenezer Owen’s distracted daughter.” What, under these circumstances, became of the unfortunate girl, presumably Josiah’s orphan niece, it is perhaps as well not to inquire. But, as respects the care of its poor and insane, Lincoln then pursued the usual course. With its records I am less familiar than with the records of other Massachusetts towns not dissimilar, and so cannot quote chapter and verse; but in the records of Weymouth I once came across the following action of the town-meeting of March 11, 1771: “Voted to sell the Poor that are maintained by the Town for this present year at a Vendue to the lowest bidder.” This tells the whole story, - a lamentation, and an ancient tale of wrong! Lincoln, in the earlier period, - that ideal age of gold so commonly referred to as the “good old times,” - having no almshouse or asylum, farmed out its poor and insane. They were annually put up at auction, and their care intrusted to whoever agreed to assume it, - undertook to feed, lodge, clothe and warm the wretched outcasts, - at the lowest rate. Last year, with an appropriation on that account less than twice as large as its average appropriation on the same account seventy years ago, Lincoln cared for four insane dependent upon it; the previous year for six. Beyond these it had no paupers to support; - only tramps to entertain.135 Nor are our records now disfigured, as then they were, by long lists of entries notifying those without visible means of support at once to return to the place whence they came. Judging by the record, eighteenth century charity certainly began at home; as also it was indisputably cold. So, through all those years Lincoln’s appropriation of $400, or thereabouts, a year, covered not only its charge for pauperism, but the cost for it of almshouse, hospital, and asylum. Viewed in that light, it cannot be called extravagance; but the character of the care bestowed admits of question. Turning from the poor and the insane to the schools, the record is not much better. Upon” the little red school-house” period, sometimes so greatly lamented, it is not necessary to dilate. 135. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

In the case of Lincoln, it is pre-natal, - a part of the histories of Concord and Lexington and Weston. Referring to the conditions then prevailing, and the educational methods in vogue, the historian of Lincoln - and he was sufficiently near to speak thereof with knowledge - exclaims: “What pen shall describe the schools, the teaching, the poverty of the appliances of learning? Lead pencils, steel pens, and ruled paper were unknown. The exercises consisted of reading, spelling, the study of arithmetic, and learning to write. These exercises, and the discipline of the school- which was usually in accordance with the maxim of Solomon - occupied the sessions.” But this, in justice be it distinctly understood, was in the earlier and provincial period, - a period prehistoric, - beyond the memory of the oldest living inhabitant. With the installation into the pastorate of the Rev. Charles Stearns, Lincoln seems to have entered on a new educational life. This was in 1781, before the close of the War of Independence; and the impetus then given was not thereafter suffered to die wholly away. Shattuck, who wrote as early as 1835, or nine years only after Mr. Stearns’s death, bears his testimony that Lincoln had always given liberal support to her common schools, and adds that she had been “rewarded in the distinguished character of her educated sons;” and the number of those among them who were graduates of Harvard is, in the case of a town which never up to the close of the nineteenth century numbered a population of twelve hundred, certainly most creditable.’ Among the names of the teachers of Lincoln’s grammar school are to be found those of Timothy Farrar, the centenarian jurist of New Hampshire, born here in 1747; of Fisher Ames, the orator statesman, born in Dedham in 1758; and of Jacob Bigelow, the eminent physician who subsequently revolutionized the practice of medicine, born in Sudbury in 1787. These are great names to inscribe over the portal of one rural school, - names to feel pride in. But, according to Mr. Porter: another bearer of a great name bore emphatic testimony to the literary atmosphere which prevailed in Lincoln, when, in the early forties, Theodore Parker publicly informed the residents of Lexington that the “little town on the hill yonder [Lincoln] has long maintained so high a standard that Lexington has depended upon her for many of its teachers.” Lincoln never rose to that grade in population which imposed on her as a town the obligation of a Latin School, but, in 1793, Mr. Steams and others instituted here a “liberal school,” as it was denominated. We are told that the old laird of Auchinleck contemptuously said of the famous Dr. Johnson that “he keppit a schule and cau’d it an Academy;” the reverse was the case with Mr. Stearns and his associates, for they installed an academy, and modestly called it a school. But what, in this respect, Mr. Stearns did has already been gratefully recorded, and I shall not repeat what others, far better informed, have in this respect’ said.’ But there is reason to claim that, throughout the first half of the last century, - and Mr. Stearns, be it remembered, did not die until 182.6, - the schools of Lincoln HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

were exceptionally good. In the veracious record of his famous voyages, Captain Lemuel Gulliver tells us that the King of Brobdingnag “gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.” The sphere of duty and of influence of Charles Stearns was not large, but within that sphere what Dr. Johnson wrote of another might be recorded of him:-

“His virtues walk’d their narrow round, Nor made I pause, nor left a void: And sure the eternal Master found His single talent well employ’d.

The second pastor of the Lincoln church did more than make “two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before;” he found the schools of the community to which he ministered poor, and he left them comparatively good. What greater service could he have rendered his people? But before dismissing the schools of that earlier period, I cannot refrain from quoting the following excellent precepts, laid down as long ago as 1817 for the guidance of Lincoln teachers and pupils. There is about them a quaintness and simplicity in these days refreshing:-” In respect to the internal order of Schools, the Committee recommend that the Masters insist on Good Order and enforce it by such prudent measures as shall be likely to produce that effect. That they strongly recommend to the scholars’ attention cleanliness of person and decency of dress, and that the scholars make it known to their parents and Guardians that it is expected of them. It is highly approved by the Committee that the Masters do whatever is in their power to preserve and promote good morals and decent and polite behaviour among the Students. That each school be reduced to as few classes as may be convenient, and that in each class the Students take their rank according to Merit, particularly in spelling.” But, when all is said, the record of Lincoln in all these respects, though quaint and graphic and instructive in its way, is but the record of well-nigh innumerable other towns somewhat similarly placed. The schools were simple and ungraded; the school-houses mean, bare and remote; the teaching in them was, perhaps, unscientific; but the annual tuition of each scholar cost five dollars, whereas now it costs twenty-five. The roads were poor and unfit for heavy teaming; but the traffic over them was light, and the cost of their maintenance nominal. All this, however, is not history; no more history than the daily diary of him who keeps a shop, or cultivates a farm. From neither the last nor the first can anything new or of value be educed. But what else is there to record? In his very sympathetic, as well as scholarly address, - for it was not, as there denominated, a “Sermon,” - delivered here now six years since, my friend,-now, alas, dead,- HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

the Rev. Edward G. Porter, observed that “Lincoln’s part in the French war, in the Revolution, and in our subsequent wars, remains yet to be fully written.” I do not think so. The story has been told, - carefully told, and by those who have studied the subject in each detail, eloquently told from every point of view. A tablet by the wayside on the old Lexington-Concord road commemorates the fact that it was in Lincoln Paul Revere’s ride on the night of April 18, 1775, was brought to a close; and a more modest affidavit tells us that, next day, Abijah Pierce, of Lincoln, “colonel of the minute-men,” went up to Concord bridge “armed with nothing but a cane.” But it is when one goes beyond the general and formal record of the day and comes in contact with its particular incidents, that April, 177 S, lives again, and we realize not only what real men and women had their being here, but we feel again as they felt. For instance, in April, 1850, Concord celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of its famous fight. Two survivors of the day were then present, Jonathan Harrington, of Lexington, of the age of ninety-two, and Amos Baker, of Lincoln, then ninety-four. Four years later, in March, 1854, I remember being present at the funeral of Jonathan Harrington, the last survivor of Lexington fight; for Amos Baker had died here in Lincoln three months after the 1850 anniversary at Concord. He lies just opposite us now, in the family tomb, on the edge of the old burying-ground. But, three days after that celebration of 1850 they recorded his recollection of what had occurred seventy-five years before;136 and it is instinct with life. He told how his “brother Nathaniel was then paying his addresses to the girl whom he afterwards married;” and, on the evening before the fight, was at the house on the Lexington road where she was staying. They must have been late callers in those days, for he there received the alarm from Dr. Prescott, who, the [?] as if it was cut with a knife. When we had fired at the bridge, and killed the British, Noah Parkhurst, of Lincoln, who was my right-hand man, said-now, the war has begun, and no one knows when it would end.’” So Amos Baker, who followed the pursuit back to Lexington meeting-house, closes with this reflection on his feelings during that long, fatiguing experience: - “I verily believe that I felt better that day, take it all the day through, than if I had staid at home.” This is history; and, racy of the soil, it is characteristic of the people and of the time. Fighting before their own lintels and over their own hearthstones, Jacob Baker, a veteran of the French wars and then a man of fifty-four, accompanied by his five sons and the husband of his daughter, join the mustering minute-men of Lincoln up by the outlet of Sandy Pond; and, armed with the old flint-lock King’s-arms and fowling-pieces, they hurry to Concord common, in time to see the glistening arms of the invading troops as they march in solid ranks up the road from Lexington. The very names of the father and his sons, biblical all, are characteristic of time and place,-Jacob, the father, and again a Jacob; then Samuel, James, Nathaniel and 136. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Amos, with a brother-in-law Daniel; and they assembled at the house of Zachary, later occupied by Jonas; the Colonel was Abijah; and, during the engagement, Amos’s right-hand man was Noah, while Joshua was struck by a bullet. Again, eighty-seven years later, and during the Civil War, one would look far to find a more typical or creditable individual case and record than that of George Weston, of Lincoln stock, and one of Lincoln’s quota. A Harvard graduate, his story has been well, and perhaps sufficiently, told; for he was of a goodly company. 1 Two years only a graduate, just entering on professional life, physically unequal to the hardships necessarily incident to all active military service, under every family inducement to remain at home, he enlisted from an overruling sense of obligation. But in him, as in so many others, pluck supplying the lack of physical stamina, he proved faithful to the end. And yet there was another side to the record both in the War of Independence and in the Civil War. That other side, too, was developed in the case of Weston, and emphasized in one of his utterances, by chance handed down to us. His entrance into the service had been peculiarly creditable to him. For a young man to enlist, or rush into the training camp, during the summer and autumn of 1861, called for no courage, bespoke no sense of sacrifice or duty; on the contrary, the restraint lay in not yielding to the universal military craze. As in the case of George Weston, many who then held back showed in so doing a suitable regard for home and domestic obligations. It was not so a year later. The glamour was now gone; and, after the terrible fighting before Richmond and Washington in June, July and August, 1862, war showed itself for what it was, something very grim. The tinsel was gone; recruits were sorely needed; enlistments had stopped.’ Then it was, five days before Antietam, in September, 1862., just as the first draft was about to be ordered, that Weston stepped to the front. He volunteered. He did so, as he said at the time, because others, his friends and classmates, had gone to their deaths “just because I, and such as I, were not in our places to help them.” Not from impulse did he act, but goaded to the sacrifice by that terrible New England conscience. Such was an individual case; nor did it stand alone. But there was another side to that great experience; a seamy side, and one now generally passed over in silence, - quietly ignored, in fact. Yet it was the side from which the lesson of greater value to posterity is to be drawn. The mistakes -stupid, unscientific, cruel, costly-of 1778 and 1862 should not be repeated; and that they may not be repeated, they must be coldly set forth and emphasized strongly. The plain, historic fact is that, individual instances like that of George Weston apart, after the first outburst of excitement which carried the whole Baker family to Concord had subsided, the record of Lincoln, as of Lincoln’s sister towns, whether in the War of Independence137 or HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

in the Civil War, is in my judgment not one to dwell upon with feelings of complacency. As a whole, and when studied in the hard, matter-of-fact entries of your town-books, it is far from being a record either of eager patriotism or of unthinking self- sacrifice. But here bear with me for a moment while I indulge in a brief disquisition; as, perchance, what I have just said may grate harshly on the ears of some, offending their most cherished preconceptions. Briefly, between 1861 and 1865 I served myself through years of actual warfare, and, since, I have searched somewhat deeply into our records of that period. My study has emphasized my recollection; so, on this subject, I feel. I have come to think that neither in our War of Independence nor in our Civil War did Massachusetts, or our Massachusetts towns, evince a military instinct, or rise to an equality with the occasion. In other words, I hold that no community has any right to go to war unless it is prepared to make war in a way at once scientific, business- like, and effective. To pursue any different course is to the last degree wasteful, dangerous, bloody, foolish. Yet this is what Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts towns, did in both their great recent war ordeals. The course pursued was as little creditable to their intelligence, as to their sense of thrift in money, or of the sanctitude of blood. In each case there was at first a great outburst of zeal and patriotism, - a rush to arms. Then followed coolness and huckstering. With the memory of the first outburst, - Lexington, in the one case, Sumter, in the other, - occasions like this are resonant; that only is dwelt upon. What ensued is ignored; but your record-books tell the story. The only strenuous effort was the effort to escape military service; food for powder was purchased in open market, and at a price advancing by leaps and bounds. The fact is that neither in 1778 nor in 1862. did the young men rush to the colors; nor would the community order and submit to a draft. Patriotism was sold and bought. Flesh-and-blood was so much a pound, twelve dollars, being, if! remember right, the top quotation. We carried, it is true, both struggles through to triumphant conclusions; but was this method of doing it creditable, or economical, or humane? Was it a thing to be proud of or to dilate on? I hold it was not. If others here think it was, I commend to their consideration the pages of the Lincoln town books. It would, in 1780 and in 1863, have been immensely creditable to Lincoln did it therein appear that, in view of the war, the men were divided and enrolled by ages, - the married and the unmarried, brothers and sole supports of mothers, - and the draft had then been rigidly and swiftly enforced. If a community elects war, its young men should be made to go to war. So doing should not be a matter of choice or of bargaining. Had this severe, scientific and logical course been adopted, and ruthlessly pursued either in 1776 or in 1861,1 risk nothing in asserting that both the War of Independence and the Civil War 137. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

would have cost in time, in treasure, in anguish and in blood, but a tithe of what they did cost. As it was, you sent forward the bounty-bought refuse of the city slums and county jails to associate with your George Westons if they survived, or to take their places when they fell; while, by the system of replenishment in vogue, you compelled those at the front to undergo eight campaigns instead of four, and to fight two indecisive battles where one vigorously followed up should have sufficed. Were it germane to the history of Lincoln, I could myself tell you of bitter experiences with those latter-day substitutes for soldiers. One fact, however, should ever be borne in mind, - a fact already referred to, and which I now would emphasize. Once only during the last two centuries has an armed enemy crossed Lincoln’s borders. The struggles in which, since her incorporation, she has been called upon to contribute, whether in money or in blood, have been remote; nor, as such things go, were her sacrifices in them really considerable. During the whole four years of our great civil conflict, for instance, Lincoln’s entire quota amounted to not more than one in ten of her population, and of that actual population, - from among her own denizens, - it is open to question whether even one in twenty was sent by her to the front. Of her assessed valuation, the conflict of which so much is said cost her less than two dollars in a hundred. She did not see her heaths devastated, nor was death’s bitter cup pressed home to her own lips; she never felt the cruel stress and wicked waste of instant, grim-visaged war. Had that lot indeed been hers, it does not for a moment admit of doubt, the spirit of April, 1775, would have again flamed forth; and, while as then, every arms-bearing man would have been found in the ranks, her substance would have been poured out like water spilt upon the plain. On this topic enough has in my judgment been said. In other respects, the roster — and it is a creditable one — of the town’s conspicuous sons has been compiled by one conscientious investigator,138 and eloquent mention made of certain of the more eminent among them by another, now recognized as past master of this description of tribute.139 Later, the general principles involved in our two great crises of national development were adequately outlined and emphasized by an orator very competent for the task, when, on the 26th of May, 1892, you dedicated your town-hall.140 Nothing on these topics has been left for this occasion. It is otherwise as respects your system of water supply. That undertaking, and its slow development, were not only events in Lincoln’s story, but their treatment by one competent for the task, who, having been present at the town-meetings, was personally familiar with the men concerned and had watched the course of events, - their treatment by such a person might, I say, be made a study as full of life and humor and character as 138. The Lincoln Church Manual, by Rev. H.J. Richardson, 1872. 139.Senator George F. Hoar, Proceedings at the Dedication of the Lincoln Library, August 5, 1864. 140. William Everett, LL.D., of Quincy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Mrs. Gaskell’s “Cranford.” The development was initiated in 1872, and for thirty years thereafter it not only supplied a portion of the community with water, but the whole of it with an ever-present bone of unfailing contention. Indeed, echoes of that contention have not yet wholly died away, — their rumble is at times distinctly heard. Nor is that surprising; for I doubt if state or nation afford another instance of a like burden assumed by a purely rural community numbering but eight hundred souls, and those scattered over some seventeen square miles of territory, with no thickly peopled centres. The act was one of genuine statesmanship; as such it implied in those who promoted it not only courage and foresight, but an absolute confidence in destiny. That in reality it was a move of self-protection, if not of self-preservation, is now apparent. But, in 1872, this was far from apparent; and Lincoln’s birthright was then threatened. An offshoot of Concord in part, Lincoln was in imminent danger of having Concord preempt Sandy Pond; and, with it, a priority in right over Lincoln’s great reservoir of one of God’s most precious gifts to man. Of the two whose prescience, shrewdness and assiduity then saved for Lincoln its patrimony, prevented the sacrifice thereof without even the proverbial mess-of-pottage return therefor, - both were within ten years still active in the town’s affairs. To see them, and cooperate with them, was my privilege. One, the traditional town-clerk, has now gone before;141 the other yet remains, wholly withdrawn from active participation in those proceedings over which through so many years he exercised an influence no less beneficial than potent. They were men of a type of which this age produces few, - a type, let me add, peculiar to New England and its town governments. Shrewd, humorous, crabbed perhaps at times and in away, they were public-spirited, as careful of the interests of the town as of their own, - the county politicians and the village statesmen. Individual in type, the outcome of New England conditions, of an antique mould, the last of the race, lingering among us from the stage-coach period, are now fast disappearing. They will soon be extinct, and the world so much the poorer; for, to men of that peculiar stamp, the railroad was as fatal as was civilization to those denizens of the forest, their longtime predecessors.

As for us who have succeeded them,-

“ground in yonder social mill, We rub each other’s angles down, And merge in [one same] form and gloss, The picturesque of man and man.”

I have referred to the dedication of your Town Hall in 1892, and Dr. Everett’s inspiring address on that occasion. But there is another utterance in the report of what occurred that day which 141. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

to my mind strikes a note of deeper significance. One to the manner born, - oppressed, it would appear, by a certain sense of solemnity very proper to the day, - being called upon, thus then expressed himself: “This town has, in a manner, reached a turning of the ways. Changes have taken place within it during the past few years greater than for a long period in its previous history. A new Library, the removal of the old Church and Town- Hall, and the erection of new and more elegant buildings in the place of each, have much altered the appearance of the middle of the town as I have always known it. “Many a venerable form familiar to this spot has gone down, and out of sight. As I view these buildings, as I look over this audience, consisting as it does largely of Lincoln people, I see not the Lincoln of my boyhood; instead, the old buildings gone, almost all of the old faces gone, and their loved and honored names one by one lettered on slabs of stone down in the valley and on the hillside. Instead of the old buildings and the old faces, modern structures and an unfamiliar street.” Coming from the source it did, there was in this something suggestive, not to say pathetic. Born in Lincoln of the old Lincoln stock, he who uttered those words had passed here his boyhood, had gone to the school, had watched the town-meeting and hearkened to the village debates, had sat under the ministrations of the Richardson pastorate. Having made his home elsewhere, he had come back to Lincoln to take part in the ceremonies of the occasion. A distant echo of Rip Van Winkle pervaded what he said, - a suggestion of bewilderment, an undertone of reminiscence and sadness. It was, moreover, as he said. The change he referred to had indeed taken place; it was deep-reaching and wide: moreover, in outward expression at least, it was sudden and recent; - the modern church edifice, - no longer a meeting- house, - the town-hall, and the new library building, all grouped together on the familiar cross-roads, emphasized the existence of another and different community. Old Lincoln had passed forever away! The fact was there. Yet I have sought in vain for any mention of that change, or reference to its cause, in the historical sketches of the town, - whether that contributed by Mr. Wheeler, or in the occasional utterances of Senator Hoar, or of Dr. Everett, or in the Manual prepared by Mr. Richardson, or in the discourses of Mr. Bradley and Mr. Porter. The change, and the cause of it, however, when once considered, both are and were obvious enough, apparent indeed to all men; so apparent, so very obvious and commonplace, and so gradual, that, perhaps, they were not thought worthy of notice. The Fitchburg railroad, as it was called, - the outcome of the energy of Colonel Alvah Crocker, that typical New Englander, active in body and in mind, untiring in movement, and voluble in speech, “A Steam-Engine in Breeches,” as he was sometimes not over respectfully denominated, - the Fitchburg railroad was formally opened for traffic to Waltham, December 20, 1843. Fourteen months later, March 5, 1845, - the day after the HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

inauguration at Washington of President James K. Polk, the first locomotive, with Alvah Crocker on it, ran into Fitchburg. On the 17th of the previous June - Bunker Hill day - the road as far as Concord had been put in operation; and Lincoln, consequently, since that day, had been in railroad communication with Boston. The 17th of June, 1844, marks the single great epoch in the modern history of the town. The great change then began, - a change slow in movement, and for years not outwardly perceptible; but, so far as Lincoln was concerned, far reaching and all involving; a change replete with interest for the philosopher, the historian and the economist. This, indeed, and the building of the original meeting-house, are the only two really parting-of-the-way events in the Lincoln record. Much, first and last, has been written and said of King Philip’s War, of Queen Anne’s War, and of the old French War; of the fall of Quebec, of the War of Independence, and of the incidents of the 19th of April along the old Lexington and Concord road. The War of Secession, and Lincoln’s contributions to it in men and in money, have also not been forgotten. And yet, if only reflected on, it will be seen that not one of those really great historical landmarks even perceptibly affected the conditions of this place, or the mode of life of its people. These were exactly the same after those epochal events, one and all, as before. Take, for instance, the War of Independence, or, for that matter, the War of Secession, - the ride of Paul Revere, or the firing on Sumter; - great events, dramatic, and of far- reaching political moment, - but how did they affect Lincoln? After them, as before, the people here year by year, season in and season out, pursued the even tenor of their ways, - a path monotonous from cradle to grave. I have herein sought to picture it as it dragged along through school and field, forest and kitchen, - the plow, the axe, the washtub and the oven; - the Sabbath ever the only break in life, the meeting-house its single centre. Those people were born, married, brought forth, and died; and one generation resembled another. Their entire biographies may be read on their gravestones. How did Quebec, or Bunker Hill, or Gettysburg, affect them? The generation which followed the War of Independence differed in no respect from that which took part in Queen Anne’s War, or that which bore the brunt of Philip’s Indian fighting. With them there was, it is true, a gradual increase in worldly possessions; a bettering of material conditions: but it was so very gradual as to be from year to year imperceptible; between generations, scarcely noticeable. The schools may have improved, though, before the Stearns pastorate, it would be difficult to point out exactly in what respect. There was an increase in the number of thoroughfares, as in the volume of traffic upon them: but in essentials those thoroughfares were the same, and, prior to 1870, it may safely be said that, judged by the standard this generation has attained unto, the people of Lincoln did not know what a good road was. The highway tax was a levy paid in kind. Yearly, on town-meeting day, prices were fixed for labor, or the HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

use of teams;142 and, at the rates thus established, those liable discharged their dues. Traditions yet survive of the way in which the Rev. Charles Stearns, D. D.,-that, in person, Falstaffian divine, - with hoe and shovel, and by the sweat of his brow, worked out his tax in company with those composing his flock. He too, it is profanely said, then larded the lean earth as he walked along. The roads corresponded with the methods in use for their maintenance. Deep in mud in the spring, deep in dust in the summer, the so-called public ways were deep in snow in winter. In the autumn only were they passable. All this the War of Independence did not better, - did not in any way change. Schools and roads and church observances, - the food, the dress, the domestic life, or the means of livelihood of that people, - continued to be as immemorially they had been. And so the faint echoes of distant battles died gently away without introducing into Lincoln a book or a paper, much less an industry or a new means of livelihood, or a breath of stronger and more varied life, or any increase of intercourse with the outer world. Not until 1825 did the town even boast a post-office;143 and the early history of that office throws a queer gleam of light on Lincoln at, so to speak, the halfway house between its starting- point and the point now reached. The railroad was only twenty years in the future, yet the place had not got going. The office was established, and one David S. Jones made postmaster, January 24, 1825. Its total receipts for the first five months of its existence were $14.35. Postmaster Jones then seems to have become wearied and discouraged, or delinquent, for no returns appear during the year ensuing. At last, in.July, 1827, the office showed signs of renewed life. Luke Gates assumed charge of it; and, during the ensuing full fiscal year, its receipts amounted to no less a sum than $47.62, an average of $3.97 a month. Even after the railroad was opened, the single daily mail was for years carried over the road to and from the station by a man on foot, - nor was he thereby over-burdened! Such was Lincoln seventy-five years after its incorporation, and when the Declaration of Independence had been celebrated for a half century. That instrument, and the stirring events which marked its proclamation, had not produced any discernible effect on the Massachusetts hill community. But at last the railroad; that changed all! And now Lincoln’s history once more becomes interesting, - an economical study, indeed, of small, perhaps, but profound, significance; for it illustrates to a remarkable degree the truth of the teachings of Adam Smith, - his faith in the benefits sure to follow the removal of every restriction on trade. Events, however, even in these latter days, -those succeeding the Declaration, - move slowly. Smith’s book first saw the light in 1776, - sixty-eight years before the railroad from Boston to Fitchburg was opened through Lincoln. If, when that road was opened, the veil could have been lifted, and the economical significance of the event revealed, it would have 142. 143. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

called for a very robust faith in the fundamental truth of the Scotch professor’s new-fangled theories to have foreseen for Lincoln anything but a future of ruin and desolation, - abandoned farms and rotting roof-trees. What did the railroad signify? - not perhaps at once, but in the slow progress and final result of an inevitable development, - a development those who looked on at the opening were to live to witness and to study; for the man now of threescore and ten was already then in his eleventh year. That opening meant for Lincoln the complete casting down of her trade barriers. Those dwelling in Lincoln were thereafter to be subjected, as respects every source of livelihood, to an unrestrained competition from each quarter of the compass - the boundless and fertile West, the frost-covered North, the genial South, and even from the barren sea. And there was not one single article which Lincoln then produced which could not be produced elsewhere under more favorable conditions. Those articles - staples of life - were henceforth to be transported by rail and” dumped,” to use the word now in vogue, not only on the markets open to Lincoln, but on Lincoln itself. Take, for instance, Lincoln’s traditional products, - those enumerated in the Lawrence settlement of 1748, - cord-wood, Indian corn, rye, pork and beef. How could Lincoln, hauling its wood over country roads, hope to compete in Boston market with wood brought by the train-load from New Hampshire and Maine? How much less could it compete with coal from Pennsylvania? Every child here knows that to-day coal has driven wood as fuel out of every house in Lincoln. A wood fire is a luxury. And Indian corn, and rye? How could Lincoln, on its rugged hillsides and with its thin upland soil, compete with the rich virgin plains of Illinois, where cereals of fabulous size and productiveness grew of themselves, - where fertilizers were wasted? And so with cattle and swine. In the States west of the Lakes, they were raised in herds and droves, living on the plenty of the land; here they must be nurtured, singly and toilfully, sheltered and fed, and ceaselessly cared for. N or was it any better with the choicer fruits of the earth,-the apple, the peach, the cherry and the strawberry. If the valley of the Mohawk, the uplands of Ohio, and the plains of Indiana and Illinois made wheat instead of meal the staff of life, so New Jersey and Delaware rushed into the production of peaches and berries under conditions which made Lincoln’s competition seemingly hopeless, flooding every accessible market. At the same time apples, potatoes and carrots, produced in the great belt reaching from Maine to Michigan, poured in by the train- load. It was, too, a case of absolute free trade. There was no tariff barrier anywhere. The cost of transportation alone had to be taken into account; - the farm wagon from Lincoln ran over the highway against the freight train from the Hudson over the railroad. Lincoln had no protection.144 Fortunately, the situation was not realized, and the change came gradually. As it developed, the unexpected occurred, - it usually does 144. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

occur.145 In other words, the abandoned farms, the vacant homesteads, the falling roof-trees, did not materialize. On the contrary, and in due time, there resulted, as I have said, a most interesting illustration of the truth of Smith’s teachings: An alert, enterprising and energetic community proved equal to the emergency; and Lincoln, quietly, insensibly almost, adjusting itself to the gradual change of conditions, instead of lapsing into everlasting ruin, grew yearly more prosperous, more populous, more intelligent and more moral. Were statistics attainable, and did time and space permit, it would be curious to follow this change through its intricate channels. Unlike many other towns, Lincoln could not diversify its occupations. Nature debarred it from so doing. It was a farming town, and, moreover, a hill town; as such it had no source of power, nor any natural advantage. It could not, like Lowell, become a mill- centre; nor a boot and shoe factory, like Brockton; it could not go into the manufacture of whips, like Topsfield, nor even of base-balls, like Natick. From the conditions of its origin, it was, and had to remain, exclusively agricultural. As such, apparently, it was doomed. How did it escape its doom? - for, unquestionably, the doom was escaped. It escaped simply by force of intelligence, and because it had to. In the first place, under the so-called “dumping” process, its markets developed an unexpected sustaining power. They even seemed to like it, and thrive under it. Contrary to all prognostications of evil and ruin, a plentiful supply of all the goods of the earth, at prices ruinously low for the home producers thereof, had a most stimulating effect, and centres of industry - each a new market in itself- began to develop with ever increasing rapidity. With wealth and population arose new and undreamed-of demands; the luxury of yesterday became the necessity of to-day. Take a few homely examples, articles known as garden truck, - asparagus, lettuce and cucumbers; before the railroad, these were raised in Lincoln only for home use, and the two latter had, as the first has still, their season. In that season they were cheap and plentiful; out of that season, money could not buy them. How is it now? Lincoln has simply gone into their manufacture, regardless of season; they are made artificially, under glass. Plentiful throughout the year, the demand for them is incessant; and they cost hardly more in December than in June. The asparagus and strawberry beds have displaced the field of Indian corn, just as wheaten bread has driven out the loaf of meal and rye. And so to-day, by a natural process, Lincoln, without protection, with no external aid or tariff barrier, has quietly adjusted itself to changed conditions; and, even as an agricultural town in a community of absolutely unrestricted free trade in all agricultural products, is more prosperous than ever before. Even wood, - cord-wood, the traditional product of the axe and wood lot, - the competition of Maine and New Hampshire beyond the State, and of Berkshire and Franklin within, has not destroyed its value; nor has coal displaced it as fuel. Though 145. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

the range and the stove have supplanted the open fireplace, the product of the forest still reigns supreme as the fuel of wealth; and, at the beginning of the twentieth century, more cordwood goes annually out of Lincoln to seek a market in Waltham, Watertown and Boston than went out at the end of the eighteenth century. Truly, it would have made glad the heart of Adam Smith could he have studied this illustration of the truth of the strange doctrine he taught.146 As Hamlet long ago observed in quite another connection, -” This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof.” Thus Lincoln passed, and successfully as slowly passed, through its ordeal of change, - its great revolution. Beginning with June 17, 1844, the outcome of the ordeal and result of the change were fitly commemorated in the utterance - instinctive and somewhat bewildered - I have just quoted from the lips of one of its sons on the 26th of May, 1892. More than forty-eight years had elapsed since the locomotive had forced its way by the banks of Walden, - over one third of Lincoln’s whole municipal life. The story of the past is told. It remains to frame the message to the future. To be complete, the inscription on the milestone must speak of us, and of the spot on which the column has to-

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

fourteen gallons of rum and wine is irresistibly suggestive of the proportions between Falstaff’s sack and bread. In 1778, during the death agony of the continental currency, a joint meeting was held of committees representing the several towns of Concord, Billerica, Lexington, Weston, Stow, Bedford, Acton and Lincoln, and they attempted the impossible feat of establishing prices at which all commodities in general use should be sold. Among the prices thus established were the following to govern inn-holders: Mug of West India phlip, IS shillings; ditto, New England, 12 shillings; Toddy, in proportion. Bowl of Punch, not set. And all this is so set down in Lincoln’s Book of Records.147 But when the consumption of rum in those days is under discussion, it is not a question of temperance. The most profitable trade of all country stores was in spirits, and all- ministers, doctors, farmers and squires - made use of it in about the same degree. They habitually ate salted meat; and habitually quenched the resulting thirst with rum. In the stage-coach days there was a house of call at every great road crossing; and the remains of three old taverns, each of which once ran its open bar, are still to be seen on the Lancaster road, on the old turnpike, and in the centre of the town. By way of contrast, the Lincoln of to-day, in town-meeting assembled now seven weeks ago, without a single dissenting voice, directed its clerk to cast one ballot for the order prohibiting during the year all sales of spirits within Lincoln limits! Other times; other men; other customs! Are we, indeed, as some maintain, degenerate? As did those of the earlier period when, on the 7th of November, 1781, the Rev. Charles Steams was installed as minister of the town, and pastor of the church which gathered in the meeting-house which preceded this edifice, we to-day are observing an occasion of interest. A century and twenty-two years have since elapsed. Presently, after the formal ceremonies of the day, we also, as did they, will sit down at the tables, and partake of the flesh-pots. Now imagine, were such an imagination possible, countenanced by my esteemed friend, Mr. Moorfield Storey, as presiding officer of the day, a proportionate recurrence to the menu, or bill of fare, of November 7, 1781. We would have to dispose of at least a couple of barrels of cider, approximately a hogshead of wine, a barrel more or less of rum, and, possibly, as much as one pound of tea. More accustomed than we to heady beverages, they had no organ in those days; only a bass viol. But, as we dwell in imagination on the possibility I have suggested, we can picture Mr. Storey, at the close of the coming entertainment, leading off with an organ accompaniment in that, to us, familiar air which relates to what will occur in the “old town to-night,” and to the carmine in which it will appear clad when to-morrow’s sun rises. But, as I have already said, - other times! - other customs! Either we, as respects· potations, are degenerate, or there were giants in those days. To return to our theme. 147. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

In other respects, also, the character of the town has changed, - not revolutionized, it has changed significantly. No longer purely agricultural, it has become more and more a residence and, so to speak, bedroom community: - that is, while fifty years ago no one148 lived here and yet pursued his daily vocation - earned his living - elsewhere, many do so now; and the number is steadily increasing. The town-meeting, that great feature of Massachusetts life, is no longer a gathering of yeomen, - children of the soil and exacting their livelihood from it. But it is still the genuine town-meeting, - the assembly of a little commonwealth, in which all are equal, all freemen, all Americans. And here let me for a moment speak of myself, and my own experience and impressions; not impossibly they may have an interest - the interest of novelty and freshness - even to those here dwelling three generations hence. Very distinctly do I remember my own first town-meeting in Lincoln, its surprise and delight. It was ten years ago, the 5th of March, 1894. I had then been less than four months a resident; and, a year before, had never but once set foot in Lincoln. In 1879, I think it was, I came here one day officially, as member of the Board of Railroad Commissioners, to investigate the circumstances of a death at the grade-crossing next east of the station. With that single exception, I had never been in Lincoln, except on a train in movement. At last, on an almost fairy-like day in May, - a day most fortunate for me, - I was on the spur of the moment induced to come out, and look at a place bordering on Fairhaven- bay, then for sale. I came. It was the 20th of May, and Thoreau’s” Pleasant Meadows,” Fairhaven-bay, and the stretching valley of the Sudbury with the Maynard hills beyond, lay basking in the fresh spring sunlight, and their germinal perfection. I saw what I wanted made ready to my hand; and, moved by a reckless impulse, I made myself its master on the spot. I have since come to regard my so doing as an inspiration; as such, thanking God for it! Just six months after I here made my home. Presently town-meeting day came round. At town meetings, I was no novice. I had, in fact, attended them for 250 years; at first in Braintree, - though there in the persons of my ancestors, - but, more recently, in Quincy myself. In them also I had habitually taken an active part. A day of change came, - a change I greatly deplored; it was, however, inevitable, and, as such, in it I silently acquiesced. Quincy outgrew town government. A large alien population by degrees came in, and secret organizations made themselves felt, perverting the old town-meeting to factional ends. I saw the system break down; and its break-down grieved me. Then Quincy became a city, -a suburban municipality. And at once almost I woke to a consciousness of the fact that the home of my youth and my earlier manhood was gone, - gone, never to return! Its whole individuality seemed departed. It was the same place outwardly in all essential respects; but I was a stranger in it. Its traditions no longer held; spiritually it 148. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

was defunct. It might be a “live” city to others; to me it was a dead town. I walked its streets a ghost, - superfluous, lagged. Where all had once been neighbors and familiar, I now knew few; and fewer still seemed to know me. So, cutting the knot, though with a sharp pang, I betook myself elsewhere. And now town- meeting day had come in the place of my new abode. As I need not say, since the period of De Tocqueville,- that is, for sixty years,-the New England town-meeting has, as a political institution, been world renowned; and, familiar as I myself was with it and its methods, I remember well my silent surprise when one day the late John Fiske, an authority on New England history, informed me, in an incidental sort of way, that he had never been present at one. I could hardly have been more surprised had some eminent practising surgeon told me that he had never witnessed a dissection. N ow it so happened that in March, 1894, an English friend of mine was here, and he had expressed a wish to see a genuine New England town-meeting; so I told him that, would he come to Lincoln, I thought I could gratify him. I had never been to one there, but I imagined I knew what it would be like. He gladly accepted my invitation, and together we went, - both strangers. Very vividly do I recall his curiosity, amusement and delight. For myself, I felt at home at once. I was back among my native surroundings. A new-comer, I naturally took no part; but the plain, orderly, common-sense procedure, the rough, manly equality, the give-and-take of town- meeting, were all there, and there in perfection. It was not the crowded hall and swaying, shouting mass to which I had of late years grown accustomed at Quincy; it was the genuine village gathering of the earlier, and, in that respect, the infinitely better time. I recognized instinctively every familiar character, though not one face or name did I know; - there was the moderator, sufficiently skilled in parliamentary law and the conduct of business; and, by him, the traditional town-clerk. On the front bench was the chairman of the selectmen; and the shrewd, humorous squire at his side. The leader of the opposition was not far to seek; nor the village demagogue; nor the town-meeting orator; nor the town-meeting bore. The prober into the details and mysteries of the town-book was also in evidence. I knew them all; I felt myself one of them. Not so my English friend. To him it was novel, and yet not altogether strange. It was the Commons House of Parliament in little; and, watching it with the deepest interest, he later in discussion referred to Mr. Samuel Hartwell, then chairman of the selectmen, as the “Chancellor of the Exchequer,” and to the list of appropriations as the “Budget;” while Mr. Wheeler became the “Speaker,” and the town-clerk remained his wonder and admiration. It was, I am fain to say, a typical town-meeting; one I was glad to have witnessed by a foreigner of intelligence. It showed our New England institutions in their home, and at work. It has been so since. As it stands to-day, I bear witness that Lincoln town government represents that form of government in a shape approaching perfection. Made up almost exclusively HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

of Americans, traditionally accustomed to the forms, not so large as to be unwieldy and yet large enough to have an element of uncertainty as to outcome in it, the voting roll of the entire town can be called in ten minutes, and the annual warrant is disposed of at a single session. What more remains to be said? What further message can be sent down for delivery to a future generation, as it plants yet another milestone? 1 think of little. The record of these days, unlike those we are here to commemorate, is full, and he who runs may read. It will tell of a town no longer remote; and one to which the fact that it is set upon a hill is a commendation, not a drawback. The natural beauties of Lincoln are plain to see, whether you float along the Sudbury, or, from the summit of the hill, view the broad stretch of rolling and wooded country off to Wachusett and the hills of New Hampshire, or walk or drive through its forest- lined roads. The population is not dense, and Nature still holds its own. As a community it is neither large nor wealthy. The statistics tell us that we number but one inhabitant to some seven and two thirds149 acres, and our worldly possessions are estimated at $2000 to each inhabitant. The map tells the story of our roads; the succession of town-books is the record of our finances, our schools and our library. As a community we are not torn by dissensions; though, in this respect, it was not always so. Indeed, I am told that, from a time which memory and tradition fail to recall, the Lincoln of former days was rent in twain, - divided as a house about to fall. But it did not fall; on the contrary it seemed to thrive through contention. Old residents, - men whose recollections run far back of this railroad epoch, assure me that the North and South feud was an inheritance from other generations, and a condition of affairs which long ago ceased to exist. To a certain extent it was Homeric, for it flavored of the muster-fields and the New England Olympic games. It was a rivalry of runners and wrestlers-of those throwing the hammer, and those shooting at the butts. There were giants then; and the giants of the South, it is asserted, contended, not unsuccessfully, with those of the North. Hence jealousies and heart-burnings; and these became chronic, and hereditary. Gradually, the issues changed; but the feud remained. What it was all about, no one seemed to know; and, curiously enough, no one now refers to it except in a humorous way. But, as between North and South, this town was, prior to 1890, the nation in miniature. The railroad was Lincoln’s Mason-and- Dixon’s line. So bitter, I am assured, was the feeling, that it was sufficient for one section to desire anything to have the other unalterably opposed to it; and when, moreover, in town- meeting the North and Centre carried an issue over the South, the meeting-house bell was rung in noisy triumph. It was a very parlous period; but,’ like most such periods, it wore itself gradually away. I have, moreover, been told that one distinctly alleviating influence - again Homeric - was the appearance at 149. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

school from the South of the daughter, passing fair, of one of the oldest and most distinctive families in that section. This maiden, - quite a Lincoln Briseis, - found favor in the eyes of the young men of the Centre and North, and they by degrees came to think that conditions could not be altogether bad or hopeless among a people of whom this was the consummate flower. And so, gentler sentiments assuming sway, they at last began to ask the why and the wherefore of it all. When my time began it was over; but I am assured that, while it lasted, - and it lasted long, - it was a great and classic feud. The opportunity was not lacking; the theme was there; the village Homer only failed us. But now there is peace and good-will in town meetings, where we still adhere to the institutions of our fathers. While liberal in expenditure, the town is not extravagant; nor, in these days of so-called “graft,” does any breath of calumny attach to those by whom our public affairs are administered. That with us more than with others the limit of improvement has been reached, we do not believe; meanwhile, as it addresses itself with confidence to the future, a reasonable contentment dwells within Lincoln’s borders. And so ends the anniversary. The milestone is planted; the record is inscribed upon it. We have looked back over the road we have travelled; we have surveyed the land in which we dwell; the holiday approaches its close. With to-morrow’s sun we will gather together, old and young, and, once more shouldering our burdens, resume the line of march. The road of the future will doubtless, as did that of the past, lead over hill as well as through dale; but, when the next resting-place is reached, let us set out in the hope that our descendants may say it has been not less well with them than it was with us and with our fathers. It is a goodly land; and may they in their day feel blest in its possession, no less than do we in ours. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

The Glacial Lake Sudbury Fifty years ago, at the close of the first century of Lincoln’s incorporated life, no study whatever had been made of the geology of Middlesex County. Since then, and especially of recent years, it has been gone over repeatedly with care, and the marks of the student’s hammer are everywhere to be found. Many data have been collected, and certain conclusions reached. These have interest in themselves; but, not improbably, their chief value hereafter will be found as a basis of comparison; for hitherto the geologists have found recurring occasion to revise the conclusions theretofore confidently reached. The ice age, for instance, was first fixed at an antiquity measured in years by the hundreds of thousands; since gradually contracted to the more reasonable period given in the text. So also as respects variations of the polar axis. That the theories, beliefs and conclusions now held will undergo similar, though continually diminishing, modification, scarcely admits of doubt. The rocks and deposits of Lincoln afford an interesting field of study. The following memorandum of results concerning it, and them, up to this time reached, has been prepared by Mr. J.W. Goldthwait of the Harvard University Geological Department. In its field it, also, is of the milestone character. The geology of an area like Lincoln involves the study of two rather different kinds of things,- (a) the bed rock, or solid foundation, of the region, and (b) the surface features; namely, the shapes given to the hills and valleys by erosion of rain and rivers and by the old North American ice sheet, and the deposits of rock waste, chiefly of glacial origin, which have been spread over the bed rock surface so as generally to conceal it. In other words, geology includes not only the study of rocks but the study of everything which is usually called the” ground.” Its object is to understand the origin of these things,- how they were produced, and what they really mean. In this paper, then, a certain order will be followed; the features of geological interest will be considered roughly in order of their age, the bed rock history first, then the history of the development of the topography, and last of all the effects of the great ice sheet. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Bed Rock Geology The rock mass, of which we see occasional outcropping ledges about the town, is composed of (0) Ancient seashore sediments, barely recognizable as such, because they have been so completely transformed or “metamorphosed” by compression, squeezing, and the action of subterranean heat. (6) Other metamorphic rocks, including some which probably broke their way up into these old sediments in a molten state some time before the great metamorphism took place, for they share it; and some which may represent the old original sea floor on which the sediments were laid down. (c) Rocks, once molten or “igneous,” which found their way into the others as subterranean lavas, but after the rocks of the first two groups had been metamorphosed. It may be well to take these up in order, to see something of their history. The first two groups have already been spoken of as “metamorphic” rocks. Under this head come all rocks which have undergone great transformation in their physical and mineralogical make-up, by reason of that intense heat and pressure which seems to be continually exerted on the earth’s crust while the earth cools and shrinks. It is believed to be chiefly this constant shrinkage that gives rise to great wrinklings of the earth’s crust, determining the location of mountain ranges. Wherever wrinkling of this sort has gone on, the rocks show the effects of it to a greater or less extent. One result is the upturning and folding of the rocks; but when the process is long continued the rocks suffer also great changes of structure, - their component crystals or grains are rearranged, flattened out and fused, and new minerals may be born. A rock thus transformed, or metamorphosed, often has a distinct banding or “foliation” in a direction perpendicular to that of compression. Gneisses and schists are two great classes of foliated rocks, - the former being massive and firm, and the latter splitting easily along the foliation. Whether a certain gneiss, or a certain schist, was originally a sedimentary deposit or a molten rock mass is often very hard to tell. Other metamorphic rocks, however, such as quartzite and marble, which need not have foliation, are clearly derived from stratified or sedimentary deposits. In Lincoln several sorts of metamorphic rocks appear at the surface; but only one or two need be mentioned. Quartzite occurs in several parts of the township, but the main belt is in the southeastern part, along the back of Mount Tabor. The area in which quartzite ledges occur is from a quarter to a half mile wide, and can be traced in a southwest direction as far as Reeves’ Hill in Wayland. Quartzite is a hard firm rock, always light colored - bluish or pinkish - and sugary in texture. It was probably once a sandstone, or rock formed from thick beds of sand hardened by pressure of overlaying deposits; but by metamorphism the original sand grains have been fused, and HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

partly turned into minute quartz crystals. The quartzite is at least six hundred feet thick. Half a mile southwest of Sandy Pond is a ledge of marble, a rock which is of local interest more from its rarity than anything else. It is a nearly white rock, crystallized with a fine grain. Marble of this sort is re-crystallized limestone, originally a calcareous sheD or slime deposit collected on the sea Boor, and later consolidated by the weight of beds laid down on top of it. Both heat and the action of percolating waters bring about the crystallization of the mass first into limestone and, later, into thoroughly crystallized marble. On account of its organic origin marble might be expected to contain fossils; but often the metamorphism has entirely obliterated them, as seems to be the case with the Lincoln rock. At several places in this locality the rock has been quarried, and where it is thus freshly exposed one can see plainly the way the original beds have been folded. The thickness of the formation is about two hundred feet. What may once have been a subterranean lava, forced into the sediments, is a broad belt of hornblende-schist almost a mile wide, running in a northeast-southwest direction through Sandy Pond. This is a rock of dark gray color and variable texture, containing a good deal of the black mineral called hornblende, as well “as mica and the two common light-colored minerals, quartz and feldspar. The mass of rock itself, and the foliated structure of it, run from northeast to southwest, showing that the squeezing took place in a direction northwest-southeast. This trend of foliation of the rocks, indeed, occurs clear across Massachusetts, indicating that the wrinkling of the rocks accompanied the formation of the Appalachian mountain system, or at least of a part of it. A belt of granite stretches in a northeast-southwest direction along the northwest border of the township, from the head of Meade Brook to the vicinity of Walden Pond. Since granite is composed of different minerals crystallized out in much the same manner that any substance like molten sugar crystallizes on cooling, it is believed that the rock mass was once hot and plastic, like lava, but that it cooled slowly to a solid state, - so slowly that distinct crystals were developed. Lavas from volcanoes cool too fast for such a complete crystallization as this, because they are on the surface. Granites and other coarse-grained igneous rocks are thought to have been formed deep down below the earth’s surface, and to be visible now because long continued erosion has brought the surface far down through the original rock mass. The presence of mica in abundance in the Lincoln granite makes it a true granite, according to accepted terminology, whereas the so- called” granites” of Quincy and Rockport, which have no mica, are not true granites, but hornblende - granites. One noticeable feature in the Lincoln rock is the occurrence of irregular veins or tongues of coarse-grained quartz and feldspar rock called “pegmatite,” which shoot through the granite in every direction. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

It is possible that this Lincoln granite is the oldest rock in the township, and represents the rock floor on which the marine sediments (since metamorphosed into quartzite, marble, and schist) were spread. This, however, is hardly more than a conjecture. Another northeast-southwest belt of rock, running through the township from Beaver Pond to the old turnpike west of Mount Tabor, is of hornblende-gneiss. The rock varies greatly in appearance, but is usually grayish or pinkish where weathered, with more or less foliation. In intimate association with it is a black rock called diabase, which occurs in bands sometimes sharply marked off from the gneiss, and sometimes blended with it along the contact. This mixture of gneiss and diabase seems to be a very firm resistant rock, for it makes the ridge of high ground northeast of Beaver Pond. Softer rocks on either side have been worn down to form the valleys. Of several other sorts of rock that are known to occur in Lincoln, only two need be mentioned. Both of these occur in. straight strips, or “dikes,” where fissures in the main rock mass were opened and filled with lava, which cooled there into firm rock. Diabase, or “trap” dikes, occur sparingly in the eastern part of the town. They are black where freshly broken, but weather with a brownish surface. “Aplite” dikes occur in a hill three quarters of a mile southwest of Sandy Pond, south of North Street. These are light colored, and made up of quartz and feldspar. The aplite and diabase of these dikes are the two youngest rocks of the region, because they fill fissures in the others, - that is, because they “cut” the gneisses, schists, etc. Concerning the age of the rocks, very little can be said. Obscure markings in the marble bear a resemblance to fossil pteropods like some found at Nahant. If these are truly fossils, the rocks belong to the “Lower Cambrian” period; but it is very doubtful. At any rate, the gneisses, schists, quartzite and marble are very old, for they have undergone great metamorphism; and, after that, they have been invaded at different times by igneous rocks of different sorts, including last of all the dike-rocks, diabase and aplite. The bed rock history, then, is a complex series of events, including the accumulation of thick beds of sediments under water, the compression and upheaval of them by mountain building forces by which the rocks have been completely metamorphosed, and the intrusion of subterranean lavas into the mass both before and after the mountain-building process was most active. All this probably involves many millions of years. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Surface Form The form of the hills and valleys hereabouts has been determined by two great geological agencies of erosion, water and ice, acting with some regard to the rock structure into which they have deeply carved. Although the shape and trend of the hills of Lincoln may seem at first sight to show little regularity, a careful inspection will bring out the fact of a rather persistent northeast-southwest trend of hills and valleys. So far as this pattern holds good, it doubtless shows the control of rock structure; for the northeast-southwest rock belts already spoken of are not all equally resistant to the destructive action of rain and rivers, and consequently the harder belts are left standing up as hills or ridges. Another feature about the topography, but one which would hardly be appreciated except when it is seen from the top of one of the higher hills of the town, is the relative accordance in height of the hills. Here, in the eastern part of the State, it is not very striking; for, though the hills rise to the same general height, they are far apart and have rather rounded summits. Farther west, however, in the Berkshires, where the hilltops cover a greater part of the total area, their accordance is very m.arked, and a view of the landscape shows a rather flat skyline. A much more perfect case of such a flattish upland country occurs in Brittany, a widely accepted explanation for it being that the region, probably originally mountainous, was worn down lower and lower, by natural process of erosion by atmosphere, rain and rivers, until it became nearly Sat, - a “peneplain,” - and stood close to sea level; that it was then tilted up to form a low plateau, and the rivers, with steepened slopes and renewed energy, cut down their valleys beneath the plateau level. In the case of New England the complexly folded structure of the rocks and their extreme metamorphism indicate that at one time the whole region was mountainous. The present low-rolling topography is not at all appropriate to such a complex rock structure. Apparently the mountains were worn down to a gently rolling country, and then the peneplain was tilted up, and again somewhat cut into by streams. Since the upland skyline rises steadily towards the northwest, the uplift of the peneplain must have been greatest in that part, so as to give the greatest slant towards the southeast. So the rather Rat skyline that one sees from the top of the Lincoln hills may represent an old peneplain, while the valleys of to-day record the work of the streams since the peneplain was uplifted. Wachusett and other hills that rise far above the general upland level are considered to be residual masses, never worn down to the peneplain, because they are composed of harder rock and were situated near the headwaters of the streams that reduced the surface of the country. These abnormally high hills have been named “monadnocks,” after the New Hampshire example. The reduction of the surface to the peneplain is placed by geologists in· “Cretaceous” time; for all the rock waste HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

produced by the wearing down of the mountains to the lowland must have been swept seaward, and deposited as sediment along the coast; and cretaceous strata occur on Long Island, Martha’s Vineyard and elsewhere, which seem to be part of this waste. One more topographic feature should be mentioned, before considering the work of the ice sheet on Lincoln topography. It is the long steep rock escarpment that runs along the eastern boundary of the township, from Mount Tabor southward as far as Kendall Green. The unusual straightness of this escarpment and its steepness suggest that it is a somewhat worn “fault-scarp,” or cliff produced by the upheaval of the whole rock mass on one side of a deep fracture, - the fracture in this case running somewhere along the base of the cliff, and the uplifted block being on the western side of it. The suggestion of faulting is strengthened by the fact that near the supposed fracture or “fault line” (east of Mount Tabor, on the eastern side of the Cambridge reservoir) the diorite rock of that region is cut by two fractures along which there has been some slipping and displacement, polishing of the rock surfaces along the planes of fracture, giving what are called” slickensides.” These two fault planes run northeast-southwest, or roughly parallel to the escarpment, and so they may be minor fractures of a parallel set. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Glacial History At the beginning of the glacial period - probably a score or even scores of thousands of years ago - New England had already gone through the geological history just outlined. The rock foundation had been built piece by piece, it had been wrinkled up into mountains, worn down to a lowland, then raised to a slanting position, and extensively cut into again by streams. Over this low upland of hills and valleys came the North American ice sheet, scraping away all the soil, planing the surface down into firm rock, tearing and plucking blocks from exposed ledges, and thus changing the shape of the surface to a considerable degree. When later the ice sheet melted back, the rubbish that it had collected was spread out in deposits of different sorts over the rock surface, and New England took on the appearance that it has to-day. The nature of the ice sheet can be appreciated by reading one of the several good accounts of it, like G.F. Wright’s “The Great Ice Age.” The North American glacier was unlike modern Alpine glaciers in that it was not confined to the valleys but covered the whole region, so that not even Mount Washington stuck up through the ice fields. Ours was a “continental glacier,” like the Greenland ice cap. Its centre of accumulation, or rather its centres, for it had three, were near Hudson’s Bay; and starting at these points it spread out radially in all directions, as an advancing sheet, until it covered the northern part of the United States, including all of New England as far south as Long Island, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. The cause of the glacial period has been discussed for many years, and is still in dispute; but one apparently good explanation is that the Gulf Stream was turned from its course by a wrinkling up of the sea bottom, and the climate of North America was thereby modified to one of great snow precipitation. Deflection of currents is known to have occurred in other cases, as for instance the Japan current, which was shut out of Behring Sea when the Aleutian Island ridge was upheaved; and, in a case like that, the climate would probably be seriously affected. The work that the ice sheet did, however, is much better understood. In Lincoln it left its marks in several ways. In the first place, the form of the hills shows glacial action. The northwest sides have gentle slopes, and the few outcrops there are low and rounded; the southeast slopes, on the other hand, are abrupt and ragged, with more abundant outcrops. The ice moved over the country from north-northwest to south-southeast, and, as it ascended the hills, it smoothed the “struck” side but tore or “plucked” away blocks from the leeward side. Where a rock surface has been recently stripped of soil it may be fresh enough to show not only the smoothness peculiar to glaciated surfaces but also the scratches or “striz” made by boulders or pebbles drawn across the surface by the ice. In both large and small ways, then, the erosive action of the ice sheet is illustrated. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Glacial boulders, or “erratics,” are also evidence of the ice age. They are merely blocks of rock that were torn up by the ice and carried along, suffering a good deal of rounding and smoothing as they went; and, finally, as the ice melted away, tumbling or settling to the ground. Often they are very large, as for instance one within sight of Walden road, on the old Baker farm. Most of the boulders in Lincoln are made of rock similar to the bed rock near by, so they probably have travelled only a short distance. Pegmatite, diorite, and granite are the most abundant. Boulders are of course only the larger fragments of rubbish left by the ice sheet. If we leave out the alluvium, which is glacial rubbish worked over in recent times by streams, all the soil cover belongs to glacial deposits of one sort or another. Some of it is “ground moraine,” or” till,” deposited directly by the plastic ice wherever the ice currents were too weak to carry off the supply of waste; and other parts of it are gravel deposits derived from the ice sheet, but laid down through the agency of streams while the ice sheet melted away. Till occurs abundantly throughout the higher ground, in patches or sheets; it is piled up rather thickly on the northern sides of many of the hills, for instance, the one northeast and the one southwest of Sandy Pond. Without the glacial deposits, these two hills would probably trend more definitely in a northeast- southwest direction, following the rock structure; but the ice moving across them in a nearly perpendicular direction has given them a north-south trend. The hill halfway between the village and the station is a “drumlin,” or high mound of till, lenticular in shape. Hagar Hill in South Lincoln is another. There seem to be no other true drumlins in the town, although they occur throughout the State, and are very common in and around Boston Harbor. These drumlins bear the same relation to the ice sheet that sand bars bear to a river, or sand dunes bear to winds; they are accumulations of waste brought about by the local inability of the ice currents to carry the load given them. Glacial gravels occur in Lincoln almost wholly on the lower ground, in the valleys. Their two usual forms of occurrence are “eskers” and “sand plains.” Eskers are winding ridges of gravel built by streams that ran on the ground in tunnels under the ice, or in caftons between ice walls. Under certain conditions of velocity and supply of gravel such a stream would upraise its bed, laying down gravel along its course; and when the ice melted away, and the supporting walls of the tunnel vanished, the gravels on either side of the old stream bed would slide down, giving it the form of a steep-sided ridge. Eskers occur along the valley of Stony Brook above and below Beaver Pond. There are others in the northern part of the town, running from Sandy Pond road southwest across Goose Pond to Lake Walden, and thence southwards. Another esker runs near the railroad south of Lincoln station. They are curiously shaped ridges, and often passed as Indian mounds in the early days before the glacial period was thought of. «Serpent ridges” they are sometimes HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

called, on account of their winding courses. Sand plains are delta-like deposits built by streams, which issued from the ice into a body of standing water at the ice front. Their Rat top is the most striking element of form. Instead of being fan-shaped, like ordinary deltas, they are usually semi-elliptical in outline. Instead of reaching back to higher ground, in the way that ordinary deltas extend back to the shore of the lake in which they were built, sand deltas are usually bounded by an abrupt slope - an “ice contact slope” - because the delta was built forward from against the ice, and the ice subsequently melted back and caused the edge of the delta to slump down. From this back-slope the flat top of a plain slopes gently forward to the front border, which is often lobate in form, like an ordinary delta. One sand delta occurs near Massachusetts Avenue just south of Wellhead Pond. It has a good steep ice-contact slope on the northern side, marking the position of the front of the retreating ice at the time it was built. The best plains, however, lie in the southwestern part of the township, west of the station. Two very fine plains in this area - partly in Wayland - are important members of an extensive series of deltas built in an extinct glacial lake that occupied the greater part of the basin of the Sudbury River while the ice sheet was retreating north, with its east-west front damming the northward flowing drainage. The gravel deposits near Lake Walden, and the plain cut by the railroad near Baker Bridge come into the same group of lake deposits. The most interesting feature of these deltas is the fact that though all of them between Wayland village and Lake Walden were probably formed in a single lake - glacial Lake Sudbury - at a time when its level was constant and controlled by the level of an outlet that passed down Cherry Brook, the deltas do not occur at the same altitude; they measure separately all the way from 160 feet above sea level at Wayland to 195 feet at Walden. When it is seen, moreover, that the increase in height of deltas going north is exactly proportionate to their distance apart, it looks very much as if the whole region had been tilted up on the north since the ice sheet left it, so as to make the extinct water-plane slant southward at the rate of about six feet a mile. Such a movement of the region is not at all improbable, as it is known to have occurred elsewhere in the glaciated area, as near as western New York, and has been suspected in New England because of certain” raised beaches” along the coast, at Cape Ann and Mount Desert. In Scandinavia, too, the land has risen since an ice sheet melted off from it. Probably the removal of the weight of a thick ice sheet is itself sufficient to account for earth movements of this sort. One of the outlets of glacial Lake Sudbury in the later stages of its short life seems to have been across the divide near Wellhead, and south down Hobbs’ Brook. Evidence of this is found in a small area of smooth bare rock, rounded as if waterworn by a torrential stream, which occurs by the side of the reservoir near Weston Street and just south of Concord HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Avenue. It looks very much as if a strong river had once swept over the ledges at this point, rounding their edges in a way that Hobbs’ Brook with its present volume could never have done. Down Hobbs’ Brook below the reservoir, also, there is a stretch of extremely bouldery ground which suggests that the old river swept over the till deposit at this point, carried with it all the clay, pebbles, and cobblestones, and left only the pavement of boulders. In the ten thousand years or so since the ice age, remark. ably little change seems to have been brought about in the form of the glacial deposits. The complete foresting of the country, followed by the de-foresting and settlement of it within historic times, has certainly produced a very different looking region from that which the ice sheet left; but during all this the rains and streams seem hardly to have touched the deltas, or to have gullied the till on the hillsides. Very little soil has accumulated on the sand plains, too; and probably because of the ease with which decaying vegetable growth can be carried down in solution through porous sands. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1906

December: Herbert Wendell Gleason compiled a map of the locations in the vicinity of Concord mentioned by Henry Thoreau in his Journal, on the basis of H.F. Walling’s town map of Concord done in 1852 on which credit for the surveying of Walden Pond and White Pond was assigned to H.D. Thoreau, Civ. Engr. (originals now at the Concord Free Public Library), H.F. Walling’s township map of Middlesex County done in 1856, and Thoreau’s plan of the Concord River from East Sudbury to Billerica Dam done in the summer of 1859 (original now at the Concord Free Public Library). Gleason also used surveys by Albert E. Wood for the shapes of Loring’s Pond and Bateman’s Pond, and a survey by William Wheeler of the Concord Water Works for the shape of Flint’s Pond. Here is how the map that Gleason produced matches up with a current GIS image:

(The above image has been produced by Mark Taylor as part of a preservation effort to determine where exactly Thoreau’s “deep cut” had been located.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1909

Newell Convers Wyeth went on the 1st of his two excursions to Walden Pond (the 2d would be in 1913). HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1910

In Concord, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn was conceding that the area leading toward Walden Pond had been considered by Concordians, rather than as a favored spot for picnics and recreations or for vacation cabins and fishing shanties, to have been “of dark repute, the home of pariahs and lawless characters.”

A modestly annotated edition of WALDEN with introduction and thumbnail biography of author was produced by Raymond Macdonald Alden, PhD, of Leland Stanford Junior University in California: TIMELINE OF WALDEN

VIEW THE PAGE IMAGES

It was this Associate Professor of English’s considered opinion that the strictly literary value of the work was HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

very uneven. Thoreau had written freely and unsystematically, as he thought and lived, not seeking to order his material carefully, or to build up the structure of his thought in the manner of one who really tries to prove something. Sometimes Thoreau’s pencil seemed to linger and amble when a critic might have preferred for it to have proceeded more directly to some point. In his considered opinion this writing was certainly longer than it needed to be and it would be perfectly all right for a busy undergrad to flip past chapters six, seven, nine, ten, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and seventeen — although “by no means omitting” the final, eighteenth chapter.

(This volume contains what perhaps was the first attempt at annotations and notes to the text. One of Associate Professor Raymond Macdonald Alden’s suggestions was that implicit in the pages of Thoreau’s WALDEN might have been a reference to the American woman poet, Mrs. Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney — but alas, it seems the good professor was mistaken here as well!) HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1913

Newell Convers Wyeth illustrated an edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s KIDNAPPED. The artist went on the 2d of his two excursions to Walden Pond (the 1st had been in 1909). HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1914

Summer: When Franklin Benjamin Sanborn went for a swim in Walden Pond, he noted that the sandbar at the neck of the cove was exposed to a length of at least fifty feet. This was only the 2d time he had seen this sandbar exposed since he had moved to Concord in 1855. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1915

June: Allen French’s OLD CONCORD, WITH DRAWINGS BY LESTER G. H ORNBY (Boston MA: Little, Brown, and Company). READ THE FULL TEXT

This book commented that “the gypsy moth has necessitated much cutting” and that therefore Walden Pond was “not so beautiful as in Thoreau’s day.”

page 10: “J. Thoreau’s” name was marked, on the map, against a house on Main Street. He too was a dependable person, and had brought up his family as a respectable man should. But his son Henry turned out odd enough, even if his name was known as far as New York, or even England. He had never made his way in the world; he would earn only enough to keep him, though he was smart enough when he improved his father’s pencil-making machinery. But having done that, he went out to Walden Pond and spent two years alone in a shanty. What could be done with such a man? page 12: The Thoreaus were abolitionists, parents and children; it was said that Henry hid slaves in his hut at Walden. It was curious that when strange negroes took the west-bound train, Henry Thoreau was very likely to board it with them, buying tickets to Canada but returning too soon to have used them HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

himself. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1918

February: In this month or the following one, Herbert Wendell Gleason took a series of Walden Pond photographs. This was such a low water point that the sandbar was exposed. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1919

Leonard F. Kleinfeld was 20 when he 1st visited Walden Pond. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1922

June: Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) visted Walden Pond, finding it to be a “dark lake spike-fringed with dark trees.” Wilson somehow had gotten the idea it had been Henry Thoreau who had originated the old saw “Cut your own wood and it will warm you twice” (not just anything and everything Thoreau mentioned had been utterly without precedent). HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1933

Newell Convers Wyeth painted his “Walden Pond Revisited,” an oil on canvas which is now at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania:

Mark Sullivan, in his “Meaning in N.C. Wyeth’s Walden Pond Revisited” in the 2004/2005 issue of The Concord Saunterer, strives mightily to position this painting in its 1933 context in the life of the artist and in the life of America. He makes an exhaustive listing of the various images that appear in the painting: Thoreau as per the Maxham Daguerreotype, the beanfield, the shanty, the pond, the railroad, the Unitarian Church steeple, Concord, the bluebirds, the view toward the west, etc., and analyzes each of these images for its mythic content. This file of the Kouroo Contexture (http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/thumbnails/W/NCWyeth.pdf) might be construed as an attempt to produce a strict chronology — which you can hold alongside Sullivan’s excellent article as you study his argument and the conclusions at which he arrives.

May 3, Wednesday: The oath of allegiance to the British crown was removed from the Irish constitution.

Joseph Wood Krutch wrote in “Walden Revisited” in The Nation that “When Thoreau retired to Walden in 1845 he was nearly a century ahead of his time. It is true that the Concord he left seems a village to us and true that we can hardly conceive of a society more simple than the one he chose to flee from, but Thoreau, with a prophet’s vision, was really running away from something which was yet to be. Refusing a rug with which a kind neighbor had offered to cover the bareness of his floor, he remarked that it was best to avoid the beginnings of evil, and it was upon that principle that he renounced our industrial society before the society itself had become firmly established.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1938

September 21, Wednesday: British mediator Lord Runciman recommended to Prime Minister Chamberlain that the Sudenland be transferred to Germany without a referendum.

Czechoslovakia agreed to an Anglo-French plan which included the cession of the Sudetenland to Germany. President Benes announced the agreement in a communique critical of Czechoslovakia’s “friends” Great Britain and France.

Spanish leader Juan Negrín advised the League of Nations that all International Brigades were to be withdrawn from the fighting.

Poland demanded that Czechoslovakia hand over the Teschen (Cieszyn) district.

In the worst weather disaster for New England in its history, the 4th most fatal in all US history, the Category Four hurricane to be known as the “Long Island Express” struck seven states in seven hours and 682 died, 433 of whom were Rhode Islanders.150 Drifting dead, typically wearing heavy boots, were initially estimated from the air by counting the tops of heads that could be seen bobbing along the surfline. The downtown of Providence flooded 17 feet above its street surfaces. All the enormous mature elm-trees surrounding the Newport “cottage” named “The Elms” were blown down.151 In Arlington, the steeple of the Pleasant Street Congregational Church was toppled. Most of the remaining isolated mature white pines that had been planted in the sandy loam by Henry Thoreau in what had been his beanfield in Walden Woods during his residency on Walden Pond, those that had not burned in that railroad fire in the 1890s, isolated as they had become by fire and standing only in sandy soil, were upset by the winds, which were measured to occasionally gust up to 183 miles per hour — with the exception of one grand old tree which could still be seen from a distance.152

THE BEANFIELD

150. Some 4-foot-long metal tubes jammed into the marshy soil and sediment layers at Succotash Marsh in East Matunuck, Rhode Island (at the west side of the ocean entrance of the Narragansett Bay) by Tom Webb of the Geological Sciences Department of Brown University, have revealed that there has been a series of overwash fans created by storm tidal surges, indicating that seven category-three hurricanes have struck Narragansett lowlands in about the past millennium. The 1st such overwash fan that has been revealed dated to the period 1295-1407CE, the 2nd to the period of roughly the first half of the 15th Century, the 3rd to approximately 1520CE (give or take a few decades), the 4th to the historic storm of the 14th and 15th of August, 1635, the 5th to the historic storm of September 23, 1815, and the 6th to the historic storm of October 4/5, 1869. The 7th such overwash fan obviously dates specifically to this historic storm of September 21, 1938. 151. 15% of the mature trees in New England were destroyed. 152. Professor Walter Roy Harding was said to be able to lead walkers through the woods to the base of this remaining tree. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Securely held in the root system of one of the white pines which had been blown over –although no-one would recognize this until Roland Wells Robbins, an archeologist who lived on the old Cambridge turnpike, would inspect this eroded root system on November 11, 1945– were some of the stones from the foundation of the chimney of Emerson’s (Thoreau’s) shanty:

A tree snapped and fell over the roof of the Concord bank, and one of the Doric pillars was knocked off its HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

front portico.

NEW ENGLAND

The “Texas” House, already damaged by fire, was destroyed during this hurricane.

THOREAU RESIDENCES The Great Elm on Monument Square, the one known about town as the “Whipping Post Elm” despite the fact that it had never been used in such a manner, was severely damaged.

In New Bedford, there was a storm surge of between 12 and 16 feet, and damage amounting to what today would be at least $3.5 billion. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1939

The limnologist Edward S. Deevey, Jr., with the indispensible assistance of his wife Georgiana Baxter Deevey, washed and inspected a sample of the “typical ooze” from the patch of muck at the bottom of Walden’s 102- foot hole, and reported on this residue of dead plankton in “A Re-examination of Thoreau’s Walden” in The Quarterly Review of Biology (17, #1, pages 1-11). EDWARD S. DEEVEY, JR.

Thoreau’s contribution to the limnology of the pond was acknowledged to have been original and genuine.

E.B. White153 drove out Route 62 from Boston to Concord to visit Walden Pond, staying overnight at the Concord Inn for $4.25 (including meals), and then early the next morning walked out Main Street and Thoreau Street and out Route 126 to Walden Pond.

153. Elwyn Brooks White (1899-1985) was the guy who had defined the style for the opening “The Talk of the Town” section of The New Yorker, so beloved by persons awaiting dental attention. At this point in his life, however, he was writing for Harper’s. Eventually he would write a classic children’s story entitled CHARLOTTE’S WEB, which does not take place at a farm near Concord and in which Henry Thoreau is not a character. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

He wrote about this experience, in the form of a letter to Thoreau, in a book of essays titled ONE MAN’S MEAT.

I have always wanted to see Walden Pond. The account which you left of your sojourn there is, you will be amused to learn, a document of increasing pertinence; each year it seems to gain a little headway, as the world loses ground. We may all be transcendental yet, whether we like it or not. As our common complexities increase, any tale of individual simplicity (and yours is the best written and the cockiest) acquires a new fascination; as our goods accumulate, but not our well-being, your report of an existence without material adornment takes on a certain awkward credibility. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

In this essay he played with various of Thoreau’s lines, as when he echoed the opening of the chapter “Solitude” by saying “It was a delicious evening, Henry, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore, if I may coin a phrase.” The pines felled by the hurricane of the previous year were still lying around, and it was from the roots of one of these that he extracted a stone to place upon the growing cairn. In all likelihood, in moving this stone White was unintentionally tampering with the cabin site, for when the archeologist Roland Wells Robbins inspected this eroded root system on November 11, 1945, he realized that some of the stones pulled out of the ground by this ball of roots were in that spot because they had been utilized by Thoreau as the foundation for his chimney: Driving through town, White noticed that Concordians seemed to be as much the victims of their own machinery and their own livelihoods during the first half of the 20th Century as Thoreau had reported them to be during the first half of the 19th. THOREAU’S CAIRN HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1942

Newell Convers Wyeth repainted his “Walden Pond Revisited,” which had been an oil on canvas, on hardboard in tempura and possibly other materials. Both the original painting and this newer one are now at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania:

Mark Sullivan, in his “Meaning in N.C. Wyeth’s Walden Pond Revisited” in the 2004/2005 issue of The Concord Saunterer, strives mightily to position this painting in its 1942 context in the life of the artist and in the life of America. He makes an exhaustive listing of the various images that appear in the painting: Thoreau as per the Maxham Daguerreotype, the beanfield, the shanty, the pond, the railroad, the Unitarian Church steeple, Concord, the bluebirds, the view toward the west, etc., and analyzes each of these images for its mythic content. This file of the Kouroo Contexture (http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/thumbnails/W/NCWyeth.pdf) might be construed as an attempt to produce a strict chronology — which you can hold alongside Sullivan’s excellent article as you study his argument and the conclusions at which he arrives. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

March: US Army Chaplain William Thomas Cummings, MM, a Catholic priest, expressed the attitude that there are no atheists in foxholes. (He ventured no opinion as to the presence of theists in foxholes.)

FOXHOLE (EMPTY)

Edward S. Deevey, Jr.’s “A Re-examination of Thoreau’s Walden” (The Quarterly Review of Biology 17, #1:1-11). READ THIS ARTICLE HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1945

Our national birthday, the 4th of July, Wednesday: In Berlin, Germany in a formal ceremony involving a 48- gun salute, the Stars and Stripes was being hoisted over the Adolf Hitler Barracks (before this year, as everyone present for the ceremony appreciated, it would have been hard to imagine something like this being allowed to happen on the 4th of July). CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY WORLD WAR II

With written permission from the park authorities, Roland Wells Robbins, an amateur archeologist who lived on the old Cambridge turnpike, began to search for the remains of Henry Thoreau’s habitation near the shore of Walden Pond.

In the July issue of The Atlantic Monthly, which was on the newsstand in Concord while Robbins was digging at Walden Pond, we saw another signal event in the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN: Dr. Vannevar Bush, a bomb expert, had finally found a forum for his pioneering article “As We May Think,” the foundation thinking on the MEMEX or memory-expander (an idea for a personal computer of sorts, and on hypertext. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

November 11, Sunday: Roland Wells Robbins discovered, on this day, embedded in the roots of one of the white pines on the bank of Walden Pond that had blown down in the 1938 hurricane, some of the stones of the foundation of Henry Thoreau’s chimney. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

November 12, Monday: One hundred years to the day after Henry Thoreau finished his cabin on Walden Pond, Roland Wells Robbins, an archeologist who lives on the old Cambridge turnpike, began to excavate the site of the cabin. And excavation proved beyond a doubt that Thoreau’s cabin had existed outside the realm of literary imagination. The people who dug into Thoreau’s cellar hole on Walden Pond found hundreds of bent house nails in the soil and sniggered at Thoreau’s remark in WALDEN, made while preparing the interior for plaster, that he “was pleased to be able to send home each nail with a single blow of the hammer.” However, there are three things to take into consideration. First, tacking up interior lathing is not the same as driving large nails into timbers. Second, Thoreau had just helped his father build this large frame house on Texas Lane so he had had lots of practice in driving nails. Third, Thoreau tells us that some of the nails he used were bent nails from the shanty near the railroad tracks, nails already surreptitiously picked over by a helper (WALDEN), so we can expect that some of the remaining nails were so bent as to be unusable, and would have been discarded, and we can expect that some, after straightening on a rock, proved to be so weakened as to be undrivable. In other word, the fact that there were hundreds of bent board nails in the cellar hole tell us precisely nothing about differences between persona and reality. There has never been a case in which literary scholarship has been accomplished by the interrogation of a hole into the ground, except when some inscription or manuscript has been thus recovered — such as for instance the discovery of some manuscripts by Aristotle in a basement in Attica, several centuries after his death. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1947

Initial publication of Roland Wells Robbins’s book about his amateur archeology at Walden Pond:

Roland Wells Robbins. DISCOVERY AT WALDEN. ILLUSTRATED WITH THE EXCLUSIVE PHOTOGRAPHS OF THOREAU’S CHIMNEY FOUNDATION AND OTHER EXCAVATIONS (Folcroft PA: Folcroft Press, 1947, 1970) HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1956

Spring/Summer: Walden Pond got so full that the beach on the east end had to be closed, so an attempt was made to lower the level of the pond by pumping it down, into the Sudbury River, at the rate of 4.000 gallons per minute. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

This attempt was an utter failure, as they would pump all summer long without lowering the level of the pond by so much as an inch. (They should have paid more attention to Henry Thoreau’s hydrography of the region. Or, they should have waited until the dry years of 1963, 1964, 1965, and 1966, which would cause the sandbar at the neck of the cove to extend a full hundred feet, a foot out of the water.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1957

The park commissioners attempted to put in a new parking lot near Walden Pond. In a disaster comparable to the effects of the 1938 hurricane, they chopped a whole bunch of trees out of the Walden Woods but then abandoned their project.

J. Lyndon Shanley’s THE MAKING OF WALDEN (Chicago IL: U of Chicago P), which, according to Robert Milder (REIMAGINING THOREAU, NY: Cambridge UP, 1995, pages 52-53), provides evidence of the power HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

which our critical paradigms possess to force us to misinterpret scholarly evidence: Although Shanley maintained that “the essential nature of [WALDEN] did not change from first to last,” the evidence of the full genetic text assembled by Ronald E. Clapper indicates that the book changed considerably. Published in 1957 during the heyday of New Criticism, Shanley’s THE MAKING OF WALDEN is a testament to the power of critical paradigms to mold the interpretation of scholarly evidence, even (or especially) when the scholar is unaware of being “theoretical” at all. Shanley’s model for the creative process and the text it produces is the neo-Coleridgean organicism advanced by Cleanth Brooks and others as a way of describing and implicitly accounting for the perfect accommodation of part to whole presumed to characterize great works of art, however problematic their origins. “The growth of WALDEN,” Shanley remarks, echoing Coleridge (or possibly M.H. Abrams’s redaction of Coleridge in THE MIRROR AND THE LAMP), “might be compared to that of a living organism that grows continuously and imperceptibly by absorbing new material into its tissue and structure, so that there is no distinguishing between new and old, or first and last.” Disposed by theory to look for and value evidence of unity, Shanley was less prepared to see important discontinuities. Nor was his particular understanding of organic form appropriate to a text that evolved over several years. Abrams himself notes that in ascribing the literary work to a principle of growth inherent in the seed, Coleridge discounts “the participation of consciousness in the creative process” he emphasizes elsewhere in his thought. As a result, he overlooks the latent tension between organicism as a theory of composition and organicism as a principle of aesthetic unity, a tension minimal perhaps in a lyric poem written in hours or days from a single impulse but potentially disruptive in a book spanning most of a decade. “Time had to pass before [Thoreau] could achieve the right focus,” Shanley argues; yet unless one imagines Thoreau working in a psychological and historical vacuum, the time that gave him distance on his subject significantly altered the consciousness which looked upon that subject and the cultural moment which enclosed it. The “right focus” of 1846-1847 was not necessarily the “right focus” of 1852-1854, though (growth being gradual) not even the author might have been able to judge precisely how he and his book had changed. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1965

This was the dryest year of the 20th Century in Massachusetts, and the third of a series of four parched years. There were only 29 inches of precipitation versus a norm of 43 inches. Not since the year 1822 had there been such a water crisis. Walden Pond would stand six feet below its normal levels, and it would be possible to drive two trucks abreast all around the shoreline. From 1966 to 1968 the pond would have to be closed to bathers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1967

EUELL GIBBONS BEACHCOMBER’S HANDBOOK / WITH DRAWINGS BY ROBERT MOWRY (NY: D. McKay Company): I protested that trying to live a beachcomber’s existence around sophisticated Honolulu would rob the experience of meaning. “Meaning!” Jim snorted. Suddenly his face cleared and brightened. He said, “Let’s look at something else for a minute. When Thoreau wanted to live the simple life in a primitive manner, did he pack up and go to the Maine woods or out to the Western wilderness? He did not. He built a shack on the shore of Walden Pond, just a half-hour’s walk from Concord, and only a good day’s walk from the big city of Boston. If he had gone out to the frontier, he would have been living just like everybody else lived out there, not because they wanted to, but because they had to, and the experience would have had very little meaning. If there was anything to prove by living that way out there in the backwoods, the people there had already proved it. To show that living close to nature had meaning and value he had to do it where nobody else was living that way. Do you think that his experience at Walden Pond had no meaning because it was only twenty miles from Boston? That’s what gave it meaning. The only way he could prove that such existence was worthwhile, and even enjoyable, was to live it where he could walk out on it any time he wanted to. That’s the only way he could convince himself, and everybody else, that he was really living such a life from free choice, and not because that’s all there was out there.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1968

George A. Romero’s low-budget epic about the terror we all felt during the McCarthy era, that our friends and neighbors or our own families would turn on us, and accuse us of things against which we would be utterly HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

unable to defend ourselves: HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Massachusetts employees with unimpeachable intentions poisoned Walden Pond with rotenone,154 then sent down skindivers to verify that the pond had indeed been cleansed, then replaced the descendants PICKEREL of the pickerel and perch and pouts and shiners and chivins or roach (Leuciscus pulchellus) and breams and eels and trout (Pomotis obesus) Henry Thoreau knew and for whom he was so loathe to angle, including that tiny striped bream (Pomotis obesus, the Banded Sunfish or Diamond Sunfish or Little Sunfish or Blue-Spotted Sunfish or Diamantbarsch) he supposed he was the first to notice, with useful game species such as smallmouth bass and (John?) brown trout.

September 28, day: Walden Pond was resurveyed by the New England chapter of the Marine Technology Society, and no discrepancies were discovered in the measurements which Henry Thoreau had taken using his primitive instruments for surveying.

154. It’s OK, rotenone isn’t one of those vicious chemicals vicious civilized humans have invented, first using them as poison gases in warfare and then using them to sterilize their fields. It’s a nice natural poison, derived from a plant root, which nice primitive people, whose lives are in touch with nature, have from time immemorial used to stun their fish. So, all you Thoreau-watchers out there who suppose that whatever’s natural is right, and who are forever supposing that Thoreau would agree with your attitude — you can go back to sleep now. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1969

The great drought of 1963-1966 was over. Walden Pond, recovered, was re-opened for bathers. Because of the limited parking in the area, the entire length of Route 126 might be lined on both sides with parked cars, from Route 2 well into Lincoln. It is presumably at this point that the parking lot across from Walden Pond acquired its hot-dog and ice-cream stand with the sign that read “Walden Breezes.” There was a train station/stop at the far end of the pond, and a dance-hall atmosphere. Alcoholic beverages caused numerous problems in the late afternoons and early evenings. On a hot summer weekend day it would require the entire shift of local police officers to deal with the problems. There is an oil painting, a serious work, entitled “Rape at Walden,” and presumably that painting dates to this period.

Edward Rowe Snow’s TRUE TALES AND CURIOUS LEGENDS — DRAMATIC STORIES FROM THE YANKEE PAST was published in New York City (273 pages, illustrated with photos and drawings): America’s first treasure diver, who sought gold at the bottom of Boston Harbor; pirate Thomas Tew, Henry Thoreau, and a treasure chest buried near Walden Pond; the witches of Massachusetts, not one of whom was burned in Salem....

1970

Re-publication of Roland Wells Robbins’s 1947 book about his amateur archeology at Walden Pond:

Roland Wells Robbins. DISCOVERY AT WALDEN. ILLUSTRATED WITH THE EXCLUSIVE PHOTOGRAPHS OF THOREAU’S CHIMNEY FOUNDATION AND OTHER EXCAVATIONS (Folcroft PA: Folcroft Press, 1947, 1970) HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1979

By this point in time the Concord municipal disposal facility hard by Walden Pond was being referred to politely as “the town’s landfill.” Nevertheless, as a Concord family got its trash ready for their Saturday jaunt to this, ahem, landfill, their children were likely to be singing a ditty “To the dump, to the dump, to the dump dump dump” to that catchy dum, dah dah dum, dah dah dum dum dum from the William Tell Overture (that had, for Rossini, signalled the approach of the mighty Swiss army).

(We may wonder what treasures will be excavated from this landfill, after the extermination of the humanoids and the rise of the cockroachoids!)

Fresh out of law school and short on ready cash, Robert Heggestad purchased on the installment plan at a Virginia antique shop a cabinet that turned out to contain some 1,700 plant and invertebrate specimens from the personal collection of Alfred Russel Wallace. Oh, wow! THE SCIENCE OF 1979

Crystal Bennett found in the Amman Citadel a human-altered sea urchin fossil in Islamic (Fatimid) deposits dating from the 10th to 12th centuries. PALEONTOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1984

In this year the water level in Walden Pond was high. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1991

July: Three Russians, Nikita Pokrovsky, Mikhail T. Gusev, and Piotr M. Saveliev, led The Thoreau Society in a nonviolence walk from the plaque marking the site where Henry was put in jail for refusing to fund slavery and the war upon Mexico (Massachusetts has long since torn down this Middlesex County prison that used to stand in the center of Concord, replacing it with several much more commodious facilities just down the road), out to Walden Pond, the site of Thoreau’s experiment in freedom.

One of these Russians, Piotr, had just come from leading a non-violence walk in the heart of Russia, a walk “in search of the green stick” which began in Yasnaya Polyana at the grave of Lev Nikolævich Tolstòy, the great Russian apostle of nonviolence.

I would like to support these three in their effort. I would like to provide them with a literary and theoretical underpinning for their fine use of the corpus of our Henry. We need this because there is a real question whether Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. were as nonviolent as Tolstòy. Gandhi explained forthrightly that for him nonviolence was a mere tactic, not a way of life. He said that Russians did not understand the tactic of non-violence, that had it been the Russians in India rather than the British in India, his people would have been forced to resort to violence. The Reverend King likewise.

One may usefully contrast Gandhi with Saul Alinsky on means and ends. Here is Gandhi:

Where there is no desire for fruit, there is no temptation for untruth or himsa. Take an instance of untruth or violence, and it will be found that at its back is the desire to attain the cherished end.

And here is Alinsky:

The man of action views the issues of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms.... He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1993

“Stolen Thoreau Book Returned to Concord Museum” (a report by David Wood): The Concord Museum recently got back, after a fifty-one-year absence, an important volume of Hindu religious literature from Thoreau’s library, the Sanskrit text of THE BHAGAVAD-GÍTÁ, edited by John Cockburn Thomson and printed in Hertford, England, in 1855. In 1855, the English writer Thomas Cholmondeley (pronounced Chum-ly) sent to his friend Henry Thoreau forty-four volumes of Oriental philosophical and religious writings, which Thoreau called in his journal “a royal gift.” Included in the gift was a new two-volume edition of THE BHAGAVAD-GÍTÁ, a book Thoreau first read in 1846 while living at Walden Pond. Both volumes, the Sanskrit text and the English translation, are inscribed on the flyleaf in Thoreau’s hand “Henry D. Thoreau from Thomas Cholmondeley.” When Thoreau died in 1862, he bequeathed some of the Cholmondeley books to Ralph Waldo Emerson; the rest, including the Bhagavad-Gita, he willed to Bronson Alcott, the pioneering educator and member of the inner circle of the Transcendentalists who is best known as the father of Louisa May Alcott. Alcott noted the bequest on the title page of each volume: “A. Bronson Alcott from H.D. Thoreau.” Alcott in turn gave the volumes to Frank Sanborn, Thoreau’s first biographer. After his death, Sanborn’s books were sold at auction, where Stephen Wakeman bought the Bhagavad-Gita. The two volumes made up lot 1072 of the Stephen Wakeman sale held on 24 April 1924. Boston book dealer Charles Goodspeed bought them and sold them to Edward Kittredge. Kittredge gave them to the Concord Antiquarian Society (now the Concord Museum) on the completion of its new building in 1930. In 1942, the slimmer of the two blue-bound volumes, containing the Sanskrit text, was stolen from the Antiquarian Society. Fifty-one years later, a California collector informed the Museum that he had been offered the book, which, he knew from Walter Harding’s 1983 checklist of the books in Thoreau’s library, had been stolen. The book had apparently entered the library of Philadelphia philanthropist Joshua Bailey in the early 1950s and been sold at auction in the 1970s. The person offering the book for sale had bought it from a San Diego book dealer, who arranged the return of the volume to the Concord Museum. Edward Kittredge, the donor of the volume to the Concord Antiquarian Society, prophesied its return in a letter to Society president Allen French dated 19 February 1942: “I feel sure the book will turn up some day and be restored to its proper place” Such a book cannot escape detection…. A bibliomaniac saw it, could not resist, and, I hope, has kept it safe. In time, therefore, it should be recovered.” The book, along with its companion volume, is on exhibit in the Thoreau Gallery at the Concord Museum, 200 Lexington Road, Concord MA. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

The Eagles album “Common Thread” had raised about $2,000,000 by this point, for The Thoreau Society and for the conservation of Walden Woods. Don Henley would add $1,000,000 of his own money to this pot, to make it possible to buy out the developers and prevent an office park from being put in on Brister’s Hill overlooking Walden Pond. BAKER FARM

Presumably Don and his friends prefer that Walden Woods remain as they are depicted in this painting by HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Cindy Kassab:

The Concord Saunterer: HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

This is the local cottage that would be acquired with Henley funds: HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1994

October 16, Sunday: It was revealed, in the L.A. Times, that Henry Thoreau did not discover Walden Pond.

An anonymous article appeared on the last page of Part II: TRAVELING IN STYLE in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, citing Hawthorne’s AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS as evidence that:

Sometimes the footsteps of the famous overlap. When Henry David Thoreau built his cabin in 1845 at Walden Pond, near Concord, Mass., the pond itself and the surrounding woods were already well-known to his contemporaries. Ralph Waldo Emerson owned the land on which the pond stood, and Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the writer and editor Margaret Fuller and other literary lights of the time frequented the area. ... Hawthorne ... describes a stroll through the autumn-bright woods and a visit to the pond in the early 1840s. The most surprising aspect of the account, which was written in 1843, is the author’s discovery of a small settlement of environmentally sensitive Irish railroad workers living at the edge of the pond.

The reference of course is to October 6, 1843 when Mr. Famous Fictioner went for a hike in the bucolic countryside around and about Concord:

I took a solitary walk to Walden Pond. ... Walden Pond was clear and beautiful, as usual.

In the course of his excursion the gent discovered something of great interest and relevance, that even some Irish day-laborers have a life and loved ones and need to have somewhere for their families to lay their heads. Per the record, he got lost on his way home to the Old Manse:

According to my invariable custom, I mistook my way, and emerging upon a road, I turned my back, instead of my face, toward Concord....

This has now all been replayed for us in this Sunday newspaper. The anonymous article, allegedly or ostensibly dealing with early literary appreciation of the aesthetics of hiking through the woods to “Walden Pond,” faces an advertisement of a cruise from La-La Land to Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlán,155 and Cabo San Lucas on the good ship Nordic Prince, and a cruise to Catalina and then Ensenada on its sister ship Viking Serenade, and headlines the idea that

155. Minus, of course, the Spanish acute accent in the Times newspaper, which does not truck with foreigners or their languages. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Thoreau Didn’t Invent This Celebrated Body of Water. Years Before He Moved There, Another Noted Writer Enjoyed Its Charms.

Following such an egregious headline, the article in the Times inserted the above anonymous remarks in italic type. Well, one shouldn’t come down too hard on the efforts of some newspaper peckerwood, who is obviously merely attempting to draw a paycheck by devising some sort of “news-hook” for a freebie citation from public- domain 19th Century sources, intended merely as another page-filler between the pretty travel ads. –But who, in the first place, is it, specifically, by name, who has had this idea that is here headlined, that Thoreau did “Invent” Walden Pond, that “Celebrated Body of Water”? And why precisely is it, that we should now be temporizing about the First Literary Appreciation of a body of water that has existed in that precise spot since the melting of the buried blocks of ice left behind by the latest glacial era, something like 10,000 years ago? And how is it that this news maven has created the perception that before Thoreau went out to Walden Pond to build his shanty in late March of the following spring season, it was “literary lights of the time” such as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Fuller who had “frequented the area”? Presumably this newsie is unaware that Thoreau was “frequenting” that pond as a little child as much as two decades before Hawthorne had ever even visited Concord:

156.Not, incidentally, “the land on which the pond stood,” a phrase which is quite remarkable not only as an impoverished simplification but also as an impoverished metaphor. And anyway, Emerson did not begin to purchase these woodlots with money from his dead wife’s estate until about a year after this initial visit by Hawthorne, so here again our hapless news flack has gotten his or her chronology back-assward. 157.Not all of which he bothered to pay, by the way. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

A 19th-Century Irish shanty in the Merrimack Valley self-centered Hawthorne– to abandon their habitations and shoulder what of their scant possessions they could carry upon their backs, and trudge on down the American tracks which they had helped to construct and beneath which some of them in fact lay buried — because the heavy work in this area had been completed and they were all by that time without steady work and, if they had elected to remain there in bucolic Walden Woods next to bucolic Walden Pond, behind the Concord Poor Farm to which they were of course not eligible to have recourse, they would have eventually starved or frozen (whichever came first). Perhaps the newshawks are also innocent of an understanding that, as Thoreau most carefully described in WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, one of these shanties Hawthorne saw, the one pertaining to the departing James Collins family, would be purchased by Thoreau for its construction materials to use in the creation of his own anti-desperation shanty, on the hill-edge down on Bay Henry, etc., etc. Such analyses seem entirely to avoid the fact that one object of Thoreau’s constructing this shanty was to demonstrate that it was possible, with care, to construct a healthful and clean and comfortable abode at an expense that anyone might afford, and thus to furnish these impoverished refugees of the potato famine with an inspirational model for imitation.158 And if “the surrounding woods were already well-known to his [Thoreau’s] contemporaries” then we are left with an interesting “how-cum” about Hawthorne getting himself so turned around and lost in these surrounding woods at the end of this quoted piece from his notebooks that, as the newspaper confesses, he had to ask for directions and had to be offered a lift back home to civilization! Just precisely how compatible is that with such terminology as “already well-known”? –Face it, most members of the Brahmin overcaste of “literary lights of the time,” with which Henry Thoreau the offspring of a peasant or tradesfamily had to deal, wouldn’t have been able to find their own asses had they been privileged to hunt with both hands. Over and above all that, we may marvel at the casualness of the

158.In fact Emerson eventually sold Thoreau’s empty shanty to one of them, his drunken Irish gardener, to shelter this man’s family. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

newspaper’s characterization of these desperately poor families of refugees of a foreign famine, forced to attempt to live on this sandy, virtually barren soil among the pines in dark Walden Woods where they could not conceivably have created productive cottage gardens, while their men had labored for like $0.73 the day for 18 hours of exhausting and quite dangerous rude labor, as, now get this, “environmentally sensitive.” Come on, newspaper people, “environmentally sensitive,” that’s for proper WASPs whose lives are not at constant risk, people who suppose that they can save the planet by sorting out their green empties from their clear empties — people like the ones who purchase your cruise tickets on the Viking Serenade and the Nordic Prince and the Love Boat! While one is at this sort of historical redactionism one might as well characterize the nigger-hating, nigger-baiting “Plug Ugly” Irish mob actions of the Boston urban hub of this period as having been, in actuality, mere prototype protests against the wickedness of chattel slavery! As a retort to this sort of newspaper-PC rewriting of history, a retort which might also be able to pass muster as an attempt at good humor, we might mention that among these “environmentally sensitive” Irishmen it was little Johnny of Concord’s Irish Riordan Family who was the most environmentally sensitive of all — because in the New England turn of seasons it was getting cold and his little toes were turning blue.159 If one perceives anything at all about “sensitivity” in the quoted passage from Hawthorne’s literary notebook, it is not sensitivity but insensitivity which one perceives — originally, we can here perceive very starkly that author’s notorious insensitivity to the problems of others, and, now, we are given an opportunity to perceive this news person’s utter insensitivity to Hawthorne’s having chosen to depict the plight of these refugees as merely picturesque.

159. Refer to Thoreau’s poem about Johnny’s plight during the early winter of 1850 and to his carrying a cloak to Johnny in the late winter of 1851-1852: “I found that the shanty was warmed by the simple social relations of the Irish.” Thoreau’s good attitude of compassion and involvement contrasts sufficiently with Hawthorne’s attitude of aestheticism and disengagement to remind one of the following distinction which Simone Weil drew during World War II in her New York notebook:

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1995

For the first time since 1942, Newell Convers Wyeth’s two paintings of “Walden Pond Revisited” were placed on public display. Christine Podmaniczky speculated, in N.C. WYETH, 1925-1935: EXPERIMENT AND INVENTION (Chadds Ford PA: Brandywine River Museum), that “There are real tonics [in the literary productions of Henry Thoreau] to brace a man when he is weary, to cleanse his vision until he sees the heights again — and there are blister and plasters in great variety and of warranted strength to make a man repent the lowness of his aims and vulgarity of his satisfactions.”

Kenneth Walter Cameron’s THE EMERSON TERTIARY BIBLIOGRAPHY WITH RESEARCHER’S INDEX. SUPPLEMENT ONE (Hartford, Connecticut; Box A, Station A, Hartford 06126: Transcendental Books). HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Simon Schama warned us, in LANDSCAPE AND MEMORY (NY: Alfred A. Knopf), that “although we generally think of Henry Thoreau as the guardian of wilderness, one of his most powerful passions was for the local and the intimate.”

Concord by this point was obtaining its domestic water supply from Nagog Pond in Acton.

“HUCKLEBERRIES”: Early in August, in a favorable year, the hills are black with them. At Nagog Pond I have seen a hundred bushels in one field — the bushes drooping over the rocks with the weight of them — and a very handsome sight they are, though you should not pluck one of them. They are of various forms, colors and flavors — some round — some pear-shaped — some glossy black — some dull black, some blue with a tough and thick skin (though they are never of the peculiar light blue of blueberries with a bloom) — some sweeter, some more insipid — etc., etc., more varieties than botanists take notice of. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

All proposals to pipe the water to wash their dishes with from Walden Pond have long since been forgotten:

WALDEN: Now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and the old log canoe, and the dark surrounding woods, are gone, and the villagers, who scarcely know where it lies, instead of going to the pond to bathe or drink, are thinking to bring its water, which should be as sacred as the Ganges at least, to the village in a pipe, to wash their dishes with! –to earn their Walden by the turning of a cock or drawing of a plug! That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore; that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks! Where is the country’s champion, the Moore of Moore Hall, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?

Robert Michael Pyle’s WHERE BIGFOOT WALKS, published by Houghton Mifflin, was touted on its dust jacket as “the sort of book Thoreau would have written if he had discovered giant footprints of an unknown origin in the vicinity of Walden Pond.”160

Thoreau was condemned as a just another self-righteous Calvinist obstructionist, by Alston Chase in his INADARK WOOD: THE FIGHT OVER FORESTS AND THE RISING TYRANNY OF ECOLOGY (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1995, page 412): “[T]he environmental crusade was propelled by unexamined assumptions whose ambiguities went unnoticed.... From preservationists such as Thoreau and Muir it inherited a Calvinistic certainty in the righteousness of its cause which justified moral exclusion of those deemed to be damned.”

Professor Lawrence Buell’s THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION: THOREAU, NATURE WRITING, AND THE FORMATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1995. From pages 70-71:

Even now, in the age of the solidly populated Northeastern corridor, one can live (for a price) within a half-mile of Walden Pond on a plot of no more than a couple of cozily landscaped acres at the end of a rustic cul-de-sac, backing up to a conservancy trail perhaps, and fancy that one is experiencing the “truth” of Thoreau’s assertions, especially at night or in the winter. But even in the best of circumstances such an aesthetic experience required editing out the noise of air traffic or of the cars on nearby Route 2, just as Thoreau largely edited out the pipe smoke and wagon traffic on the Wayland road (now Route 126).

160.Actually, of course, someone had upon one occasion pointed out some giant footprints among the rocks on the shoreline of the ocean to the north of Boston, but Thoreau indulged in talk about our need for the fantastical rather than in any Bigfoot fantasies. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

March 29, day: Walden Pond was photographed from earth orbit: HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1997

May: The magazine Field & Stream indicated that from the point of view of “the sportsman,” a proposed moratorium on fishing at Walden Pond was “Thoreau-ly Ridiculous.”

A WEEK: Who hears the fishes when they cry?

During this year the water level in Walden Pond was high.

An additional 113 acres in the vicinity of Nagog Pond were purchased by Littleton and merged into the 90 acres of protected grounds of the old Nashobah site for Christianizing natives, as town open space.

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

May-August: Aircraft from the USS Constellation’s air wing, Carrier Air Wing Two, patrolled the No-Fly Zone over southern Iraq in support of Operation Southern Watch. The Connie completed its 18th overseas deployment after operating for more than 10 weeks in the Arabian Gulf. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1998

April 19, Sunday: Robert Pinsky reviewed Robert Sullivan’s THE MEADOWLANDS: WILDERNESS ADVENTURES AT THE EDGE OF A CITY (NY: Scribner, 1998) for The New York Times Review of Books. It appears that the agenda for this new book about “Swamp Dreams: A voyage to the toxic yet lovely New Jersey Meadowlands” is characterized in a couplet from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins: “‘And for all this, nature is never spent,’ says Hopkins in the epigraph poem, ‘There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.’” There is a place in the Meadowlands called Walden Swamp, a difficult-to-reach spot that demonstrates how an area can be polluted yet unexplored. Sullivan’s canoe trip to Walden Swamp is arduous. Describing the place, he deploys in especially concentrated form the verbal pattern whereby he describes the detritus of civilization within a vocabulary we associate with “naturalist” writing; correspondingly, he applies an industrial vocabulary to wildlife. Thus, near an egret with feathers “the color of Styrofoam” he notes “waterlogged cigarette butts ... bloated and curled as if impersonating shrimp.” Similarly, he notes “a small school of plastic soda bottles” and mentions “the migratory pattern of the cars.’ Despite the “sewery smell” of the swamp, it is full of muskrats and wildfowl, and the splashes of spawning carp: “Thrashing around in the foul-smelling muck, the carp, each approximately two feet long, did not seem at all out of place beneath the New Jersey Turnpike; the scales on their backs were gross and coarse in the pattern of worn-down radial tires.” This self-conscious little stylistic trick is more than a trick, because it points us toward reality. Living creatures survive in this environment, and the exact habits and adaptations and ills of the egrets, herons, muskrats, carp, catfish, turtles, mosquitoes, phragmites and spartina there deserve close attention precisely because, like it or not, they are part of a matrix that includes our Pepsi bottles, cigarette filters, antifreeze and paradichlorobenzine. The implication is that someone who takes an airplane from Newark to Colorado or Montana, hoping to reproduce the experience of Henry David Thoreau or John Muir, is not doing as Thoreau and Muir did: the restorative venture from ordinary life into the truly unexplored wilderness, Sullivan implies, may require a paradoxical direction. At the end of the 20th century, the unexplored secrets of nature may reside, at least partly, in the ways that nature has dealt with our worst depredations.... Though it would be unforgivable to repose in this unspent quality, taking redemption for granted, it would also be a mistake to neglect the unspent in search only of that theoretical, in a way mushy, ideal, the unspoiled. A few weeks earlier, before this paen to the swamp had been reviewed, there had been the following exchange between two casual WALDEN-readers, on a discussion list on the Internet: > > Has anyone on this list ever had the chance actually > > to go to Walden Pond? HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

> Yes, I was there - once. It would have been in the > late ’60s. All I remember was my disgust, and rising > anger, at the mess it was. I’ve never returned. > Perhaps it is different now. If so, maybe someone > will tell us.

It would seem, on the basis of the foregoing, that we have not been doing an adequate job of depicting Walden Pond as having been part of a degraded landscape since early in the European intrusion. We have not emphasized that the 1st industry in Concord had been an extractive one, raking up the layer of bog limonite under the meadows and transporting it in flat-bottomed boats and carts to local pig iron smelters. The scars of this are described by Henry Thoreau and yet we seldom bring this to the attention of casual readers. Thoreau had been walking through a landscape which was still transected by the marks of heavy carts. The smelting of course had required huge quantities of charcoal, so the charcoal-makers had been stripping the surrounding woodlands very early on of any organic material they could pile into their mounds covered with earth that might transform itself into charcoal over a number of days and nights of attentive tending. The circles of charred earth on which the charcoal-makers had staged that operation were still in evidence in Thoreau’s day, as were the overgrown remains of the smelting facilities. Then the extractive operation and its iron miners had moved on to pristine Acton and, during the race war, the watershed around the pond became the venue for an atrocity. There was a Vietnam-type “free fire zone” law in effect, according to which any native American who was more than one mile distant from his or her habitation of record could with impunity be killed, and on August 6, 1676, after the real danger of the war was quite past, while things were quieting down, three peaceable “Christian Indian” women and three of their children who were living on Flint’s Pond ventured to the other side of Walden Pond, about one and one-half miles from their habitation, out of limits while picking huckleberries, onto Hoar property — so the Concord Militia offed them. Two white Concordians, Stephen and Daniel Goble, would be hanged for this race crime, by the neck until dead, on Boston Common, although for some reason the authorities would decide they did not need to hang Nathaniel Wilder or, of course, the militia lieutenant in charge, Daniel Hoar. In other words, Walden Woods had been polluted not merely by human use of nature but also by human misuse of humans. But how often do we bring this to the attention of WALDEN readers, or of visitors to Walden Woods? The shore of the pond has since been the site of a pottery works, and even today we see in the soil shards and remnants of broken pottery. There must have been quite a bit more broken pottery and suchlike residue lying around to the east of the pond during Thoreau’s time. Thoreau described nothing that was pristine, except his own imagination. Prior to Thoreau’s era, Walden Woods had been where Concord’s black slaves and housemaids lived. Thoreau takes us on a tour of the cellar holes. It is interesting to note that the two books from this period which deal carefully with the ordinary lives and hopes of individual persons of color are WALDEN and, of course, Frederick Douglass’s NARRATIVE of 1845. When the railroad workers came through, they were of course predominantly Irish ecological refugees of the potato famine. Of necessity they lived low. They were in direct and desperate economic competition with Americans of color and thus there was everywhere they went a great deal of race friction: when they began to erect their shanties alongside the path being leveled for the railroad, Concord’s blacks needed to be elsewhere. Thus Concord’s black citizens during Thoreau’s era were moving into the meadowlands along the river, farther from Walden Pond and that RR and its laborers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

With all this use by successional laborers in dire poverty, Walden Woods was never what you would call a clean area, let alone a pristine area, and we notice that, in WALDEN, Thoreau comments about the lingering scent of a horse carcass that had been consigned to a cellar hole.

WALDEN: There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable heath of Nature was my compensation for this.

In addition, the woods beyond Concord’s Alms House and Poor Farm on Walden Street did not have the reputation of being a safe place, and thus a woman during Thoreau’s era would have needed to be very careful to be escorted, and to be out of those dark woods before dusk. That being the history, it is not remarkable that when Concord went to establish its official town dump, it would position that dump across the road from the famous pond, and when it went to establish its trailer court, would position that trailer court directly opposite the pond. So now Walden Pond, with the highest concentration of urine of any pond in New England, is being loved to death. Walden Pond is a good place to go, to experience ambivalence — and yet it was not ambivalence that the casual WALDEN-reader who went there, quoted above, had been prepared by his or her reading of Thoreau’s book and our exegeses of Thoreau’s book to experience.

One of the remarkable things about Thoreau’s WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS is its recuperative agency. It caused people for the first time to want to respect the glacial sandpile known as Walden Woods as a venue (as we, for instance, so earnestly want to be able to respect it as a venue). That, I would offer, is magic, and is a needed magic, and is a magic which we in turn may apply — to places of our choosing, as Robert Sullivan in his THE MEADOWLANDS: WILDERNESS ADVENTURES AT THE EDGE OF A CITY, reviewed above, has so recently applied it to the meadowlands beneath the New Jersey Turnpike. Our project is not about locating an unpolluted place and then going there, tourist-like, but is about creating an unpollutable place by an exercise of the imagination and the will. We have not, however, been doing an adequate job of communicating the nature of our project, as witness the fact that neither the writer Robert Sullivan nor his reviewer Robert Pinsky has “picked up on” the similarity between their agenda and Thoreau’s. That couplet by Hopkins which was used as an epigraph for THE MEADOWLANDS, “And for all this, nature is never spent / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things” is a couplet which might well serve as an epitome of one of the deep insights of WALDEN. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

1999

In this year the water level in Walden Pond was high.

On the back cover of their annual business report for this year, the American General Financial Group of the American General Corporation implied that it had made itself the legal owner of Thoreau’s phrase “Live the live you’ve imagined” — a phrase which, along with other snippets from Thoreau’s writings presented against

pictures of Walden Pond, they had been featuring in their TV advertisements for annuities, etc.

WALDEN: I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

By their use of this Thoreauvian phrase, they appear to be recommending to their potential customers that they save enough money, and invest it wisely enough, that they will be able to retire to someplace nice, eventually. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

June: W. Barksdale Maynard, an adjunct faculty member of the Delaware College of Art and Design, writing in the Art Bulletin for June 1999 on “Thoreau’s House at Walden” (pages 303-325), properly protested that although Henry Thoreau has been “long mythologized as a uniquely brilliant and self-sufficient figure,” literary scholars have been failing to provide the sort of “broadly contextual studies” which are needed if we are to understand how the guy fitted into his locale and his era. An example of this, he offers, is the improper adulation which has been expressed for Thoreau as a seminal architectural thinker who, in the first half of the 19th Century, was allegedly writing already in anticipation of the tradition of Frank Lloyd Wright and other 20th-Century architectural innovators. That sort of adulation is improper because these hagiographers really have not make any serious study of 19th-Century architectural attitudes or of how Thoreau’s own attitudes compared with these. They have not properly contextualized their appreciation. Maynard’s present article is offered in partial correction of this deficiency: it is an attempt at such a contextualization, demonstrating that rather than being a seminal architectural thinker who was already in the 1st half of the 19th Century anticipating such 20th- Century figures as Frank Lloyd Wright, Thoreau was actually a man of his times, with architectural attitudes typical of the most enlightened of his times. The 10 X 15 shanty at Walden Pond, which was framed not with the new “balloon” framing that had been being pioneered in Chicago but with the older style of in-place framing, “has seldom been examined in the full context of contemporary architectural thought.” The shanty structure was not depicted with exact precision by Sophia Thoreau in her famous frontispiece drawing, for

REPLICA OF SHANTY

EMERSON’S SHANTY Henry noted in his copy of the book that “I would suggest a little alteration, chiefly in the door, in the wide projection of the roof at the front; and that the bank more immediately about the house be brought out more distinctly.” Evidently, in accordance with what was considered good architectural design in that period, Thoreau had made the eves of the roof project a bit farther out over the doorway than was depicted by his sister, in order to protect his lintel from falling rain, and evidently the structure was, in accordance with what was then considered the best siting for a country villa, more snugly than would be apparent in Sophia’s drawing under the protection of the slope to the northwest. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

This is what the frame of the shanty would have looked like, standing in the woods before any boards or shingles or lathe and plaster had been applied:

(I would not myself have bothered to demonstrate that the hagiographers who have alleged that Thoreau was not a man of his times, but had already in the 1st half of the 19th Century uniquely been anticipating such 20th- Century architects as Frank Lloyd Wright, had their heads up their collective asses. I would have assumed that everyone who matters already is very well aware that such hagiographers have their heads up their collective asses. I would have automatically assumed that such hagiographers had actually not done their homework, had not done any comparative research whatever into architectural history. I have met some of these hagiographers, and understand where they are coming from. I ignore their work product.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Along the way, W. Barksdale Maynard points out that Roland Wells Robbins found the cabin foundation at 204 feet from the pond edge (when the pond is full enough to form a marsh in Thoreau’s Cove), whereas on Thoreau’s manuscript map (to his eye) the distance to the little marshy protrusion appears to be about 190 feet,161 and whereas, in the text of WALDEN, Thoreau roughly indicated this distance as merely some “half a dozen rods,” which, if it had been intended as a precise measurement rather than a fuzzy approximation, would have been precisely 99 feet and therefore most inaccurate. “About a dozen rods” would be appropriate, if the foundation that Robbins dug into was indeed the foundation of Thoreau’s shanty rather than that of some other unknown previous or subsequent structure that had stood on that small ledge of land. The orientation of the shanty, on Thoreau’s 1846 manuscript survey map of Walden Pond, is at about 145 degrees, its door facing between southeast and south-southeast. The compass declination taken by Robbins from the chimney foundation which he uncovered, when corrected for the known magnetic differences between 1846 and 1946, does corroborate this survey map.

(I find that I am not as amazed as Maynard, that Thoreau’s fuzzy approximation “half a dozen rods” actually was off by about half a dozen rods.)

161. This is now controverted by Professor Donald W. Linebaugh, who tells me that he has overlaid Thoreau’s map over his own GPS map of Robbins’s diggings and has demonstrated that they do match within a foot or two. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

What Maynard intends by all this is that “within the boundaries of the nearly fourteen acres owned by Emerson, [Thoreau] had located his house in precisely the way prescribed by the villa books” that were contemporary in Thoreau’s era, books that he may well have perused either firsthand or secondhand. “Suiting the ideal –and at the same time adapting itself to the somewhat awkward orientation of Emerson’s lot– it stood partway up a moderate rise, was protected to the north and east, and faced southeast, toward a sunny exposure and the view of the lake.” Could this similarity to the recommendations of the existing villa books have been a mere coincidence? “Naturally, some of the similarities between Thoreau’s situation at Walden and the villa books are coincidental, but his own written accounts seem to emphasize these similarities deliberately, as if to signal his awareness of accepted principles concerning the fitness of a country house to its location.”

Building on pastoral conventions popularized by eighteenth-century poetry, these men advocated the habit of retirement and the reform of domestic architecture along the lines of the humble English cottage, a model of integrity, fitness, and the rustic Picturesque.

Maynard provides an interesting commentary on Thoreau’s lengthy architectural remark in WALDEN,

Far from being novel, this is an eloquent summary of philosophies in the villa books, signaling Thoreau’s sympathy for a central goal of those books — to reform architecture in light of “humble log huts and cottages of the poor.” It is in this same spirit of the “indweller” that he attacks the “take up a handful of earth” conceit: “What do you take up a handful of dirt for — Why dont [sic] you paint your house with your blood?” ... [Thoreau] did not pioneer fitness, truth, or the “organic”; all these ideas he borrowed, shaping them to his own purposes and expressing them in bold, sharp words that [Andrew Jackson] Downing, bound by polite conventions, necessarily avoided. Rather than seeing Thoreau as an anomalous visionary, we should appreciate his shrewd grasp and effective rephrasing of the radical architectural ideas current in his day. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

WALDEN: True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. A sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at the cornice, not at the foundation. It was only how to put a core of truth within the ornaments, that every sugar plum in fact might have an almond or caraway seed in it –though I hold that almonds are most wholesome without the sugar,– and not how the inhabitant, the indweller, might build truly within and without, and let the ornaments take care of themselves. What reasonable man ever supposed that ornaments were something outward and in the skin merely, –that the tortoise got his spotted shell, or the shellfish its mother-o’-pearl tints, by such a contract as the inhabitants of Broadway their Trinity Church? But a man has no more to do with the style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that of its shell, nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his standard. The enemy will find it out. He may turn pale when the trial comes. This man seemed to me to lean over the cornice and timidly whisper his half truth to the rude occupants who really knew it better than he. What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is the only builder, – out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appearance; and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life. The most interesting dwellings in this country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque; and equally interesting will be the citizen’s suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining after effect in the style of his dwelling. A great proportion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a September gale would strip them off, like borrowed plumes, without injury to the substantials. They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar. What if an equal ado were made about the ornaments of style in literature, and the architects of our bibles spent as much time about their cornices as the architects of our churches do? So are made the belles-lettres and the beaux-arts and their professors. Much it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what colors are daubed upon his box. It would signify somewhat, if, in any earnest sense, he slanted them and daubed it; but the spirit having departed out of the tenant, it is of a piece with constructing his own coffin, –the architecture of the grave, and “carpenter” is but another name for “coffin-maker.” One man says, in his despair or indifference to life, take up a handful of the earth at your feet, and paint your house that color. Is he thinking of his last and narrow house? Toss up a copper for it as well. What an abundance of leisure he must have! Why do you take up a handful of dirt? Better paint your house your own complexion; let it turn pale or blush for you. An enterprise to improve the style of cottage architecture! When you HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

W. Barksdale Maynard gives Thomas Woodson full credit for having already pointed out to us that there was an obvious and important link yet to be discovered between Thoreau’s excursion to the Berkshires and Catskills during 1844 and his subsequent sojourn on Walden Pond. “His country house ... seems to have been initially suggested by a Catskills ‘mountain house’ he had recently admired,” a house which, when it was looked for, turns out, most sadly, no longer to be in existence. (We can visit the approximate site of this structure — but there is now nothing there.)

At this point Maynard conflates the author Thoreau with the literary protagonist he created in WALDEN, and conflates Thoreau’s stay at Walden Pond with the book by that title: “His Catskills trip has been virtually overlooked as an essential source of inspiration for Walden.” In committing such an elementary error, Maynard more or less places himself in the same boat as the folks who summer after summer wrongheadedly make a pilgrimage to Walden Pond expecting that this venue will inspire them, only to find themselves turned off by its crowds, noise, trash, and natural degradation, and its general local crassness being right next door to a trailer park and a dump and visible from a well-traveled road and from a railroad tracks on which there are frequent trains. Such reader pilgrims depart cursing Concord and/or the 20th Century, and cursing their fellow tourists, but only because they fail to recognize that the book WALDEN wasn’t about finding some really great geographical place to be at, the very best place to be at, better than any other place to have a pic-nic at, a beautiful pristine place that can in itself because of its beauteousness and pristineness provoke endless inspiration, and reporting that place’s location so that everybody and her brother could go there and enjoy it, HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

but rather was about learning how to make the place where one is, wherever one is, whatever its condition, become endlessly inspiring by means of an internal change in one’s personal climate of mentation. Maynard supposes that the book WALDEN was preaching about the external circumstances which Thoreau describes — a mistake which admittedly is an easy one to commit because Thoreau simply does not allow any easy binary opposition between the external and the internal. By making such a conflation, however, Maynard puts Thoreau more than I would consider entirely appropriate in the same bucket with other 19th-Century disaffected individualist types such as Friend Ricketson of New Bedford, folks who equivalently indulged themselves with personal shanties.

In the wake of his Catskills trip of 1844, Maynard alleges,

Thoreau creatively translated wilderness values to a suburban location as part of his desire “to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization.” Following, in part, the lead of the villa books, he published his house design in WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS (1854), urging it as a model both intellectual and practical, stressing its complete opposition to all that was false and pretentious in the architecture of the day and highlighting its affinities to the so-called primitive hut, thereby joining the many contemporaries concerned with the origins of architecture and the promise, by return to “first principles,” of true architectural reform. Viewed in context, the Walden experiment no longer seems, as it is so often portrayed, anomalous, antisocial, and escapist; instead, it may be understood as an intelligent and ambitious attempt to engage in current dialogues on the villa, the rustic, and the reform of domestic architecture, as Thoreau sought to participate in a popular new kind of lifestyle, suburban retirement. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

(While I cannot disagree that the author of WALDEN is often portrayed as “anomalous, antisocial, and escapist,” I do not agree that at this point our scholars need to produce any further refutations of such popular attitudes. Such attitudes are held only by those who have not yet begun their study of this literary figure, and do not needed to be treated with any seriousness.)

However, I have a further caveat: Was that all that Henry David Thoreau’s life and writing supposedly was about? —About a mere seeking to “participate in a popular new kind of lifestyle, suburban retirement,” as indicated by this architectural historian in the summation to his article? If this was indeed so, I suggest, Cynthia should have sent our poet up garret at once: “And don’t you sneak back down here, either, Hank, my boy, until you are ready to be a full human being!” No, this wasn’t so. Thoreau’s life and writing, although it was conducted largely within a town, Concord, which was at that point becoming a bedroom community connected to beautiful downtown business Boston by a commuter rail line, was not about seeking retirement to the suburbs as a popular new kind of lifestyle. Get a clue!

WALDEN: A comfortable house for a rude and hardy race, that lived PEOPLE OF mostly out of doors, was once made here almost entirely of such WALDEN materials as Nature furnished ready to their hands. Gookin, who was superintendent of the Indians subject to the Massachusetts Colony, writing in 1674, says, “The best of their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks of trees, slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up, and made into great flakes, with pressure of weighty timber, when they are green.... The meaner sort are covered with mats which they make of a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and warm, but not so good as the former.... Some I have seen, sixty or a hundred feet long and thirty feet broad.... I have often lodged in their wigwams, and found them as warm as the best English houses.” He adds, that they were commonly carpeted and lined within with well-wrought embroidered mats, and were furnished with various utensils. The Indians had advanced so far as to regulate the effect of the wind by a mat suspended over the hole in the roof and moved by a string. Such a lodge was in the first instance constructed in a day or two at most, and taken down and put up in a few hours; and every family owned one, or its apartment in one.

DANIEL GOOKIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

To encapsule my personal attitude in regard all this, WALDEN didn’t happen to be about living in a house, it happened to be about living:

(WROTE WALDEN) (DID NOT WRITE WALDEN) But don’t bother to consult our architect wannabee’s lengthy 1999 article. Due to the passage of time, you can consult his hot idea at greater length: HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

W. Barksdale Maynard. WALDEN POND: A HISTORY. NY: Oxford UP, 2004

EMERSON’S SHANTY HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

2000

October 12, Thursday: Brad Dean went for an airplane ride. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

WINTER 2001/2002

Winter: The drought of this winter would drop the level of Walden Pond considerably, so that by October 2002 the sandbar at the neck of Bay Henry would begin to reveal itself. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

2002 HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

October: “AUTUMNAL TINTS” was reprinted in The Atlantic Monthly.

The drought of the previous winter had dropped the level of Walden Pond considerably, and the sandbar at the neck of Bay Henry was revealing itself more or less as it had in 1823. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Management acquired Goose Pond in Concord and land to the northeast of it, adding 22 acres to the Walden Pond State Reservation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

2006

March 13, Monday: The ice went on Walden Pond. Although the pond had frozen over in mid-January, this winter the ice had never become thick enough to support anyone’s weight.

In Providence, Rhode Island’s “ProJo,” the Providence Journal, Paul Davis’s series about the days of slavery and the international slave trade continued: Plantations in the North: The Narragansett Planters While Newport merchants profited by trafficking in slaves, colonists across Narragansett Bay found another way to grow rich. They used slaves to grow crops and raise livestock on small plantations throughout South County. For 50 years, Newport’s merchants loaded the surplus farm products onto ships bound for slave plantations in the West Indies where they were traded mostly for sugar and molasses. By 1730, the southern part of Rhode Island was one-third black, nearly all of them slaves. The Narragansett Planters thrived from the early 1700s to just before the American Revolution, which brought trade to a standstill. * * * From his counting house above Newport harbor, Aaron Lopez fretted about the future. The Portuguese immigrant had sold soap in New York, candles in Philadelphia and whale oil in Boston. But a plan to trade goods with England failed because the market was glutted. Now, heavily in debt to an English creditor, Lopez sought a new market. He chose Capt. Benjamin Wright, a savvy New England trader, as his agent in Jamaica. From the tropics, Wright acted as a middleman between Lopez and his new buyers — slave owners too busy making sugar to grow their own food. Don’t worry, Wright told Lopez in 1768. “Yankey Dodle will do verry well here.” Yankee Doodle did. His chief suppliers were just across the Bay. There, amid the rolling hills and fertile fields, hundreds of enslaved Africans worked for a group of wealthy farmers in South Kingstown, North Kingstown, Narragansett, Westerly, Exeter and Charlestown. Relying on slave labor, the so-called Narragansett Planters raised livestock and produced surplus crops and cheese for Newport’s growing sea trade. As the Newport slave merchants prospered in the early 1700s, the Narragansett Planters had success selling their crops and horses to slave plantations in the West Indies. The slaves, brought by Newport merchants from the West Indies and later Africa, cut wheat, picked peas, milked cows, husked corn, cleaned homes and built the waist-high walls that bisected HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

the fields and hemmed them in. So many blacks worked along the coast that, by the mid-1700s, southern Rhode Island boasted the densest slave population in New England after Boston and Newport. While most New England communities were organized in compact villages with small farms, southern Rhode Island evolved into a plantation society. “South County was unique in New England,” says author Christian M. McBurney. Cheap land made it possible, he says. The Narragansett Indians had once ruled the region, but Colonial wars and disease had greatly reduced their number, leaving huge tracts of vacant land up for grabs. A territory dispute between Connecticut and Rhode Island scared off some timid settlers. Investors, many of them from Newport and Portsmouth, “scrambled to the top,” says McBurney. They bought land on credit, sold the unwanted lots to generate cash and started farms. By 1730, the most successful planters —including the Robinson, Hazard, Gardiner, Potter, Niles, Watson, Perry, Brown and Babcock families— owned thousands of acres. In Westerly, Col. Joseph Stanton owned a 5,760-acre estate that stretched more than four miles long. A typical farm had 300 sheep, 100 bulls and cows and 20 horses. “The most considerable farms are in the Narragansett Country,” concluded William Douglas who, in 1753, surveyed the English settlements in North America for the Mother Country. The region’s rich grazing and farm lands benefited from warm winters and “a sea vapour which fertilizeth the soil,” he wrote. The owners sometimes relied on family members and indentured Indians for help, but slaves did most of the work. The largest planters —families like the Robinsons, Updikes and Hazards— owned between 5 and 20 slaves. Although their plantations were much smaller than those in the southern Colonies, an early historian described the area as “a bit of Virginia set down in New England.” Made rich from their exports, the planters built big homes, sent their children to private schools and carved the hillsides into apple orchards and gardens. North Kingstown planter Daniel Updike kept peacocks on his 3,000-acre farm. Framed by deep blue feathers, the exotic peafowl screeched and strutted in their New World home. * * * Rowland Robinson, a third-generation planter and slave holder, was one of the region’s most successful planters. In 1700, his grandfather purchased 700 acres on Boston Neck, “east by the salt water.” By the time he died, the elder Robinson owned 629 sheep, 131 cows and bulls, 64 horses and eight slaves. His son, William, the colony’s lieutenant governor, increased the family fortune by acquiring more land. William, who owned 19 slaves, died in 1751, and Rowland, one of six sons, settled on the family estate. Tall and handsome, with “an imperious carriage,” the younger Robinson rode a black horse and owned more than 1,000 acres and HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

a private wharf. His farm, a mile from the Bay, gave him easy access to the Newport market. During a two-year period in the 1760s, he delivered more than 6,000 pounds of cheese, 100 sheep, 72 bundles of hay, 51 bushels of oats, 30 horses and 10 barrels of skim milk to Aaron Lopez who then shipped them to the West Indies and other markets. Most planters relied on public ferries. They hauled their cheese, beef, sheep and grains along muddy Post Road to South Ferry, the public port that was a vital link between Newport and the Narragansett country, also called King’s County. In 1748, Boston Neck planter John Gardiner urged legislators to expand the busy port at South Ferry. The current boats, he complained, are “crowded with men, women, children” along with “horses, hogs, sheep and cattle to the intolerable inconvenience, annoyance and delay of men and business.” * * * According to one account, Rowland Robinson owned 28 slaves. Tradition says he abandoned the slave trade after a boatload of dejected Africans arrived at his dock. But the region’s planters bought slaves until the American Revolution. Even small farmers, like the Rev. James MacSparran, owned field hands and domestic servants. “My two Negroes are threshing rye,” wrote MacSparran, who owned 100 acres, on July 29, 1751. Their work had a profound effect on the economy, says historian Joanne Pope Melish. Freed from domestic chores, white masters were able to pursue other opportunities, jobs or training. Some learned new trades, became lawyers or judges, or sought public office. In the end, slave labor helped Rhode Island move from a household-based economy to a market-based economy, says Melish. “Slaves contributed to the expansion and diversification of the New England economy,” she says. Plantation owners, merchants, importers and retailers prospered on both sides of the Bay. From his home on Thames Street, Aaron Lopez could walk to his private pier and a warehouse next to the town wharf. In a loft above his office, sail makers stitched sheets of canvas. His Thames Street shop supplied Newport’s residents with everything from Bibles and bottled beer to looking glasses and violins. Lopez, one of the founders of Touro Synagogue, and his father- in-law, Jacob Rivera, owned more than a dozen slaves between them, and sometimes rented them to other merchants. Lopez became Newport’s top taxpayer. He owned or had interest in 30 ships, which sailed to a dozen ports. He wasn’t alone. By 1772, nearly half of Newport’s richest residents had an interest in the slave trade. “The stratification of wealth was astonishing,” says James Garman, a professor at Salve Regina University. “And it had everything to do with the African trade.” Although the Narragansett Planters weren’t as well off as their monied counterparts across the Bay, they took their cues from HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

Newport’s merchants and the English gentry. Their large houses —Hopewell Lodge in Kingston, Fodderring Place at Pt. Judith— often stood more than a mile apart. John Potter’s “Greate House” in Matunuck included elegant woodwork and a carved open arch. Rowland Robinson’s house featured gouged flower designs, classical pilasters and built- in cupboards adorned with the heads of cherubs. The Reverend MacSparran described a typical day of socializing: “I visited George Hazard’s wife, crossed ye Narrow River, went to see Sister Robinson, called at Esq. Mumford’s, got home by moon light and found Billy Gibbs here.” So much company, he confessed, “fatigues me.” Their wealth “brought social pretensions and political influence ... all without parallel in rural Rhode Island and New England,” says McBurney. The elegant lifestyle did not last. During the Revolutionary War, the British burned Newport’s waterfront. Many merchants fled, and trade stalled. Lopez moved to Leicester, Mass. In 1782, he drowned when his horse plunged into a pond. The Narragansett Planters did not recover from the loss of the Newport market. The sons of the big planters chopped the plantations into small farms. Some freed their slaves. But before the Revolution, they lived a carefree life. In the spring, they traveled to Hartford to “luxuriate on bloated salmon.” In the summer, they raced horses on the beach and roasted shellfish, says Wilkins Updike in a history of the Episcopal Church in Narragansett. During corn-husking festivals, men and women gathered for “expensive entertainments” in the large halls of “spacious mansions,” says Updike. The men wore silk stockings, shoes with shiny buckles and “scarlet coats and swords, with laced ruffles over their hands.” Their hair was “turned back from the forehead and curled and frizzled” and “highly powdered.” The women, dressed in brocade and high-heeled shoes, “performed the formal minuet with its thirty-six different positions and changes. These festivities would sometimes continue for days ... These seasons of hilarity and festivity were as gratifying to the slaves as to their masters,” Updike says. In the 18th century, Yankee Doodle did all right. On the farms and on the wharfs he made money — sometimes as a slave owner, sometimes as a slave trader, sometimes as both. HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

2013

December 16, Monday: Professor of Geology Robert M. Thorson of the University of Connecticut , a geo-archaeologist and dinosaur paleontologist and limnologist and glaciologist, and the author of both 2005’s EXPLORING STONE WALLS: A FIELD GUIDE TO NEW ENGLAND’S STONE WALLS and 2009’s BEYOND WALDEN: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF AMERICA’S KETTLE LAKES AND PONDS, and Harvard University Press, released a book that digs down to Walden’s foundations, titled WALDEN’S SHORE: HENRY DAVID THOREAU AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE . Coining a new vocabulary, Professor Thorson categorized Henry Thoreau not as transcendentalist but as “descendentalist”: “Descendentalism— Practice or philosophy of descending toward meaning and truth as simplicity, rather than ascending or transcending toward complexity. Defined in this book to provide a counterpoint to the more familiar word ‘transcendentalism’.”

Professor Thorson characterized Walden Pond as “Lake in Concord, Massachusetts, created by melting of multiple residual blocks of stagnant ice and maintained by the filling of large voids with groundwater beneath a steady state water table. Its western basin was the site of Thoreau’s famous experiment in deliberate living and the inspiration for his book WALDEN.” He described Walden Woods as “Historic woodland surrounding Walden Pond, especially to the north. Generally characterized by irregular topography and sterile soils associated with meltdown collapse of the Walden kame delta.” He described a phenomenon of which few of us are aware, the twice-annual “turnover” of the waters of Walden Pond during its winter freeze-up and then again during its spring ice-melt: “The lake mixes at a critical temperature of approximately 39 degrees Fahrenheit and 4 degrees Centigrade, when water reaches its maximum density.” He pointed out that Walden Pond does flow, albeit at such a slow rate that it is impossible to observe, and calculated that the time an average molecule of water descending upon the surface of the pond in a spring shower spends within the pond itself is nearly five years. During a drenching rain which adds one inch of new water to the top of the pond, since the average porosity of the aquifer of Walden Woods seldom exceeds 20%, it requires the top five inches of sandy loam to store that same quantity of fresh rainfall. “Effectively, the aquifer drainage is never complete.” “This provides yet another mechanism that ensures continuous flow.”

Professor Thorson asserted that it was Earth’s late-stage collision with another protoplanet, resulting in the birth of the moon, that gave it its significant wobble and tilt, changed its rate of spin, tweaked its orbit, and thus created the familiar cycle we now have of the day, the month, and the seasons. He also attributed, however, the longer cycle of the Ice Ages and Interglacials to said late-stage collision with another protoplanet, roughly the size of Mars. Fancy that — Walden Pond as a more recent record of the planet Earth’s late-stage collision with another protoplanet roughly the size of Mars! Fancy that — the existence of Walden Pond as HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

related directly to the origins of the Moon! –Ooh, if Henry were only alive today, he would so eat up this stuff!

The long passage in WALDEN on the shapes of the flowing sand in the deep cut of the railroad in the spring is something that makes the eyes of students glaze over. Where is Thoreau going with this stuff? Yet the passage is key to understanding the book. For Thoreau, there is one way and one way only, that organic life could have come into existence on this planet, and that is that it must have developed out of, arisen from, the inorganic. This message has not been lost on Professor Thorson, for he pointed out again and again in his new book, how Thoreau sought to problematize the barrier between these easy binaries, the animate and the inanimate, the organic and the inorganic, the living and the not alive. For instance, on page 23 he authored the following in regard to “Thoreau’s lifelong love affair with lichens”: They hug the earth tighter than any other multicellular life form, living in the nick of space between the gaseous veil of Earth’s atmosphere and the mineral chemistry of its crust. Lichens –whether on bedrock ledges, erratic boulders, or Concord's famed fieldstone walls– symbolized more plainly to him than anything else the dependence of organic life on inorganic mineral substance.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Walden Pond HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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 2014. 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: March 4, 2014 HDT WHAT? INDEX

TRAVELING MUCH IN CONCORD MA

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 MA

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.

REPLICA OF CABIN