Henry David Thoreau's Railroad

Henry David Thoreau’s Railroad By Harry Chase Only a handful of American literary notables–Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, Thomas Wolfe, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carl Sandburg, perhaps others--have written of railroads, trains or locomotives. Bret Harte and John Greenleaf Whittier penned poems about railroad wrecks. Henry David Thoreau, the Concord, Massachusetts, transcendentalist and naturalist, far outdid all these authors combined. In his two-million-word journal, which covers the years 1838 to 1861, he writes about railroads, mostly the Fitchburg Railroad, its engines and trains, right-of- way, employees and much more, on 393 occasions. 1 In his 1854 masterwork, Walden, Thoreau devotes 11 pages of Chapter IV, “Sounds,” to the Fitchburg’s operations and workmen. E.W. Teale, in his introduction to the chapter, comments, “I cannot think of another stretch of track so celebrated in literature.”2 The Fitchburg Railroad began train service to Concord, 20 miles northwest of Boston, in 1844 when Thoreau was 26, a year before he moved into his world-famous cabin at Walden Pond; and to Fitchburg, 30 miles beyond Concord, the following year.3 The railroad, later the Boston & Maine, now the Fitchburg Line commuter railroad of Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, enters Concord from the town of Lincoln on the southeast and after less than two miles takes a sweeping left-hand curve past Concord depot (on what now is called Thoreau Street) and exits westward into Acton. About a mile and a half before reaching the depot, close to the Lincoln town line but in Concord, the tracks touch the southwest shore of Walden Pond.4 It was there that passing trains were visible to Henry Thoreau from a window of the cabin, in which he lived two years, two months and two days. We know the railroad was double-tracked because Thoreau tells us so. On November 28, 1850, after noticing that Johnny Riordan, a bright four-year-old Irish schoolboy, has learned to walk the railroad against the current of traffic, Thoreau puts these words into the lad’s mouth: And if I meet the cars, I get on the other track, And then I know whatever comes I needn’t look back. 5 Concord was then a village of only 2,000 souls, but what a village!–Revolutionary War battleground, home of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Amos Bronson Alcott whose daughter Louisa May wrote the novel Little Women, poet William Ellery Channing and philanthropist and biographer Franklin Sanborn.6 And Henry David Thoreau, born 1817 in Concord as David Henry but when grown changed the order of his names.7 As did his family, neighbors and friends, he pronounced his last name like the word “thorough.8 So frequently did he walk the tracks from the cabin to his parents’ home near the depot or to Concord village, about a mile and three quarters by either route, that “the men on the freight trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to me as to an old acquaintance, they pass me so often, and apparently they take me for an employee; and so I am. I too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth.”9 Many people assume that nature-boy Thoreau deplored the railroad’s intrusion on Concord’s bucolic tranquility. If so, he seldom shows it. He felt that with the steam locomotive “the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it,”10 and adds, “Have not men improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was invented? Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than they did in the stage-office? There is something electrifying in the atmosphere of the former place. I have been astonished at the miracles it has wrought, that some of my neighbors, who, I should have prophesied, once for all, would never get to Boston by so prompt a conveyance, are on hand when the bell rings. To do things ‘railroad fashion’ is now the byword...11 In June 1850 he expands on this subject. “The cars come and go with such regularity and precision, and the whistle and rumble are heard so far, that town clocks and family clocks are already half dispensed with, and it is easy to foresee that one extensive well-conducted and orderly institution like a railroad will keep time and order for a whole country. The startings and arrivals of the cars are the epochs in a village day.”12 As for the railroad’s impact on his fondness for hiking Concord’s highways and byways, he writes, “The railroad is perhaps our pleasantest and wildest road. It only makes deep cuts into and through the hills. On it are no houses nor foot travellers. The travel on it does not disturb me. The woods are allowed to hang over it. Though straight, [it] is wild in its accompaniments. All is raw edges.”13 Interesting words from the pen of a nineteenth-century transcendental naturalist! On August 10, 1854, the day after Walden was published, Thoreau notes only that he was up at 4:30 a.m., walking the railroad.14 The railroad’s right-of-way and tracks The Fitchburg Railroad’s causeway and Deep Cut are more often mentioned in his journal than any other feature on the railroad. Both are situated between Walden Pond and Concord depot. The half-mile-long causeway lies northwesterly of the Cut and was built (Thoreau says on February 14, 1856) “some twelve years ago” with sand from Deep Cut.15 The causeway is one of the first and is the last of the railroad subjects Thoreau writes about in his journal. He first mentions it in 1850, a hundred years before my initial visit to the spot, when describing a not-uncommon occurrence during railroad construction. He tells of the “meadow through which the Fitchburg Railroad passes by a very high causeway, which required many a carload of sand, where the laborers for a long time seemed to make no progress, for the sand settled so much in the night that by morning they were where they were the day before, and finally the weight of the sand forced upward the adjacent crust of the meadow with the trees on it many feet, and cracked it for some rods around.”16 Probably no railroad cut in history received more literary attention than Thoreau gives to Deep Cut, which thanks to him has become known around the world. In October 1950, when I first visited Walden Pond, the tracks were accessible from the State Park.17 I climbed the sloping bank and walked a quarter mile along Boston & Maine’s well- maintained roadbed for a close look at the Cut, which turned out to be neither as deep nor as impressive as I had expected. By the time of my next visit a fence blocked access to the tracks.18 Thoreau on his walks often chatted with the Concord section men, most of whom were immigrant Irish, and observes in his journal that railroad men “are not like other laborers.”19 To his ears, their daily work made music. “[T]he sound made by the railroad men hammering a rail is uncommonly musical.”20 And, “The sound of the laborers’ striking the iron rails of the railroad with their sledges . resounds, as it were, from the hazy sky as a roof ...”21 He notices that they “were cutting willows there [along the causeway] to set on the sides of the Deep Cut, to prevent the gullying . .”22 The chestnut ties used by the Fitchburg Railroad quite naturally interested the woodsman in Thoreau. “It is well known that the chestnut timber of this vicinity has rapidly disappeared within fifteen years, having been used for railroad sleepers, for [fence] rails, and for planks, so that there is danger that this part of our forest will become extinct.”23 On April 1, 1852, he writes, “The railroad men have dug around the sleepers that the sun may dry them.”24 And on November 21, 1860: “Got a section to-day of a white cedar railroad sleeper which I was told came from the eastward and was brought up from Charlestown.” He counted about 250 annual growth rings and measured the diameter as 16-1/2 inches. “This is the oldest, as well as slowest-growing, tree that I have counted the rings of. I see other sleepers nearly as old.”25 Untreated wooden ties lasted only five or six years before needing to be replaced because of rot or splitting. Even then they found a use. Schoolboy Johnny’s father, Patrick Riordan, “buys the old railroad sleepers at three dollars a hundred, but they are much decayed and full of sand.”26 Engine facilities at Concord Concord in Thoreau’s day had a combined passenger and freight depot, though he writes little about it. Nearby were an engine house and turntable, which typically he mentions only because they provided him with nature observations. “Found a hangbird’s [oriole’s] nest fallen from the ivy maple. Compounded wholly of that thread they wipe the locomotives with [cotton waste (editors’ note)] and one real thread, all as it were woven into a perfect bag.”27 “As I went by the engine-house, I saw great icicles four feet long hanging from the eastern eaves . .”28 “In the large circular hole or cellar at the turntable on the railroad, which they are now repairing, I saw a star-nosed mole endeavoring in vain to bury himself in the sandy and gravelly bottom.”29 The adjacent wood-yard with its two sheds and their stacks of pitch pine locomotive fuel interested him more.

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