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, , 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 , 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 , 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 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. The south woodshed was “a mere roof open at the side, under which several men were at that time employed sawing wood with a horse-power,”30 reducing four-foot cordwood sticks into shorter lengths for the engine fireboxes. The “horse-power,” which was the genuine article, disturbed Thoreau. “Saw to-night Lewis the blind man’s horse, which works on the sawing-machine at the depot, now let out to graze along the road, but at each step he lifts his hind legs convulsively high from the ground, as if the whole earth were a treadmill continually slipping away from under him while he climbed its convex surface. It was painful to witness . . . .”31 At that time, Indians often came from Maine in hopes of finding work or to sell baskets they wove from strips of wood, and camped wherever they could. In the frigid early winter of 1856 Thoreau notes, “The wind is so cold and strong that the Indians that are encamped in three wigwams of cloth in the railroad wood-yard have all moved into two and closed them up tight.”32 The engine tenders got their water from what Thoreau called “Boiling Spring,” which “is turned into a tank for the Iron Horse to drink of . . . .”33 It “burst out part way up a hillside, a long-existing spring much deepened and enlarged.”34 The railroad’s use of the spring and the nearby pitch pine woodland made Thoreau unhappy. On June 17, 1853, he gripes, “The devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending whinney is heard throughout the town, has defiled the Boiling Spring with his feet and drunk it up, and browsed off all the woods around the pond.”35

The “murderous Lincoln Bridge” Many New England towns, including mine, had bridges over the tracks that were built when clearances were tighter than now. These low overpasses even into the twentieth century reaped a small but steady harvest of unsuspecting hoboes who were knocked off the tops of night freight trains, their bodies, usually with shattered skulls, being found next day beside the track. “A man killed at the fatal Lincoln Bridge died in the village the other night. The only words he uttered while he lingered in his delirium were ‘All right,’ probably the last he had uttered before he was struck.”36 “Yesterday I walked under the murderous Lincoln Bridge, where at least ten men have been swept dead from the cars within as many years. . . . We have another bridge of exactly the same character on the other side of the town, which has killed one, at least, to my knowledge.”

Thoreau believed that all the casualties were Fitchburg Railroad employees, but it would seem to me that brakemen, who most often walked the car tops, should have known the location of all low bridges on the road. He wanted a law requiring such overpasses to be raised four feet.37

Passenger trains and an escaped slave After my 1950 visit to Walden Pond I noted in my own journal that “the railroad embankment at the far end of the bright blue lake is clearly visible from the north and east shores. Early in the afternoon I heard a train coming and saw a little B&M 4-4-0 and two red open- vestibule coaches hurry northward.” In 1851 five daily Boston to Fitchburg passenger trains and four from Fitchburg to Boston stopped at Concord depot. Trains leaving Boston at 6:35 and 7:30 a.m. and 12:15, 2:00 and 4:00 p.m. were scheduled to stop at Concord at 7:25 and 8:18 a.m. and 1:07, 4:52 and 6:50 p.m.; the last run ended at Concord. Fare between Boston and Concord was 55 cents, a half day’s pay for a working man. A train originating in Concord left for Boston at 7:00 a.m., reaching Boston at 8:05. Trains from Fitchburg to Boston stopped at Concord at 8:45 a.m. 1:08 p.m. and 6:10 p.m. and got to the state capital at 9:40, 2:00 and 7:05. The fastest of these, the 1:08 out of Concord, made the 20 miles in 52 minutes including a stop at Waltham. A through train leaving Fitchburg at 4:50 p.m. reached Boston at 6:30, passing non-stop through Concord and other intermediate stations.38 A February 1857 timetable lists three Fitchburg-bound “accommodation” trains that stopped at all intermediate stations, scheduled at Concord at 8:25 a.m., 12 noon and 5:00 p.m.; and at 6:30 the train arrived that terminated in Concord. Boston-bound trains left Concord at 7:00 a.m. (originating in Concord) and accommodation trains at 8:30 a.m. and 1:30 and 6:47 p.m. Fares between Concord and Boston were still 55 cents.39 Although Thoreau, even when living at Walden Pond, often used “the cars” to visit the library of his alma mater Harvard College in Cambridge, or went to Boston, he also made longer trips to Maine (where he saw a novel sight, “a hill where they were using a steam-shovel at the new railroad cut . . . .”),40 , Rhode Island, City and Philadelphia. The latter two places he reached via Worcester and Hartford. Concord’s passenger trains he viewed through transcendental eyes. “I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. Their train of clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear.”41 “Far through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns, where once only the hunter penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart these bright saloons without the knowledge of their inhabitants, this moment stopping at some brilliant station-house in town or city, where a social crowd is gathered, the next in the Dismal Swamp, scaring the owl and fox.”42 On a nocturnal walk through new-fallen snow under a nearly-full moon, February 3, 1852, Thoreau sees that the “reflector [headlight] of the cars , as I stand over the Deep Cut, makes a large and dazzling light in this air. . . . and now whizzes the boiling, sizzling kettle by me, in which the passengers make me think of potatoes, which a fork would show to be done by this time. The steam is denser for the cold, and more white; like the purest downy clouds in the summer sky, its volumes roll up between me and the moon, and far behind, when the cars are a mile off, it still goes shading the fields with its wreaths,–the breath of the panting traveller.”43 Slavery in the United States was not abolished until after Thoreau’s death in 1862. Many black men and women who escaped from Southern servitude traveled the so-called “Underground Railroad” by which anti-slavery activists forwarded them from one safe haven to another until they reached the North or Canada. But some rode real trains to freedom. Henry Thoreau was an ardent abolitionist and in October 1851, risking his own freedom, helped a runaway slave avoid arrest. “Just put a fugitive slave, who has taken the name Henry Williams, into the cars for Canada. He escaped from Stafford County, Virginia, to Boston last October . . . .” The man had learned that his master would sell him his freedom for $600, but even with help could raise only $500. The iniquitous Fugitive Slave Act passed by Congress in 1850 required even private citizens to assist police in capturing runaway slaves, who were then returned to their “owners.” The law jailed those who helped slaves escape. Informed that city cops were hot on his trail, Williams “fled to Concord last night on foot” and lodged in the Thoreau family home “till funds could be collected to forward him. Intended to dispatch him at noon through to Burlington [Vermont], but when I went to buy his ticket, saw one at the depot who looked and behaved so much like a Boston policeman that I did not venture that time.”44 Harding45 says Thoreau put Williams on the 5 p.m. train instead and saw him safely on his way. Escaping slaves not only guided themselves by the North Star, they often followed railroads or telegraph lines on their flight to freedom.

Freight trains and their cargos Thoreau was an early riser and often on his pre-dawn rambles met the morning freight train. Typical is the following: “Down the railroad before sunrise..A freight train in the Deep Cut . . . . When the vapor from the engine rose above the woods, the level rays of the rising sun fell on it. It presented the same redness–morning red,–inclining to saffron, which the clouds in the eastern sky do.”46 Thoreau was fascinated by the great variety of loads carried by the freight trains which, in the East Coast tradition of building railroads from seaports into the rural interior, hauled raw materials from country to city and finished products in the reverse direction. “The cattle-train came down last night from Vermont with snow nearly a foot thick upon it.”47 “Saw a load of rock [sugar] maples on a car from the country.”48 Thoreau’s curiosity led him to visit a train stopped on a Concord siding. “Measured a stick of round timber, probably white pine, on the cars this afternoon,–ninety-five feet long, nine and ten twelfths in circumference at butt and six and two twelfths in circumference at small end, quite straight. From Vermont.”49 “I was just roused from my writing by the engine’s whistle, and looking out, saw shooting through the town two enormous pine sticks stripped of their bark, from the Northwest [of New England] and going to Portsmouth [] Navy Yard, they say,” probably for ships’ masts.50 Another passing freight train “had in front a dozen dirt-cars [from] somewhere up country, laden apparently with some kind of earth (or clay?) . . . .”51 He also saw “some men unloading molasses-hogsheads from a truck at the depot the other day, rolling them up an inclined plane.”52 53 In Walden Thoreau lists many other commodities he’d seen pass through Concord: groceries, chairs, cranberries and huckleberries, cotton bales, woven cloth, silk, woollens, books, palm leaves for making summer hats, Manila hemp and cocoanut husks, old junk, gunny bags, scrap iron and rusty nails, paper, hogsheads of brandy, torn sails, Maine lumber, baled rags, linen, lime, salt fish, Spanish hides with the tails still attached, sheep and even their shepherds. In one journal entry he tells us what the railroad did not haul. “It is interesting to see [wagon] loads of hay coming down from the country nowadays,–within a week. . . . They do not carry hay by railroad yet.”54 Occasionally live “freight” escaped from the cars. A woodchopper told Thoreau he “heard a cock crow this morning, a wild one, in the woods. It seems a dozen fowls (chickens) were lost out of the cars here a fortnight ago. Poland has caught some, and they have one at the [railroad] shanty, but this cock, at least, is still abroad and can’t be caught.”55 “About the first of November a wild pig from the West, said to weigh three hundred pounds, jumped out of a car at the depot and made for the woods. The owner had to give up the chase at once, not to lose his passage [on the train], while some railroad employees pursued the pig even into the woods a mile and a half off, but there the pig turned and pursued them so resolutely that they ran for their lives and one climbed a tree.” At last report the pig had not been captured.56 Even the lowly Concord work train caught Henry’s attention. At 5 a.m., in a fog, “The echo of the railroad whistle is heard the horizon round; the gravel train is starting out.”57 With nature uppermost in his mind, Thoreau on September 2, 1851, asks himself, as have more recent naturalists and botanists, if the seeds of wild plants might not “be distributed from Boston on the rays of the railroads, the seeds mixing with the grains and all kinds of dirt and being blown from the passing freight cars?”58

Fires set by engines There’s no question that the spark arresters applied, if they were, to smokestacks of early wood-burning locomotives were ineffective. Visitors from countries where engines burned coke or coal were fascinated by the way American engines vomited firebrands. Charles Dickens in 1842 rode a night train of the Boston & Lowell Railroad and wrote of “travelling in a whirlwind of bright sparks, which showered around us like a storm of fiery snow.”59 A spark-spewing Boston & Providence engine even set its own cars afire. Judging by Thoreau’s notes, Concord appears to have escaped the worst of these blazes. “Observed a fire yesterday on the railroad,–Emerson’s Island that was. The leaves are dry enough to burn . . . .”60 Four years later: “Already I hear of a small fire in the woods in Emerson’s lot, set by the engines . . . .”61 “I miss very much the early willows along the railroad, which have been cut down the past winter to prevent catching fire from the engines and spreading to the woods. And hence my neighbor the switch-man has bean-poles to sell.”62 “The grass is so dry and withered that it caught fire from the locomotive four or five days ago near the Widow Hosmer’s, and the fire ran over forty or fifty rods [750 feet more or less], threatening the house,–grass that should have afforded some pasturage.”63

The deadly heat of summer The same New England weather extremes that hamper today’s train operations and bedevil signal and maintenance-of-way employees, wrought varying degrees of havoc in Thoreau’s time. New Englanders still suffer in summer from sweaty heat and humidity, a condition especially tough on section men laboring in the reflector-oven of ballast, ties and rails. “It was so hot summer before last [1850] that the Irish laborers on the railroad worked by night instead of day for a while, several of them having been killed by the heat and [drinking] cold water.”64 “The heat to-day (as yesterday) is furnace-like. . . . The railroad men cannot work in the Deep Cut, but have come out onto the causeway, where there is a circulation of air. They tell with a shudder of the heat reflected from the rails.”65 Not satisfied by chatting with the track-repairers, Thoreau toted a thermometer to Deep Cut. “Air out of doors, generally, 86 degrees F. On the sand between the rails in the Deep Cut, 103 degrees.”66

The opposite extreme–cold and snow Despite our Currier and Ives mental images of nineteenth-century New England winters, eastern Massachusetts in Thoreau’s time received only slightly more snow than it gets today.67 But then as now, exceptional snowfalls sometimes occurred and Thoreau reported them. On December 23, 1850, he writes, “Here is an old-fashioned snow-storm. There is not much passing on railroads. The engineer says it is three feet deep above.”68 Three years later: “The snow is mid-leg deep, while drifts as high as one’s head are heaped against the houses and fences, and here and there range across the street like snowy mountains. The cars are nowhere. . . . At the post-office they ask each traveller news of the cars, –‘Is there any train up or down?’–or how deep the snow is on a level.”69 “On north side the railroad, above the red house crossing, the cars have cut through a drift about a quarter of a mile long and seven to nine feet high, straight up and down.”70 “It is invariably the east track on the railroad causeway which has the least snow on it. . . . The snow-plow yesterday cast the snow six feet one side the edge of the cars, and it fell thick and rich, evenly broken like well-plowed land. It lies like a rich tilth [cultivated or tilled ground] in the sun, with its glowing cottony-white edges and its shadowy hollows.”71 “The track-repairers have shovelled four little paths by the side of the rails, all the way from the depot to Walden.”72 But within a week, “For a couple of days the cars have been much delayed by the snow, and it is now drifting somewhat . . . spoiling the labor of the track-repairers, gradually burying the rails.”73 “Yesterday’s snow drifting. No cars from above or below till 1 P. M.” Next day Thoreau sallied forth with his home-made yardstick and measured an average of 16 inches of snow near the railroad, the top two inches being what had drifted. Thus we know how much snow it took to delay the trains.74 “A driving northeast snow-storm yesterday and last night, and today the drifts are high over the fences and the trains stopped. The Boston train due at 8.30 A. M. did not reach here till five this afternoon.”75 Ice on the rails would cause the driving wheels of the engines to spin. "The ground is encased in this thin black glaze . . . and the iron rails and the telegraph wire."76 "There is a fine mizzling rain, which . . . freezes on the railroad rails when it does not on the wooden sleepers.77

Floating ice cakes threaten a bridge Here Thoreau tells us of the endangered railroad bridge over Assabet River, not quite two miles west of Concord depot. “Great cakes of ice are wedged against the railroad bridge . . . , and still threaten its existence. They are about twenty feet in diameter and some twenty inches thick, of greenish ice, more or less tilted up and commonly another, if not two more, forced directly underneath the first by the current. They stretch quite across the river, and, being partly tilted up against the spiles of the bridge, exert a tremendous power upon it. They form a dam between and over which the water falls, so that it is fully ten inches higher on the upper side of the bridge than on the lower. . . . The track repairers have been at work here all day, protecting the bridge. They have a man on the ice with a rope around his body,–the other end in their hands,–who is cracking off the corners of the ice with a crowbar. One great cake, as much as a dozen rods [about 200 feet] long, is slowly whirling round just above the bridge, and from time to time an end is borne against the ice which lies against the bridge. The workmen say that they had cleared the stream here before dinner [lunch], and all this had collected since. (Now 3 P. M.) If Derby’s Bridge [the highway bridge over Assabet River just south of the railroad] should yield to the ice which lies against it, this would surely be swept off. They say that three (?) years ago the whole east end of the bridge was moved some six inches, rails and all.”78

A spring flood In Concord the Assabet and Sudbury rivers join to form Concord River, which flows north toward the Merrimac. The broad meadows bordering those streams are subject to extensive flooding, which I've seen on spring visits there. “All sorts of lumber is afloat. Rails, planks, and timber, etc., which the unthrifty failed to secure now change hands. Much railroad lumber is floated off. While one end rests on the land, it is the railroad’s, but as soon as it is afloat it is made the property of him who saves it. I see some poor neighbors as earnest as the railroad employees are negligent, to secure it.”79

The telegraph comes to Concord In 1851 the Vermont & Boston Telegraph Co., incorporated in 1848, completed its 289- mile line from Boston through Concord to Burlington. It cost $212 per mile, used no. 8 Swedish iron wire fastened to glass insulators on oak, chestnut or cedar poles located 200 feet apart and was powered by ranks of batteries.80 The telegraph company was a private firm unrelated to the Fitchburg Railroad, though they used its right-of-way for their pole line and maintained a sending and receiving office in Concord depot, common practice in New England at the time. Thoreau, himself a practical workman, was underwhelmed by the company’s employees. “I find three or four ordinary laborers to-day putting up the necessary outdoor fixtures for a magnetic telegraph from Boston to Burlington. They carry along a basket of simple instruments, like travelling tinkers, and, with a little rude soldering, and twisting, and straightening of wires, the work is done. It is a work which seems to allow for the greatest latitude of ignorance and bungling, and as if you might set your hired man with the poorest head and hands to building a magnetic telegraph. . . . Somebody had told them what he wanted, and sent them forth with a coil of wire to make a magnetic telegraph.”81

Thoreau's death and his last journal entry Henry David Thoreau, after spending the bitterly cold day of December 3, 1860, counting annual growth rings on tree stumps atop Fairhaven Hill in Concord, came down with a bad cold that turned to bronchitis and then tuberculosis. Following a long decline, he died at his Concord home May 6, 1862.82 He was 44 years old. His last journal entry, written while suffering from his final illness but still capable of limited outdoor walking, reveals a more scientific observer than before. Of the patterns of fallen snow on the causeway he writes in almost geological detail: “After a violent easterly storm in the night, which clears up at noon (November 3, 1861), I notice that the surface of the railroad causeway, composed of gravel, is singularly marked, as if stratified like some slate rocks, on their edges, so that I can tell within a small fraction of a degree from which quarter the rain came. These lines, as it were of stratification, are perfectly parallel, and straight as a ruler diagonally across the flat surface of the causeway for its whole length. Behind each little pebble, as a protecting boulder, an eighth or a tenth of an inch in diameter, extends northwest a ridge of sand an inch or more, which it has protected from being washed away, while the heavy drops driven almost horizontally have washed out a furrow on each side, and on all sides are these ridges, half an inch apart and perfectly parallel. “All this is perfectly distinct to an observant eye, and yet could easily pass unnoticed by most. Thus each wind is self-registering.”83

The heroic snowplow crewmen I reserved this quote from Walden until the end because as one whose father, a New Haven Railroad signalman, for 41 years labored day and night through New England snowstorms, I react with emotion to Henry David Thoreau’s great tribute to railroaders. In it he equates the heroism of those who man the Concord snowplow with that of United States troops who braved musket and cannon fire in an 1847 Mexican War battle. “I see these men every day go about their business with more or less courage and content, doing more even than they suspect, and perchance better employed than they could have consciously devised. I am less affected by their heroism who stood up for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the steady and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snow- plow for their winter quarters; who have not merely the three-o’-clock-in-the-morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or when the sinews of their iron steed are frozen. On this morning of the Great Snow, perchance, which is still raging and chilling men’s blood, I hear the muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilled breath, which announces that the cars are coming, without long delay, notwithstanding the veto of a New England northeast snow-storm, and I behold the plowmen covered with snow and rime, their heads peering above the mould-board . . . .”84

Notes

1 Thoreau, Henry D., Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Ticknor and Fields, Boston, 1854, repub. as Walden or Life in the Woods and Illustrated with 142 Photographs, an Introduction and Interpretive Comments by Edwin Way Teale, Dodd, Meade Co., New York, 1946, pp. 119-129. 2 Ibid, p.114. 3 Barrett, Richard C., Boston’s Depots and Terminals, a History of Boston’s Downtown and Back Bay

Railroad Stations from 1834 to Today, Railroad Research Publications, Rochester, N.Y., 1996: p. 1. 4 Thoreau, Henry D., The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1906, repub., ed. by Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1962, (Map of Concord, Mass., Herbert W. Gleason, pp. 1754-1755.) 5 Ibid., v. 2, p. 118. 6 Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration for Massachusetts, Massachusetts, a Guide to its Places and People, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1937, p. 213. 7 Harding, Walter, The Days of Henry Thoreau, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1967, p. 54. 8 Long-time residents of Concord today still use that pronunciation, undoubtedly handed down from forebears who knew the Thoreau family. 9 Thoreau. Walden, p. 119. “Track-repairer” was Thoreau’s term for what we call a section man. 10 Ibid., p. 120. 11 Ibid., p. 123. 12 Thoreau, Journal, v. 2, p. 31, June 1850. 13 Ibid., v. 3, p. 342, Mar. 9, 1852. 14 Ibid., v. 6, p. 430, Aug. 10, 1854.

15 Ibid., v. 8, pp. 180-181. 16 Ibid., v. 2, p. 13. This kind of subsidence occurred during the building of other New England railroads, including the Boston & Providence, on which the roadbed sank 40 feet into a swamp along with the road’s first locomotive. Standard practice at the time was to build a fill 10 feet higher than its final level to allow for settlement. 17 Two photographs by Teale in Thoreau, Walden, p. 128, show a steam train passing Walden Pond’s southwest end, and the railroad embankment there. 18 Another photo by Teale [Ibid., p. 127] looks southeasterly along the B&M tracks from the Concord Turnpike overpass, which did not exist in Thoreau’s time. 19 Thoreau, Journal, v. 3, p. 342, Mar. 9, 1852. 20 Ibid., v. 4, pp. 452-453, June 6, 1853. 21 Ibid., v. 5, p. 104, Apr. 9, 1853. 22 Ibid., v. 12, p. 114, Apr. 4, 1859. 23 Ibid., v. 14, p. 137, Oct. 10, 1860. 24 Ibid., v. 3, p. 371. 25 Ibid., v. 14, pp. 256-257. A remarkably large tie! Charlestown, near Boston, was the urban terminal of

the Fitchburg Railroad during the first five years of its existence. 26 Ibid., v. 7, p. 497, Oct. 19. 1855. 27 Ibid., v. 7, pp. 218, Feb. 29, 1855. 28 Ibid., v. 8, p. 76, Jan. 1, 1856. 29 Ibid, v. 8, p. 367, June 6, 1856. 30 Ibid., v. 9, p. 222, Jan. 15, 1857. 31 Ibid., v. 5, pp. 276-277, June 18, 1853. 32 Ibid., v. 9, p. 184, Dec. 17, 1856. 33 Ibid., v. 5, p. 266, June 17, 1853. 34 Ibid., v. 13, p. 390. Gleason’s 1906 map shows Boiling Spring more than a quarter mile southwest of the railroad. Thoreau doesn’t explain how water is carried from it to the railroad tank. “Boiling” describes the bubbling of the spring, not its temperature. Thoreau’s thermometer showed that it was the coldest of Concord’s 18 natural springs. 35 Ibid., v. 5, p. 266. 36 Ibid., v. 9, p. 151, Dec. 3, 1856. Gleason’s 1906 map does not identify this bridge. 37 Ibid., v. 9, pp. 175-176, Dec. 10, 1856. Herbert Fisher, father of Charles E. Fisher who with three others founded (in 1921, the year of your author’s birth) the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society, believed it was the mid-1880s or, at the earliest, 1870s before knotted leather or rope “telltales” hanging above the tracks were introduced as low bridge warnings. [C.E. Fisher, written comm. 1961.] The 1836 overpass in my town was raised four feet but deaths continued to occur even when telltales were used. 38 American Railway Guide, and Pocket Companion, etc., Curran Dinsmore & Co., New York, 1851; repub. Kalmbach Publishing Co., Milwaukee, 1945, p. 94. 39 Barrett, Op. Cit., p. 214. Accommodation trains were those that stopped at all intermediate stations. 40 Thoreau, Journal, v. 5, p. 432, Sept. 3, 1853. 41 Thoreau, Walden, p. 120. The “distant field” is Thoreau’s famous bean field. 42 Ibid., p. 123. 43 Thoreau, Journal, v. 3, p. 274, Feb. 3, 1852. 44 Ibid., v. 3, pp. 37-38, Oct. 1, 1851. 45 Harding, Op. Cit., p. 315. 46 Thoreau, Journal, v.3, pp. 70-71, Oct. 14, 1851. 47 Ibid., v. 3, p. 114, Nov. 13, 1851. From Brattleboro, Vt., it was 13 miles south on the Brattleboro

Branch of the Vermont & Massachusetts Railroad to Greenfield, Mass., then 56 miles east on the V&M to Fitchburg. 48 Ibid., v. 4, p. 38, May 8, 1852. 49 Ibid., v. 4, p. 413, Nov. 18, 1852. Such a lengthy load would have required at least three flatcars. 50 Ibid., v. 5, p. 298, June 23, 1853. 51 Ibid., v. 7, p. 205, Feb. 21, 1855. 52 Ibid., v. 12, p. 9, Mar. 3, 1859. 53 Thoreau, Walden, p. 120, 125-126. 54 Thoreau, Journal, v. 3, p. 287, Feb. 8, 1852. 55 Ibid., v. 7, pp. 497-498, Nov. 19, 1855. 56 Ibid., v. 11, pp. 339-340, Nov. 22, 1858. 57 Ibid., v. 2, p. 401, Aug. 19, 1851. 58 Ibid., v. 2, p. 446. 59 Dickens, Charles, American Notes for General Circulation, Chapman & Hall, London, 1842, repub. as American Notes, a Journey, Fromm International Publishing Corp., New York, 1985, p. 69. 60 Ibid., v. 3, p. 479, Aug. 29, 1852. 61 Ibid., v. 8, p. 248, Apr. 4, 1856. 62 Ibid., v. 5, p. 55, Mar. 27, 1853. 63 Ibid., v. 6. p. 485, Aug. 29, 1854. 64 Ibid., v. 2, p. 238, June 11, 1851. 65 Ibid., v. 4, p. 206, July 9, 1852. 66 Ibid., v. 7, p. 431, July 3, 1855. 67 Old Farmer’s Almanac for 1854, p. 46, prints a ten-year record of snow depths furnished by “a writer in the Boston Transcript.” Average annual snowfall from winter of 1843-4 to that of 1852-3 came to 45.2 inches. U.S. Weather Bureau records for Logan International Airport, Boston, indicate that the annual snowfall there from 1981 to 2010 averaged 43.8 inches. 68 Thoreau, Journal, v. 2, p. 128. 69 Ibid., v. 6, p. 33, Dec. 29, 1853. 70 Ibid., v. 6, pp. 47-48, Jan. 2, 1854. 71 Ibid., v. 8, p. 75, Dec. 31, 1855. 72 Ibid., v. 8, p. 76, Jan. 1, 1856. These “paths” were dug to clear the flangeways on the inner faces of the rails. 73 Ibid., v. 8. p. 96, Jan. 8, 1856.

74 Ibid., v. 8, p. 183, Feb. 18 and 19, 1856. 75 Ibid., v. 14, p, 330, Mar. 22, 1861. 76 Ibid., v. 9, p. 240, Feb. 6, 1857. Here we have the “black ice” of which TV meteorologists warn motorists. 77 Ibid., v. 11, p. 372, Dec. 13, 1858. 78 Ibid., v. 11, p. 372, Dec. 13, 1858. 79 Ibid., v. 12, p. 61, Mar. 18, 1859. 80 Reid, James D., The Telegraph in America: its Founders, Promoters, and Noted Men, Derby Brothers, New York, 1879, pp. 389-393. 81 Thoreau, Journal, v. 2, p. 428, Aug. 28, 1851. 82 Harding, Op. Cit., p. 441, p. 466. 83 Thoreau, Journal, v. 14, p. 340, Nov. 3, 1861. 84 Thoreau, Walden, p. 124. End