Historic Walden Woods (file 1 of 5)

"With the knowledge of the name comes a distincter recognition and knowledge of the thing. . . ."
                                                      Thoreau’s Journal, August 29, 1858 (001)

"All Walden Wood might have been preserved for our park forever. . . ."
                                                      Thoreau’s Journal, October 15, 1859 (002)

Introduction
        William Ellery Channing, Henry Thoreau’s most frequent walking companion, states in the first biography of his friend: "Three spacious tracts, uncultivated, where the patches of scrub-oak, wild apples, barberries, and other plants grew, which Mr. Thoreau admired, were Walden woods, the Estabrook country, and the old Marlboro’ road." (003)Channing, who had access to Thoreau’s manuscript Journal before and after his death, probably has in mind an entry for June 10, 1853, in which Thoreau specifies the same three wild tracts and adds a fourth not mentioned by Channing. After describing the Estabrook country, Thoreau writes:

        A second great uninhabited tract is that on the Marlborough road, stretching westerly from Francis Wheeler’s to the river, and beyond about three miles, and from Harrington’s on the north to Dakin’s on the south, more than a mile in width. A third, the Walden Woods. A fourth, the Great Fields. These four are all in Concord. (004)

        Of these four great wild expanses which Thoreau walked, studied, and celebrated, the one most intimately associated with his memory is Walden Woods. Not only is Walden Woods the setting of [Page 003] one of the most famous works of American literature, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), but in Walden Woods Thoreau generated his theory of forest succession, a cornerstone of modern ecological science.
        The purposes of this paper are to show that: 1) "Walden Woods" (or its variant "Walden Wood") was a concept and term in common currency in Concord throughout the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth century, and grew to be and remains today a familiar term among readers of the Concord authors and chroniclers of Concord history; 2) Walden Woods stretches over a clearly identifiable area of the towns of Lincoln and Concord, from the Sudbury River to Saw MM Brook, from Flint's Pond to Fairyland; and 3) numerous literary and historical references help to substantiate the boundaries of Walden Woods as determined by the geology and ecology of the area. The nomenclature and descriptions abound in a variety of sources: legal documents and public records; diaries and letters; newspapers and magazines; books of history, literature, and natural history. Walden Woods appears most conspicuously and enduringly in the works of the Concord authors—Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, Channing, Sanborn, Curtis, Conway, Sidney, Bartlett, Brewster, and others—as well as in popular and scholarly works about them. Famous figures of Concord history, literature, and scholarship repeatedly refer to Walden Woods with familiarity and affection. Necessarily, then, this survey is not a compilation of all known references to Walden Woods but rather a large and representative sampling of them.

Thoreau in Walden Woods
        In Walden Woods—or "in the wood of Walden" as Channing says (005)—Thoreau lived from 1845 to 1847. "1 lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor," he begins his classic account of his sojourn, Walden, or Life in the Woods. (006) The path from the highway to his "abode in the woods"(007) was about a half mile long and no house was visible within a quarter mile or more.(008) In the chapter of Walden called "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," Thoreau describes the setting of his idyll:

        I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord and somewhat higher than it, in the midst of an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln.(009) [Page 004]

A little further on in Walden Thoreau pinpoints his location in that "extensive wood":

        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. (010)

        Thoreau built his one-room house on an eleven-acre lot purchased in 1844 by his friend and fellow Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. (Emerson himself writes of Thoreau’s "solitary life in the woods by Walden.") (011)There was a pine wood behind the house (012)and the rest of the lot was "mostly growing up to pines and hickories"; (013)or, as Thoreau writes elsewhere in Walden, the hillside where he lived was "covered with pine woods, through which I looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the woods where pines and hickories were springing up." (014)
Thoreau clearly considered himself in the woods as well as at the pond. Not only does the subtitle of his book, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, indicate this, but his syntax reinforces the point. For example, Thoreau writes that he "went down to the woods by Walden Pond" (015)and that he "went to the woods to live deliberately." (016)The chapter "Spring" ends, "Thus was my first year’s life in the woods completed." (017)And in his Journal, Thoreau muses:

But why I changed? Why I left the woods? I do not think that I can tell. I have often wished myself back. I do not know any better how I came to go there. (018)

That this distinction between "wood" and "pond" is deliberate is reinforced by a revision in the first draft of Walden. Where Thoreau first wrote that he "went to the pond to live," he altered the manuscript to read "went to the woods." (019)Any lingering doubt about the locus of Thoreau’s life can be dispelled by this memorandum on the last page of his 1848-1850 Journal notebook: "Left Walden Woods Sept. 6, 1847." (020)
        In the end, however, the pond and the woods were one because Thoreau felt at one with the pond and the woods. "A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature," he writes, [Page 005]

        It is earth’s eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next to the shore are the slender eye-lashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows. (021)

Indeed, two months before he died, Thoreau asked his publisher, then preparing a second edition of Walden; or, Life in the Woods, to drop the subtitle and call his book simply Walden. (022)
        Interestingly, Walden Pond may have been named by early settlers for the woodland which surrounds it. (023)Adams Tolman points out in Indian Relics of Concord:

Of course we must dismiss as too childish for serious consideration, the story of Walden being derived from some mythical "Squaw Walden", for the name is pure Saxon, occurring in dozens of places in old England, and possibly our pond was named by some old settler in memory of one of these, familiar to him in childhood’s home, for many of our first colonists came, it will be remembered, from "the Weald (or Wald) of Kent." (024)

"Weald" is a modification of the German "Wald," meaning a woods. According to the Oxford English Dictionary a "Weald" or "Wald" is "the name of the tract of country, formerly wooded, including the portions of Sussex, Kent, and Surrey which lie between the North and South Downs." More broadly, "Weald" or "Wald" refers to "a wooded district or an open country." "Furthermore, the central part of the Weald is a hilly wooded area." (025) "Wealden" means "of or pertaining to the Weald." (026)Walden Pond, then, means "the pond of the woods."
        Walden Woods in Thoreau’s day was a solitary place. Walden Pond, amid hills "exclusively woodland," (027) "a perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak woods," ((028))had long lived "reserved and austere, like a hermit in the woods." (029)Standing on Heywood’s Peak, recently cleared, rising above the shore, Thoreau "could not see over or beyond the woods which surrounded me." (030) No wonder he boasted in Walden, " I have my horizon bounded by woods all to myself." (031)After Thoreau’s death his friends and admirers continued to characterize his house site as a retired place. Wilson Flagg’s The Woods and By-Ways of New England (1872) describes Walden Pond as "a beautiful sheet of water surrounded by a wild wood" and places [Page 006] Thoreau’s house site "in an open space between two sections of Walden woods." (032) Bronson Alcott, in a prefatory sonnet to Franklin B. Sanborn’s Henry D. Thoreau (1882), asserts that Thoreau left the village behind "To build thyself in Walden woods a den." (033)Elbert Hubbard, writing in 1904, places Thoreau’s house site "in a dense woods, on a hillside that gently sloped down to the clear, cold, deep water of Walden Pond." (034) In Old Concord: Her Highways and Byways (1888), Margaret Sidney describes Thoreau’s retreat as "in a deep wood between Lincoln and Concord." (035) And that same year, Edward Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s son who as a boy sauntered in Walden Woods with Thoreau, cast the scene of his retreat as "a continuous wood which hid Walden among its oaks and dark pines." (036) The advantages of retirement to Walden Woods were the same at the turn of the century as they had been when Thoreau lived there. His biographer Annie Russell Marble wrote in 1902: "No place near Concord was so wildly picturesque and, at the same time, accessible, for this experiment." (037)

Walden Woods Before Thoreau
        For more than half a century before Thoreau moved to the woods, Walden had harbored the outcasts and cast-offs of the village—freed slaves, drunkards, and, a little later, the shanty Irish. Concord historian F. B. Sanborn records, "It is curious that the neighborhood of Walden . . . was anciently a place of dark repute, the home of pariahs and lawless characters, such as fringed the garment of many a New England village in Puritanic times." (038) In another work, Sanborn explains this clustering:

The shorter road from Concord village to Lincoln, the next town south-east, runs through the Walden woods and skirts the Pond, which lies partly in Lincoln. It was not the oldest road, but a makeshift of later times for access to the woods and the ponds, and naturally became the abode of denizens who rather shunned publicity, like the freed slaves of the 18th century, and white persons who had an affinity more than normal for ardent spirits. Something of the same inhabitation prevailed along the Old Marlboro Road, on the other side of the Walden woods, and running through the Sudbury woods. (039) [Page 007]

        Thoreau, an iconoclast himself, did not prejudge his predecessors. His description depicts a vivacious subculture:

Within the memory of many of my townsmen the road near which my house stands resounded with the laugh and gossip of inhabitants, and the woods which border it were notched and dotted here and there with their little gardens and dwellings, though it was then much more shut in by forest than now. (040)

In the chapter of Walden, "Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors," Thoreau "repeopled the woods." (041) Most of the earlier residents of Walden Woods whom Thoreau describes lived on or near Brister’s Hill, where, Thoreau supposed, "The sterile soil would have been proof against any lowland degeneracy." (042) East of Thoreau’s beanfield and across the road lived Cato, freed slave of Duncan Ingraham, who gave Cato "permission to live in Walden Woods." (043) Zilpha White, the Black witch of Walden Woods, was heard by travellers along the Walden Road muttering over her gurgling pot, "Ye are all bones, bones!" (044) She lived "by the very corner of my field, still nearer to town . . . , making the Walden Woods ring with her shrill singing." (045) Tommy Wyman, the potter, who died a little less than two years before Thoreau moved to Walden Woods, (046) had a house above the bank on the east end of the pond. He used to scare the village boys away from his huckleberry fields with stories of an Indian doctor who lived in the woods and cut out small boys’ livers to make medicine. (047) In Wyman’s tenement after him lived the squatter Hugh Coyle (Thoreau spelled it Quoil), a drunkard and ditcher, whose residency in Walden Woods slightly overlapped Thoreau’s. He was rumored to have been a soldier at Waterloo. "Napoleon went to St. Helena," observed Thoreau, "Quoil came to Walden Woods." (048) Brister Freeman, for whom Brister’s Hill is named, lived "down the road, on the right, on Brister’s Hill." (049) He was "an active and thrifty negro" (050) and the apple orchards he planted still adorned the hillside when Thoreau lived at Walden.
        Thoreau writes in his account of Walden’s former inhabitants:

        Farther down the hill on the left, on the old road in the woods, are marks of some homestead of the Stratton family; whose orchard once covered all the slopes of Brister’s Hill, but was long since killed out by the pitch-pines, excepting a [Page 008] few stumps, whose old roots furnish still the wild stocks of many a thrifty village tree. (051)

Commenting on the cellar hole of the Stratton house still visible on Brister’s Hill, Thoreau writes in his Journal: "These are our Ninevahs and Babylons. I approach such a cellar-hole as Layard the scene of his labors, and I do not fail to find there relics as interesting to me as his winged bulls." (052) (Emerson expresses a similar thought about the Irish shanties in Walden Woods: "These will one day be regarded as wonderful ruins, equal with Capua or the Mexican Antiquities.") (053)
        Down the hill and, according to Thoreau, "Nearer to town, you come to Breed’s location, on the other side of the way, just on the edge of the wood." (054) John C. Breed’s profession was barber and his downfall rum. Passersby often found him dead drunk in the carriage path and humanely dragged him to the side of the road. Finally, in 1824, someone found Breed in the highway, "dead beyond the power to recover." (055) His house burned down March 7, 1836. (056) Thoreau’s assertion that Breed’s house stood just on the edge of Walden Woods is reinforced by his observation on March 13, 1855, that the stubble of Stow’s rye field was "in front of the Breed house." (057)
        A ride along the Walden Road in the early nineteenth century was always an adventure. "It was then much more shut in by the forest than now," Thoreau recounts in Walden,

        In some places, within my remembrance, the pines would scrape both sides of a chaise at once, and women and children who were compelled to go this way to Lincoln alone and on foot did it with fear, and often ran a good part of the distance. Though mainly but a humble route to neighboring villages, or for the woodman’s team, it once amused the traveller more than now by its variety, and lingered longer in his memory. Where now firm open fields stretch from the village to the woods, it then ran through a maple swamp on a foundation of logs, the remnants of which, doubtless, still underlie the present dusty highway, from the Stratton, now the Alms House, Farm, to Brister’s Hill. (058)

        Mary Wilder White, a belle of Concord, gives this vivid account in 1806 of an inadvertent adventure in the wilderness of Walden Woods: [Page 009]

Had I the pen of A. C. L, I would describe a ride with Sarah, which occupied yesterday afternoon. More than two hours we were lost in an intricate wood, which extends over part of Lincoln and Concord, and which embosoms two sheets of water of considerable extent; and round which we wound through paths overgrown with shrubs, the branches of trees on either side frequently striking the chaise, and impeding our course, without the power of directing ourselves into the travelled road. The idea of being lost within three miles of Concord is rather ludicrous; but our situation was rendered distressing by the charge of Mrs. Farnham’s sick infant, and the approach of night. I have seldom felt a more joyous surprise than when, on emerging from the wood, we discovered ourselves to be within a mile of home. (059)

Even at mid-century Walden was still a largely uninhabited tract. Augusta Bowers Smith, born at Concord in 1846, recalled the Walden Road as it was during her girlhood: "Beyond the poor house there were no houses—the road running past meadows, woods, Walden Pond and on into Lincoln town." (060)
        Thoreau, always eager for lore of Walden Woods, recorded the memories of Concord’s and Lincoln’s older townspeople:

An old man who used to frequent this pond nearly sixty years ago, when it was dark with surrounding forests, tells me that in those days he sometimes saw it all alive with ducks and other water fowl, and that there were many eagles about it. (061)

In his Journal for October 12, 1851, Thoreau records a conversation with George Minott, the old farmer and hunter who lived on the slope of the ridge above the Lexington Road. They had been referring to the area of Walden Woods near the Edmund Hosmer Farm:

He tells me of places in the woods which to his eyes are unchanged since he was a boy, as natural as life. He tells me, then, that in some respects he is still a boy. And yet the gray squirrels were ten then to one now. But for the most part, he says, the world is turned upside down. (062) 

5. William Ellery Channing, Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist, New Edition, Enlarged, ed. F.B. Sanborn (Boston, 1902), p. 7.

6. Henry D. Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton, 1971), p. 3. Thoreau also mentions that two young men who visited him "lived about a mile off through the woods. ( Walden, p. 170). They are possibly the Curtis brothers who lived at Edmund Hosmer’s farm on the Lincoln Road.

7. Thoreau, Walden, p. 84.

8. Henry D. Thoreau, Journal, Volume 2: 1842-1848, ed. Robert Sattelmeyer (Princeton, 1984), p. 149.

9. Thoreau, Walden, p. 86.