Historic Walden Woods (file 2 of 5)

[Page 010] Walden Woods in Thoreau’s Youth
        Thoreau’s own memories of Walden Woods reach back to the 1820s. "When I first paddled a boat on Walden," he recalls,

it was completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its coves grape vines had run over the trees next the water and formed bowers under which a boat could pass. The hills which form its shores are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high, that, as you looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of an amphitheatre for some kind of sylvan spectacle. (063)

        Thoreau recollected the tranquility of an even earlier vision which occurred during his earliest childhood, while the family lived in Boston:

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. (064)

This first view of Walden was a primal vision. When Thoreau took up his abode in the woods almost a quarter century later, he described the magnetism which had drawn him back to that spot "away in the country":

That woodland vision for a long time made the drapery of my dreams. That sweet solitude my spirit seemed so early to require that I might have room to entertain my thronging guests, and that speaking silence that my ears might distinguish the significant sounds. Some how or other it at once gave the preference to this recess among the pines where almost sunshine & shadow were the only inhabitants that varied the scene, over that tumultuous and varied city—as if it had found its proper nursery. (065)

Even after Thoreau’s life became part of the landscape of Walden Woods that earliest woodland vision remained the touchstone of his success:

. . . 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 [Page 011] 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. (066)

        Thoreau caught his first glimpse of Walden in 1821. That same year the Middlesex Gazette published a description of the scene which would have met the child’s eyes:

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.... (067)

        But already the woodman’s axe was altering the scenery of Walden Woods. Around 1822 the large oak grove atop the high hill on the Lincoln side of the pond (later called Emerson’s Cliff) was cut off, after flourishing more than forty years. (The magnificent chestnut trees which had graced the western slope of the hill had disappeared around 1808.) Pines had grown on the hilltop before the oaks and heaps of stones on the hill evidenced that even earlier—before the middle of the eighteenth century—that part of the woods had been cleared for pasturage. (068)
        When the Thoreaus returned to Concord in 1823 and moved into the brick house at the village end of the Walden Road, Walden Woods became classroom and playground for six-year-old David Henry. Walden was where boys went to be boys, and men to be boys again. The pond was a bathing place, the woods a breathing space. Some of the town went a-fishing there. In summer, while waiting for the harvest, farmers found their way to a favorite swimming spot on the sandy eastern shore below Wyman’s pottery. There they washed away the dust of the world in Walden’s deep waters.
        Mrs. Thoreau remembered Walden Pond and Fairhaven Cliffs in Walden Woods as favorite retreats of her sons, Henry and John, during their boyhoods. "The boys would take their luncheon and not be home till night," she recalled. (069) In his autobiographical notes written about 1837 (070) Thoreau lists several favorite boyhood haunts, including "Bare [sic] Garden hill, "Walden," and the "cliffs and [Page 012] Springs"—all within Walden Woods. In a manuscript entitled "Musings," written when he was seventeen years old, Thoreau gives an account of the impact of Walden Woods—particularly Bear Garden Hill, the Boiling Spring, and the Cliff on Fair Haven Hill—on his imagination:

Fair Haven. In the freshness of the dawn my brother and I were every ready to enjoy a stroll to a certain cliff, distant a mile or more, where we were wont to climb to the highest peak, and, seating ourselves on some rocky platform, catch the first ray of the morning sun as it gleamed upon the smooth still river wandering in sullen silence far below. The approach to the precipice is by no means calculated to prepare one for the glorious denouement at hand; after following for some time a delightful path that winds through the woods, occasionally crossing a rippling brook [Hubbard's Brook], and not forgetting to visit a sylvan dell whose solitude is made audible by the unwearied tinkling of a crystal spring [the Boiling Spring]—you suddenly emerge from the trees upon a flat and mossy rock which forms the summit of a beetling crag. The feelings which come over one on first beholding this freak of nature are indescribable. The giddy height, the iron-bound rock, the boundless horizon open around, and the beautiful river at your feet, with its green and sloping banks fringed with trees and shrubs of every description are calculated to excite in the beholder emotions of no common occurrence—to inspire him with vast and sublime conceptions.
        The eye wanders over the broad and seemingly compact surface of the slumbering forest on the opposite side of the stream, and catches an occasional glimpse at a little farmhouse "resting in a green hollow and lapped in the bosom of plenty", while a gentle swell of the river, a rustic, and, fortunately, rather old, looking bridge on the right, with the cloudlike Wachusett in the distance, give a finish and beauty to the landscape, that Is rarely to be met with even in our own fair land. (071)

Thoreau wrote this reminiscence in 1835. That same year Lemuel Shattuck stated in his History of Concord, "Walden woods at the south, and other lots towards the southwest parts of the town, are the most extensive (woods], covering several hundred acres of light—soil land." (072) [Page 013]
        Joseph Hosmer, a boyhood friend of the Thoreau brothers, gives this account half a century after their adventures in Walden Woods:

        Fair Haven Cliffs, one of the favorite resorts of the Thoreau’s [sic], must be seen to be known and appreciated. The Concord river, with its serpentine figure pushing its way to the ocean; the Monadnoc and Wachusett in the distance, together with Lake Walden in full view on the east, presents the same appearance to us that they did in our boyhood, and to remind us that, while we are changing and passing, they are not! Nothing can surpass this sublime picture of beauty and loveliness.
        I rode up the boiling spring (minus the boil) on Fair Haven Hill, recently, and then took the path that Thoreau has often trod, over the top, down the "devil’s stairway," over rocks, down its craggy sides, now sliding, now hanging by a twig that was anchored firmly to its side on to the bottom of the cliffs. I then followed westwards through brush and bramble to the river. The descent is not difficult, but the ascent is quite another thing. It was the same old way that, in my boy days, in company with John and Henry Thoreau, we wandered one bright spring day in a year that has so long since past [sic] that it now seems dim and shadowy. Many recollections were pleasing, but I often found my eyes wet with tears. (073)

        All the Thoreau children loved Walden Woods. The walk to Walden, Fair Haven, and the Boiling Spring was a route John Thoreau took his Concord Academy scholars on Saturdays, giving them instruction in botany, geology, and other departments of natural history. (074) Henry introduced surveying into the curriculum and had his class measure the height of the Cliff above the river. (075) The Thoreau brothers and sisters in their letters to each other evoked the promise of a ramble in Walden Woods to entice the traveler home. For example, Henry wrote his sister Helen, teaching in Roxbury, on January 21, 1840 (original text in Latin):

When Robin Redbreast brings back the springtime, I trust that you will lay your school-duties aside, cast off care, and venture to be gay now and then, roaming with me in the woods, or climbing the Fairhaven cliffs,—or else, in my boat on Walden, let the water kiss your hand, or gaze at your image in the wave. (076) [Page 014]

After Thoreau’s death in 1862 his sister Sophia continued to celebrate Walden Woods, now made more memorable by association with her brother. In 1869 she wrote Ellen Sewall Osgood (to whom her brothers, in their turn, long ago had proposed marriage, both unsuccessfully): "If you were only here I would show you the sacred haunts of our village. We would visit Walden, and Fair Haven too." (077) "Cannot Walton and Anna be spared to visit us at this time?" Sophia wrote their father, Daniel Ricketson, Thoreau’s New Bedford friend, "Walden & Fair Haven are all ready for company as well as we." (078) On another occasion, Sophia chose the Cliff on Fair Haven as the place to discuss with Daniel Ricketson "her brother Henry’s strong faith in the immortality of the soul." (079)
        Throughout Thoreau’s young adulthood, Walden Woods remained his favorite haunt. "The thought of Walden in the woods yonder makes me supple jointed and limber for the duties of the day," he wrote near the end of 1840. (080) His Journal for 1837 to 1844, which survives, for the most part, only in abridged transcriptions or torn fragments of the original notebooks, mentions Concord locales ninety—seven times. Thirty—seven of these references are to Walden Woods or sites in Walden Woods, including Walden, Goose, and Fair Haven Ponds, the Cliffs, and the Boiling Spring. Thoreau’s earliest Journal reference to "Walden wood" occurs in his entry for April 26, 1838, in his poem "The Bluebirds":

They seemed to come from the distant south,
Just over the Walden wood. (081)

Much of Thoreau’s early essay "A Winter Walk" describes a walk in Walden Woods (though the name is not given), featuring visits to Walden Pond—"And now we descend again, to the brink of this woodland lake, which lies in a hollow of the hills"—and the Cliff––"Now our path begins to ascend gradually to the top of this high hill, from whose precipitous south side we can look over the broad country, of forest, and field, and river, to the distant snowy mountains." (082)
        So accustomed did Thoreau become to the term "Walden Woods" that he used it quite casually in his writings. "For the first time this winter I notice snow-fleas this afternoon in Walden Wood," he notes on January 15, 1852. (083) On December 9, 1856, he writes, "Coming through the Walden woods, I see already great heaps of oak leaves collected in certain places on the snow-crust by the roadside, where an eddy deposited them" (084) When an Italian carries a hand [Page 015] organ through the village, Thoreau remarks, "I hear it even at Walden Wood." (085) In Walden Thoreau portrays "the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacular of Walden Wood." (086) Or a walk recorded in Thoreau’s Journal might be headed simply, "To Walden Woods." (087)

Walden Woods from Brister’s Hill to the Cambridge Turnpike
        An area of Walden Woods to which the townspeople retired regularly for repose and recreation was Hubbard’s Close and its environs at the bottom of Brister’s Hill, on the east side of the Walden Road, extending towards the Turnpike where it terminated in an avenue of ferns. (088) As early as the summer of 1849 Thoreau called this area Fairyland. (089) By the early 1850s the children of the town were familiarly referring to it by this name. (090) Ellen Emerson calls the area Fairyland no less than eight times in her published letters. (091) Sophia Hawthorne, in her diary for April 1853, mentions a walk her son Julian took in "Fairy Land" with Ralph Waldo Emerson. (092) Her daughter Rose places the locale precisely "in Walden Woods." (093) The name took and a popular guidebook of the 1920s, Concord: A Pilgrimage to the Historic and Literary Center of America, informed the visitor: "A tiny pond in Walden woods at the left of the road on the way to Walden Pond is called Fairyland." (094)
        Indeed, the town had long considered this tract below Brister’s Hill as well as the lands atop it, part of Walden Woods. On January 1, 1808, when John Richardson mortgaged to Abiel Heywood land on both sides of the Walden Road (the former Stratton piece north of Walden and the land on Brister’s Hill above Hubbard’s Close, extending to the area of Goose Pond), their deed described the parcels as "both in Walden Woods." (095) Almost half a century later, on April 7, 1857, Abel Brooks sold Ebby Hubbard a small wedge of woodland on Brister’s Hill. The deed places the land "in Walden Woods so called." (096)
        Fairyland was an enchanted playground for the townspeople. "A beautiful little dell shut in by woods," (097) Frank Sanborn calls it, and George Bartlett "a romantic spot." (098) To Bartlett, too, Fairyland is "a suburb of Walden," (099) and he thus describes it in the sixteenth edition of his popular Concord Guide Book (1895): [Page 016]

Fairyland has a pretty pond embowered in trees, and a delicious spring, clear and cool enough to have been patronized by the fairies. It has always been a favorite haunt for the children of the village, and many of the school children have often used it as a play and picnic ground. Some thirty years ago, the pupils of a well-known school used to hold fairy masques and costume parties there, and if a wayfarer had strayed in, he would have been surprised to find himself in the centre of a fairy ring or gypsy carnival. Now quiet citizens use it as a pleasant place for a summer stroll; and berrying parties in the summer, and nutting excursions in the autumn, often visit it, and return with abundant harvests. (100)

On November 27, 1883, Edith Emerson Forbes, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s daughter, purchased Fairyland from Samuel Hoar "in order to save its noble trees from the woodman’s axe." (101)
        The "delicious spring" Bartlett refers to in The Concord Guide Book is Brister’s Spring, at the bottom of Brister’s Hill near the Walden Road. In Walden Brister’s Spring symbolizes the fountain of inspiration. Its cool water supplements Walden Pond’s during the summer months. Thoreau writes in Walden:

Commonly I rested an hour or two in the shade at noon, after planting, and ate my lunch, and read a little by a spring which was the source of a swamp and of a brook, oozing from under Brister’s Hill, half a mile from my field. The approach to this was through a succession of descending grassy hollows, full of young pitch-pines, into the larger wood about the swamp. There, in a very secluded and shaded spot, under a spreading white-pine, there was yet a clean firm sward to sit on. I had dug out the spring and made a well of clear gray water, where I could dip up a pailful without roiling it, and thither I went for this purpose almost every day in midsummer, when the pond was warmest. (102)

        Rising above Hubbard’s Close and Brister’s Spring is Ebby Hubbard’s Woods, described by Sanborn as "some of the finest oak and pine forest in Concord." (103) Emerson called it Hubbard’s Park (104) and Ellery Channing referred to it as some of the most beautiful woodland in Concord, "so full of lights and leaves." (105) Rising from Hubbard’s Close, climbing the hill from the creek and meadow, were first birches and alders, next oaks, then lofty white pines, "changed to lofty firs on the concealed bank." (106) It was a "charming hillside," [Page 017] thought Channing, "covered with white oaks, silver birch, red oak, white pine, little hemlock, white maple"—a grove "perfectly alive with melody of birds." (107) In Ebby Hubbard’s Woods, too, Thoreau came upon "some very handsome canoe birches . . . the largest I know, a foot in diameter and forty or fifty feet high." (108)
        Apparently, Ebby Hubbard did not admire the admirer of his woodlot. A reporter for the Springfield Daily Republican interviewed Hubbard in the winter of 1871-1872 and found that he "seemed to think little of Thoreau, laying stress on the fact that he had seen him carrying home trees on Sunday, which he had taken up in the woods, to plant at Walden Pond. ‘He wasn’t worth anything,’ was the old man’s final verdict." (109)
        This was also the verdict of many of Thoreau’s fellow townspeople. They wondered to what end this Harvard graduate was skulking across their woodlots. He seemed to be trailing in the tracks of the scamps and ne’er-do-wells who traditionally drifted to Walden Woods, the backside of town. Few appreciated that Thoreau used Walden as a writer’s retreat. The author of Walden wrote in his Journal, "A farmer told me in all sincerity, having occasion to go into Walden Woods in his sleigh, he thought he never saw anything so beautiful in all his life, and if there had been men there who knew how to write about it, it would have been a great occasion for them." (110) Walden was a nice place to visit but nobody respectable ought to live there.
        Edward Emerson assessed Thoreau’s contemporary reputation thus:

We who care for Thoreau and revere him, whether or no we knew him personally, must feel keenly how little he was prized in his day by even the literary and scholarly class, whose opinions influenced a wider public. Also, as a matter of course, how impossible it was for the mass of people, even in his own town, of very limited range of thought and no interest in Walden but horn-pout in one weedy bay (since grown up into land) or, in the woods, with cord-wood or pot-hunting, to see what manner of man he was. (111)

        At the urging of Emerson and Alcott, however, Concord did pay homage to Thoreau on March 30, 1874, when the citizens voted at Town Meeting to name a new street from the depot to Brister’s Hill, intersecting the Walden Road, Thoreau Street. (112) Thoreau’s friend Bronson Alcott called it "a compliment of his townsmen associating [Page 018] him henceforth with the village and his route across the fields, when living, to Walden Pond.... Hereafter the traveller from afar, when inquiring for Thoreau’s walk, can be pointed to the street bearing his name, and leading to the shores of Walden celebrated in his story of ‘Life in the Woods.’" (113)
        On the other side of the Walden road from Brister’s Spring and Ebby Hubbard’s Woods is Laurel Glen as well as a glacial kettle hole with a glacial esker through it. The hollow extends from the bottom of Brister’s Hill closest to town south towards Walden Pond. In his writings, as early as the summer of 1849, Thoreau calls this area Laurel Glen. (114) Richard O’Connor, an historian of Walden Woods, describes the hollow thus:

        The early colonists and, indeed, the Indians of this area before them, were known to have established paths and roads across such eskers. Considering how much Fairhaven Road extension was used in the Colonial period (it was the main road to Watertown and Sudbury), and the amount [of] meadow hay harvested in the Fairhaven Bay area at this time, this path was well used before the path or road we now call Walden Street was in use (Walden Street was laid out as a county road in 1706).

        The town officially laid out this path as a town road on March 14, 1671.

        Henry Thoreau travelled this path, when he had his house at Walden, from the center of town and from Emerson’s house. This is the cart path mentioned in Walden, in all probability. This was the path he took to Brister’s when he wished to avoid the steeper Walden Street. (115)

        Hubbard’s Close and Walden Woods extend to the (Cambridge) Turnpike. In the days of the Concord authors the land on the other side of the Turnpike consisted of low, level meadows. (116) The old Love Lane (now Hawthorne Lane) passed through them for half a mile to meet the Boston (Lexington) Road near Hawthorne’s Wayside. Hawthorne, as well as Bronson Alcott when he lived at Orchard House (and earlier at the Wayside when it was called Hillside), could look across meadows, interrupted only by clumps of willows, "to the wooded hills, beyond which . . . is Thoreau’s Walden Pond." (117) Hawthorne and Alcott usually passed this way to Walden, along Love Lane, across Brister’s Hill and through Ebby Hubbard’s Woods, along [Page 019] a woodland lane, to the pond. In Concord Days (1872), Alcott describes the vista towards Walden Woods from Orchard House: "On the southwest is an ancient wood, Thoreau’s pride, beyond which is Walden Pond, distant about a mile from my house, and best reached by the lane opening opposite Hawthorne’s." (118)
        Sometimes Alcott and Hawthorne passed farther along the Turnpike to the Lincoln (now Sandy Pond) Road, to the Edmund Hosmer Farm. In the chapter "Winter Visitors" in Walden, Hosmer is the "long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, to have a social ‘crack."’ (119) In the second draft of Walden (1849) Thoreau alludes to Hosmer as the farmer "who lived near the skirts of the wood." (120) Sanborn identifies Hosmer as one of Thoreau’s nearest neighbors "by a woodland path" often traversed by Emerson, Alcott, Channing, Thoreau, and Sanborn himself. (121) This is apparently the route Hawthorne describes in his diary for August 15, 1842, while he was living at the Manse. He had set out for Walden Pond with his friend Hilliard, calling on Emerson to join them as they walked down the Turnpike:

        We turned aside a little from our way to visit a Mr. Edmund Hosmer, a yeoman of whose homely and self-acquired wisdom Mr. Emerson has a very high opinion....
        After leaving Mr. Hosmer, we proceeded through woodpaths to Walden Pond, picking blackberries of enormous size along the way. The pond itself was beautiful and refreshing to my soul.... It lies embosomed among wooded hills, not very extensive, but large enough for waves to dance upon its surface, and to look like a piece of blue firmament, earth-encircled…. (122)

        The Alcotts lived in the Hosmer house for a short time after they moved to Concord from Harvard and Still River in 1844, making Bronson Alcott an even earlier inhabitant of Walden Woods than Henry Thoreau. The Curtis brothers (George William and Burrill) secured a room at the Hosmer farmhouse in the summer of 1845. Here they rented a small piece of ground "on which they labored half a day, and roamed the woods or read the other half." This farm was "one-half mile east of Emerson, on a cross-road which led directly to Walden Pond through the woods." (123) This juxtaposition of philosophers produced some happy symposiums. George William Curtis, later famous as the editor of Harper’s Magazine, recalled a particularly memorable party in 1845, when Emerson, Hawthorne, [Page 020] Alcott, and others sat in Emerson’s parlor while "Orson [Thoreau] charmed us with the secrets won from his interviews with Pan in the Walden woods." (124) That same year the Curtises, Alcott, Channing, Emerson, Hosmer and his three sons helped Thoreau set up the frame and raise the roof of his house at Walden.

70. Thomas Blanding, "Beans, Baked and Half-Baked (6)," Concord Saunterer, 12:4 (Winter 1977), 14.

71. Henry D. Thoreau, Early Essays and Miscellanies, ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer (Princeton, 1975), pp. 15-16.

72. Lemuel Shattuck, A History of the Town of Concord (Boston, 1835), p. 199.