Historic Walden Woods (file 4 of 5)

[Page 030] Fair Haven Hill
        Sanborn said that "the Transcendentalists, like the Zorastrians, worshipped on the hilltops, and liked each to have one of his own." (190) Thoreau’s sacred hilltop was Fair Haven, especially its Cliff overlooking the river and Walden Woods. It was a favorite destination of John and Henry Thoreau on their boyhood walks, a frequent site for Thoreau family picnics (as for the townspeople generally), and the place where Henry experienced many of his most joyful moments in nature. Joseph Hosmer, Thoreau’s boyhood chum, recalled:

For him, there was no charm like the clear, placid streams and lakes, the craggy cliffs and dells of his own ‘Fair Haven;’ they were part and parcel of his being, and from them he could no more stray for any length of time, than he could cease to be. (191)

"In all my rambles I have seen no landscape which can make me forget Fair Haven," Thoreau wrote in May 1850,

I still sit on its Cliff in a new spring day, and look over the awakening woods and the river, and hear the new birds sing, with the same delight as ever. It is as sweet a mystery to me as ever, what this world is .... (192)

The Cliff is the place of renewal Thoreau returns to repeatedly throughout his life. On the Cliff, as he wrote in a youthful poem called "Cliffs,"

The loudest sound that burdens here the breeze is the wood’s whisper .... (193)

Here Thoreau left the world and himself behind and came to his senses again. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers he writes: "When I visit again some haunt of my youth, I am glad to find that nature wears so well. The landscape is indeed something real, and solid, and sincere, and I have not put my foot through it yet." (194) [Page 31]
        George Bartlett in the Concord Guide Book describes Fair Haven Hill as

the haunt of Thoreau, which furnished him in summer berries for his simple meals, and inspiration for his vivid descriptions of all seasons of the year. He used to sit often on the cliffs, which form the south-eastern side of Fairhaven hill, and command a view of the bay and its surroundings, and also of the Lincoln Hills. (195)

Annie Russell Marble, Thoreau’s turn-of-the-century biographer, also describes the prospect:

        From the cliffs above the river, Monadock and Wachusett are outlined in the distance, while in the foreground are many of Thoreau’s favorite walks—the old Carlisle Road, a tract of swamp and woodland to the northeast,—the Esterbrook country, farther west, begirt with birches and cedars and enticing with apple-orchards and berry-pastures,—Nine Acre Corner and Fairhaven, southward, affording unsurpassed glories of sunset, pictured with glowing colors in Thoreau’s journal-pages. (196)

Thoreau himself writes in Walden that sometimes, "while the sun was setting, [I] made my supper of huckleberries and blueberries on Fair Haven Hill." (197) After spending a night in jail in 1846 for refusing to pay a poll tax to a government waging war to extend slave territory, Thoreau "returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair-Haven Hill." (198) On the same errand on July 27, 1852, Thoreau writes in his Journal, "The slight distraction of picking berries is favorable to a mild, abstracted, poetic mood, to sequestered or transcendental thinking." (199)
        All the transcendental brethren enjoyed retiring to the Cliff. Here Bronson Alcott considered planting his utopian community in 1843 before he settled instead at Fruitlands in Harvard, Massachusetts. Here Channing sought solace and inspiration for his poetry. Thoreau wrote Emerson in 1848 that Channing "for the most part . . . sits on the Cliffs amid the lichens." (200) Emerson too found it a reliable retreat and reference. When Thoreau was on Staten Island in 1843, Emerson wrote him that the Wyman trial was making quite a stir in the village, "But the Cliff and Walden, which know something of the [Page 032] railroad, know nothing of that; not a leaf nodded; not a pebble fell." (201)
        Tahatawan Cliff Thoreau sometimes called this favorite haunt; so named for the Indian chief who long ago had frequented the rocks. (202) In his "Musings" manuscript, April 20, 1835, Thoreau says of the Cliff: "This interesting spot, if we may believe tradition, was the favorite haunt of the redman, before the axe of his pale-faced visitor had laid low its loftier honors, or his strong water had wasted the energies of the race."(203) While Thoreau was at Harvard, this was the hill he longed to climb at home:

If there’s a cliff in this wide world,
‘S, a stepping stone to heaven,
A pleasant, craggy, short hand cut,
         It sure must be Fair Haven.(204)

While in Concord for Christmas vacation from Harvard in December 1836, Thoreau composed a Latin epitaph entitled "The Cliffs—a Cenotaph" to honor Tahatawan. This tribute translates in part:

This cliff shall be his cenotaph.
O Indians, alas! where in the world are they?(205)

        Generations of visitors have attested that the Cliff provides the most sublime prospect in Concord. "For more than a hundred years these cliffs have been a favorite resort for the nature lover and the climax of many a Sunday walk or autumnal holiday trip, as no better view can be had of the waving tree-tops and gentle river."(206) This is George Bartlett’s view in the Concord Guide Book—an opinion also held by naturalist William Brewster in his October Farm. After a long drive "in Walden woods" on October 24, 1876, Brewster goes "thence to Fairhaven Cliffs, where we remained till sunset, talking and looking out over the glorious landscape."(207) Even Thoreau’s literary nemesis James Russell Lowell singled out the Cliff as a spectacular place to visit when he was rusticated in Concord from Harvard College in 1838. He wrote his classmate George Loring: "By the illustrious! it does not seem a week since you were over here, & yet it is today. Let me see, you didn’t go over to see our Cliffs did you? You had better come over here again they are really worth seeing."(208) [Page 033]
        James Spooner of Plymouth, visiting the Thoreaus in the fall of 1854, wrote home to his parents about a walk he had just taken with Henry Thoreau in Walden Woods:

. . . We went up on the hills from which you can see distant mountains & a wide prospect of the river, dale & hamlet around. We soon came to the "Cliffs"—a perpendicular ledge of rock some (200 ft) hundred feet above the woods & river below—all wild & rugged far from any house, a stupendous work of Nature & worth as much to see as Niagara Falls or the Giant’s Caus[e]way!! I should like to see you look down there—you would have to hold on though[;] it makes one so dizzy. We saw & passed through "Pleasant Meadow" & the "Baker farm," saw the house where John Field lived, & "Fairhaven Bay" & "Conantum, the desolate pasture & river reach & wild apple orchard & deserted house."(209)

        To Thoreau the view from the Cliff was a wilderness prospect—"a sheeny lake in the midst of a boundless forest."(210) "I see Fair Haven Pond from the Cliffs, as it were through a slight mist. It is the wildest scenery imaginable,—a Lake in the Woods," Thoreau writes in his Journal on August 5, 1851; (211) and again, three months later, "Fair Haven by moonlight lies there like a lake in the Maine wilderness in the midst of a primitive forest untrodden by man."(212) Walden Woods and Fair Haven similarly impressed two Englishmen visiting some thirty years apart. Grant Allen writes in the Fortnightly Review in May 1888, after recently visiting Concord:

I saw nothing wilder among the unbroken solitudes of the Upper Ottawa tributaries than these woods that fringe the bank of Walden. Not a human habitation, not a cleared farm, not a sign of life or civilised occupation anywhere broke the unvaried expanse of wild woodland.(213)

Even as late as 1917 Herbert Gleason recounts in Through the Year with Thoreau:

Not long ago the writer piloted to the crest of Fair Haven Hill—one of Thoreau’s dearest shrines—an English friend with whom he had recently been mountain-climbing in the Canadian Rockies. This friend, a world-wide traveller and an alpinist of international fame, notwithstanding that he was fresh from scenes of superlative grandeur in the Canadian [Page 034] Alps, was enthusiastic over the view from this little hill declaring it one of the most beautiful he had ever seen.(214)

        Indeed, a local writer had expressed the same sentiment in an article entitled "Walden Woods," in the Concord Freeman for June 27, 1884:        

Our people go to Europe to get a glimpse of the Alps, they
go to Florida to roam among the orange groves, to the
Adirondacks to ramble among towering trees and wild
woodlands, then to return to Concord and sensibly make up
their minds that, after all, these far distant pictures are                
equalled if not excelled by our own Walden Woods and the                
deep clear lake on whose surface is shadowed forest pictures
of enchanted beauty.(215)

                Next to Walden itself, the Cliff is the Concord locale most sacred to Thoreau’s memory. Sanborn writes in the last of his several biographies of Thoreau, "Should a statue of Thoreau ever be erected in Concord, these cliffs, where the brothers commemorated their Indian ideal, would be the proper place for it, and the rock itself might be carved into his aquiline features."(216) Kate Tryon makes this point even more succinctly in the title of her article about Fair Haven Hill in the Boston Daily Advertiser for March 23, 1897. She calls it simply "Thoreau’s Hill." (217)

Bear Garden Hill and the Boiling Spring
        Bear Garden Hill, a spur of Fair Haven Hill, was visited by Thoreau from about age six and remained a frequent destination on his walks. (218) For Thoreau, as for the rest of the town, Bear Garden Hill was the choicest berry pasture in Concord. During the nineteenth-century the settled area nearer to town than Bear Garden Hill was known as Hubbardville, named for a family of farmers who owned the land and lived near the Fairhaven Road-Sudbury Road intersection. (219) Much of the area around Bear Garden is meadow-wetlands which were flooded and drained annually during the early days of settlement for the crop of prized meadow hay. (220) Other parts of Bear Garden were given over to pasturage. (Thoreau mentions seeing cattle on Bear Garden Hill in 1851.) (221) The upland, however, remained principally wooded and Thoreau refers to "the dark pitch pine wood" on Bear Garden Hill. (222) "My thoughts expand and flourish [Page 035] most on this barren hill," Thoreau writes, "where in the twilight I see the moss spreading in rings and prevailing over the short, thin grass, carpeting the earth, adding a few inches of green to its circle annually while it dies within." (223) The rocky expanses, the dark pitch pine wood, the sandy promontory combined to make this hill a particularly wild and evocative tract. Bear Garden Hill was a favorite place for moonlight walks and it is a locale featured in Thoreau’s "Moonlight" papers. (224)
        The Boiling Spring at Bear Garden Hill was Concord’s coldest and most popular spring from colonial days and a literary symbol for the Transcendentalists. It was so named because it bubbled as it oozed from the earth. The land around it, called the "Boiling Spring woodlot" on old deeds, was at one time owned by Maine relatives of the Thoreaus. (225) Both Ellery Channing and Ellen Emerson refer to the Boiling Spring as an objective of their walks. (226) Channing, in fact, published a poem about the Boiling Spring called "Walden Spring":

And resting there after my thirst was quenched,
Beneath the curtain of a civil oak,
That muses near this water and this sky,
I tried some names with which to grave this fount. (227)

        Thoreau considered the Boiling Spring one of the wonders of Walden Woods. "There are few really cold springs," he reflected in his Journal, "I go out of my way to go by the Boiling Spring. How few men can be believed when they say the spring is cold? There is one cold as the coldest well water. What a treasure is such a spring! Who divined it?" (228)
        Thoreau knew who had defiled it. On February 10, 1844, David Loring, Concord’s lead pipe manufacturer, had purchased water rights to the Boiling Spring. According to Walden Woods historian, Richard O’Connor:

His plan was to supply the Concord depot with water by piping it from the Boiling Spring. Loring sold the rights to the railroad, and the spring was dug out and bricked in, and the aqueduct constructed, probably in 1846. (229)

On June 17, 1853, Thoreau laments in his Journal: [Page 036]

The Boiling Spring is turned into a tank for the Iron Horse to drink at, and the Walden woods have been cut and dried for his fodder. That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending whinner is heard throughout the town, has defiled the Boiling Spring with his feet and drunk it up, and browsed off all the wood around the pond.(230)

The next year, in Walden, he continues his jeremiad:

... 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?(231)

Thoreau wrote prophetically to his mother from Staten Island In 1843: "I should have liked to be in Walden woods with you, but not with the railroad."(232)
        Nor was Thoreau alone in regretting that the railroad encroached on Walden Woods. Ellery Channing wrote in 1849 or 1850: "It is obvious that these woodland plantations both on the River, and elsewhere must continually diminish, inasmuch as the Railroad consumes Itself, & carries off vast quantities as we may truly say of wood each year."(233) George William Curtis vented his apprehension in a striking comparison: The train's whistle, he said, was "a shriek sharper than any that had rung from Walden woods since the last war-whoop of the last Indians of Musketaquid."(234)

Walden Woods in Lincoln
        Lemuel Shattuck in his History of Concord (1835) describes "Goose Pond, lying easterly of Walden.... one of a number of small ponds, in a tract of land peculiarly broken into ridges and vales, which in some seasons are nearly dry.(235) The names Goose Pond and Little Goose Pond turn up in some of the earliest documents relating to the land transaction in the town.(236) This area was long known for excellent 'fowling" and later for ornithological studies. William Brewster owned twenty-seven acres at the pond in the 1890s, having [Page 37] bought them to save the woods from the woodchopper’s axe. (237)Goose Pond is the second Concord locale (after Annursnack Hill) Thoreau mentions in his Journal. (238)In Walden he refers to "Goose Pond, of small extent, . . . on my way to Flint’s." (239)
        Thoreau places Flint’s Pond "a mile eastward" of Walden Pond, in Lincoln. (240) "A walk through the woods thither was often my recreation." (241) When he walked to Lincoln Center to lecture, by way of Goose and Flint’s Ponds, Thoreau did not travel in the road, nor pass a house "between my own hut and the lecture room." (242) He surmised that there had been a connection between Walden and Flint’s Ponds in some antedilovian age:

I have said that Walden has no visible inlet nor outlet but it is on the one hand distantly and indirectly related to Flint’s Pond, which is more elevated, by a chain of small ponds coming from that quarter, and on the other directly and manifestly to Concord River, which is lower, by a similar chain of ponds through which in some other geological period it may have flowed . . . (243)

        Thoreau liked to climb the Cedar hill on the southeast side of Flint’s Pond "for the sake of the view"—"an extensive forest view." (244) He writes in his Journal for September 12, 1851:

I go to Flint’s Pond for the sake of the mountain view from the hill beyond, looking over Concord. I have thought it the best especially in winter, which I can get in this neighborhood .... I go to Flint’s Pond also to see a rippling lake and reedy island in its midst,—Reed Island. A man should feed his senses with the best that the land affords. (245)

        Walden Woods covers an extensive tract in Lincoln as well as Concord and reaches to Flint’s Pond and the area around Jacob Baker’s. Thoreau in the Journal he kept at the pond refers to the echo of the whippoorwills coming "faintly from far in the Lincoln woods." (246) Particularly regrettable was the loss of the "boundless chestnut woods of Lincoln,—they now sleep their long sleep under the railroad." (247) In 1860 a remnant of this chestnut wood still stood near the Lincoln line, about half a mile east of the Deep Cut on the railroad tracks, "through the woods and over hill and dale." (248) Chestnuts were not the only tree grown scarce in Walden Woods. Thoreau noted in his Journal on January 5, 1850: [Page 038]

        Discovered a small grove of beeches today-between Walden & Flint's Ponds-standing by a little run which-at length, makes its way through Jacob Baker's meadow and a deep broad ditch which he has dug-& emptied into the river. -A tree which has almost disappeared from Concord woods, though once plenty.
        It is worth the while to go some miles only to see a single beech tree. So fine a bole it has, so perfect in all its details, so fair & smooth its bark-as if painted with a brush-and fringed with lichens, I could stand an hour and look at one.(249)

        The road to Sudbury which skirts Walden Pond existed as early as 1648. (A highway from Watertown to Concord had been laid out in 1638.) The Walden road, according to Charles Walcott in Concord in the Colonial Period, "ran through the woods to the southward of Walden Pond, where it crossed the ravine, and emerged from the woods at the James Baker place, in Lincoln."(250) (Ellen Emerson, after a fire in Walden Woods in 1883, observes that .almost the whole region from Mr. Baker's to the Pond is burned."(251) Thoreau in his Journal for July 16, 1851, refers to the pine plains behind James Baker's, 'where late was open pasture, now open pitch pine woods." Thoreau continues,

These are among our pleasantest woods,— open, level, with blackberry vines interspersed and flowers, as ladys slippers, earlier, and pinks on the outskirts. Each tree has room enough. And now I hear the wood thrush from the shade, who loves these pine woods as well as 1.(252)

Fires in Walden Woods
        Fires were always a threat in Walden Woods. Ellen Emerson described Walden around 1878 as "still wooded-more so than in Thoreau's day, but there have been bad wood-fires lately that have taken off some of the best trees."(253) References to "fire in Walden Woods" appear in the Concord Town Reports for 1879-1880, 1884-1885 (two fires), 1885-1886 (two fires), 1887-1888, 1889-1890, 1891-1892, 1895-1896, 1896-1897, and 1899-1900.(254) Thoreau, however, found compensation in the fires, even in one he himself had accidentally started at Fair Haven Bay in 1844. He writes in his Journal for September 10, 1851: [Page 039]

        How beautiful the sproutland (burnt plain) seen from the Cliff! No more cheering and inspiring sight than a young wood springing up thus over a large tract, when you look down on it, the light green of the maples shaded off into the darker oaks; and here and there a maple blushes quite red, enlivening the scene yet more. Surely this earth is fit to be inhabited, and many enterprises may be undertaken with hope where so many young plants are pushing up. In the spring I burned over a hundred acres till the earth was sere and black, and by midsummer this space was clad in a fresher and more luxuriant green than the surrounding even. Shall man then despair? Is he not a sprout-land too, after never so many gearings and witherings? If you witness growth and luxuriance, it is all the same as if you grew luxuriantly. (255)

A letter Frank Sanborn wrote to the Boston Herald after an especially damaging fire in 1896 is worth quoting in full for its description of Walden Woods:

Thoreau and the Walden Woods
The Damage by the Recent Fire Not as Great as Was Reported.

To the Editor of the Herald:
        The notice in your widely circulated journal concerning the recent fire in Walden woods will convey a wrong impression to many readers, the facts about that fire having naturally been exaggerated while it was going on, and before any one could say where it would stop. I examined the localities yesterday, and can qualify to some extent your remarks.
         The term "Walden woods" covers a great tract, on both sides of the Fitchburg railroad, and on all sides of the pond, which it is now the fashion to call a "lake." This tract might be so measured as to be two miles long by half a mile, or even a mile in width, and of this area, probably less than half a square mile was burnt over in the last fire, which did not reach the fine large pines around Thoreau’s cove and cairn, nor, indeed, [Page 040] any of the woods immediately encircling the water. It did run through a large plantation of white pines, made by Thoreau some 20 rods from his hut eastward, on land belonging to his friend, Emerson, and it burned through a large tract on the east side of the Lincoln road, between the shallow lake called Goose pond, and the hillsides covered with great oaks, chestnuts and pines, once called "Hubbard's woods," and named by Emerson "The Park." Fortunately, this park, now the property of Emerson's daughter, Mrs. W. H. Forbes, was hardly touched at all, so that the regions more especially associated with the two friends, Emerson and Thoreau were not greatly injured by the fire.
        Through this park ran the path by which Alcott, while Thoreau was living by Walden (1845-47), used to visit his young friend-walking across from the Edmund Hosmer farm, or from what soon became Hawthorne's "Wayside," then owned and occupied by the Alcotts. Emerson's own way to Walden was only for a few rods through the fields; he then followed the wide Lincoln road, over "Brister's hill," or diverged to the right, at the hill's foot, into a woodpath. Both sides of this woodpath have been devastated either by the axe or by fire, but nature is quick to repair such ravages in our woods, and before 10 years, if the railroad engines set no more fires, nobody could see where the late fire has run in this part of the tract. Probably the pines planted by Thoreau's hands are mostly killed, and this is a serious loss. But the woodland associations of Thoreau and Walden are only slightly injured otherwise, by what seemed so disastrous a combustion. F. B. SANBORN. Concord, May 25.(256)

201. Harding and Bode, eds., Correspondence, p. 137.

202.  Thoreau, Journal I (Princeton), p. 66.

203.  Thoreau, Early Essays and Miscellanies p. 16.

204.  Carl Bode, ed., Collected Poems of Henry Thoreau, enlarged edition (Baltimore, 1964), p. 381.

205.  Kenneth W. Cameron, "Thoreau's Early Compositions in the Ancient Languages," Emerson Society Quarterly, 8 (111 Quarter 1957). 20-29.

206.  Bartlett, Concord Guide Book (1895). p. 178.

207.  William Brewster, October Farm (Cambridge, 1936), pp. 12-13.

208.  Joel Myerson, "Eight Lowell Letters from Concord in 1838," Illinois Quarterly, 38 (Winter 1975), 36.

209. Francis B. Dedmond, "Thoreau as Seen by an Admiring Friend: A New View," American Literature, 56:3 (October 1984), 339-340.

210.  Thoreau, Journal, 2:463.

211.  Thoreau, Journal, 2:374.

212.  Thoreau, Journal, 2:464. Ornithologist Ludlow Griscom,
Birds of Concord (Cambridge, 1949), p. 60, places the land
between Fair Haven Hill and Fair Haven Bay in "Walden Woods."

213.  Quoted in Henry Salt, The Life of Henry David Thoreau
(London, 1890), p. 9.

214.  Herbert W. Gleason, Through the Year with Thoreau
(Boston, 1917), pp. xxiii-xxiv.

215.  Anonymous, "Walden Woods," Concord Freeman, June 27,
1884. 1 am grateful to Richard O'Connor for bringing this
article to my attention.

216.  Sanborn, Life of Henry David Thoreau pp. 186-187.

229. Memorandum, Richard O’Connor to J. Walter Brain, August 31, 1988.

230. Thoreau, Journal, 5:266.

231. Thoreau, Walden, p. 192.

232. Harding and Bode, eds., Correspondence, p. 131.

233. Channing, 1849-1850 essay on walks in Concord and neighboring towns, bMS Am 1898[77], Houghton Library, Harvard University.

234. Curtis, "Emerson," Homes of American Authors, p. 234.

235. Shattuck, History of Concord, p. 200.

248. Thoreau Journal, 14:135-137 (October 17, 1860); Thoreau "Dispersion of Seeds," Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Thoreau’s Journal description of this chestnut wood in Lincoln is headed "To Walden Woods." He places the chestnut wood about one-and-a-half miles from Concord village. His route is across the open fields and meadows south of the village. About a mile from the village he enters an extensive pine and oak wood which, half a mile eastward ("further through the woods towards Lincoln") near the Lincoln line, begins to contain chestnuts.

249. Blanding, Fragmentary Journals, p.111.

250. Charles Walcott, Concord in the Colonial Period(Boston, 1884), p. 80.

251. Ellen Emerson, Letters, 2:515.

252. Thoreau, Journal. 2:313.

253. Ellen Emerson to Mr. Perry, cat 1878, Thomas Blanding, "Beans, Baked and Half-baked," Concord Saunterer, 12:1 (Spring 1977), 19.

254. I am grateful to Richard O’Connor for this tally.

255. Thoreau, Journal, 2:488-489.

256. Herald, May 26, 1896, clipping in "Emersoniana Tributes 1882," Concord Free Public Library.