Historic Walden Woods (file 5 of 5)

[Page 040] The Cutting of Walden Woods
        Britton's Hollow, in Walden Woods, was along the Lincoln (Sandy Pond) Road, between Goose Pond and Saw Mill Brook. Just over the line, in Lincoln, along the same road and still in Walden Woods, was Britton's Camp, as disruptive a factor in the landscape as the railroad; for, as Emerson reminds us, Britton's "trade is lumber."(257) Thoreau describes Britton's devastation of the hollow which bears his name:

        It was a mistake for Britton to treat that Fox Hollow lot as he did. I remember a large old pine and chestnut wood there [Page 041] some twenty years ago [ca. 1840]. He came and cut it off and burned it over, and ever since it has been good for nothing. I mean that acre at the bottom of the hollow. It is now one of those frosty hollows so common in Walden Woods, where little grows, sheep’s fescue grass, sweet-fern, hazelnut bushes, and oak scrubs whose dead tops are two or three feet high, while the still living shoots are not more than half as high at their base. They have lingered so long and died down annually. At length I see a few birches and pines creeping into it, which at this rate in the course of a dozen years more will suggest a forest there. Was this wise? (258)

        But the cutting continued. Nothing more dramatically illustrates the degree of devastation than to contrast the woodlands indicated on the 1830 and 1852 maps of Concord. (259) The latter (to which Thoreau contributed a survey of Walden Pond) shows a greatly reduced standing forest in Walden Woods. By 1852, the railroad, the lumber business, and town fuel supplies had taken their toll on the woods. That same year, Thoreau reflected in his Journal: "This winter they are cutting down our woods more seriously than ever,—Fair Haven Hill, Walden, Linnaea Borealis Wood, etc., etc. Thank God, they cannot cut down the clouds." (260) That same year too Thoreau added the following passage to his draft of Walden, five years after he left the woods:

        But since I left those shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water. My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down? (261)

"These woods!" Thoreau writes as the woodchoppers laid waste the landscape, "Why do I feel their being cut more sorely? Does it not affect me nearly? The axe can deprive me of much. Concord is sheared of its pride. I am certainly the less attached to my native town in consequence. One, and a main, link is broken. I shall go to Walden less frequently." (262) Britton’s business declined and Thoreau informed Emerson in February 1848, "Joel Britton has failed and gone into chancery—but the woods continue to fall before the axes of other men" (263)
        Less than a week before Thoreau lamented the destruction of Fox Hollow, he had noted in his Journal: [Page 042]

        The woods within my recollection have gradually withdrawn further from the village, and woody capes which jutted from the forest toward the town are now cut off and separated by cleared land behind. The Irish have also made irruptions into our woods in several places, and cleared land. (264)

This is not to suggest that Thoreau found the Irish presence in Walden Woods wholly disagreeable. He had written Emerson on October 17, 1843, when the Irish were first settling into their shanty villages near Walden Pond:

        Methinks I could look with equanimity upon a long street of Irish cabins and pigs and children revelling in the genial Concord dirt, and I should still find my Walden wood and Fair Haven in their tanned and happy faces. (265)

        Thoreau himself felt culpable in the cutting of Walden Woods. In his capacity as surveyor he divided the land in men’s eyes and made Walden Woods marketable. He was aiding and abetting his neighbors in their alteration of the landscape. There is selfassessment in his New Year’s Journal entry, 1858:

        I have lately been surveying the Walden woods so extensively and minutely that I now see it mapped in my mind’s eye—as, indeed, on paper—as so many men’s woodlots, and am aware when I walk there that I am at a given moment passing from such a one’s wood-lot to such another’s. (266)

        Yet, despite the incursions of business and commerce into Walden Woods, its unity as a wild tract remained intact. "They cannot fatally injure Walden with an axe," Thoreau wrote, "for they have done their worst and failed." (267) He took heart from the noble stand of trees which remained on the bank and brow of Brister’s Hill:

        I love to look at Ebby Hubbard’s oaks and pines on the hillside from Brister’s Hill. Am thankful that there is one old miser who will not sell nor cut his woods, though it is said that they are wasting. It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. (268)

Even after Thoreau’s death in 1862, his friends considered how he would have continued to lament village encroachments on Walden [Page 043] Woods. Ellery Channing told Sophia Thoreau six years after her brother's death that he could often hear his voice, "deploring the loss of woods & changes in landscape."(269) Four years later Bronson Alcott saw the woodcutters felling the Ministerial lot and closing in on Ebby Hubbard's Woods:

        The woodchoppers have felled the timber on the Ministerial lot across the interval, having as yet Ebby Hubbards woodlot, which doubtless is doomed now he is no longer here to protect it from their strokes. It qualifies the landscape very considerably, this opening of forty acres to view, and one must be reconciled to lose his handsome fringe of forest on that side of the prospect. It is well that Thoreau is far, if he has indeed left these sylvan haunts of his. Does not every stroke of the axe smite the Dryad?(270)

Ecological Succession in Walden Woods
        Thoreau's awareness of the irrevocable loss such devastation caused to the landscape compelled him to turn ' his attention increasingly to the study of forest preservation, to assure that when one forest is cut a new and healthy one will grow in its place. As Emerson pointed out in his obituary for Thoreau in the Boston Daily Advertiser, May 8, 1862, "His latest studies were in forest trees, the succession of forest growths, and the annual increment of wood."(271) His last unfinished, still unpublished, work on this subject is called "The Dispersion of Seeds."(272) From this massive project Thoreau culled a shorter text, 'The Succession of Forest Trees," delivered before the Middlesex Agricultural Society on September 20, 1860, and subsequently published in the New York Weekly Tribune and elsewhere. These works have the purpose "to show how, according to my observation, our forest trees and other vegetables are planted by Nature."(273) Part of "The Dispersion of Seeds" deals with principles of forest management. On a metaphorical level "The Dispersion of Seeds," like Walden, is a celebration of the restorative spirit of nature. "As time elapses & the resources from which our forests have been supplied fail," Thoreau wrote at the beginning of "The Dispersion of Seeds," 'we shall of necessity be more & more convinced of the significance of the seed."(274) Thoreau planted this thought in American culture in the soil and symbol of Walden Woods.
        So concerned was Thoreau that Concord (and America generally) retain substantial parts of its forest for inspiration and [Page 044] education that he proposed formal controls for its protection. These proposals are all the more impressive when we remember Thoreau’s dislike of governmental interference in individual lives. This time, however, Thoreau came out of the woods to propose to his fellow townspeople some purposeful political action:

        Each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest of five hundred or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation. We hear of cow-commons and ministerial lots, but we want men—commons and lay lots, inalienable forever. Let us keep the New World new, preserve all the advantages of living in the country. There is meadow and pasture and wood-lot for the town’s poor. Why not a forest and huckleberry-field for the town’s rich? All Walden Wood might have been preserved for our park forever, with Walden in its midst.... (275)

Thoreau implies this same plan in his Journal for January 22, 1852:

        The towns thus bordered, with a fringed and tasselled border, each has its preserves. Methinks the town should have more supervision and control over its parks than it has. It concerns us all whether these proprietors choose to cut down all the woods this winter or not. (276)

In a passage reminiscent of his well-known self-description in Walden "surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes" (277)—Thoreau compares his role in Walden Woods to that of an English Warden, a keeper of the woods who inspects it regularly. "Does not our Walden need such?" Thoreau asks, then answers his own question, "Walden Wood was my forest walk." (278)
        On his woodland walks Thoreau was always on the alert for signs of new growth. He paid attention particularly to the "frosty hollows so common in Walden Woods, where little grows," (279) such as Britton had cleared at Fox Hollow. Thoreau noted in his Journal on November 27, 1858:

        Those barren hollows and plains in the neighborhood of Walden are singular places.
        I see many which were heavily wooded fifteen or thirty years ago now covered only with fine sedge, sweet-fern, or a [Page 45] few birches, willow, poplars, small wild cherries, panicled corners, etc. They need not amount to hollows at all: many of them are glades merely, and all that region is elevated, but the surrounding higher ground, though it may be only five or ten feet higher, will be covered with a good growth. One should think twice before he cut off such places. Perhaps they had better never be laid bare, but merely thinned out. We do not begin to understand the treatment of woodland yet.... (280)

Thoreau saw, however, that not all anomalous features of Walden Woods result from man’s devastation. Writing of Heywood’s Meadow, ten or a dozen acres in the woods along the railroad, (281) Thoreau observes the effect water has in preventing trees from growing over the meadow. He observes astutely about the surficial structure of Walden Woods: "You may say that it takes a geological change to make a wood-lot there." (282)
        Thoreau took heart from the restoration of the forest within his recent memory. He recalled that the old pigeon-place field by the Deep Cut in Walden Woods was once an open grassy field: "It is now one of our most pleasant woodland paths." (283) In the fall of 1860 he remarked on the pitch and white pine wood just east of Hubbard’s close at Brister’s Spring, which he had known as pasture thirty years earlier. (284)
        Thoreau observed that most second growth woodland in the town had been cut between 1845 and 1850 for the railroad. (Second growth Thoreau described as that wood which has been cut but once.) Other new woods (woods which sprung up de novo), all pine and birch woods, which Thoreau could remember springing up were the pitch pines on Bear Garden Hill, some of the pitch and white pine wood on and around Fair Haven, the pitch pines east of Hubbard’s Close, and Thoreau’s own pitch pine field at Walden. (285)
        Thus did Walden Woods replenish itself though with little help from man. "It struck me again to-night,. Thoreau wrote in Walden, "as if I had not seen it almost daily for more than twenty years,—Why, here is Walden, the same woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; where a forest was cut down last winter another is springing up by its shore as lustily as ever." (286) [Page 46]

Walden Woods as a Memorial to Thoreau
        Thoreau’s friends intimately connected his name with the locales he wrote about. Bronson Alcott said, "Lake Walden, but for him would have been but ‘the Concord Pond’ unknown to fame." (287) As early as 1850 Alcott had recognized the unique identity with which Thoreau and the other Concord authors had infused the landscape. "Concord is classic land," Alcott noted, for here dwelt "the Americans par excellence and men of the future....The names of Emerson and Thoreau and Channing and Hawthorne are associated with the fields and forests and lakes and rivers of this township...." (288)
        Thoreau himself anticipated the effect a book like Walden would have on the local landscape, forever altering its significance for mankind:

        Any book of great authority and genius would seem to our imagination to permeate and pervade all space. Its spirit like a more subtle ether would sweep along with the prevailing winds of a country—conveying a new gloss to the meadows, and the depths of the wood, and bathing the huckleberries on the hill, as sometimes a subtle influence in the sky washes in waves over the fields, and seems to break on some invisible beach in the air. It would spend the mornings and the evenings—and all things would confirm it. (289)

It is this pervasive influence on Walden Woods which Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter, attributes to Thoreau when she writes, Walden woods rustled the name of Thoreau whenever I walked in them." (290)
After Thoreau’s death in 1862 the intimate association of Walden with his memory became more common in the press. Thomas Lang’s article "Walden Pond" describes Walden in 1868 as "a pond embosomed by wooden hills" and notes, "His book awakened the attention of the public to the great natural beauties of the pond." (291) Frank Sanborn notes in the Springfield Republican, January 25, 1869, "It is now twenty-four years, lacking a few months, since Henry Thoreau began to build his house in Walden Woods, beside the pond he has made famous." (292) A few months later another writer for the Republican, then one of the country’s leading newspapers, provided the public with this description of the setting of Thoreau’s book: "The forest around the lake is full of charming nooks, with tiny [Page 047] circlets of ponds let into their centers, with tall trees, immense in girth, towering out of their recesses." (293)
Sometimes the association of Thoreau and Walden Woods was extravagant even by admirers’ standards. H. A. Blood published a poem entitled "Thoreau" in the New York Tribune in 1865, which included these lines:

In his native Walden-wood
He was our modern Robin Hood. (294)

        Amanda B. Harris, in "Thoreau’s Hermitage" in the New York Weekly Evening Post, January 31, 1877, calls Walden "The pond in the Woods" in one of the article’s sub-headings. She continues: "That limpid sheet of water, which is destined to immortality in literature, is a mile and a half below the historic village of Concord, in the midst of woods, and not a house can be seen from any part of its shores." (295) Fisher, correspondent for the Boston Transcript, wrote in "A Visit to Old Concord" that the chief reason to go to Concord is "to seek out the haunts of that powerful recluse who erected his hut in the woods." (296)

Pilgrimages to Walden Woods
        Increasingly, Walden Woods became a place of pilgrimage for Thoreau’s admirers who recognized that setting as a symbol of man’s relation to nature. Frank Sanborn wrote in the New England Magazine in 1890, "After all, the interest of the Concord pilgrimage centres about Walden." (297) George Bartlett, author of the Concord Guide Book, noted in Picnic Days:

        Pilgrims from the distant West and scholars from the Old World who come to Concord, eagerly inquire for Walden woods and the site of Thoreau’s house, and each visitor lays a stone on the cairn which is thus being slowly built by his loving friends from far and near. (298)

Similarly, Annie Russell Marble wrote in Thoreau: His Home, Friends and Books:

        The pervasive atmosphere of his memory extends through the town, from the willow banks of the Concord river [Page 048] to the woods encircling Walden, with its monumental cairn of world-wide contributions. (299)

        A steady stream of pilgrims came to Thoreau Country from the 1860s on. Robert Collyer, one of the first to make the pilgrimage after Thoreau’s death, said of his trip to Concord from the midwest in 1862: "I went in the fall of that year to look at his grave and Walden woods and the pond." (300) John Albee visited Walden and afterward published a sonnet in the Joumal of Speculative Philosophy entitled "At Thoreau’s Cairn, Walden Woods, 1879." (301) When naturalist John Muir made his pilgrimage on June 8, 1893, he described the visit thus:

        We walked through the woods to Walden Pond. It is a beautiful lake about half a mile long, fairly embosomed like a bright dark eye in the wooded hills of smooth moraine gravel and sand, with a rich leafy undergrowth of huckleberry, willow, and young oak bushes, etc., and grass and flowers in rich variety. No wonder Thoreau lived here two years. I could have enjoyed living here two hundred years or two thousand. (302)

        One of the earliest recorded pilgrimages to Thoreau Country is prototypical. Calvin Greene, a resident of Rochester, Michigan, had corresponded with Thoreau in 1856 after reading Walden and had sent him money to have his daguerreotype taken. Greene came to Concord a year and a half after Thoreau’s death and was welcomed by Thoreau’s family and friends who directed or guided him to Thoreau’s haunts. Already, upon his arrival, Greene had wasted no time in seeking out the site of Thoreau’s retreat. "Left for the Walden woods by the old Lincoln road," Greene wrote in his diary. (303) The next day Ellery Channing guided Greene to Brister’s Spring, "where I went, lay down & drank a good cold drink of water to the memory of the writer who has given it consequence." (304) Channing also guided Greene to the Cliffs, Baker Farm, and Walden Pond—principal sites in Walden Woods. Finally, two days later, before leaving Concord, Greene himself made a second trip to Walden and the Cliffs. It was a wholly memorable pilgrimage. When Greene returned to Concord eleven years later, his first act upon reaching town was to start out "for the Walden Pond Country." (305) He visited the pond and the Cliffs again. "The vale," he said, "lake & river running through it, & Hollowell Place looked much as they did 11 years ago—The house on the Baker Farm had disappeared." (306) This pilgrimage, like the earlier one, included a symbolic gesture to [Page 049] Thoreau’s memory. "I stop’d at Brister’s Spring, & as it had become a sacred fountain to me, I lay down & deliberately drank seven swallows of its cool clear water to the memory of its absent poet." (307)

Later References to Walden Woods
        It was not long before the term Walden Woods appeared in both the critical and popular literature about Thoreau. Henry Salt uses the term in an English biography, The Life of Henry David Thoreau (1890). (308) Earlier in England, Thomas Hughs had used the term Walden Woods several times in an article in the Academy for November 17, 1877. (309) Edward Emerson used the term Walden Woods in his sketch of Thoreau’s life, Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend. (310) The turn of the century saw widespread circulation of the term. Clara Laughlin, for example, in the Book Buyer for October 1902 writes:

        But think of a man . . . who could sit on the shores of Fairy Pond in Walden woods, and weave a spell that would draw reverent thousands to the spot to gaze at it for his dear sake, and make the straining eyes of other thousands see the place as he saw it, and revere all woodland beauty, all of God’s outdoor world as they never had done before.... (311)

        Arthur Rickett writes in The Vagabond in Literature "Walden Wood had been a familiar and favoured spot for many years, and so he began the building of his tabernacle there." (312) P. A. Graham, writing in Nature in Books in 1891, attests:

. . . In that Walden wood he stands as the most wonderful and sensitive register of phenomena, finer and more exact than any cunningly devised measure. He is vision and hearing, touch, smelling, and taste incarnate. Not only so, but he knows how to preserve the flashing forest colours in unfading light, to write down the wind’s music in a score that all may read, to glean and garner every sensuous impression. (313)

        Harriette R. Shattuck, writing in the Boston Transcript in 1882, recommends "if one seeks quiet, he may ride through the woods to Walden." (314) N. B. Bartlett repeated this sentiment in "Thoreau and Walden Pond" in the Book News Monthly for February [Page 050] 1910: "The spirit of Thoreau is abroad in the peaceful Walden woods. His work, prompted by his love of Nature, has left its impress upon all this region." (315) This identification of Walden with Thoreau’s ideals remains firm into the twentieth century. Josephine Swayne enlists the term Walden Woods in The Story of Concord in 1905. (316) Harold H. Blanchard, in "Thoreau’s Concord" in the Tuftonion for the fall of 1944, expresses regret "that a trailer camp has been permitted to lodge itself in the lovely Walden Woods." (317) Townsend Scudder, in Concord American Town, writes about the Concord men going off to the Civil War: "The inhabitants watched the train vanish behind Walden woods, then walked silently home." (318) Naturalists and literary scholars alike have recognized the significance of the woodland setting of Thoreau’s book. Ralph Rusk, Emerson’s biographer and the editor of his letters, uses the term casually and frequently. (319) Roger Tory Peterson writes in Wild America: "His Walden has become a place of pilgrimage.... The woods are there, and the same animals and plants—most of them." (320) Kenneth Cameron, founder of the Emerson Society, reminds us, "Walden woods provided the inspiration and symbolism of their poetry." (321) Allen French, Concord historian, writing in Old Concord describes Walden as "completely surrounded by woods" and as a "place still remote." He describes ‘Walden woods" as opening "a quarter of a mile before the pond itself became visible through the trees as one reached the top of the rise." (322) William Condry, Thoreau’s English biographer, aptly entitled an article in Country Life in 1962 "The Sage of Walden Woods." (323)

Thoreau's Wish for Walden Woods
        The foregoing survey demonstrates that the tract called Walden Woods extends over a considerably larger area of Lincoln and Concord than is currently represented (1989) by the Walden Pond State Reservation. The writings of Concord authors, historians, and naturalists alike help to define the boundaries of Walden Woods. Its expanse extends to the Cambridge Turnpike, Fairyland (Hubbard’s Close), Laurel Glen, Bear Garden Hill, Sudbury River, Fair Haven Bay, Baker Farm, Mount Misery, Flint’s Pond, and Saw Mill Brook. This is the Walden Woods Thoreau wished preserved as a park, "a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation." (324) It is to this concern that Thoreau addresses the concluding pages of his lecture on "Huckleberries," which he wrote for the enlightenment of his townsmen but which he did not live to deliver: [Page 051]

        What are the natural features which make a township handsome—and worth going far to dwell in? A river with its water-falls—meadows, lakes—hills, cliffs or individual rocks, a forest and single ancient trees—such things are beautiful. They have a high use which dollars and cents never represent. If the inhabitants of a town were wise they would seek to preserve these things though at a considerable expense. For such things educate far more than any hired teachers or preachers, or any at present recognized system of school education.
        I do not think him fit to be the founder of a state or even of a town who does not foresee the use of these things, but legislates as it were, for oxen chiefly.
        It would be worth the while if in each town there were a committee appointed, to see that the beauty of the town received no detriment. If here is the largest boulder in the country, then it should not belong to an individual nor be made into door-steps. In some countries precious metals belong to the crown—so here more precious objects of great natural beauty should belong to the public. (325)

257. Rusk, ea., Emerson Letters, 3:205.

269. William Ellery Channing to Sophia Thoreau, January 4,1868, Concord Antiquarian Society Papers, Concord Free Public library.

270. Alcott, Diary 47, March 16,1872, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

271. E[merson]., "Henry D. Thoreau," Boston Daily Advertiser, May 8,1862.

272. Henry D. Thoreau, "The Dispersion of Seeds," Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

273. Thoreau, "Dispersion of Seeds," Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

274. Thoreau, "Dispersion of Seeds," Berg Collection, New York Public Library.