|
The Thoreau Institute
at Walden Woods Library
About Thoreau's Life and Writings
Texts and Links
including Thoreau's contemporaries, his readings, current
scholarship and
related documents
Henry D. Thoreau
Brief Overviews:
Walden, The Place
—Ronald
Wesley Hoag
Walden Pond, presumably named by early colonists after Saffron Walden, England, is
located in Concord, Massachusetts, about eighteen miles northwest of Boston and a
mile-and-a-half southeast of Concord center, near the junction of Routes 2 and 126.
Encompassing some sixty-one acres, Walden Pond is approximately a half-mile long with a
considerably narrower but varying width. A path following the shoreline runs nearly a
mile-and-three-quarters along the base and sides of rising, forested banks. Railroad
tracks at the pond's western extremity parallel the Walden road (Rt. 126) to the east.
Walden Pond is the centerpiece of the approximately 425-acre Walden State Reservation,
administered by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and is the crown jewel in the much
larger Walden Woods ecosystem, identified in the writings of Henry Thoreau and now being
incrementally secured and protected by the Walden Woods
Project.
Walden Pond occupies the bottom of a kettle hole created by the melting of the
Wisconsin glacier about ten- to twelve-thousand years ago. Its steep sides were built up
from sand and gravel deposited by swirling meltwater eroding a diminishing block of ice
left in the glacier's wake. From 8,000 to 6,000 B.C., the Walden environment was tundra
like, inhabited by creatures including mastodons, musk ox, bisons, and caribou. By the
time of white settlement in the 1630s, the land surrounding the pond had become densely
forested with the chestnut-oak-hickory association that has characterized much of the last
three thousand years. By Thoreau's day pine trees, among them the "tall arrowy white
pines" that he cut down for cabin timber in March 1845, were a prominent part of the
hardwood/conifer mix.
A water-table pond, Walden has no springs or streams running into or out of it, above
or below the surface. Water is added to the pond's volume by seepage, rainfall, and
snowmelt; it is subtracted through seepage (principally during periods of high water into
Well Meadow and the Andromeda Swamp and thence to the Sudbury River at Fairhaven Bay),
through evaporation, and through uptake by trees and plants. In 1968 marine technologists
confirmed the absence of springs or feeder streams and corroborated Henry Thoreau's 1846
determination of the pond's greatest depth as 102 feet. The same scientists also recorded
a September surface temperature of seventy-six degrees and a bottom temperature of
forty-one degrees.
Notably, Walden Woods, Concord, and, indeed, all of New England were far less densely
forested in the mid-to-late nineteenth century (including during Thoreau's 1845-1847
Walden stay) than they are today. Much previously wooded land was cleared for cultivation
or pasturage, while the wood stoves and other requirements of a growing population
consumed local woodlots faster than they could be regrown. During the twenty years before
Thoreau began his Walden residency, most of the trees on one Walden hillside owned by
Ralph Waldo Emerson were cut down. Ironically enough, Emerson then purchased an additional
fourteen acres of Walden woodland, including the land on which he let Thoreau built his
cabin and plant his beanfield, in large part to preserve the threatened sylvan setting of
the pond that charmed him just as it did his younger friend. Yet not without reason is the
sound of woodchopper Alek Therien's ax a persistent refrain in Walden. And not long after
Thoreau left the pond, the severe winter of 1851-1852 caused much of Walden Woods to be
cut for firewood. Still, the pond and its immediate shoreline remained a woodland retreat,
and in 1855 Thoreau joined with
Emerson,
Bronson
Alcott, and
William Ellery Channing to
form the "Walden Pond Walking Association," a whimsical yet fitting rubric for
their saunterings to Walden and other spiritually renewing destinations.
Despite its relative wildness, the Walden Pond that Thoreau knew from his first
childhood encounter had long since ceased to be an untouched wilderness lake. Nor does he
pretend that it is one. While Walden's essential wildness is as unviolated as the
inviolable wildness of nature itself' this is a pond with a long human association. Not
just natural history but human history had taken place there for thousands of years before
Thoreau's arrival, just as it has continued to occur there for the century-and-a-half
since his departure. More than twenty-five-thousand Indian artifacts dating from
approximately six-thousand years ago have been found around Walden Pond; countless others
from the centuries since that distant era. Henry Thoreau was famous for his ability to
find arrowheads, including one inadvertently discovered point that he whimsically
attributed to Tahattawan, the Indian chief who in 1637 signed over to English newcomers
six square miles of Concord land including Walden Pond.
Distanced from Concord's business and residential center and largely uncultivated, the
area around Walden Pond was a home to those Concordians who found or placed themselves on
the fringes of the community, several of whom are described in
Walden: slaves such as Cato
Ingraham and the ironically named Brister Freeman, whose "hospitable" wife Fenda
told fortunes; Zilpha, another black woman who "spun linen for the townsfolk, making
the Walden Woods ring with her shrill singing"; Tommy Wyman, a potter who told tales
of an iron chest on the bottom of the pond that was sometimes seen floating toward shore
before sinking once again; and John Breed, a barber and drunkard in whose life and death
Thoreau found "an extreme instance of the power of appetite for rum"
(Journal).
The woods were home, too, Lo families of shanty Irish such as Walden's John Field, many of
whom helped build the Fitchburg Railroad whose newly laid tracks carried the first Concord
train across the west end of the pond the year before Thoreau began his cabin.
In Thoreau's time Walden Pond served as a nature retreat not just for him but for the
town at large. Concord fishermen sought its native pickerel, pout, and perch (since
replaced by stocked trout), not letting thick winter ice keep them from their quarry.
Hunters and waterfowlers roamed its woods and stationed themselves on its shores.
Picnickers, berry pickers, and skaters made Walden a frequent destination, and then as
now it was a popular swimming hole. Abolitionists met at Walden and local celebrations
were held there. And during Thoreau's residency, the pond attracted short-lived economic
interest as an ice-harvesting site, an activity described in Walden.
In the years after Thoreau's death Walden was exploited for recreational use. The
railroad put in picnic tables in 1866, a bath house in 1868, and in 1880 began conducting
excursions to the pond that continued into the next century. A pavilion, merry-go-round,
race track, boat rentals, and concessions were Victorian period embellishments. Notably,
as early as 1875 Harper's Magazine urged that Walden be protected from overuse. In 1922
the Emerson family and others deeded more than eighty acres of Walden land to the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts to secure the pond for appropriate recreation and to
preserve its natural beauty. Although Walden today has been restored to pre-amusement park
condition, its management as a heavily used (though restricted) swimming site is
controversial, especially to the many Thoreauvian pilgrims who visit the pond, the cabin
site, and the cairn begun there in Thoreau's honor by Bronson Alcott and Mary Adams of
Iowa in 1872. In 1965 Walden Pond was designated a National Historical and Literary
Landmark. About 750,000 people visit it annually.
|
