Thoreau attends a meeting of the Town and Country Club at 12 West Street with 27 other men. This is the only meeting of the club Thoreau attends and he never becomes a member (Emerson Society Quarterly, no. 8 (1957), 2).
Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his journal on 24 March:
At Alcott’s [A. Bronson Alcott] last Tuesday (20 March) we had a meeting of thirty men, and discussed the expediency of a Club & Clubroom. A.cott was festal & Olympian, as always, when friends come; his heart is then too great; his voice falters & chokes in his throat. Every newcomer seems large, sacred, & crowned to him. It was proposed that the Club should rent the room in which we sat, (Alcott’s,) & that he should be declared perpetual secretary. It is much wanted by the country scholars a café or Reading Room in the city, where, for a moderate subscription, they can find a place to sit in, & find their friends, when in town, & to write a letter in, or read a paper. Better still, if you can add certain days of meeting when important questions can be debated, communications read, &c. &c. It was proposed by Hale [Edward E. Hale] & others, sometime since, to form in Boston a “Graduates’ Club.” This would be that. Then the ministers have a “Hook & Ladder,” or a “RailRoad Club.” [Thoreau is then included in a list of 54 other men]
(The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 11:77-79)
See Kenneth Walter Cameron’s “Emerson, Thoreau, and the Town and Country Club” (Emerson Society Quarterly, no. 8 (1957), 2–17).
