Henry David Thoreau
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7. Many fine collections offer excellent and wide-ranging introductions to the best current work on Thoreau’s life and thought in a range of disciplines. Good general introductions include Kevin P. Van Anglen and Kristen Case, eds. Thoreau at 200: Essays and Reassessments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016; Joel Myerson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); William E. Cain, ed., A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); François Specq, Laura Dassow Walls, and Michel Granger, eds., Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013); and Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings, ed. William Rossi (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 3rd ed., 2008). Walden is reconsidered in Sandra Harbert Petrulionis and Laura Dassow Walls, eds. More Day to Dawn: Thoreau’s “Walden” for the Twenty-First Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007); environmental writing is represented in Schneider, ed., Thoreau’s Sense of Place (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000); politics and philosophy are introduced in Jack Turner, ed., A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009) and Rick Anthony Furtak, Jonathan Ellsworth, and James D. Reid, eds., Thoreau’s Importance for Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). In addition, the historical introductions to the many volumes of the Princeton edition of the Writings of Henry D. Thoreau offer troves of authoritative information and informed perspectives.
8. Richard M. Lebeaux, “From Canby to Richardson: The Last Half-Century of Thoreau Biography,” in Thoreau’s World and Ours: A Natural Legacy, ed. Edmund A. Schofield and Robert C. Baron (Golden, CO: North American Press, 1993), 127.
9. In 1977, Harding himself said he was “astonished” to see that no one had yet built on his armature of facts the kind of narrative he envisioned but did not write himself: “I very definitely did not intend or even hope to say the last word on the subject” (Walter Harding, “Thoreau Scholarship Today,” TSB 139 [Spring 1977]: 1). I thank Walter for his generosity, and second his words on my own account!
Introduction
1. PEJ, 1:9 (October 29, 1837). “Musketaquid” was the name of the river, the valley it ran through, and the people who lived upon it.
2. PEJ, 1:5 (October 22, 1837).
3. Lemuel Shattuck, A History of the Town of Concord (Boston: Russell, Odiorne; Concord, MA: John Stacy, 1835), 50–51; Ruth R. Wheeler, Concord: Climate for Freedom (Concord, MA: Concord Antiquarian Society, 1967), 49–54.
4. Shattuck, History of Concord, 32; Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xi–xii; see also her Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Wolverton points out that practicing Native crafts as a form of livelihood was a kind of economic resistance: see Nan Wolverton, “‘A Precarious Living’: Basket-Making and Related Crafts among New England Indians,” in Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience, ed. Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts and the University of Virgina Press, 2003), 360.
5. PEJ, 3:130–31; Richard D. Brown, “‘No Harm to Kill Indians’: Equal Rights in a Time of War.” New England Quarterly 81.1 (March 2008): 34–62.
6. J, 7:132–37 (January 24, 1855), in William Wood, New England’s Prospect (1633).
7. Brian Donahue, The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 61, 69, 111–12; Shattuck, History of Concord, 379; Walden, 183.
8. Donahue, Great Meadow, 79 and passim, 107; Walden, 195.
9. Brian Donahue documented this collapse in “Henry David Thoreau and the Environment of Concord,” in Thoreau’s World and Ours: A Natural Legacy, ed. Edmund A. Schofield and Robert C. Baron (Golden, CO: North American Press, 1993), 181–89.
10. PEJ, 4:166–69. On this “poetic symbiosis” between Thoreau and his home landscape, see J. Walter Brain, “Thoreau’s Poetic Vision and the Concord Landscape,” in Tho-reau’s World and Ours: A Natural Legacy, ed. Edmund A. Schofield and Robert C. Baron (Golden, CO: North American Press, 1993), 281–97.
11. Walden, 182.
12. Robert M. Thorson, Walden’s Shore: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); see especially 96–99, 106–11, 135–48. As Thorson details, Walden Pond is more precisely “a coalesced lake created by the filling of four separate kettle basins with groundwater” (144).
13. Shirley Blancke and Barbara Robinson, From Musketaquid to Concord: The Native and European Experience (Concord, MA: Concord Antiquarian Museum, 1985); Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting, 3. Clamshell Hill is now the site of Emerson Hospital.
14. Donahue, Great Meadow, 34; see also William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), ch. 3.
15. Shattuck, History of Concord, 2.
16. R. Wheeler, Concord, 19; Shattuck, History of Concord, 4; Donahue, Great Meadow, 75.
17. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 58–66.
18. Shattuck, History of Concord, 20–24; 28–31.
19. Ibid., 76–87.
20. J, 9:160.
Chapter One
1. Maria Thoreau to Jennie M. LeBrun, Bangor, Maine, January 17, 1878, Thoreau Family Correspondence, vault 35, unit 3, Concord Free Public Library (hereafter CFPL); Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Henry D. Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882), 6; Days of HT, 6. Sanborn’s great-uncle, Levi Melcher, was a clerk in Jean Thoreau’s store. Sanborn, The Life of Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 5.
2. Jean, or possibly Philippe.
3. J, 7:325–27. The letters from HDT’s great-uncle Peter/Pierre Thoreau (addressed to Elizabeth Thoreau in reply to her letter telling of Jean’s death in 1801) give the Concord Thoreaus the family news from Jersey. HDT copied them into his Journal on April 21, 1855, and noted Aunt Maria’s theory that the letters ceased at Peter/Pierre’s death in 1810 because he was the only Jersey Thoreau who could write in English. See Wendell Glick, “The Jersey Thoreaus,” TSB 148 (Summer 1979): 1–5.
4. EEM, 113; CC, 183; William Ellery Channing II, Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist, ed. F. B. Sanborn (Boston: Charles E. Goodspeed, 1902), 2.
5. J, 9:132–33.
6. Jayne E. Triber, A True Republican: The Life of Paul Revere (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 133; Days of HT, 4–5.
7. PEJ, 6:194–95. A skeptical Henry turned to the diary of John Adams to confirm this family narrative.
8. Ibid., 3:337.
9. Annie Russell Marble, Thoreau: His Home, Friends, and Books (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902), 35–36; Maria Thoreau to Harriet Lincoln Wheeler, Bangor, December 5, 1876, Thoreau Family Papers, vault 35, unit 3, CFPL.
10. John Thoreau once recollected that he, as well as all his sisters except for Elizabeth, had been born on Richmond Street between Salem and Hanover Streets; this would be the street in back of Prince Street, in North Boston near Paul Revere’s House and the Old North Church (J, 11:381). The children of Jean Thoreau and Jane “Jennie” Burns Thoreau were Elizabeth or “Betsy” (1782–1839), John (1783–84), Jane (1784–1864), Mary (1786–1812), John (HDT’s father, 1787–1859), Nancy (1786–1815), Sarah (1790–1829), David (July 15, 1792–December 1792), Maria (1794–1881), and David (1796–1817).
11. J, 11:381, 131, 9:132.
12. Ibid., 10:252, 275; 278–79 (the neighbor was Mrs. William Munroe).
13. Maria Thoreau to Harriet Lincoln Wheeler, December 5, 1856, Thoreau Family Correspondence, vault 35, unit 3, CFPL.
14. Robert A. Gross, “Faith in the Boardinghouse: New Views of Thoreau Family Religion,” TSB 250 (Winter 2005): 1.
15. Gross, “Faith in the Boardinghouse,” 1; Marble, Thoreau: Home, F
riends, Books, 35.
16. Sanborn writes that Isaac Hurd, son of Dr. Isaac Hurd and nephew of Joseph Hurd (who profited so handsomely from Jean Thoreau’s estate), involved his father in his debts and “was for a while a prisoner for debt in the Concord jail,” implying it was Hurd rather than John who had incurred some of John Thoreau’s early debts (Sanborn, Life of Thoreau, 43).
17. J, 11:436; Robert A. Gross, The Transcendentalists and Their World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, forthcoming), ch. 5, mss. pp. 5–8.
18. Anne McGrath, “Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau,” Concord Saunterer 14.4 (Winter 1979): 9.
19. Edmond Hudson, “The Wide Spreading Jones Family” (1917), TSB 221 (Fall 1997): 6. Eventually the British government, recognizing this family’s extraordinary sacrifice and service to the Crown, awarded four of the surviving Jones brothers a modest grant of ₤100 each. Mary and the four brothers who remained in the United States received nothing (ibid., 11).
20. PEJ, 4:445–46 (April 14, 1852), 3:15. Contrary to Thoreau’s account, the escapee was not Simeon but Josiah Jones; Simeon was then imprisoned for his role in Josiah’s escape. Thoreau lists Mary’s brothers as best the family recollected them; four had escaped to Nova Scotia across the bay from Bangor, Maine. In 1795, when Mary brought her daughters Sophia, Louisa, and Cynthia to visit them, they were nearly shipwrecked—a dramatic story whose ending was lost when pages were torn out of Thoreau’s Journal (ibid., 3:15–16).
21. See Sanborn, Life of Thoreau, 18–19, 534; and E. Harlow Russell, “Thoreau’s Maternal Grandfather Asa Dunbar: Fragments from His Diary and Commonplace Book,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, April 19, 1908, 66–76.
22. Mary Jones Dunbar’s children were Polly, born in Salem in 1773; William, born in Weston in 1776; Charles, born in Harvard in 1780; Sophia, born in Harvard in 1781; Louisa, born in Keene, 1785; and Cynthia (HDT’s mother), born in Keene, 1787; see S. G. Griffin, A History of the Town of Keene (Keene, NH: N.p., 1904), 586–87.
23. Joseph C. Wheeler, “Where Thoreau Was Born,” Concord Saunterer, n.s., 7 (1999): 8; Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (1976; New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 59, 63.
24. J, 9:381; Marble, Thoreau: Home, Friends, Books, 55–56; W. E. Channing II, Poet-Naturalist (1902), 3; J. Wheeler, “Where Thoreau Was Born.” Thoreau’s Birth House is the center of Thoreau Farm, an educational institution; see http://thoreaufarm.org (accessed March 17, 2016).
25. J, 9:213.
26. George Hendrick, ed., Remembrances of Concord and the Thoreaus: Letters of Horace Hosmer to Dr. S. A. Jones (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 4, 10–11. Daniel Ricketson noted Cynthia’s “rare intellectual power” and “unusual vivacity,” attributing Henry’s “fine gift for conversation” to her influence (Marble, Thoreau: Home, Friends, Books, 42).
27. Days of HT, 8.
28. J, 14:329–30; Leslie Perrin Wilson, In History’s Embrace: Past and Present in Concord, Massachusetts (Concord, MA: Concord Free Public Library, 2007), 39–42.
29. J, 11:436; Wilson, In History’s Embrace, 42.
30. T. D. Seymour Bassett, “The Cold Summer of 1816 in Vermont: Fact and Folklore,” New England Galaxy 15.1 (Summer 1973): 16.
31. Middlesex Gazette, July 19, 1817; William R. Baron, “1816 in Perspective: The View from the Northeastern United States,” in C. R. Harrington, ed. The Year without a Summer? World Climate in 1816 (Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Nature, 1992), 125–26; Bassett, “Cold Summer” 19.
32. J, 9:411, 8:64. David Henry reversed his first two names around the time he graduated from Harvard.
33. W. E. Channing II, Poet-Naturalist (1902), 3.
34. J, 8:65; Marble, Thoreau: Home, Friends, Books, 36.
35. Hendrick, Remembrances, 20; Sanborn, Life of Thoreau, 33.
36. J, 8:93–94.
37. Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 84–86; Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson: A Biography (New York: Viking, 1981), 113–14; JMN, 14:327–28, September 1859.
38. J, 8:23.
39. PEJ, 2:173–74.
40. Days of HT, 15; J, 8:245–46, 12:38.
41. John Farmer and Jacob P. Moore, eds., Collections, Historical and Miscellaneous; and Monthly Literary Journal (Concord, NH: Jacob B. Moore, 1823), 30–31; Middlesex Observer, November 9, 1822, 3.
42. For the history of pencil-making in Concord, see Robert A. Gross’s definitive exposition in Transcendentalists and Their World, ch. 5, mss. pp. 28–42; “Memoir of William Munroe,” Memoirs of the Members of the Concord Social Club, 2nd series (Cambridge, MA: N.p., 1888): 145–56; Hendrick, Remembrances 23–25; Lemuel Shattuck, A History of the Town of Concord (Boston: Russell, Odiorne; Concord, MA: John Stacy, 1835), 218. See also Henry Petroski, The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (New York: Knopf, 1990), ch. 9.
43. Gross, Transcendentalists and Their World, ch. 5, mss. pp. 11, 42. Harding reproduces the October 1825 notice in Milton Meltzer and Walter Harding, A Thoreau Profile (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1962), 138; see also Days of HT, 16–17. Harding states that John Thoreau learned the process of making pencils in 1820 from Joseph Dixon in Salem (Meltzer and Harding, Profile, 136), but I have been unable to confirm this. Dixon is widely credited with introducing the first wood and graphite pencil in the United States, but since he did not start manufacturing pencils until 1829 (at the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company in Jersey City), this seems unlikely.
44. Edward Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend (1917; Concord, MA: Thoreau Foundation, 1968), 32.
45. J, 11: 437; CHDT, 543 (Daniel Ricketson to HDT, February 9, 1859), 546 (HDT to Daniel Ricketson, February 12, 1859).
46. Marble, Thoreau: Home, Friends, Books, 39; Hendrick, Remembrances, 93; records of the Ornamental Tree Society, CFPL.
47. Sanborn, Henry D. Thoreau, 24; JMN, 15:489; Edward Emerson, Thoreau as Remembered, 14, 13; Jean Munro LeBrun, neighbor to the Thoreaus, in Meltzer and Harding, Profile, 3; J, 12:38 (“chattable society”).
48. Hendrick, Remembrances, 77, 15; Alfred Munroe, quoted in Thoreau as Seen, 49.
49. [Joseph Hosmer?], “J. H.,” “A Rare Reminiscence of Thoreau as a Child,” TSB 245 (Fall 2003): 1–2; W. E. Channing II, Poet-Naturalist (1902), 5.
50. J, 8:94; EEM, 15; Edward Emerson, Thoreau as Remembered, 14–15.
51. EEM, 15–16; W. E. Channing II, Poet-Naturalist (1902), 5–6; Sanborn, Life of Thoreau, 39.
52. Autobiography of Hon. John S. Keyes (CFPL online), 6; Gross, Transcendentalists and Their World, ch. 4, p. 7; Walden, 330.
53. Tom Blanding, “Beans, Baked and Half-Baked (6),” Concord Saunterer 12.4 (Winter 1977): 14.
54. Autobiography of Hon. John S. Keyes (CFPL online), 31.
55. Ann Bigelow quoted in McGrath, “Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau,” 12–13; Hendrick, Remembrances, 92–93. Henry remembered helping boil up a kettle of chowder on Walden’s sandbar when he was seven years old (Walden, 180).
56. Sanborn, Life of Thoreau, 39; JoAnn Early Levin, “Schools and Schooling in Concord: A Cultural History,” in Concord: The Social History of a New England Town, 1750–1850, ed. David Hackett Fischer (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, 1983), 366–68; Autobiography of Hon. John S. Keyes (CFPL online), 5; J, 8:94–95.
57. Details of the Mill Dam are taken from Gross, Transcendentalists and Their World, ch. 4, pp. 3–7, and from Autobiography of Hon. John S. Keyes (CFPL online), 7–9.
58. Edward Jarvis, Traditions and Reminiscences of Concord, Massachusetts, 1779–1878, ed. Sarah Chapin (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 41.
59. Gross, Transcendentalists and Their World, ch. 1, pp. 30–48; Autobiography of Hon. John S. Keyes (CFPL online), 7; Jarvis, Traditions and Reminiscences, 39–41.
60. The following discussion is deeply indebted to Gross, “Faith in the Boardinghouse.”
61. PEJ, 4:458–59; J, 8:270–71; Gross, “Faith in the Boardinghouse,” 3–4.
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br /> 62. Week, 72–73; Walden, 98.
Chapter Two
1. Edward Jarvis, Traditions and Reminiscences of Concord, Massachusetts, 1779–1878, ed. Sarah Chapin (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 109–18.
2. Robert A. Gross, “Men and Women of Fairest Promise: Transcendentalism in Concord,” Concord Saunterer, n.s., 2.1 (Fall 1994): 7. The citizens were William Whiting (whose son had returned from the Concord Grammar School black and blue from a beating by his schoolmates), Samuel Hoar, Josiah Davis, Abiel Heywood, and Nathan Brooks. They purchased land and built the school on what is now Academy Lane, and their policy of welcoming Concord’s daughters as well as its sons was seen as progressive for its time.