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While working on an entirely different project, I came across a map showing the earliest documentation of the size of the woodland around Walden Pond in Thoreau's boyhood. The "Map of Boston and Its Vicinity...." was first published by John G. Hales in 1819. The image above is from the 1820 version, which differs in some cultural features but not in the extent of the woodland. (Courtesy of the State Library of Massachusetts.)
These would have been the woods of Henry Thoreau's earliest memory. In the map above, Concord village is at the top and Lincoln Center is at the bottom right, with the town line running diagonally from Fair Haven Bay at bottom right. The Concord (Sudbury) River is at the left; Walden (called here "Waldron") Pond is at left center; Sandy (now Flint's) Pond is at the right center. This map has a certain historic interest as people try to understand how this landscape informed Thoreau's and Emerson's writings and thoughts. It also can provide a baseline as people continue ecological studies of the woods.
The Hales 1819-20 map has details that show a lot of knowledge of local conditions, and these details add to its credibility. Three examples that catch my eye are the corridor of woods running southwest from Walden Pond to Mt. Misery and the bridge to Nine Acre Corner. And it shows as wooded the brook valley below the modern Thoreau Institute to Baker Bridge Road (logical). And it shows a portion of the east shore of Flint's Pond as wooded, including the point on which Stearns Wheeler's cabin (and the chestnut grove?) was located (thus, it also looks likely). It is also generally consistent with Hales's legislatively-mandated 1830 surveys of Lincoln and Concord, though the woods in the 1830 surveys appear on quick review to be slightly smaller, which is also likely. (I note that Thoreau hand-copied the 1830 Hales survey of Lincoln, and apparently amended on his copy some of Hales's 1830 boundaries of wetlands but not of these woods.)
In 1821, Hales published a small book describing distances from Boston with brief notes about local communities. In it he noted, "[Lincoln's] soil is coarse and rocky, a great portion whereof is covered with wood, and not more than one third of the town under culture.... The south part of [Concord] against Lincoln...is hilly and considerably wooded." [John G. Hales, Survey of Boston and its Vicinity..., (Boston: E. Lincoln, 1821) p. 68-71.]
Historian Brian Donahue of Brandeis commented in a recent e-mail: "This map conforms very nicely to my impression of Walden Woods. The only thing that seems odd to me is that no trees are shown on the plain between Fairhaven Bay and Fairhaven hill.... The Harvard Forest has worked with Hales maps throughout the state and has been able to corroborate woodland boundaries from other sources in several cases. Our impression is that they're pretty accurate."
This earlier map does not alter the conclusions of the 1989 article by Thomas Blanding "Historic Walden Woods" in the journal The Concord Saunterer, or the ecological boundaries discovered by Dr. Edmund Schofield. The 1833 edition of the Hales map does appear in this article on Walden Woods; though it does have many changes in cultural features, there are not material differences in the outline of these woods. Map evidence of the boundaries of the woods is but one of the factors to consider in determining the extent of what Thoreau and others called Walden Woods--the underlying ecology and Thoreau's own words are also important.
Land Preservation Efforts. It is significant that much of the Walden woodlands of 1819 have been preserved, through years of effort, from the Emerson family donations in the nineteenth century to the recent Walden Woods Project. It has been a wonderful conservation effort deserving of continued support. The map below shows in red both a rough outline of the 1819 woodland area and Walden Pond itself. The shaded areas in green and gray show various types of conservation-protected land in Concord and Lincoln. Route 2 swoops across the northern part of the 1819 woods.
Comments are invited at sfe--at--post.harvard.edu (insert @ for --at--)
Steve Ells, 39 Todd Pond Road, Lincoln MA 01773
Source: The map legend reads "Map of Boston and Its Vicinity From Actual Survey by John G. Hales." The image above is from the 1820 version, published by the courtesy of the State Library of Massachusetts. I have compared this map with the less-clear copy of the 1819 map that is displayed at the New England Historic Genealogical Society and, though certain cultural details differ, the woodland boundaries are the same. I have not seen the 1819 map that is at the Amherst College Library, (published in Philadelphia by Hales and J. Melish). A recent article noted that "Each edition added more to a knowledge of the cultural landscapes. The last edition [1833], which came out after Hales's death, used the facts he had discovered in his maps of the towns [including Concord and Lincoln] made in 1830 and 1831" [Peveril Meigs. 1975. "John G. Hales, Boston Geographer and Surveyor, 1785-1832," The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, v. 129 p. 23-29]. (Meigs also commented favorably on the tight specifications required by the legislature for what geographic details [e.g., woodland] the 1830 surveys must contain.)