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Caption: This is the lost split-stone bound that marked the Lincoln-Concord town line that ran through the southest corner of Walden Pond. (Detail of photo by Norman Foerster, 1905. Thoreau Society Archive. Used with permission of the Henley Library, Thoreau Institute.) The shoreline has changed somewhat in the last 100 years, but perhaps Walden is still a two-town Pond. |
The Lost Concord-Lincoln Town Boundary
in Walden Pond
Summary (rev. April 8, 2005)
The granite post that once marked the Concord-Lincoln town boundary in Walden Pond (shown above in 1905 photo) may have been rediscovered. During their "perambulation" of their shared line in 2000, the selectmen of the two towns believed they found this fallen monument and have requested that it be re-erected nearby. When this is done, a historic feature will have been restored and the custom of perambulation memorialized.[1] It will also be a reminder that Walden was a pond within the boundaries of both towns in Henry Thoreau's day, as it had been since 1754. It was in that year that the legislature split Lincoln from Concord and set the boundary at "the south easterly side of Walden Pond, so-called."[2] Many maps and the state's official 1904 Town Boundary Survey Atlas show the Lincoln-Concord boundary as running through the pond in its southeast cove. Though only a small part of the pond was in Lincoln, this fact is of historic and legal interest, and is pertinent as to how Thoreau, a surveyor, naturalist, author, and mystic, viewed his world. Since the stone post has disappeared, the memory of the boundary has faded. The shoreline is now altered by erosion and construction, and there is a need to determine the true boundary and how much, if any, of the pond is still in Lincoln. By conservative estimate, Lincoln's part of sixty-one-acre Walden Pond now appears to be about one-quarter of an acre, about three hundred feet in length and, at its widest point, up to thirty feet wide below the high water line [photo at end]. The selectmen of the two towns have asked the cooperation of the Walden Pond State Reservation in erecting the stone in a proper location. I hope this can be accomplished before the celebrations in 2004 of both Lincoln's 250th anniversary and the 150th anniversary of the publication of Walden. And before the next perambulation, which is due in 2005.
Historic
The three most important events defining the town boundary at Walden Pond are the following: the statute that created the boundary in 1754; the placing of a boundary stone in 1829; and the state's official town boundary atlas in 1904. In 1754, the Massachusetts legislature established the boundary between the original (and reluctant) town of Concord and the newly split-off town of Lincoln. This statute declared that the boundary ran from a boundary corner in the Concord River at Well Meadow Brook, "from thence, to the southeasterly side of Walden Pond, so called...."[3] I infer there was not at that time a physical monument at the Walden corner, for when, at other corners, a physical mark existed (however ephemeral, e.g., "the northwest corner of said tan house...a stake & a heap of stones...a rock...the corner of the wall...a heap of stones"), this statute took pains to mention each mark.[4]
Though the new Lincoln line was thus bounded by Walden Pond at its "southeasterly side," the statute is not clear on its face exactly what this meant--for example, how much of the pond would be within Lincoln at high or low water levels? The boundary clearly would not move depending on water level in a particular year. Both history and the 1646 great ponds law can guide us. Walden Pond is, of course, a statutory "great pond," the beds of which are owned by the state from the center out to the low water line.[5] It seems likely therefore that the 1754 statute would have used the most southeasterly point on the line of state ownership (i.e., a point on the low water line) to define the town boundary "corner." Any pond surface south (i.e., shoreward) of such a line would have been within the town of Lincoln.
Walden historian Richard O'Connor has discovered town records of eighteenth-century perambulations. These I believe tend to confirm the use of the low water line to define the corner. The 1771 perambulation recorded that there was a heap of stones as the bound at the [undefined] "SE corner" of the pond. But in 1786, the perambulators from both towns agreed to change this bound "by reason the pond often overflowed sd. [said] heaps of stones and could not be come at." Their report described the new boundary as going "across the flats of Walden Pond on which the former heap of stones lay....to a stake and stones near a pine tree marked."[6] I infer that the original bound location had been at or near the low water line and had proven to be impractical because "often overflowed", and that the marker had been moved a few feet along the line, with the consent of both towns, to a new foot-dry location. Sliding the bound along the line a few feet would have made very little difference in the actual boundary, for it made only a minor change in direction at this corner.
As further support from history, Mr. O'Connor believes that the bound shown on the 1904 state atlas (Figure 5) stands precisely on or close to the spot that marked the boundary between certain Second Division land grants in 1662 and 1666.
As will be discussed, this bound's location was made more permanent by the erection of a granite post by perambulator Lemuel Shattuck and others in 1829; and it was carefully surveyed and confirmed by the 1904 state atlas (Figure 5), which now defines the bound and has been agreed to by the two towns.
Nineteenth century atlases
A town boundary running through Walden Pond appeared in generally-accepted 19th century atlases of Concord and Lincoln. It was the line in these atlases that caught my attention, for the memory of Walden as a two-town pond has somewhat faded. Though an earlier plan of Lincoln (by Samuel Hoar in 1794) does not show Walden at all, this is inconsistent with the actual perambulation reports of the time (see above); the plan is also described by a Lincoln historical text as "a mere outline sketch."[7]
In June 1829, Lemuel Shattuck, Concord historian and map publisher, reported to the Concord and Lincoln selectmen that he and Lincoln officials officially "perambulated the line and renewed the bounds by putting up Stones marked with the initial of the towns [Lincoln and Concord] agreeably to the laws of the Commonwealth."[8] The "angle at Walden Pond" received one of those marked stones.
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| Caption: 1905 photo by Norman Foerster: "Walden with debris from the R.R. picnic grounds," Detail of stone is at top of page. (From the Thoreau Society achives, with permission of Henley Library, Thoreau Institute.) Below is a photo of the same scene taken March 6, 2004, with the pond ice-covered. The boundary runs sharply across the photos, almost parallel with the top and bottom. |
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The following year perambulator Shattuck published the well-regarded 1830 Hales maps of Concord and Lincoln (Figures 1 and 2). These maps, having the benefit of this new marker, showed a narrow portion of the cove to be in Lincoln.[9] Shattuck also included Hales's Concord map in his authoritative 1835 "History of the Town of Concord."
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Figure 1. 1830 Hales map of Concord, showing boundary (diagonal) crossing pond. |
Sorry, this map detail not available for web use. See hard copy.
Figure 2. From Henry Thoreau's hand-drawn copy of Hale's 1830 map of Lincoln. (Courtesy of Concord Free Public Library.) |
The 1852 Walling map of Concord (Figure 3 below), made with Thoreau's assistance, shows even more of Walden Pond as being within Lincoln.[10] (In 1884 and 1892, to show Thoreau-country locations, Thoreau's friend H.G.O. Blake included an annotated version of Walling's map in his editions of selections from Thoreau's journals.)
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Figure 3 The 1852 Walling map, showing town line generously crossing Walden. |
Figure 4. Herbert W. Gleason's annotated map of Concord (1906), showing line crossing pond. |
Herbert W. Gleason prepared, for the 1906 edition of Thoreau's writings, Figure 4, a "Map of Concord, Mass. Showing Localities mentioned by Thoreau in his Journals." Its boundary is closer to Hales's line. Other maps of that time are generally consistent, with a varying but distinct portions of the pond shown as being in Lincoln. For example, the 1875 Beers county atlas includes a generous part of the southeast cove in Lincoln.[11] And see, e.g., Smith and Bumstead (1858) and G. H. Walker (1889).
Thoreau
Thoreau wrote of Walden as surveyor, an author, a naturalist, and a transcendentalist . Thoreau opened his book Walden with the statement that he lived alone in a house, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and that statement is literally true--his house at the pond was indeed in Concord. Thoreau also wrote that Walden Pond was "a gem of the first water which Concord wears in her coronet." And this poetical statement is also true. What did the less-poetical Thoreau know of the boundary?
Thoreau was definitely aware of the 1830 Hales atlas, for he carefully copied out by hand Hales's map of Lincoln (Figure 2).[12] And Thoreau helped Walling prepare his 1852 map by contributing to it his Walden survey. Neither Thoreau's 1846 draft nor the survey ultimately printed in Walden in 1854 shows any town boundary at all--that wasn't the point of this Walden-centric effort.[13] Thoreau as a surveyor and a naturalist did refer to the Walden boundary stone. For example, in 1850, he mentioned the stone at Walden on his plan of a parcel of Emerson's land that was located "within Lincoln Bounds"--on both the plan and in his surveyor's field notes he referred to the "course of the town line, as given on town map, from stone by Walden Pond" to Fair Haven Bay, etc.[14] Thoreau also perambulated this boundary the following year with the selectmen of the two towns. His surveyor's book of field notes for that day contains a description of the boundary, which mentions the Walden bound: "Sep. 15 '51 Perambulated the line between Concord & Lincoln...further on the same course to a stone by Walden Pond."[15] His personal journal for that day does not further describe the Walden boundary. (He soon thereafter lamented that the experience of perambulation had distracted his artistic vision, but he eventually came to acknowledge that the experience of surveying revealed to him layers of human and natural history in the Walden Woods landscape, despite it causing it not to be as "easy to see so much wildness and native vigor there as formerly."[16]) His journals do refer to this location, but simply to identify the location of natural phenomena not of towns. For example, on July 3, 1853, he wrote, "The Uticularia vulgaris now yellows low muddy water--as near the Lincoln bound by Walden." Similarly, on June 23, 1854, "Lysimachia stricta perhaps yesterday at Lincoln bound Walden." See also, August 22, 1856. On March 14, 1860, he related the bound to a pond phenomenon--ice-out:
"I am surprised to find Walden almost entirely open [i.e., free of ice]. There is only about an acre of ice at the southeast end, north of the Lincoln bound, drifted there" [Emphasis added to all. This quote courtesy of J. Walter Brain].
On October 26, 1860, however, he recorded the ages and succession of the stumps on the whole southeast side of the pond, including the cove and the east shore as far as "the swimming place," but did not trouble to mention the town boundary.
Franklin B. Sanborn, who was a Thoreau acquaintance, biographer-editor, and historian as well as a Concord resident, wrote of Walden Pond as lying "partly in Lincoln."[17] This, then, was the two-town perception of the time. I suppose it was generally unremarked-upon because it was not considered remarkable. A two-town Walden Pond is consistent with Thoreau's literary and experiential use of Concord's permeable boundaries--for example, fifty-five percent of his Walden Woods (including Pine Hill, Mt. Misery, Baker Farm, and upper Emerson's Cliff) was in Lincoln, as was Flint's Pond and much of Fair Haven Bay and the river. These locales were all part of his Concord-based universe of thought and personal experience. They were, in Walter Brain's happy phrase, part of his "Concord of the mind."[18]
20th century and today
As I mentioned, three events have established this boundary corner. The first was the 1754 statute. The second was the towns' erection of a more permanent marker in 1829. And the third, now to be discussed, was the state's 1904 Town Boundary Survey Atlas (Figure 5 below, and see citation in footnote 3). This impressive effort did not alter this bound but surveyed it to modern standards. It officially confirmed that a small portion of Walden Pond at its southeast corner was within Lincoln. The atlas includes clear plans of the town corners (with lat/long coordinates, and corrected bearings and distances); and other detail. Each bound marker was surveyed, and all locations were accepted by both towns. This atlas described the granite mark at the Walden corner as being "in scattering woods, about ten feet from the shore." The plan shows it to have been on a small protrusion or bulge on the shore.[19] It was so located that the line crossed the adjacent dent in the shoreline at what appears to be...yes, low water.
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Figure 5. The Walden Pond corner in the southeast cove in the official 1904 Mass. Town Boundary Atlas. The boundary is the diagonal line, and the granite marker is shown by the numeral eleven. Note that the line crossed the pond in the "dent" to the northeast. The current boat launch is near the rivulet, now filled in. |
What is the situation in 2002? Well, history has played a few tricks on Walden Pond. A recent state park planning document opens as follows: "Located in the towns of Lincoln and Concord, Walden Pond draws the highest attendance of any of the Department of Environmental Management's inland properties."[20] As a result of this intense human use, the small treed bulge on which the stone post had been located in 1904 is gone. A retaining wall (Figures 6, 8 [faintly], & 13) now protects the base of the former bulge from high water erosion. After construction of the wall, two maps (Figures 8 [faintly] & 13) show the boundary marker to have been set between the wall and the pond. But the old marker has since disappeared and was thought to have been lost.
Figure 6. Boat launch from west, showing retaining wall at base of former treed bulge. Former rivulet in foreground. Low water, Nov. 2002.
Post-1904 maps are mostly consistent with a two-town pond but are not enough to show what has happened to this shoreline during the last century. These include municipal maps of Lincoln and Concord; plans of the state reservation; and Mass GIS, and USGS, such as below. Some of these post-1904 maps raise their own questions.[21]
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Figure 7. Plan of Walden Pond State Reservation, Dec. 1922 |
Figure 8. Concord's 1960 contour map. (Retaining wall is faintly shown. Contours may extend below high water.) |
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Figure 9. Control Diagram, Air Survey, 1960? With Mass. Coord. System. |
Figure 10. Concord GIS, Nov. 2002. Odd contours. |
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Figure 11. Lincoln CC 1976 Open Space Plan map by J. Q. Adams. |
Figure 12. Concord NRC 2000 Open Space map |
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Figure 13. USGS 1987 Concord Quad. Water level in cove shown very low? Boundary shown on beach? |
Figure 14. Friesz and Colman (USGS 2001). Wall not shown. Odd contours. Triangle is July 19, 1999 water elev. |
What happened to the marker stone and when? Scattered perambulation reports in selectmen's files in Lincoln and Concord suggest that, after reports that the marker was "in water," it fell sometime after the 1970s.[22] It is ironic that the custom of perambulation broke down at this time and in this place. The state park also appears to have no record of the stone's falling or its disappearance. During a cold, wet December afternoon in 2000, however, the selectmen-perambulators from the two towns found a 9 by 7 inch shaft fallen-down and half-buried on Walden's bank, just below the footpath and about 120 feet southwest of the boat launch (see photo 17 in appendix).[23] If this is the old bound, perhaps the bank stabilization project had simply utilized the fallen (and broken?) stone as a berm.[24] The selectmen in 2000 believed this stone to be the old corner mark,[25] and apparently they realized that it was not at its original location. As the Concord selectmen reported,
"In accordance with MGL c. 42, section 2, we identified a stone we believe is the granite boundary marker adjacent to the existing public walking path near the southeastern corner of Walden Pond. This boundary marker is lying on the surface of the ground. We will request the Commissioner of the State Department of Environmental Management to instruct his staff... to work with our communities to raise this historical marker to its appropriate upright position...For future reference, the boundary [marker] near Walden Pond... [is] located on the U.S. Geological Survey topographic map (Concord Quadrangle)."[26]
For selectmen's letters of December 2000, click here for one, and here for the other.
As of the present writing in 2002, however, the granite shaft is still half-buried and may be broken.[27] Perhaps the erection of the bound may not be considered important by some, for the entire Walden Pond is now within the state reservation. But the marker is historic and maintenance of town bounds is the law. The town boundary is still used by the park's law enforcement personnel. Good fences make good neighbors.
Estimated Boundary Line
As discussed, in both 1830 and 1904 there was both a permanent mark and a well-regarded surveyed plan showing a small portion of Walden Pond to be in Lincoln. However, the monument has been lost and the shoreline here has changed in the last century from erosion, beach replenishment [?], wash-in from the boat ramp, and construction.
Only a study or survey based on the 1904 atlas can confirm the town boundary line. One can make a conservative estimate, however, based on the 1904 atlas, aerial photos, various plans, and visual sightings to the Route 126 road stone. Conservatively, Lincoln's part of Walden Pond appears to be about one quarter of an acre at the head of the southeast cove, with about 300 feet of beach length and up to thirty feet of width below high water, tapering at both ends. At low water, Lincoln has only beach, except where the shore may have eroded to the south since 1904. At regular high water periods, though the pond comes up to the wall, and Lincoln's quarter-acre is all Walden water.
Such a conservative boundary line is annotated with a line on the photo below. In the words of the perambulators of 1786, it would go "across the flats of Walden Pond." The photo looks southwest along the estimated boundary line on April 8, 2005. The extent of the water in the middle distance corresponds to the small dent in the shore to the east of the bulge shown on the 1904 atlas. The bulge has been eroded, however, and is barely visible on this side of the boat launch area. (If, however, the boundary was at the location of the fallen stones located by the selectmen, Lincoln's part of the pond would increase slightly.)
Figure 15. A conservative estimate of Lincoln-Concord boundary in Walden Pond (on April 8, 2005). High water extends to above the foot of the wall. The fallen stone discovered in 2000 by the selectmen of Concord and Lincoln as the marker (?) is horizontal and half-buried on the bank in the right of the photograph.
Conclusion
Thoreau wrote that Walden Pond was "in the midst of an extensive wood between [Concord] and Lincoln." Living for two decades in Lincoln, I take pleasure in having connections to his symbolic landscape, as I did when I lived two decades in Concord. Though only a small part of the pond is probably in Lincoln, this fact is of historic and legal interest, and it is pertinent as to how Thoreau, a surveyor, naturalist, author, and mystic, viewed his world. I agree with the selectmen that the historic boundary stone should be re-erected, and at an appropriate site that would demonstrate the two-town nature of the pond. Since a surveyor's skills may be needed, it is too bad Henry Thoreau isn't around to assist with the GPS calculations--or with another perambulation. I'd like to express my appreciation to the former chairman of the Concord selectmen, Richard W. Wheeler, whose commitment to this issue led to its resurrection in 2000. As he told me, "Bounds are a precious part of our heritage. Their importance is ingrained in us."
The status of getting that survey done is unclear. Comments are welcomed.
Stephen F. Ells, <SteveElls--at--earthlink.net>, & (781-259-8982)
39 Todd Pond Road, Lincoln MA 01773
(This paper is also available at <http://homepage.mac.com/sfe/henry>.)
Appendix.
Figure 17. Old granite post(s) identified by selectmen during perambulation in 2000, southwest of boat launch ramp. Trail fence is at left, beach is to right. The carved "C" and "L" were not seen on the accessible faces. (Photo Nov. 2002).
Figure 18. Unknown broken stone at foot of main path to Route 126 near steps to Red Cross Beach, Nov. 2002. Note carved "C". (See, footnote 24.)
Acknowledgments:
I appreciate the courtesy of Selectpersons R. Wheeler, R. Delori, J. Kerr, and S. Mattes; Markus Pinney of the Concord Natural Resources Commission; Douglas Meagher, Assistant Concord Town Manager; John Woodsmall III of the Concord Engineering Division; Nancy Zuelke, Lincoln Town Clerk; Donna Adam, secretary to the Lincoln selectmen; the Concord selectmen's office; Stephen Carlin of the Walden Pond State Reservation; the staffs of the state library, the Concord Free Public Library Special Collections, the Lincoln Public Library, and the Henley Library; Malcolm Ferguson; Margaret Flint; John Hammond; Bob Lemire; John MacLean; Peter Von Mertens; Edmund Schofield; Richard Smith; and especially J. Walter Brain and Richard O'Connor. Any errors are mine.
