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Thoreau Country: Location Note

   Christian Yellow Birch  Yellow Birch Swamp. Thoreau's journal, Jan. 4, 1853, while surveying the Hunt lot: "To what I will call the Yellow birch swamp E[bby] Hubbard's in N part of town. Still ice is left on the trees ­but today is a windy & blustering day. The quantity of ice on the birches being reduced they are still more wand or faerylike. Tall ones with no limbs for half their height are gracefully bent over & are now swaying from side in the exactly like waving ostrich plumes-as delicate as the spray on frosted windows. The color of these ice-clad trees at a distance is not white; but rather slightly greyish or hoary which better merges them in the landscape.

"This is the 4th day of the ice. The landscape is white not only from the ice on the ground & trees but from the snow which fell yesterday though it is not an inch deep. In respect to snow the winter appears to be just beginning ...
   "I must call that Swamp of E Hubbard's W of the Hunt Pasture--Yellow Birch Swamp. There are more of those trees than anywhere else in the town that I know. How pleasing to stand beside a new or rare tree. & few are so handsome as this. Singularly allied to the black birch in its sweet checkerberry scent & its form & to the canoe birch in its peeling or fringed & tasselled bark. The top is brush-like as the black birch The bark an exquisite fine or delicate gold color - curled off partly from the trunk with vertical clear or smooth spaces as if a plane had been passed up the tree. The sight of these trees affects me more than California gold. I measured one 5 & 2/12 feet in circ. at 6 feet from the ground. We have the silver & the golden birch. This is like a fair flaxen haired sister of the dark complexioned black birch -  with golden ringlets -
 

 At Yellow Birch Swamp

  "How lustily it takes hold of the swampy soil & braces itself. And here flows a dark cherry wood or wine colored brook over the iron red sands in the sombre swamp. swampy wine. In an undress, this tree. Ah, time will come when these will be all gone. Among the primitive trees. What sort of dryads haunt these. Blond Nymphs. Near by, the great pasture oaks with horizontal boughs..."
  Note: A corrected location for the Thoreau's Yellow Birch Swamp: When Thoreau on the draft Hunt survey first named the Yellow Birch Swamp (see page on Hunt survey and Upernavik),  he placed the swamp at a different location in Easterbrooks Country than the locations shown on later maps prepared by others. Compare Thoreau's draft survey with Gleason (1906), Fenn (1970), USGS (1943, 1964, & 1987), Maguire­MCZ (1973), and the Carlisle Mosquito (Sept. 9, 1994).) The makers of these later maps may not have had access to Thoreau's own notation, which is the definitive source. When I searched for Thoreau’s Yellow Birch Swamp at the place shown on Thoreau's draft survey (about 1200 feet NNW of the top of Hubbard’s Hill), I found nearby a wet valley with yellow birches (above) and a "wine colored brook" (below).

Then, to my surprise I found a set of stepping stones crossing the brook.  No path, just a memory.


 
 

 Minot Pratt elm

 He continued the journal entry, as he left the woods after surveying:  "At [Minot] Pratt's - the stupendous boughy branching elm-like vast thunderbolts stereotyped upon the sky. Heaven defying - sending back dark vegetable bolts - as if flowing back in the channel of the lightning...." [End of Jan. 4, 1853 selection.]
   Photo at top by Jamie Christian on Punkatasset Hill. Other photos by author at Yellow Birch Swamp. Artwork at bottom by author from circa 1890 photo (probably by Ralph Holden) of Minot Pratt's elm, which grew in his dooryard (now Robb's) at the foot of Punkatasset on Monument Street. Other journal references to the Yellow Birch Swamp can be found at May 12, 1853; June 4 & 10, 1853; Feb, 18, 1855; May 18, 1857; June 2, 1857; Oct. 5, 1857; March 6, 1859; May 5, 1859; and Feb. 28, 1860.
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