To rally public support for its preservation,
Estabrook's friends, in addition to pointing to its notable history, its
ecological value, and the community's affection, have relied on a few
evocative passages in Thoreau's writings about Estabrook. My sense,
however, was that there was a richer vein to discover--that there were
more, hidden references about Estabrook in the journals than had been
realized. When I searched, the journals did not disappoint me. Not only
did they tell a vivid story about Estabrook, they also told much about
Thoreau, the man, the writer, and the naturalist. What was to be a
simple--but more complete--list of journal entries has become a compiled
text of fifty thousand of Thoreau's words about Easterbrooks from one
hundred sixty journal entries and a few other passages in "Wild
Apples," "Dispersion of Seeds," "Huckleberries," Walden, A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and Wild Fruits.
J. Walter Brain has said, "Although Thoreau
never got to writing a book or essay on the Estabrooks Country, it was
in the Journal that, for over twenty years, he tracked its poetry
of place." (Paul Brooks called Thoreau's journal his "great poem.") As
the Concord Historical Commission said "These passages are not merely
haunting descriptions of a landscape lost to time. They continue to
resonate because we are still able to experience the beauty and mystery
of these woods in much the same way Thoreau did." The passages connect
the woods to its various histories--geological, Native American,
colonial, early industrial, revolutionary, agricultural, natural, and
literary.
Moreover, these passages capture the tensions
hidden in Estabrook's forgotten landscape and in Thoreau's inner
terrain. Some tensions are reminiscent of Walden; some are
Estabrook's own. Is it a deserted or a peopled land; a wild or a
congenial place? With open moors or dark woods? Are the people coarse or
simple and direct? Do they find there sterility or fertility? Starvation
or satisfaction? Does he write of the present or ancient times; of
former inhabitants or current visitors; of death or creation; with
natural or spiritual vision; in dispassionate or lyrical expression?
These tensions enrich our experience because they express truths about
the land and the thoughts it evoked. Though Waldenless, Estabrook has
its own Walden, its own spiritual metaphor--the old Carlisle road. This
road (now the old Estabrook road) was and is the spine of the Estabrook
experience.
Because our attention is focused on an
interesting place and its people, the initially overwhelming full
journal (it is two million words long!) becomes graspable. We can see
Thoreau and his journal evolve, yet the passion and the
personality of the man, our remarkable fellow-citizen, remain vivid and
likable. (Click for information on on-line
texts and more information on publications about Thoreau in his
Easterbrooks Country.)
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Caption:
This is a picture of Middlesex students celebrating Estabrook at the
Musketaquid Festival Parade in Concord. Click here for a
larger version of this
picture [36K]. |
The quote on the poster
is Henry Thoreau's, written specifically about his "Easterbrooks
Country" and Walden Woods. It reads as follows:
"We
boast of our system of education, but why stop at schoolmasters and
schoolhouses? We are all schoolmasters and our schoolhouse is the
universe. To attend chiefly to the desk or schoolhouse while we neglect the scenery[*] in which it is placed is absurd. If we do not look out we shall find our fine schoolhouse standing in the cowyard at last." [* for "scenery," I think he also meant nature and all the inspiration that the wild offers. As he said, "In wildness is the preservation of the world."]
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Herbert Gleason's 1906
annotated map of places Thoreau visited.
This is the Estabrook portion of Gleason's
memorable 1906 map, with modern annotations and some corrections. It is
large file (110K) but it is
legible on-screen and suitable for printing.
Thoreau did his own maps of Estabrook
country--his surveys. On one, he cryptically scrawled "Upernavik, the most
northerly inhabited spot upon the globe." What
did he mean?
The pencil mill.
Henry's father had many careers--the last was as a
maker of pencils. During Henry's youth, the father operated a sawmill on
one of Estabrook's tiny brooks to cut up the cedars of Estabrook's
pastures to make pencils. The millpond and the foundation of the mill are
still there on Saw Mill Brook (the site probably had been in use for
centuries). Click here for a larger
version of photo. (Photo reproduced courtesy of Thoreau Institute.)
Many years later, the son would write:
"Was that a large shad bush where
Father's [pencil] mill used to be? There is quite a waterfall beyond,
where the old dam was. Where the rapids commence, at the outlet of the
pond, the water is singularly creased as it rushes to the fall--like
braided hair as the poet has it. I did not see any inequalities in the
rock it rushed over which could make it so plaited" (April 21, 1852).
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The Yellow
Birches. Jamie Christian's
toned photo of Estabrook's yellow birches on Punkatasset captures
their golden ringlets. About trees, Thoreau could be both scientific
(as he puzzled out forest succession) and lyrical. Both impulses led
him in 1853 to write, after a cold January day spent surveying nearby:
"How pleasing to stand beside a new
or rare tree. & few are so handsome as this... in its peeling or
fringed & tasselled bark... The bark an exquisite fine or delicate
gold colorcurled 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."
More pictures and journal text
here. |
To read an entry from Thoreau's journal
about a walk on the old Carlisle road (now called the Estabrook road),
click here or on the picture
[September 24, 1859].
 |
Thoreau described
the Indian corn hills between the Paul
Adams Place and Bateman's Pond and, as this link discusses, because of
this, they were recently re-discovered. In a Journal of Historical
Archaeology article, Middlesex School's consultants (J.C. Garman,
P.A. Russo, S.A. Mrozowski, and M.A. Volmar) took cheap shots at
Thoreau's archaeological observations. In a
critique of this article, I
called it a lost opportunity for scholarship. |
 |
Brooks Clark's farm. Here's the farm at the south
edge of Estabrook Woods that both Thoreau and William Brewster knew as
the Clark Farm (now Rasmussen's). Thoreau's cabin rotted away beside
the Estabrook road, in the trees at the upper left of the photo, after
the farmer's son dragged it here from Walden, intending to live in it.
He died not long afterwards, and the cabin rotted away for the next
twenty years. Click here for wider
version and a Thoreau journal entry about the barefooted Brooks Clark. |
| Thoreau's Easterbrooks Country. This is the best and perhaps
the only almost-contemporaneous photograph of the maze of old
pastures, apple trees, woods, and berry bushes that captured Henry
Thoreau's imagination in his Easterbrooks country. |
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