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| This wigwam was, I believe, built by Middlesex students in 1998 on the northern promontory on the eastern shore of Bateman's Pond. Henry Thoreau and his brother opened a school in Concord about 1840, and the innovative Thoreau would bring his students here. An acquaintance wrote, "One new feature [of the school] was a weekly walk in the wood or pastures, or a sail or row on the river, or a swim in one of the ponds of the township, [such as Walden or ] Bateman's Pond; and there was much instructive talk about the Indians who formerly lived or hunted there." (Here is a document, "Thoreau at Middlesex School," listing the dates on which Thoreau wrote in his journal about the area now known as Middlesex School.) |  |
| Two images of the Polypody Fern at Bateman's Pond. Below is one by Herbert W. Gleason (from Gleason's Through the Year With Thoreau [1917]). The second image was taken in Cornel Florida Ravine, at the southeastern shoreline of the pond, in April 2000. | (Thoreau at Bateman's Pond on Nov. 2, 1857): "[In] the midst of the dry and rustling leaves...it stands so freshly green and full of life... The bare outline of the polypody thrills me strangely....It is a fabulous, mythological form." |
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A memorial bench erected by a Middlesex class to honor a young classmate. A hundred fifty years earlier, George William Curtis, then a young man boarding at a farm near Punkatasset Hill, wrote about breaking away from farm work. He walked through "the woods and the great silent fields" and read a book while sitting above the shoreline of what was probably Bateman's Pond. |
| The Bateman's Pond cart road east of the pond. |  |
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One day in 1857, Emerson and Thoreau were walking between the site of Paul Adams' and Bateman's Pond, and Thoreau saw something that caught his eye--corn hills. Corn hills were mounds that colonial farmers or native people put in their fields to plant corn and other vegetables on. At the public hearing on the Middlesex project, citizens asked that the archaeologists search for these lost mounds. To everyone's astonishment, they found them--hundreds of them. The corn hills were built in the mid-1700s by Robert Estabrook, perhaps on an older Indian field. The Mass. Historical Commission declared these rare examples to be eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. They are on both sides of the Bateman's Pond cart road, not far from the wigwam shown in the pictures above. Winter photo. |
| Cornel Florida Ravine at Bateman's Pond. |  |
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Cornel Florida Ravine at Bateman's Pond. |
| A Red-bellied Woodpecker feeds at the Christian house in Estabrook in a snow storm (photo by Jamie Christian). It now breeds near Bateman's Pond. It was a southern bird, which was not present during Thoreau's lifetime. It has extended its range and is now a regular breeder nearby. This is the type of transformation that Estabrook's godfather of which Ernst Mayr spoke:
"Now, that is the kind of turnover we get everywhere. Sometimes we don't know why. We have to think of the ecosystem not as something fixed for all times... But it is a dynamic balance between species. Some increase. Some decrease... Estabrook Woods... is an ideal area... We know comparatively little about the dynamics of our temperate forests in New England, and I think Estabrook Woods would be the ideal place... [to] just record what's happening." |
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