Walking along the old Estabrook road in Estabrook Woods, Concord, Mass.

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A Walk On The Estabrook Road
(Thoreau's old Carlisle road)

	Come for a walk on the Estabrook road, Thoreau's old Carlisle road. Thoreau's Walden house rotted away beside the Estabrook road, probably near the trees at the upper left of the photo. A farmer's son dragged it here from Walden. He had intended to live in it but died not long afterwards. Photo by Stina Andersson.
	Looking back at the probable site of Thoreau's former cabin and at the farm at the south edge of the Estabrook Woods that Thoreau knew as Brooks Clark's farm (now Rasmussen's). Click here for an entry from Thoreau journal about the barefooted Brooks Clark.
	Jan Buerger photographed ski and walking tracks in the snowed-in road as it entered the woods.
	On April 19, 1975, the Bicentennial of the American Revolution, Nick Chase photographed the Carlisle Minute Men and their neighbors as they retraced down the old Estabrook road the steps of their original minute men on their way to the North Bridge. The procession occurs each year. It's the only route in such a rural condition. Note the small boy riding high!
	Summer ferns soften the edge of the old Estabrook road.
	Thousands of white water lillies cover Mink Pond. Very shallow, neighborhood children called it Stump Pond. The pond has many Wood Duck houses and Great Blue Herons. The resident beaver are now raising the water sufficiently to attract migrating diving ducks like the American Goldeneye.
	I can't resist sharing Ann Chapman's magical picture of Mink Pond at dawn. It was this spot that National Public Radio visited, searching for peace and quiet despite the sound of jets from nearby Hanscom Field. (Click here for the text of the NPR broadcast).
	Lime quarries and kiln. Further up the old road are the limestone quarries, which were first in use 1685. Limestone was precious to the colonists. One reason was that it was used to plaster the walls to keep the wind out and the chimneys to keep the house from burning down around them. There are seven working pits, like small slits in the metamorphic rock, from which the locals laboriously chipped the marbelized stone.
	Walking through the quarries, one can touch the farmers' labors where they dug out the stone.
	The old lime kiln is visible 50' east of the Estabrook road, near the Esker Trail. The limestone was heated there and turned into plaster. Ruth Wheeler said this kiln first opened in the late 1600s for plaster for a meetinghouse near Waverly. Many decades later, botanists would visit the area to find plants that liked a sweet soil.
	A paradise in the fall. Thoreau wrote, "What shall this great wild tract over which we strolled be called? ... It is a paradise for walkers in the fall....Shall we call it the Easterbrooks country?" The paradise was the Eden-like profusion of wild fruits that were abundant in the mixed landscape of the time--grapes, apples, blueberries, barberries, plums, cranberries. Emerson called it "a cornucopia of golden joys." This photo by Ann Chapman.
	The Estabrook cellar is for many people the destination of their walk (though some walkers don't even notice it, so quietly does it hide behind the stone wall). It is the center of their woods experience, the place they have come to believe is the most isolated from the urban world. (Jan Buerger photos). Click for a larger version .
Henry Thoreau's best walking companion, the poet Ellery Channing, wrote of this forgotten spot in his poem "The Lonely Road." When the Thoreau Society has walked in the Estabrook Woods during its annual meetings in recent years, the group has stopped at this old place and each walker has read a few lines of the poem: [Click here for the text of Channing's poem].	Some of the landscape features Channing mentions are still visible, (e.g., "A little wall half falling bounds a square / Where choicer fruit-trees showed the Garden's pride."
Ellery Channing's poem concludes: "A long Farewell, thou dim and silent spot, Where serious Winter sleeps, or the soft hour, Of some half dreamy Autumn afternoon; And may no idle feet tread thy domain, But only men to Contemplation vowed, Still as ourselves, creators of the Past."	Click here for a Thoreau journal entry about a fall walk along the old road.

Click here for the minute man history of the Estabrook Road

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