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  Thoreau Country: Location Note

"Estabrook orchard," photo taken May 8, 1899,
by Herbert W. Gleason

 This is the best of the very few photographs of the maze of old pastures, apple trees, woods, and berry bushes that captured Henry Thoreau's imagination in the Easterbrooks country. Herbert W. Gleason took "Estabrook orchard" on May 8, 1899, only forty years after Henry wrote the following:

"It is an endless succession of glades where the barberries grow thickest, successive yards amid the barberry bushes where you do not see out. There I see Melvin and the robins, and many a nut brown maid sashé-ing to the barberry bushes in hoops and crinoline, and none of them see me...There I go searching... (Journal, Sept. 24, 1859)."

[This was rescued from a low-contrast print from the Concord Free Public Library.] Do you see the apple blossoms now?
   
 

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