Thoreau Country: Location Note

Saw Mill Brook in Estabrook Woods
(Also known as Wigwam or Ralph's Brook)

The waters from much of Estabrook Woods flow to Saw Mill Brook. Though tiny, evidence of its value is concealed in the woods. For example, above, Lansing Old strides across the brook at the ruins of an old dam. It impounds a storage pool upstream of one of the old mill sites, John Thoreau's.

In Henry's youth, his father John operated a saw mill at a site that probably that had been used many times before. John used the mill to cut for pencils the cedars that were growing up in the old pastures. This 1901 photo by Herbert W. Gleason shows the sluice flowing down past the foundations of the mill. [From the Rolland W. Robbins Collection of the Thoreau Institute. Used with permission.]

Swamps are splattered throughout the Estabrook Woods, many drained by Saw Mill Brook. One is the Yellow Birch Swamp. Click for a Thoreau text and more information about this lost swamp.

This is Mink or Stump Pond, the site of Thoreau's Great Pasture Oaks. It was flooded in the 1940s as a goose pond. Beavers now occupy it, as they probably had over the centuries.

This is the sluice on the dam at Hutchins Pond, as Saw Mill Brook leaves Estabrook Woods.

Saw Mill Brook flows (at the left) into the flooded Concord River at the Great Meadows.

[Page by S. Ells, 2/2002]
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