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THE SEASONS IN ESTABROOK COUNTRY
An Anthology about the Cycle of the Year and this Landscape
EPIGRAPHS FROM ESTABROOK COUNTRY
"Our round of walks as regular as the seasons; now to low spots to look for early spring plants also for early birds. Nature is an eternal provision and repetition. Snow, ice melting everywhere in roads and fields.[Henry says] there is nothing but the seasons."
Ellery Channing in his pocket diary, March 6, 1859."A man must attend to Nature closely for many years to know when, as well as where, to look for his objects, since he must always anticipate her a little. Young men have not learned the phases of Nature; they do not know what constitutes a year, or that one year is like another. I would know when in the year to expect certain thoughts and moods, as the sportsman knows when to look for plover."
Henry Thoreau in his journal, September 24, 1859
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INTRODUCTION
This is an anthology of a place-the Estabrook Country. All the selections were written in or about the roughly fifteen hundred acres in Concord and Carlisle, Massachusetts called the Estabrook country, the Estabrook Woods or, by Henry Thoreau, the Easterbrooks Country. [001]The anthology celebrates this place by gathering the words of fifty people who over three and a half centuries have written or spoken about life here. Some tell of the passage of the seasons; some write of the impact of the place on them; some tell about what this place has meant to them; and some tell how this landscape (and by extension potentially any landscape) can connect to science and to spirit.Few people know of the uninhabited Estabrook Country, and many who visit do not visit again because the place is not charismatic. Now modestly wooded and intimate, it is not as starkly beautiful as it was in Thoreau's day. Not being famous has protected it. Still often empty and with a beauty that must be teased out, Estabrook is not hard to get lost in, not hard to be surprised in. Thought it was not wilderness even in Thoreau's time, it was his first-named "great wild tract." It became the final resting-place of his Walden house. It is split down its middle by the old Estabrook road, down which Minutemen hurried to join the Concord fight at the North Bridge. Nearby to the south is the Minuteman National Historical Park, the site of the first battle of the Revolutionary War. Nearby to the east are the Concord River and the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. Rocky, rough and swampy, Estabrook Country is different from the sandy Walden Woods, and people over the centuries have used and perceived it differently: Emerson called it "the savage fertile houseless land," but his daughter called it "dear Easterbrook."
By happy chance, the care of some of its owners, and the perseverance and generosity of citizens, much of Estabrook Country remains undeveloped and available to us to experience. It is time to celebrate that. Estabrook's friends have long known of a few evocative passages in Henry Thoreau's writings about his "Easterbrooks Country." There was, however, much more to discover both in his writings and in the words of other people who have known this place. For example, Thoreau's massive two-million-word journals contain about fifty thousand words about the Estabrook Country; and there are other Estabrook passages in his "Wild Apples," "Succession of Forest Trees," "Dispersion of Seeds," "Huckleberries," Walden, and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Not only do these passages tell a vivid story about Estabrook Country, they also tell much about Thoreau the man, the writer, the transcendentalist, and the naturalist. The landscape had many levels of meaning.
Thus, the heart of this anthology, The Seasons in Estabrook Country, is Thoreau's ever-fresh journal, which Paul Brooks called Thoreau's "great poem." [002] Walter Brain adds, "Although Thoreau never got to writing a book or essay on the Estabrook Country, it was in the Journal that, for over twenty years, he tracked its poetry of place." [003] Though I use in this anthology only about seventy passages from Thoreau's Journal (containing only half the words he wrote about Estabrook Country), these passages capture the tensions that were hidden in Estabrook's landscape and in Thoreau's inner terrain. Is it a deserted or a peopled land; a wild or a congenial place? Does it have open moors or dark woods? Are the people there coarse and pinched, or simple and direct? Do they find there sterility or fertility, or starvation or satisfaction? Though Walden-less, Thoreau found in Estabrook Country its own [Page 4] spiritual metaphor-the old Carlisle road as a pilgrim's way. This road (now the Estabrook road [004] ) was and is the spine of the Estabrook experience.
In addition to Thoreau's words, I have included in The Seasons in Estabrook Country about one hundred passages from about fifty other people who have written or spoken about Estabrook Country since 1653. These are the voices of farmers and their wives, Emerson and his children, poets, naturalists, schoolchildren, Revolutionary War soldiers, college presidents, suburban wives, grocers, walkers, scholars, and ne'er-do-wells. These very different voices connect this landscape to its various histories-geological, Native American, colonial, early industrial, revolutionary, agricultural, natural, spiritual, ecological, playful, and, of course, literary. In sum, author John Hanson Mitchell said that "There is no place on earth where the sense of place is better documented." [005]
Another history is suggested by these selections-Estabrook's inspiring but controversial conservation history. It is inspiring that twelve hundred acres of the Estabrook Country has been acquired by Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, by the towns, and by local land trusts, as an ecology study area, as Thoreau said it should be-for instruction and re-creation. But controversy continues, as the adjacent Middlesex School, once a partner in preservation, now proposes to develop 2000 feet or more into the Woods. (More information on that is in note 83.) Thoreau would remind the offending schoolmasters,
"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 a cowyard at last."
This clash can be seen to represent the same tension of expectations and goals so well expressed in Thoreau's writings and life. Scholar Thomas Blanding adds, speaking of the importance of the wild to body and soul, "If the Estabrook woods go, there won't be any place to get lost in the woods.If Concord doesn't think that's essential, Concord's very much mistaken." [006] Famed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, who was the godfather of Estabrook's ecological study area, once wrote, in a way Thoreau would have found sympathetic, about a needed connection between a hands-on educational experience with nature and the wise conduct of human affairs:
"Since the investigation of diversity includes the study of relationships, organisms must be studied alive and in the field.....It is about time we realize that the future of mankind is not something 'written in the stars,' something controlled by external forces, but that it is we humans ourselves who hold the fate of the species in our hands. We now have a fairly good idea what the major ills of mankind are and it has become quite clear that only a few of them are susceptible to purely technological solutions. Instead, most of them are of a behavioral-sociological nature and require a change in our value systems, a change one is not likely to accept unless one has a far better understanding of nature, of the dynamics of populations, of the biological basis of behavior, and of other components of the biology of organisms, than most of those have who are responsible for policy decisions. It will require a deeper understanding [and] massive education." [007] [Page 5]
Acknowledgements: I have been greatly assisted by the courtesies and work of Ray Angelo; Allie Bemis Bueti; Thomas Blanding; J. Walter Brain; Dr. Janet Buerger; Carol Dwyer; Mary and Mary Gail Fenn; by the editors of the Princeton edition of Thoreau's Journal; and by Marcia Moss and Leslie Wilson of the Concord Free Public Library. A grant from the Thoreau Country Conservation Alliance was of great assistance with the expenses of research. The responsibility for errors is mine. I would appreciate corrections and comments at 39 Todd Pond Road, Lincoln MA 01773, <sfe@post.harvard.edu> or <SteveElls[at]earthlink[dot]com>. I am confident there is much Estabrook lore still to be learned.
A few editorial notes: You will note that the Thoreau quotations from 1853 and before have a rougher, more informal punctuation and spelling than later ones. These earlier quotations are taken from the most recent and authoritative text of Thoreau's journal, the Princeton edition. I prefer the roughness of the Princeton text, for Thoreau was writing a journal and not a polished product. All citations to Thoreau's journals are given simply by date. To give a better sense of Thoreau's mind in action, I have included fewer but more complete journal entries, rather than simply quotable-fragments. Selections are arranged by day-of-year order, but, for clarity, I have grouped a few entries or taken them out of strict date-order; these groups are indicated by separator bars. Also for clarity, I have italicized all quotations other than Thoreau's and have wavy-underlined or bolded text for which there is a major endnote. Finally, to catch the browser's eye, I have shaded certain interesting passages. A basic Estabrook bibliography is appended, and I invite the reader to refer to my article in the journal of the Thoreau Society, "Henry Thoreau and The Estabrook Country: A Historic and Personal Landscape," The Concord Saunterer, n. s., 4 (Fall 1996): 73148, which is available at the Society's Shop at Walden Pond. Additional text and photographs will soon be posted on the author's upcoming web site (inquire of author for URL) or on the web site of the Thoreau Society: <www.walden.org> (please omit the brackets).
Cover, maps, and illustrations. The cover is edited from a scanned photograph from a book which was taken ca. 1890 probably by Ralph Holden. Thoreau often passed under this eighty-five-foot American Elm in Minot Pratt's dooryard as he entered Estabrook Country. This renowned oak-type elm also sheltered the corn-husking gatherings attended by Louisa May Alcott and her friends and the picnics of transcendentalists. The cover's quotation is from Thoreau's Journal of Jan. 4, 1853 (also see herein on page nine). A enlarged version of the sketch that Thoreau made of this elm on the same day (with Punkatasset in the background) is opposite page nine. A comparison of the sketch with the cover, the latter representing the tree as it was thirty-seven years later, suggests how Thoreau's sketch successfully caught the "lightning" energy of the tree. The frontispiece of "Barefooted Brooks Clark" on the old Estabrook road is by N. C. Wyeth (from Francis H. Allen, ed., Men of Concord (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1936). Photographs not otherwise credited to Janet Buerger and Ann Chapman are by the author.
Endnotes:
1. What's in a name? The place-name Easterbrooks-Estabrook. [Back to text.] As Thoreau and his friend Ellery Channing walked one day in 1853, they made up names for this wild area: "Easterbrooks Country," "Melvin's Preserve," "Apple pastures," and "Robin Hood Ground," and good names they were. Thoreau's consistent favorite was "Easterbrooks Country," and I preserve this spelling in any Thoreau quotations. It was, however, Ellery Channing, who, twenty years later, may have been the first to publish this name, using the even-then commoner spelling, "Estabrook country":
"Three spacious tracts, uncultivated, where the patches of scrub-oak, wild apples, barberries, and other plants grow, which Mr. Thoreau admired, were Walden woods, the Estabrook country, and the old Marlboro' road" (Emphasis added. E. Channing, Thoreau, The Poet-Naturalist, [Boston: Roberts Brothers , 1873] p.16).
The next published use of Estabrook country of which I am aware was in 1888 by Emerson's son, Edward Waldo Emerson. He wrote a touching passage about his father walking with his children in the Estabrook country (quoted herein in an early July entry). Fifty years later, Emerson's grandson, Raymond Emerson, who then lived in the Brooks Clark house and owned land in Estabrook country, continued to use this name, e. g., on his "Sketch Map of Estabrook Country, July 1947, rev. April 1950."
On the other hand, the phrase "Estabrook Woods" seems to have come into use (though not exclusively) in the 1890s, perhaps as the landscape became reforested. (See, e.g., Bacon, Walks and Rides [1897] and Sanborn, Recollections [1909].) The honor of first use of the name "Estabrook Woods" may go to Estabrook's conservationist neighbor, William Brewster, for it appears as a heading for his Feb. 4, 1892 journal entry in October Farm (Cambridge, 1937), p. 26. (This heading may, however, have been inserted by Brewster's editor.)
What one calls this great wild tract is a matter of personal preference. The name "Estabrook Woods" has the advantage of emphasizing the present ecological value of the core--in naturalist Walter Brain's words, "an extensive, continuous, unbroken and undisturbed swath of forest." I prefer the name "Estabrook Country:" Not only was this the original name that encompassed the entire and varied wild area, but also it is generous enough to include the current mix of habitat (extensive woods, a few open marshes, swamps, bordering fields, etc.). This mix even now provides some of the natural and landscape diversity that Thoreau enjoyed. Aldo Leopold had the idea: "There is much confusion between land and country. Land is the place where corn... and mortgages grow. Country is...the collective harmony of its soil, life, and weather. Poor land may be rich country" (A. Leopold. A Sand County Almanac With Other Essays on Conservation From Round River. New York: Ballantine Books, 1970-. P. 177). [Back to text.]
2. Paul Brooks, The People of Concord. Chester: Globe Pequot Press, 1990. P. 39. [Back to text.]
3. J. Walter Brain, "Estabrook Land Was Thoreau's 'Wild Tract'," Concord Journal, Feb. 17, 1994, and in LWV, 109. [Back to text.]
4. Thoreau's "old Carlisle road" is now called the Estabrook road. This dirt lane--little used for two hundred years--splits Estabrook Country in half, north to south. It is important not only to history but to our appreciation of Estabrook.
I think the Estabrook Country in the seventeenth century was a web of paths with names as vague as "ye way which goeth into the woods." Some of these, as the centuries passed and parcels were exchanged and divided, were formalized as bridleways, cart paths, or private or public ways. These paths or ways appear in the early and confusing Concord town records of the 1600s. Sometimes information is scant; there is no record of acceptance for even some of the principal roads in the North Quarter of Concord, such as Lowell Road and Monument Street. The southern part of Estabrook road was, in part, the early "way to the Twenty Score." Ruth Wheeler says Estabrook Road was also called "the road from Concord to Carlisle by Benj. Clarks" (Wheeler, "North Bridge Neighbors," n. 26). In some deeds and Concord's first town directory, published in 1886, Estabrook Road was called "Lime Kiln Road," and William Brewster in the 1890s referred to both Estabrook road and to "the Lime Kiln Road," (Brewster, October Farm, 18 and 27.
In the eighteenth century, Carlisle's first meetinghouse was almost built in 1754 on the old Estabrook road (see note 10), and down this old road came minutemen on April 19, 1775 on their way to the North Bridge fight. By the 1850s, however, as the land emptied, Estabrook road was so little used that Ellery Channing called it the Deserted Road or the Lonely Road. Some activity, however, continued on the old road. In 1877, "Most of [Concord's] road work...was the repair of the whole of Estabrook Road to the Carlisle line which had been badly cut up by teams bringing out wood" (Richardson, Concord Chronicle, 31). At the end of the nineteenth century, it was also becoming fashionable for walking, and the Appalachian Mountain Club guided walking trips for pilgrims to Concord. As late as the 1890s, farmers continued to drive dry cows and heifers up to Estabrook pastures for the summer (Wheeler, "North Bridge Neighbors," 38), and into this century Carlisle farmers brought wagonloads of produce down the old road on their way to the railroad and the Boston market. [Back to text.]
5. Constance Putnam, "Estabrook Woods Teaches Educators a Lesson." Concord Journal, June 17, 1993. This is reproduced in Janet Buerger, ed., Portfolio I: A Collection of Information on Estabrook Woods, League of Women Voters of Concord/Carlisle (1994), 485 pp. at p. 361. This document is an invaluable source of information and is hereafter cited as "LWV." [Back to text.]
6. The story of the Middlesex School development is summarized in note 83. Blanding's quote is from Adam Engel, "Estabrook Countdown," Concord Journal [obscured date]. (Also in LWV, 60.) [Back to text.]
7. E. Mayr, "Museums and Biological Laboratories," Brevoria, 416:1-7 (MCZ, Dec. 28, 1973). [Back to text.]