| To the top page for "The Seasons in Estabrook Country" |

[Page 7]

THE SEASONS IN ESTABROOK COUNTRY

"WINTER"

Dec. 13, 1851. The Carlisle town boundary dispute and Samuel Kibbe's personal declaration of independence. [008] Surveyor Henry Thoreau was hired by the town of Concord to survey the irregular and contentious northern boundary of the town with Carlisle, which ran through Estabrook Country. He wrote:

"While surveying today... in Mason's pasture- just over the line in Carlisle [fn.1].... We had one hour of almost Indian summer weather in the middle of the day. I felt the influence of the sun-- It melted my stoniness a little. The pines looked like old friends again. Cutting a path through a swamp where was much brittle dogwood &c &c I wanted to know the name of every shrub. This varied employment to which my necessities compel me serves instead of foreign travel & the lapse of time-- If it makes me forget somethings which I ought to remember, it no doubt enables me to forget many things which it is well to forget. By stepping aside from my chosen path so often I see myself better and am enabled to criticize myself. Of this nature is the only true lapse of time. It seems an age since I took walks & wrote in my journal-- And when shall I revisit the glimpses of the moon? To be able to see ourselves-- not merely as others see us-- but as we are-- that service a variety of absorbing employments does us....

"When I think of the Carlisle man whom I saw today-- & the filthiness of his house-- I am reminded that there are all degrees of barbarism even in this so called civilized community. Carlisle too belongs to the 19th century.

"Saw Perez Blood in his frock.[fn.2] A stuttering sure -- unpretending man, who does not speak without thinking, does not guess-- When I reflected how different he was from his neighbors Conant-- Mason-- Hodgman-- I saw that it was not so much outwardly-- but that I saw an inner form. [009] -- We do indeed see through and through each other-- through the veil of the body-- & see the real form and character-- in spite of the garment-- any coarseness or tenderness is seen and felt under whatever garb. How nakedly men appear to us-- for the spiritual assists the natural eye."

Jan. 5, 1853. The imaginative but eccentric young poet Ellery Channing was Thoreau's birth-year mate and favorite walking companion. This day Channing wrote in his pocket diary:

"Exquisite day, behind [Minot] Pratt's,[fn.3] squirrels tracks in pure snow fine. View like summer from behind Barrett's, beautiful mts, ice on river soft beautiful blue-- squirrel chirps, Silvery birches still in swamp. Tracks of gunner & his dog. Sun very bright over tree-tops-beautiful ends of birch twig as toucht by the setting sun. Also gray birches in the swamp, alders wonderfully fine, silvery. Nest of the red or gray squirrel. Squirrel holes in hollow tree. Rose, amber, green fine over west."

[Page 8]

Jan. 8, 1855. Thoreau took a simple winter walk, probably past the abandoned site of the mill at which his father had sawed Estabrook's cedars for the family pencil business, to Thomas Estabrook's 1683 cellar hole: [010]

"To Easterbrooks place via old mill site. It is now a clear warm and sunny day....There is a healthy earthy sound of cock-crowing. I hear a few chickadees near at hand, and hear and see jays further off, and, as yesterday, a crow sitting sentinel on an apple tree. Soon he gives the alarm, and several more take their places near him. Then off they flap with their caw of various hoarseness. I see various caterpillars and grubs on the snow and in one place a reddish ant about a third of an inch long walking off. In the swamps you see the mouths of squirrels' holes in the snow, with dirt and leaves and perhaps pine scales about them. The fever-bush is betrayed by its little spherical buds."

A blizzard. Ellery Channing lived in the mid-1840s on Estabrook's Punkatasset.[fn.4] In a poem he described his home as a "small cottage on a lonely hill." He would walk to Walden Pond to visit Thoreau at his cabin. Thoreau in Walden introduces him thus-"The one who comes from farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet." Channing wrote in his pocket diary of such a tempest near Punkatasset:

"A gigantic snow-storm occurs here seldom. The last I saw was in 1846....I lost the road going home [to Punkatasset] from the villageby getting over the wall, so great was the drift, the quantity of the snow & the violence of the wind. The great trees shook then like their twigs, a mighty wind was roaring, & the snow fell in damp masses, & so stuck to one's face & figure. I have seen nothing at all up with that since." [011]

The Humphrey Hunt Survey (December 22, 1852 through January 4 & 5, 1853). A year after he had surveyed the town boundary, Thoreau again found himself surveying the cold, northern Estabrook Country. This time, he mapped the old Humphrey Hunt Wood and Pasture Land, a long, irregular lot running through swamps and fields from near Punkatasset NNW almost to the Carlisle line. On his draft survey, he recorded in pencil some extraneous but interesting items-another old mill site, [012] particular trees, a new swamp he has just found (and named). He even jotted a cryptic reference to Upernavik, a lonely outpost in Greenland-"Upernavik, the most northerly inhabited spot upon the globe." [013] Thoreau wrote a number of times about this surveying experience:

[Page 9]

Dec. 22, 1852. "Surveying the Hunt Farm this & the 20th....A rambling- rocky- wild moorish pasture [fn.5] this of Hunt's;-- With 2 or 3 great white oaks-- to shade the cattle-- which the farmer would not take fifty dollars apiece for though the ship-builder wanted them. The snow balled so badly to-day while I was working in the swamp that I was set up full 4 inches. It is pleasant cutting a path through the bushes in a swamp-- to see the color of the dif. Woods....The squirrel rabbit fox-tracks &c attracts the attention in the new fallen snow-- & the squirrel-nests-- bunches of grass & leaves high in the trees more conspicuous-- if not larger now or the glimpse of a mead[ow] mouse-- give occasion for a remark. You cannot go out so early but you will find the track of some wild creature."

o On Jan. 4, 1853, Thoreau returned to the old Hunt lot:

"To what I will call the Yellow birch swamp [014] E Hubbard's in N part of town. Still ice is left on the trees-- but today is a windy & blustering day. The quantity of ice on the birches being reduced they are still more wand or faerylike. Tall ones with no limbs for half their height are gracefully bent over & are now swaying from side in the exactly like waving ostrich plumes-- as delicate as the spray on frosted windows. The color of these ice-clad trees at a distance is not white; but rather slightly greyish or hoary which better merges them in the landscape.

"This is the 4th day of the ice. The landscape is white not only from the ice on the ground & trees but from the snow which fell yesterday though it is not an inch deep. In respect to snow the winter appears to be just beginning

"I must call that Swamp of E Hubbard's W of the Hunt Pasture-- Yellow Birch Swamp. There are more of those trees than anywhere else in the town that I know. How pleasing to stand beside a new or rare tree. & few are so handsome as this. Singularly allied to the black birch in its sweet checkerberry scent & its form & to the canoe birch in its peeling or fringed & tasselled bark. The top is brush-like as the black birch The bark an exquisite fine or delicate gold color-- curled off partly from the trunk with vertical clear or smooth spaces as if a plane had been passed up the tree. The sight of these trees affects me more than California gold. I measured one 5 & 2/12 feet in circ. at 6 feet from the ground. We have the silver & the golden birch. This is like a fair flaxen haired sister of the dark complexioned black birch-- with golden ringlets -- How lustily it takes hold of the swampy soil & braces itself. And here flows a dark cherry wood or wine colored brook over the iron red sands in the sombre swamp. swampy wine In an undress, this tree. Ah, time will come when these will be all gone. Among the primitive trees. What sort of dryads haunt these. Blond Nymphs. Near by, the great pasture oaks with horizontal boughs--

"At [Minot] Pratt's [fn.6] -- the stupendous boughy branching elm-- like vast thunderbolts stereotyped upon the sky. Heaven defying-- sending back dark vegetable bolts-- as if flowing back in the channel of the lightning.... [015]

[Page 10]

"In the twilight I went through the swamp-- & the Yellow birches sent forth a dull yellow gleam which each time made my heart beat faster-- Occasionally you come to a dead & leaning white birch-- beset with large fungi like ears or little shelves-- with a rounded edge-- above. I walked with Yellow birch.

"If there were Druids whose temples were the oak groves-- my temple is the swamp. Sometimes I was in doubt about a birch whose vest was buttoned smooth & dark-- till I came nearer & saw the yellow gleaming through as where a button was off.

"The animals do not use fire-- man does. At first there was a pile of cold fat pine roots on the icy rock -- A match was rubbed -- fire elicited and now this fire is the most emphatic and significant fact hereabouts Fire slumbers never far off. and the friction of a match can awaken it."

Jan. 11, 1853. Ellery Channing wrote in his pocket diary about the land between Bateman's Pond and the Estabrook Road:

"Snow all off, cocks crowing lustily. I have no interest in Baseman [sic] pond [and] none in the P. O. [fn.7] Shall break that habit of going at night; once a week was ample. I believe once I never went at all. Tis but an interference, if it is in my way, good, otherwise not.The country behind [Brooks] Clarkes [fn.8] is a very fine walking country. A wide, new & lively view can be got here, of the village, cliffs, Clarke's house [016] & the like. An old cellar-hole, a fine large Andromeda swamp, a great range of country, those fine far-off Bedford Hills & Lincoln. A very fine grove of pines here that I have never seen before. Behind Clarke's, country opens beautifully from rocks behind Bateman's [Pond]. Mtns cold and blue from here. [fn.9] Crows. [Fine] view of Wach[usett] behind Brown's[. Fine] from behind Hubbard's hill. Great deal of grey maple twigs birches & the russet fields.

"Twilight, this is the time of chosen beauty. Then all work is over, all sound ceases; only beauty remains. So soft, so silent, so religious.-

[Page 11]

"It was remarkably pleasant to me to get into a new field, a new swamp, a new wood; to see an old cellar hole for the first time that overlooked a fine prospect. All this because it was new and unexpected. The truth is, I have overwalked most of these Concord fields, & not often find a new one. Yet to find a new one here gives a true pleasure, having usually to find so many old ones.

"This place behind Clarke's-I have oft been on the edges, but a few steps was needed to carry me on. In fact this district from the corner of the Deserted Road the Carlyle Road [fn.10] & back of Bateman's pond is on the whole a new district to me. I have walked the road but have not taken between the roads. Specially the fine W[hite] pine grove I found today pleased me; it had so perfectly escaped me; here too a swamp with lofty spruces, that merits more exploration. The woodmen look puzzled to see me; especially as I had a pup in my arms. Still I believe, that were it not for the practical advantages of walking, I should not always go, but air for the lungs, & landscapes for the eyes seem indispensable. I know that millions do without them & still live on. I know not but in as good health as I have ever had, yet I am sure & I suppose it is from long habit, as I become at once light-headed on confinement, & lose all true sense of existence. So much for a habit."

Feb. 13, 1966. Ernst Mayr, Thomas Flint, and others had a vision to create an ecology study area (the Concord Field Station) in the Estabrook Woods. [017] Concord Journal: "HARVARD TO ESTABLISH 700-ACRE LIVING LABORATORY. A Wildlife center that will serve as a living laboratory for teaching and research is being established in Concord by Harvard University. [Ernst Mayr, then director of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, said,] "Such land is needed to permit the study of living nature. We are in desperate need to know more about the dynamics of animal populations, about the turnover in plant communities and about the replenishment of living renewable resources. This is important for solving many of the practical problems that man faces every day....It is planned that the Estabrook Woods will form the center of a balanced ecological study area....The entire outdoor laboratory would be available to other universities as well as the biology students at Middlesex School. The School already owns 100 acres of the woods and has already shown its interest...."

Thirty years later, on Jan. 14, 1997, Harvard's President Neil Rudenstine permanently dedicated to conservation its 700 acres in Estabrook Woods. It had been acquired in the 1960s as an ecology study area by Harvard 9see note 17), but some in Concord perceived that the post-Mayr MCZ had less interest in doing research in Estabrook Woods. They feared Harvard would sell Estabrook for development as it had done with another property it had owned in town. Finally, in 1997, Harvard issued a legally-enforceable Notice of Public Charitable Obligation to restrict the land permanently. This was done explicitly in recognition of the thirty years of efforts of the two towns, private land donors, and the Concord and Carlisle land trusts to provide, at great cost [018], a conservation buffer of more than four hundred adjacent acres, much of it protected by conservation restrictions. The 1200 acres of the Estabrook Woods is not a public park. Its core is Harvard's nature preserve and research area. These Woods are mostly privately owned, with public access permitted on much for studying, sauntering, and low-impact traditional uses. At the dedication ceremony, President Rudenstine declared,

[Page 12]

"This [mutual stewardship] is a wonderful example of what can happen when communities work together. Rare is it these days that ways can be found to increase the amount of open space in our cities and towns. And rare is it that so many people are willing to look to the future as they have in this project, and to give so much of their time and energy toward an effort as good and important as this."

The Massachusetts Secretary of Environmental Affairs, Trudy Coxe, added, "This is a visionary concept. This extraordinary [natural] laboratory, rich in diversity of plants and animals, intact and close to one of America's largest cities, will be preserved forever." [019]

Jan. 28, 1853. Thoreau wrote of agricultural drainage next to Bateman's Pond. He thought the hard labor expended in doing the work dignified the farmer's life-in his essay "Walking," Thoreau said "he makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural." [020] In his journal, he also wrote of the ubiquitous cutting of the diminishing forests in town:

"As I approached Bateman's Pond-- The ice looked blue-- Is it indeed blue like Walden ice?

"I saw an improvement, I suppose by Wm Brown-- on the shore of this Pond this P.m. which really is something to tell of-- The exploits of the farmer are not often reported even in the agricultural paper-- nor are they handed down by tradition from father to son -- praiseworthy and memorable as so many of them are-- though if he ran away from hard work once in his youth & enlisted, and chanced to be present at one short battle, he will even in his old age love to dwell on this 'shoulder his crutch & show how fields are won' with cruel satire as if he had not far better shown this with his axe & spade & plough. Here was an extensive swamp level of course as a floor-- which first had been cut,-- then ditched broadly-- then burnt over-- then the surface pare off stumps & all in great slices-- then these piled up every six feet 3 or 4 feet high like countless larger muskrat cabins to dry-- then fire put to them-- & so the soil was tamed. We witnessed the different stages in dif. parts of the swamp.

"You can walk in the woods in no direction but you hear the sound of the axe." [fn.11]

Jan. 31, 1864. Over the years, the letters of Emerson's daughter Ellen had talked of many "blissful" Estabrook expeditions and picnics to "dear Easterbrook," where, she said, "the great fun began." In this lively letter, Ellen Emerson wrote her father about an afternoon's sledding on Punkatasset with her brother Edward:

"Coasting is the great business nowadays. Edward and I have tried it almost every day, and it is so perfect that Miss Dillingham has been moved to give a half holiday to the children, who began early in the afternoon, first on the back hill where they were soon joined by the children of Lizzie Weir's school. This didn't suit the young aristocracy and they emigrated to Mr. Stedman Buttrick's hill and coasted there till someone proposed Poncatasset, and the boys drew the girls on their sleds down the river till they came to the right place, and then they coasted till dark. Wasn't it a splendid afternoon's work?" [021]

[Page 13]

Ca. February, 1846. While Ellery Channing lived on Punkatasset, he wrote this appealing poem, "The Lonely Road," about a walk up the Estabrook Road to the Estabrook cellar hole. Some walkers find it fitting to recite the poem by turns at the old cellar.

Jan. 31, 1853. Thoreau: "Found an Ind[ian] adze [022] in the Bridle-Road [fn.12] at the brook just beyond Daniel Clark Jr's house."

On Feb. 4, 1892. Ornithologist William Brewster [023] first came to Concord only about eight years after Thoreau's death. He returned regularly to observe birds in their natural setting (which he preferred to the laboratory or museum) and to visit his friend Daniel Chester French, the sculptor. He was a leader in America's fledgling efforts for bird conservation. For many years had a beloved home, October Farm, which still stands at the eastern edge of Estabrook Country, at 1360 Monument Street. On this day, he wrote in his journal about a winter's ride on a wood sled on the old Estabrook road-

"This morning I went to the lime kiln [024], riding up the Estabrook road on a wood sled. The scene, after we had fairly entered the woods, was simply one of bewildering beauty. I can find no words to describe it but I do not think I have ever seen it equalled before. The forest had put on an ermine robe. Not a tree or a bush of whatever species that was not clad wholly in purest white. Even the pines showed scarce a trace of green or brown. Their branches were bent down by the weight of snow to a considerable angle below the horizontal plane, giving them a curiously close resemblance, especially at a distance, to spruce or fir trees.

"The snow lay about six inches deep on the ground where it had not been intercepted in its fall by the trees. At first it was fine and powdery but as the sun rose higher it became wet and settled into a more solid and very soggy blanket which covered the ground everywhere. There were many tracks of mice and shrews, a few of squirrels and rabbits. and occasionally the trail of a fox or dog. In one place I found what I first took for an otter track. It was a furrow about eight inches wide and two deep with obsolete foot-prints in the bottom. The obscurity and apparently small size of the foot-prints puzzled me at first but the mystery was solved when I traced the furrow to a hole as large as my fist in a mound. The edges of the hole were smeared with fresh blood and rabbit's fur. Evidently some animal of the weasel family and probably a mink had killed a rabbit and, after its usual custom, had dragged it to its hole, moving backward, the carcass of its victim making the furrow and obliterating the tracks of the slayer. Saw several little parties of Chickadees and heard a Kinglet and a number of Blue Jays. Reached the house about 1 P.M., riding back on the sled on the top of a load of wood."

Feb. 5, 1853. In the "thickest fog I have seen in this town," Channing walked up "the Deserted Road" (the Estabrook road) to the Boulder Field (a group of ten large glacial erratics). He jotted in pencil this poem fragment in his pocket diary:

"The rocks for age, gray with time,
Their soft rounded outlines wear away
Whole races of men. What time! What time!

Mysterious was the boulder-field in the fog. I might have lost myself here. Here loom the great boulders, silent as the past. Here they loom, here they lay, mysterious as eld. Here might you sit your long, -lone life away." [025]

[Page 15]

Feb. 16, 1852. Thoreau: "Man's relation to oxen is the same as it was in primitive ages-- It is equally primitive. He has got no nearer to them. If his ox breaks through the ice, he knows no better how to get him out than if it had never happened. The helpless unwieldiness of the ox is remarkable-- I was told yesterday that when a man had got his ox out of Bateman's Pond, the latter gave a spring and coming down his hind legs slipped & spread apart on the ice, & he was split up so that he had to be killed."

Feb. 18, 1854. Thoreau: "To Yellow Birch Swamp.... It does not take so much fuel to keep us warm of late. I begin to think that my wood will last. We begin to have days precursors of spring....At the old mill-site, saw two pigeon woodpeckers [ft.13] dart into and out of a white oak. Saw the yellow under sides of their wings. It is barely possible I am mistaken, but since Wilson [fn.14] makes them common in Pennsylvania in winter, I feel pretty sure. Such sights make me think there must be bare ground not far off south. It is a little affecting to walk over the hills now, looking at the reindeer lichens here and there amid the snow, and remember that ere long we shall find violets also in their midst. What an odds the season makes! The birds know it. Whether a rose-tinted waterlily is sailing amid the pads, or Neighbor Hobson is getting out his ice with a cross cut saw, while his oxen are eating their stalks....How different their environment now from when the queenly flower, floating on the trembling surface, exhaled its perfume amid a cloud of insects. Hubbard's wooded hill is now almost bare of trees. Barberries still hang on the bushes but all shriveled. I found a bird's nest of grass and mud in a barberry bush filled full with them. It must have been done by some quadruped or bird. The curls of the yellow-birch bark form more or less parallel straight lines up and down on all sides of the tree, like parted hair blown aside by the wind, or as when a vest bursts and blows open. Rabbit tracks numerous there, some times quite a highway of tracks over and along the frozen and snow-covered brook. How pleasant the sound of water flowing with a hollow sound under ice from which it has settled away, where great white air bubbles or hollows, seen through the ice and dark water, alternately succeed each other....

"What a contrast between the upper and underside of many leaves.--The indurated and colored upper side and the tender more or less colorless under side--male and female,--even when they are almost equally exposed!...The handsome lanceolate leaves of the Andromeda polifolia [A. glaucophylla, Bog Rosemary], dark but pure and uniform dull red above, strongly revolute, and of a delicate bluish white beneath deserve to be copied on to works of art." [026]

Footnotes and Endnotes for "Winter"

Footnotes:

Footnote 1. Mason's Pasture was in northeast Estabrook Country, just east of Two Rod Road. It is erroneously identified on Gleason's 1906 map at item 85 as Merrick's Pasture. [Back to text.]

Footnote 2. Perez Blood was a farmer and a unlikely-astronomer who lived at the northern edge of Estabrook Country. His woods became part of Thoreau's investigations on the succession of forest trees. [Back to text.]

Footnote 3. Minot Pratt (1805-78), a farmer-horticulturist, was once the trusted citizen-farmer of Brook Farm, the utopian community. He and his wife Maria then built what is now the Robb house at 635 Monument Street at the southern foot of Punkatasset. [Back to text.]

Footnote 4. Punkatasset is the native people's name (meaning broad-topped hill) of a drumlin that marks the southeast edge of Estabrook Country. It is within sight of the Old North Bridge. [Back to text.]

Footnote 5. Channing breathlessly described this part of Estabrook country, now wooded, in his poem "The Barren Moors": "On your bare rocks, O barren moors, / On your bare rocks I love to lie,-- / They stand like crags upon the shores, / Or clouds upon a placid sky...." [Back to text.]

Footnote 6. Thoreau and Pratt would swap botanical news. Maria Pratt, his wife, said that Henry Thoreau used to come much to their home: "[Thoreau] was sociable & kind, & always seemed at home." They liked his ways, like their own, and believed in them: "[N]o pretense; no show; let guests & friends come at any time, & take them as they find them." (E.W. Emerson, Henry Thoreau As Remembered By A Young Friend [Thoreau Foundation, 1968] 80). [Back to text.]

Footnote 7. I. e., the Post Office, the center of newspapers and gossip. A week earlier, Thoreau had written in his diary, "There are two worlds- the post office and Nature" (Jan. 3, 1853). [Back to text.]

Footnote 8. Brooks Clark was an old farmer whose house (now replaced, see below) was at what is now 393 Estabrook Road (Rasmussen's). He is immortalized by Thoreau and by N. C. Wyeth's illustration "Barefooted Brooks Clark." Passing the fields behind the house, one should also remember bachelor Cyrus Clark, who farmed here until he was ninety-six (in 1923). Gladys Clark remembered "[W]e always enjoyed him because we could hear his voice way across the field calling to his horse as he worked, 'Come on, Kate.' That horse was a real part of his life" (Oral History, August 1979). [Back to text.]

Footnote 9. The far blue hills in the western and northwestern horizon would have included Mounts Wachusett and Watetic in Massachusetts; and, in New Hampshire, the Peterborough Hills and the Unncanoonuk Mountains (the latter near Manchester), and even the distant, icy Mount Monadnock. Thoreau found them mind-expanding. They are best now seen (in partial views) from two publicly-accessible hilltops in Lincoln: Pine Hill and Drumlin Farm. [Back to text.]

Footnote 10. These are names for the old Estabrook road. [Back to text.]

Footnote 11. Ellery Channing's diary indicates he was at Bateman's Pond that day, too, very probably as Thoreau's companion. Channing commented testily, "But I was hurried along & could not see things well. It is bad to be hurried & against your will." [Back to text.]

Footnote 12. The Bridle-Road is the old Two Rod Road (meaning a right of way two rods wide, often bordered by two walls), which went up the eastern side of Estabrook Country from Punkatasset past Mason's Pasture in Carlisle. Thoreau probably found this adze near the brook that is now the outlet from Hutchins Pond (built in 1906 as an ice-pond). [Back to text.]

Footnote 13. Now called Northern Flickers. [Back to text.]

Footnote 14. Alexander Wilson, early ornithologist, whose works were among those Thoreau consulted at the Boston Society of Natural History. [Back to text.]

Endnotes:

8. The Concord-Carlisle boundary dispute and Samuel Kibbe's personal declaration of independence. Housewright and farmer Samuel Kibbe's (1725-1796) place off the Estabrook road was originally within Concord. In 1779, when Carlisle for a second time (see, note 10 on the fight over the first meeting house) tried to split off from Concord to become a separate district (later, town), Mr. Kibbe and some neighbors refused to assent--they wanted to remain part of Concord. He and five other stubborn Concordians petitioned the legislature for their freedom to be let alone, using the language of the Revolutionary war, which was even then being fought:

"It is our oppinion a right every american ought to enjoy, and for which LIBERTY they have fought and BLED, and are still in Contest for, not to have their Rights taken from them without their Consent, or Receiving an Equavolent therefor."

The legislature, though it did create the new town of Carlisle, also agreed to his petition in part: his lot remained officially and stubbornly a small patch of Concord but within Carlisle. This island of Concord is so shown on maps of the time. Mr. Kibbe marked his lot with four cornerstones (still there in the woods), into which was chiseled a clear "C" for old Concord, not for new Carlisle. Further east, the boundary jogged this way and that, with two dozen angles to be marked, to include or exclude other farms. By Thoreau's time, the Kibbe place was an abandoned cellar hole, a jumble of stones. Though Thoreau's survey was part of the towns' effort to straighten out the boundary, this would not happen for another fifty years (until 1903). [Back to text.]

9. Thoreau respected some of these farmers and outlivers (i. e , those that inhabited the borders of the towns) for their naturalness and simplicity. Among these in Estabrook Country were Perez Blood, Jacob Farmer, George Melvin, and Minot Pratt. He was repelled, however, by the barbarism of others. His aversion should not be understood as petulance or snobbery. It reflected his frustration with the economic circumstances and human limitations that prevented them from making a connection with the divine, which for Thoreau was the object of a transcendental life. [Back to text.]

10. The 1683 Estabrook Cellar Hole. [Back to text.] Gradually, the entire thousand acres of Estabrook Country has taken the name of the seventeenth-century builder of this cellar hole, Thomas Estabrook. For many people, this handsome cellar hole, at the physical center of the woods and near the intersection of its principal trails, is the destination of their Estabrook experience. This small but picturesque ruin and the nearby jumble of walls, piles, and holes make it a satisfying rustic puzzle. It is generally accepted that Thomas Estabrook (d. 1720-21), younger brother of Concord's minister, settled at this cellar hole with his wife Sarah about the time of their marriage in 1683. It must have been a lonely spot, for this was only a few years after King Phillip's War, in which most European settlements to the west of Concord were destroyed. Thomas is listed in the second order of proprietors in 1694 as having one horse, two oxen, and two cows. It is not clear how long this site was occupied, but at least four generations of Estabrooks lived in Estabrook Country. Thomas' son Thomas apparently bought land and a house near Bateman's Pond and lived there, as did his son Robert, and (at the so-called Paul Adams place) Robert's daughter, Rebecca. See discussion of Rebecca Estabrook-Paul Adams Place in note 50.

Estabrook's colonial history. It is remarkable how much there is still unknown about the Estabrook Country even in such a lovingly memorialized town as the venerable Concord. Enough is known, however, to give a blurred picture of colonial Estabrook, and the remarkable fact is--many of the sites still exist. Archaeological-historian Dr. Janet Buerger referred to this when she said, "The intact broader landscape is the single most important thing about the value of the archeological sites in Estabrook." (Memo to Concord-Carlisle LWV, Oct. 1, 1996).

In the seventeenth century, the earliest known European activity in Estabrook Country was the deeding to individual owners of First Division lots (i. e., those first deeded out from undivided land between 1635 and 1652 by and to the town's first settlers). The existence of such First Division lots in Concord's North Quarter has been generally known from the old records at the CFPL. It had not, however, been generally appreciated that five of these lots were deep in Estabrook Country. That is, that five were north of the common land that later in the 1600s came to be called the Twenty Score. (The Twenty Score was an undivided parcel of four hundred acres in which twenty neighborhood proprietors had rights for pasturage, etc. It lay approximately between Bateman's Pond and south of Punkatasset.) In 1998, Dr. Brian Donahue, the historian now at Brandeis, made a preliminary map of these First Division lots. He found Estabrook an excellent landscape to work with because the old patterns of ownership are still visible in the shapes of the lots and the patterns of walls. His map of Estabrook Country's land divisions through 1667 ("Brian Donahue Preliminary Draft 1998") brings into better focus an additional half-century of Estabrook's history, back to 1650. His preliminary map shows six First Division lots--Brown's meadow near the lime quarries, Bateman's and Smedley's meadows at Bateman's Pond, Thomas Flint's 60 acres at Bullocks Wigwam (see note 106), and Buttrick's and Hunt's meadows. This early ownership doesn't mean that there were Europeans' living on these lots by the 1650s (but quaere Bullocks wigwam), but it does mean that the town's first settlers were using parts of Estabrook as their own. Now researchers can start to ask questions, such as why did the settlers so value this or that parcel? Was it a lime quarry? A mill-site? A meadow or wood lot? Did it have good soil or peat? How did they get to these parcels? How ancient are the ways? Thus, Estabrook Country can come more alive as a historic place.

Later in the seventeenth-century, residential settlement in Estabrook Country included Thomas Estabrook, (about 1683, at the Estabrook cellar); and perhaps one of the Boaz Browns (from c. 1664?, at the existing double cellar hole off the way called, variously, the lane, the road to the Paul Adams place or Hugh Cargill Road). Some historians suggest that Estabrook road was an early access between Blood's Farm and Concord and that the lime quarry (note 45) on Estabrook road was in operation in the late 1600s. Two Rod Road is said to have been in use by the late 1600s. Nearby, around Estabrook Country's edges, in addition to the Flints and the Hunts near or on Punkatasset, were the Clarks (1690), and Samuel Buttrick (1677). Settlement in the last half of the seventeenth century was approaching Estabrook Country from the wilder north as well as from the direction of Concord's original village. These northerly neighbors included Benjamin Russell (1680), John Adams (1662) and Robert Blood (about 1653). These are some of the families of whom Emerson wrote in his poem "Hamatreya" (Carl Bode, ed., The Portable Emerson (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 637-38):

Buckeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint,
Possessed the land which rendered to their toil
Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool and wood.
Each of these landlords walked amidst his farm,
Saying, "'Tis mine, my children's and my names's.
How sweet the west wind sounds in my own trees!
How graceful climb those shadows on my hill!
I fancy these pure waters and the flags
Know me, as does my dog; we sympathize;
And, I affirm, my actions smack of the soil."

Where are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds:
And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plow.
Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys
Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs;
Who steer the plow, but cannot steer their feet
Clear of the grave.
. . . . . . . .
Hear what the Earth says:--
. . . . . . . .
"They called me theirs,
Who so controlled me;
Yet every one
Wished to stay, and is gone,
How am I theirs,
If they cannot hold me,
But I hold them?"

The "tedious question" of putting Carlisle's first meetinghouse on old Estabrook road? Estabrook Country almost became the center of the new town of Carlisle. In the 1750s, there were enough people in northern Concord (which then extended in places two miles north of the current border) to petition to break away from Concord. They also boldly proposed to take seven thousand acres of old Concord (almost all of the land north of the Concord River and almost all of Estabrook Country) with them to be part of the new Estabrook-centered Carlisle. Robert A. Gross describes the factionalism and bitterness that existed between the "outlivers" and the Concord establishment (Gross, Minutemen and their World [New York: Hill and Wang, 1976], 15-17). There was one hitch--the petitioners had to agree by a deadline on a site for the new town's meetinghouse. Human nature, however, conspired with Estabrook's glaciated topography to frustrate a solution. There were two centers of settlement in the nascent new town, but they were separated by Estabrook's north-south Cedar Swamp. Because this swamp is almost a mile long, each neighborhood probably wanted the meetinghouse to be on its side of the swamp! After two years and more than twenty votes, the almost-townspeople had chosen--and rescinded--three meetinghouse sites. One was east of Two Rod Road on "Capt. Jonathan Buttrick's plain" (i. e., in the vicinity of the house still standing at 1024 Monument Street). The two other sites voted were near the old Estabrook road--one near the Estabrook cellar ("chosen" in 1754); and one further north ("chosen" in 1756), near Estabrook's forgotten "Poplar Hill" (Sidney A. Bull, "Carlisle," in History of Middlesex County, Mass., ed. D. Hamilton Hurd [Phil.:1890] v. I, ch. LIV, 712). About the former site, Carlisle historian Sidney Bull wrote,

[The winning voters] went so far as to prepare a part of the timber and have it teamed to the location on Poplar Hill, which elevation is situated on an elevation at the right of what is known at the present day as the old Concord road, and near what was formerly known as the Estabrook place, but which, at the present time, is used only for the purpose of pasturing cattle, and is only distinguished by the ruins of what was formerly the cellar, no building having covered the same for many years past. This timber was never used, but, tradition informs us, was allowed to lie on the spot until it decayed (Bull, "Carlisle," v. 1, 712).

The second Estabrook site, chosen in 1756, was apparently further to the north on old Estabrook road, probably to attempt to garner other voters' support. Carlisle historian Ruth Wilkins locates this other Poplar Hill site at a place probably on the rise just south of the present town line and just west of old Estabrook road (Wilkins, Carlisle, 49.). A modern house with stone sculpture is probably close to the site. The disgruntled Monument-Streeters and others, however, refused to abide by the selection, the deadline passed, and this first effort to form Carlisle died aborning in 1756.

Ninety years later (and fifty years after the second and successful attempt to form the new town [see note 8]), Thoreau, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, punned outrageously and biblically about this history--perhaps reflecting a raucous moment as he and his brother, still young men, start out on their adventure:

"On the other hand, the road runs up to Carlisle, city of the woods, which, if it is less civil, is the more natural. It does well hold the earth together. It gets laughed at because it is a small town, I know, but nevertheless it is a place where great men may be born any day, for fair winds and foul blow right on over it without distinction. It has a meeting-house and horse-sheds, a tavern and a blacksmith's shop, for centre, and a good deal of wood to cut and cord yet....Yonder in Carlisle the building of the temple [i.e., the proposed meeting-house] was many wearisome years delayed, not that there was wanting of Shittim wood [Exodus XXV, 5!], or the gold of Ophir, but a site therefor convenient to all the worshippers; whether on 'Buttrick's Plain,' or rather on 'Poplar Hill.'--It was a tedious question" (Emphasis added. Henry D. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, ed. Carl V. Hovde et al. [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980], 51).

Eighteenth-century dwellings included Thomas II, Robert, and Rebecca Estabrook (see note 50); Benjamin Clark (site at 393 Estabrook Road); and Samuel Kibbe (cellar hole and well). The Yellow Birch Cellar is reported to be the unfinished 1740s house of Henry Flint, whose wife is said to have vetoed their move there. (Allie Bemis suggests, however, that since Henry Flint purchased land near Monument Street in 1757, the Yellow Birch Cellar could have been abandoned at that time.) Nearby were Isaiah Greene's and Nathan Barrett's (site at Punkatasset). Little is known about a fifth small cellar site in northern Estabrook, the "Black Birch Cellar," but Channing wrote that it was the source for a phrase in Walden:

"Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings, with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimbleberries, hazel-bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny sward there; some pitch-pine or gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney nook, and a sweet-scented black birch, perhaps, waves where the door-stone was. Sometimes the well dent is visible, where once a spring oozed; now dry and tearless grass; or it was covered deep- not to be discovered till some late day- with a flat stone under the sod, when the last of the race departed. What a sorrowful act must that be- the covering up of wells! coincident with the opening of wells of tears. These cellar dents, like deserted fox burrows, old holes, are all that is left where once were the stir and bustle of human life, and 'fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,' in some form and dialect or other were by turns discussed." ("Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors," Walden, emphasis added.) [Back to text.]

11. Pocket Diaries of William Ellery Channing, ed. Frederick T. McGill, Jr. (transcribed typescript, 1930s), 120, November 13, 1853 (courtesy of Thomas Blanding). [Back to text.]

12. This is not the mill site off the Esker Trail, which is thought to have been his father's, but instead is at the west end (and may be submerged by) of what is now (since ca. 1906) Hutchin's Pond. [Back to text.]

13. The Northwest Passage in Estabrook Country. [Back to text.] Thoreau's pencilled draft survey of Humphrey Hunt's wood and pasture land (at CFPL and reproduced in Moss [1976] and LWV at 112) has surprises that do not appear on the finished survey. The draft survey's best-kept secret was a barely-legible marginal notation in its extreme lower-left corner. When deciphered, it reads, "Upernavik, the most northerly inhabited spot upon the globe." (The quotation marks are Thoreau's, and the notation appears to be more formal than a marginal scribble and less formal than a legend.) Where in the world was Upernavik? It was a small trading outpost on the west coast of Greenland; it was sometimes the outermost stop for, and the salvation of, Baffin Bay's whalers and Arctic explorers. I have not yet located the source of the quotation, but it is not unusual to see Upernavik referred to in the nineteenth-century literature of Arctic exploration as Greenland's and even the Earth's most northern permanent settlement. For example, an encyclopedia to which Thoreau had in the past referred noted that: "Upernamick [sic]...[is] the most northern settlement" (Encycl. Americana, v. VI, p. 52 [1831]). One contemporary explorer wrote, "Upernavik is not less the limit of safe navigation than the remotest bound of civilized existence" (Hayes, I. I., Open Polar Sea, [New York, 1867]).

Why in the world might Thoreau have had a quotation about Upernavik on his mind? The explanation may be straightforward. Earlier in this year of the Hunt survey (1852), Thoreau had been absorbed by accounts of the search for the explorer Sir John Franklin. Franklin had been but the latest to undertake the three-hundred-year quest for the Northwest Passage and for the Open Polar Sea. These were the rumored open-water routes that would link England across the Canadian Arctic to the riches of the Pacific and the Northwest coast, and even give access to the North Pole. After leaving Upernavik in 1845, Franklin and his men disappeared--"Thereafter a cloud descends upon [the expedition]; it passes into the heart of the grim solitudes of the Polar World, and men hear of it no more" (Adams, Recent Polar Voyages (1876), p. 90). For ten years thereafter, a total of forty rescue expeditions from America and Britain searched beyond the edge of the known world to learn his fate--and to claim the glory of discovery. (The expedition's lingering doom, which probably included cannibalism, did not become known until 1859.) Allusions to the Arctic, to human aspirations, and to Franklin are in Thoreau's published writings both before and after 1852 (e. g., A Winter Walk, Natural History of Massachusetts, Walden, and the Journal). Though none mentions Upernavik, in these writings he literally connected Concord with the Arctic by comparing, for example, Fairhaven Bay and Flint's Pond with Arctic places, and he connected Concord with the Arctic through the migrations of birds. He also made a metaphorical connection between the North's secular explorer-namers and his own spiritual quest. The English explorer and admiral, Sherard Osborn, whose book on the first Franklin search Thoreau had been reading earlier in 1852, vividly stated the case for secular courage as his expedition passed beyond Upernavik:

"Now for the Northwest! we exclaimed,--its much talked of danger,--its chapter of horrors! As gallant Frobisher [a 16th century explorer] says, "it is still the only thing left undone, whereby a notable mind might be made famous and remarkable." As it was in Frobisher's day, so it is now, unless Franklin has accomplished it, and lies beset [frozen in the ice] off Cape Jakan--and why may it not be so?" (Sherard Osborn, Stray Leaves from An Arctic Journal, [New York, 1852] p. 15)

Thoreau makes his own explicit and personal connection to the quest for the Northwest Passage in the "Conclusion" chapter of Walden:

"Direct your eye sight inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography.

"What...does the West stand for? Is not our own interior white on the chart?...Is it...a North-West Passage around this continent, that we would find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost...?... Be rather the...Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes....Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice" (p. 320-21).

In a late letter to Blake, he makes the quest to the unexplored as central to being human:

"Whether he sleeps or wakes, whether he runs or walks, whether he uses a microscope or a telescope, or his naked eye, a man never discovers anything, never overtakes anything, or leaves anything behind, but himself....Where is the 'Unexplored land" but in our untried enterprises? To an adventurous spirit any place... or his own yard, is "unexplored land,'... You must make tracks into the Unknown. That is what you have your board & clothes for. Let us sing" (Correspondence of HDT, W. Harding and C. Bode, eds., (Westport CT: Greenwood Press) 1974, p. 580, May 20, 1860).

And in a wonderful journal entry made in 1852, the year of the survey, he uses the metaphor of places beyond Upernavik to state his life's search-- to connect the figurative Bering Straight (off Alaska) and Lancaster Sound (off Greenland) of thought by traversing the unknown space between them and finding the dreamt-of Open Polar Sea, through which mariners (and philosophers!) would sail unimpeded. He writes,

"As I cannot go upon a north west passage then I will find a passage round the actual world where I am. Connect the Bherring Straits & Lancaster Sounds of thought. Winter on Melville Island and make a chart of Bank's Land- Explore the northwest trending Wellington Inlet-where there is said to be a perpetual open sea- cutting my way through floes of ice..." (March 28, 1852).

But what could have been the reason that led Thoreau to write the quotation about Upernavik on this draft survey and in such an odd marginal location? A whimsical motive is a possibility--his journal for December 1852 and January 1853 suggests how icy it had been while he surveyed. But Estabrook Country, unlike Upernavik, is un-inhabited. What, for Thoreau, would have been Upernavik--i. e., figuratively, the inhabited spot at the edge of the wild? He was still writing Walden, so perhaps he thought to link the metaphorical Upernavik to his wintertime home at Walden Pond, from which he ventured forth into landscapes that he would sometimes call Arctic. So was this an author's reminder to himself of an Arctic image for possible use? Alternatively, there is a more literal connection to the Walden house--at the time of the Hunt survey, the Walden house had been sitting for four years beside the old Estabrook road. A local farmer's son had moved it there to live in (at least temporarily; see, note 65). In fact, the relocated Walden house was the closest structure to the notation's location on the survey--it was only three hundred yards off the lower left edge. Was his old house thus Upernavik to him as he left cold Estabrook Country that day at dusk? Did he take shelter there? Or possibly Thoreau could simply have been reminding himself that places and experiences can be metaphorically connected and that surveying in the icy wilds of the Hunt lot was itself exploration and a quest. As he later said, Estabrook's Boulder Field was the "globe itself, here named pasture" (Nov. 3, 1857). [Back to text.]

14. Thoreau's "discovery" of, naming of, and a corrected location for, the Yellow Birch Swamp: On the draft Hunt survey he did name a geographical feature, just as Arctic explorers did. (Channing would later say, "He was compelled to name places for himself, like all fresh explorers" [Channing, 1873, p. 17].) On the survey, Thoreau scrawled "Yellow Birch Swamp" at a different location than those shown for this swamp on later maps of Estabrook Country prepared by others, who may not have had access to the Hunt survey. Compare with Gleason (1906), Fenn (1970), USGS (1943, 1964, & 1987), Maguire-MCZ (1973), and the Carlisle Mosquito (Sept. 9, 1994). [Back to text.]

15. Minot Pratt's elm. This American Elm was 16.5 feet in circumference and particularly electric in appearance. On March 6, 1873, Thoreau's friend Minot Pratt addressed a meeting of the Concord Farmer's Club, held at his house at Punkatasset. Pratt was a founding member of the Concord Farmers' Club, which held weekly meetings at which speakers would present essays. To be sure that the speaker was on hand, the meeting was held at his house and a supper was served by his family. Pratt's address was "Trees of Concord, Indigenous and Introduced," and it in part extolled the American Elm, one example of which he was particularly proud--the one in his dooryard:

"We have many noble specimens [of the elm] in Concord; but chief among these is that under the shadow of which the gentlemen of the Club will have the honor of passing as they leave for home. There may be others that have a larger girth, but for its heavy branches, horizontal spread, and perpendicular height, in one word, for its absolute grandeur, this is pre-eminent." [Back to text.]

16. The Brooks Clark-Raymond Emerson House, now Stratton Tavern-Rasmussen House. Described by Gladys Clark as "a plain country home," the old Clark house at 393 Estabrook Road (the end of the paved road) had come to dominate one of the principal entrances to Estabrook Country. New owners in the 1990s, the Rasmussens, determined that the old house had undergone so many changes over the years that, at the time it was demolished in 1995, none of the original structure remained. The owners wrote, "We opened all the walls before demolition and found...not a single timber, joist, or stud [was] in the house from before 1900, [based] on the joinery techniques used, nails, masonry, and saw marks on the wood." Reconstructed on the site at 393 Estabrook Road is the handsome Stratton Tavern, originally built in Northfield, Massachusetts, in 1759. The Strattons settled in Concord in the mid-1600s and, though some moved to Deerfield-Northfield in 1713, other Strattons were on Concord's minutemen muster roll in 1775. Though the Strattons had no direct prior connection with the Estabrook country, they did with Thoreau, who mentioned the family in Walden. There was once a tavern (much less grand) nearby: Edward Jarvis recalled that "Abel Davis kept an indifferent tavern on the Carlisle road [probably Lowell Road]. . . . This was much the haunt of drinking men from Concord and Acton" (Jarvis, Traditions, 102). The barn nearby, replacing one of 1960s vintage, is a 1790 Dutch barn moved from upper New York state. The Rasmussens also repaired much of the damage done to the nearby landscape by a bulldozer-crazy, prospective developer, John Hill. Meadowlarks and kestrels have returned to the fields. The small brick cottage was built by Raymond Emerson, for use when his family was away at the Cape. [Back to text.]

17. The 1960s vision of Ernst Mayr and Thomas Flint for a new ecology study area (the Concord Field Station) in Estabrook Woods and the role of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. [Back to text.] As background for President Rudenstine's 1997 act of dedication, a brief history of both Harvard's and Middlesex School's (see note 83) prior involvement is appropriate. The idea for a ecological study area in the seven-hundred-acre core of Estabrook Country took shape in the early 1960s under the guidance of Harvard Professor Ernst Mayr, one of the world's greatest evolutionary biologists. It was part of his effort to let the winds of the living natural world blow through the corridors of the academy, and to provide the MCZ (and the wider educational community) with a research and teaching tool vital to the study of natural diversity. Four Concord residents (MCZ Curator Barbara Lawrence, David Emerson, Thomas Flint, and Lawrence Terry, then retiring headmaster of the adjacent Middlesex School [see note 83]) led the campaign for Estabrook protection. Ernst Mayr says that Thomas Flint was particularly important: a the descendent of a Concord first settler who had owned land in Estabrook in 1653, Mr. Flint was active in the new Concord Land Conservation Trust and took the leadership to reassure the town and each affected landowner.

Concord had been besieged with subdivision plans. For example, the Concord Patriot recalled that "The minutes of the Planning Board for 1953 are sketchy and brief, nearly a staccato account of the countless plans for developing neighborhoods on small houses on small lots. Subdivision plans were submitted for open lands all over the town" (Sept. 20, 1979). And in the 1960s, the state Department of Public Works held a public hearing in town at which it proposed to re-route Route 2 through the Great Meadows and the Estabrook Woods. So there were many reasons why the town and Estabrook's neighbors would support its preservation.

With the assistance of the Nature Conservancy, the sponsoring committee, co-chaired by Messrs. Flint and Terry, raised $495,000 to enable Harvard to acquire close to 700 acres as the center of a biological study area. The Middlesex School trustees loaned money for the acquisition of options. There were six hundred donors: $67,000 from individuals and $427,000 from such local and national foundations as the Ford Foundation, Arthur Vining Davis, Avalon, Nature Conservancy, Permanent Charities, Concord Land Conservation Trust. Total Ford Foundation grants in the 1960s and early 1970s for the acquisition and development of the Field Station in Estabrook and the supporting lab in Bedford totaled $32 million! (One would think that this endowment would fund a fine Estabrook ecological curriculum.)

The MCZ's acquisition was hailed at the time as an outstanding example of cooperative stewardship and community unity. It was held out as a model for open space acquisition as an alternative to outright public ownership.

Interesting new information has come to light about Ernst Mayr's reasons for creating a field station. In his proposal to the Ford Foundation for a grant to purchase a site in Estabrook Woods, wrote:

"To preserve some relatively unspoiled remnants of nature for the benefit of future generations has become a sacred obligation...not just for esthetic and spiritual purposes, but in order to permit the study of living nature. We are in desperate need to know more about the dynamics of animal populations, about the turnover in plant communities, and about the replenishment of renewable resources....Intelligent conservation involves a knowledge of ecology--a knowledge of the relationship of plants and animals to their environment. And field work is the life blood of ecology....Why is field research needed?...[We] are still appallingly ignorant about the working of nature...." (Mayr, E. [ca. 1965]. "Proposal for a 700 Acre Ecological Outdoor Laboratory within 20 Miles of Cambridge at Concord, Massachusetts." Cambridge: MCZ.)

This proposal described the MCZ's criteria for a field station (a varied terrain, a tradition of careful public use, protection against human alteration for long periods, proximity to Cambridge, and a sufficient size to prevent edge disturbance). Dr. Mayr described the 670-acres in Estabrook Woods as "an almost ideal tract of land" (Report of the Museum Director, Annual Report: 1966-67, p. 6). The Ford Foundation proposal continued,

"From the point of ecological diversity, the area [in Estabrook Woods] contains most of what is typically New England. There are open fields, and an orchard, fields 'going back' to woodland--young, old, and second-growth--and a few stands of large conifers. There is a small stream, a pond of about 15 acres, a smaller pond, and marshland....The wildlife is remarkably diverse and the flora is well represented. It should be emphasized, however, that its desirability stems not so much from its unique ecology, but from its being typical of a great deal of the land in New England and New York."

In June of 1966, the MCZ issued "Plans for Research at the Concord Field Station of the Museum of Comparative Zoology." This document proudly announced the creation of the CFS and suggested a curriculum of investigations of benefit to science and the environment. It concluded as follows:

"This much is certain, however, that none of these projects could be undertaken without the availability of a large tract of unspoiled woodland. The Concord Field Station promises to have an enormous impact on the development of biological research at Harvard, and well beyond."

For summary descriptions of Harvard's educational activities in Estabrook Woods, see bibliography. One publication summarized activities in the 1970s:

"The Field Station is used by faculty and students and amateur naturalists for teaching and research in the environmental sciences. The Estabrook Woods, a 690 acre woodland, serves as the center for studies in these disciplines" (M. E. Myer and N. Ranney, "Aesthetic Management in New England Woodlands." Bedford: CFS, 1976.)

The Countway Laboratory of the Concord Field Station in Bedford housed many of collections until 1999, when unfortunately most were dispersed and the Center for Population Studies was closed. Thus, it is not clear whether the 1997 Rudenstine rededication ceremony will in fact result in the revitalization of research programs in Estabrook Woods. [Back to text.]

18. $2,500,000 in tax dollars have been spent to protect Estabrook Country since 1970, as well as major private donations. Since the original fund-raising and purchase of the MCZ lands in the 1960s, many public funds have been invested in increasing Estabrook's protection. The cost of additional public land acquisition in Estabrook Country has been as follows: $653,000 from the towns of Concord and Carlisle; $294,000 in state "Self-Help" aid; and, in 1996, a $1.5 million federal grant for a conservation restriction. Estabrook was eligible for this federal grant because, on nomination by the state Department of Environmental Management, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture designated the entire Estabrook Country an official forest legacy area under an Act of Congress.

Thus, the public monies expended since 1965 to purchase land and restrictions to protect Estabrook Country total more than two and one half million dollars. This is a conservative estimate as the parcels included are narrowly defined. (An additional million public dollars have been spent for agricultural preservation restrictions for the adjacent Nathan Barrett-Hutchins farmland between Punkatasset and the Concord River.) Additional private donations since 1970 have been probably worth additional millions.

Congratulate yourselves and the other donors. The job is not finished, however. [Back to text.]

19. Harvard University Gazette, Jan. 16, 1997, p. 3. [Back to text.]

20. David R. Foster's new book thoughtfully discusses the transforming landscape that Thoreau described, including many references to Estabrook Country (Thoreau's Country. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999). [Back to text.]

21. Jan. 31, 1864, Edith W. Gregg, ed., The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson (Kent: Kent State Univ. Press, 1982), I: 330-1. [Back to text.]

22. Native First People. [Back to text.] Estabrook gives many hints of its native-people past. Farmer Daniel B. Clark, Jr., who farmed there, was aware of the native people's former presence on his land--on July 5-6, 1847, he wrote in his diary that, "Commenced haying....Mowed over the indian hills on the side hill [east of the house]." (The term "indian hills" or "corn hills" refers to the agricultural practice of planting corn and beans, for example, in small mounds rather than in furrows. See, for a colonial example, note 107.) The Concord Historical Commission confirms that a highly significant archeological area, dating from the Middle Archaic Period to Late Woodland (from 8000 to 350 years ago) is near this brook. In the seventeenth century, this brook was known as Wigwam (or Ralph's) Brook, which may refer to this settlement (or to the unidentified feature in this watershed that is referred to in a Flint family document in 1653 [and later deeds] as "Bullock's Wigwam.") The brook has been since the eighteenth century called Saw Mill Brook.

There are other examples of native people's presence in Estabrook. When asked about native people's artifacts in the Estabrook area, a Lawrence family member told the author that the family had jars full of artifacts that had been picked up on their lands at the northeast edge of Estabrook Country. Also, on a terrace above Bateman's Pond, professional archaeologists found a black argillite Levanna point, which suggests a Late Woodland or Contact-era occupation.

The young schoolmaster Henry Thoreau would bring his students to learn of Indian life in the natural world: "One new feature [of Thoreau's activities as a new schoolmaster] was a weekly walk in the woods or pastures, or a sail or row on the river, or a swim in one of the ponds of the township, [such as] Bateman's Pond; and there was much instructive talk about the Indians who formerly lived or hunted there" (F. B. Sanborn, The Life of Henry David Thoreau [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917], 204). On August 29, 1857, Thoreau also wrote of reports of an old campsite at the Indian Rock (see entry Aug. 29, 1857 and note 64).

Shirley Blancke reports that she was able to find, through oral history and one or two historical notes, traces of only four native people altogether living in Concord from the late seventeenth to the nineteenth century. One, described in note 64, lived south of Bateman's Pond. One woman is buried east of Monument Street. She was also told by Wendell Gustafson that there were one or two other nineteenth-century graves of native people in the Estabrook Woods. (S. Blancke. "Concord and Native First People." New Perspectives on Concord's History - Climate for Freedom, Concord: Mass. Found. for Humanities, 1983. P.35, 64-65.)

Finally, like a message from the deep past, in a plowed field between the southern edge of Estabrook Country and the river, a single fluted point of the Paleoindians was found. This lanceolate spear point was made about eleven thousand years ago, when the valley was post-glacial tundra. Stephen Loring writes of this find, "Considering the great antiquity of the earliest hunters, the nomadic and cyclical nature of their subsistence activities, and that they apparently grouped in small bands composed of only a few families, it seems remarkable that we should find any evidence of their passing at all. They were the ultimate pioneers, the land's very first explorers, the brave adventurers who penetrated where no man had ever been before. (Loring, S., "Prehistoric Concord," Concord Patriot, July 12, 1979, p. 14). [Back to text.]

23. William Brewster (1851-1919) and October Farm. The eminent ornithologist Ludlow Griscom of Harvard wrote, "Having now spent some thirteen years in studying Brewster's field work and records, it is my humble opinion that he was one of the greatest and most naturally gifted field ornithologists that America has ever produced." (Griscom, The Birds of Concord, 1949). Brewster filled scores of binders with meticulous data on his observations (now at the MCZ). After Brewster's death, two books of non-technical entries (October Farm (1937) and Concord River, Harvard U. Press) were edited from his journals and are classics of American nature writing. Hundreds of photographs taken by him or his staff are at the MAS's Mildred Morse Allen Center in Canton. The description of wood thrush song is from October Farm, p. 26. [Back to text.]

24 The lime kiln. An old lime kiln, ruined but recognizable, is about 20 yards east of the old Estabrook Road and a quarter-mile south of the lime quarries, which are described in note 45. Lemuel Shattuck in his History of Concord (1835) wrote that there were "several species of limestone in the north part of town; formerly manufactured into lime." The heat of the kiln transformed the local marblized limestone into plaster. Ruth Wheeler says "a lime kiln was built in the north part of town in the Estabrook woods, that region of rugged pastures once called twenty score. Lime for Watertown's west meeting house was bought here and of course it was used with the Concord bricks for Concord chimneys." Wheeler, Ruth, Concord, Climate for Freedom, (Concord: Antiquarian Society 1967). This may have been the Angier meeting house, the first built in western Watertown (near present Waverly) in 1692-7. Edmund Anderson, Waltham, 1630-1884 (1936); and Martha Holland, "The Estabrook Farm, Exploring Fact and Fantasy Through Historical Archeology," (unpublished paper at CFPL, May 20, 1985). Ruth Chamberlin Wilkins, in Carlisle: Its History and Heritage, adds that the lime from the kiln in Estabrook woods was also used for Carlisle houses. (Carlisle MA: Carlisle Historical Soc. 1976, p. 29). It appears to have been the area near the kiln, not the quarries themselves, that attracted most of the attentions of botanists. Hosmer, for example, paid regular visits. [Back to text.]

25. McGill, Pocket Diaries, 130-31, February 5, 1853. [Back to text.]

26. This bog shrub in the heath family has evergreen leaves. Thoreau may have found them in an Estabrook sphagnum bog off Hugh Cargill Road (Ray Angelo, pers. comm.). [Back to text.]

[End of "Winter" section.]

 | To the top page for "The Seasons in Estabrook Country" |