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The Seasons in Estabrook Country
ONCOMING WINTER
Nov. 7, 1858. Thoreau: "To Bateman's Pond. It cleared up this forenoon....I see the cold sunlight from some glade between the clouds falling on distant oak woods, now nearly bare, and as I glance up the hill between them, seeing the bare but bright hillside beyond, I think, Now we are left to the hemlocks and pines with their silvery light, to the bare trees and the withered grass. The very rocks and stones in the rocky roads (that beyond Farmer's) look white in the clear November light, especially after the rain. We are left to the chickadee's familiar notes, and the jay for trumpeter. What struck me was a certain emptiness beyond, between the hemlocks and the hill, in the cool, washed air, as if I appreciated even here the absence of insects from it. It suggested agreeably to me a mere space in which to walk briskly. The fields are bleak, and they are, as it were, vacated. The very earth is like a house shut up for the winter, and I go knocking about it in vain. But just then I heard a chickadee on a hemlock, and was inexpressibly cheered to find that an old acquaintance was yet stirring about the premises, and was, I was assured, to be there all winter. All that is evergreen in me revived at once....
"Methinks those scarlet oaks, those burning bushes, begin to be rare in the landscape. They are about Bateman's Pond, at any rate."
"My apple harvest! [105] It is to glean after the husbandman and the cows, or to gather the crop of those wild trees far away on the edge of swamps which have escaped their notice....[W]ith experienced eyes I explore among the clumps of alder (now bare) and in the crevices of the rocks full of leaves, and prying under the fallen and decaying ferns, ferns which, with apple and alder leaves, thickly strew the ground. From amid the leaves anywhere within the circumference of the tree, I draw forth the fruit, all wet and glossy, nibbled by rabbits and hollowed out by crickets, but still with the bloom on it and at least as ripe and well kept, if not better than those in barrels, while those which lay exposed are quite brown and rotten. Showing only a blooming cheek here and there between the wet leaves, or fallen into hollows long since and covered up with the leaves of the tree,-- a proper kind of packing. I fill my pockets on each side, and as I retrace my steps in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home, I eat one first from this side, and then from that, in order to preserve my balance. And here and there is one lodged as it fell between the bases of the suckers which spring thickly from a horizontal limb. In the midst of an alder clump, covered by leaves, there it lies, safe from cows which might smell it out and unobserved by the husbandman; reserved for me."
Nov. 8, 1858. Thoreau: "To Boulder Field....Those trees and bushes which grow in dense masses and have many fine twigs, being bare, make an agreeable misty impression where there are a myriad retreating points to receive the eye, not a hard, abrupt wall; just as, in the sky, the visual ray is cushioned on clouds, unless it is launched into the illimitable ether. The eye is less worn and wearied, not to say wounded, by looking at these mazes where the seer is not often conscious of seeing anything. It is well that the eye is so rarely caught and detained by any object in one whole hemisphere of its range, i. e. the sky. It enjoys everlasting holiday on this side. Only the formless clouds and the objectless ether are presented to it. For they are nervous who see many faces in the clouds. Corresponding to the clouds in the sky are those mazes now on the earth. Nature disposes of her naked stems so softly as not to put our eyes out. She makes them a smoke, or stationary cloud, on this side or that, of whose objective existence we rarely take cognizance. She does not expect us to notice them. She calls our attention to the maple swamp more especially in October....
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"Nature has many scenes to exhibit, and constantly draws a curtain over this part or that. She is constantly repainting the landscape and all surfaces, dressing up some scene for our entertainment. Lately we had a leafy wilderness, now bare twigs begin to prevail, and soon she will surprise us with a mantle of snow. Some green she thinks so good for our eyes, like blue, that she never banishes it entirely, but has created evergreens.
"It is remarkable how little any but a lichenist will observe on the bark of trees. The mass of men have but the vaguest and most indefinite notion of mosses, as a sort of shred and fringes, and the world in which the lichenist dwells is much further from theirs than one side of the earth from the other. They see bark as if they see it not. Those objects which, though constantly visible, are rarely looked at are sort of eye-brush.
"Each phase of nature, while not invisible, is yet not too distinct and obtrusive. It is there to be found when we look for it, but not demanding our attention. It is like a silent but sympathizing companion in whose company we retain most of the advantages of solitude, with whom we can walk and talk, or be silent, naturally, without the necessity of talking in a strain foreign to the place.
"I know of but one or two persons with whom I can afford to walk. With most the walk degenerates into a mere vigorous use of the legs, ludicrously purposeless, while you are discussing some mighty argument, each one having his say, spoiling each other's day, worrying one another with conversation, hustling one another with our conversation. I know of no use in the walking part in this case, except that we may seem to be getting on together toward some goal; but of course we keep our original distance all the way. Jumping every wall and ditch with vigor in the vain hope of shaking your companion off. Trying to kill two birds with one stone, though they sit at opposite points of the compass, trying to see nature and do the honors to one who does not.
"Animals generally see things in the vacant way I have described. They rarely see anything but their food, or some real or imaginary foe. I never saw but one cow looking into the sky.
"Lichens as they affect the scenery, as picturesque objects, described by Gilpen or others, are one thing; as they concern the lichenist, quite another..
"These are the various grays and browns which give November its character. There are also some red mazes, like the twigs of the white maple and our Cornus sericea, etc. (the red osier, too, further north), and some distinct yellow ones, as willow twigs, which are most interesting in spring. The silvery abeles are steadily falling nowadays. The chalky white under side of these leaves is remarkable. None of our leaves is so white.
"I think I admire again about this time the still bright-red or crimson fruit of the sumach, now when not only its own but most other leaves have fallen and there are few bright tints, it is now so distinct on its twigs. Your attention is not distracted by its brilliant leaves now.
"I go across N. Barrett's land and over the road beyond his house. The aspect of the Great Meadows is now nearly uniform, the new and exposed grass being nearly as brown and sere as that which was not cut. Thus Nature has been blending and harmonizing the colors here where man had interfered.
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"I wandered over bare fields where the cattle, lately turned out, roamed restless and unsatisfied with the feed; I dived into a rustling young oak wood where not a green leaf was to be seen; I climbed to the geological axis of elevation and clambered over the curly-pated rocks whose strata are on their edges, amid the rising woods; and again I thought, They are all gone surely, and left me alone. Not even a man Friday remains. What nutriment can I extract from these bare twigs? Starvation stares me in the face.
'Nay, nay!' said a nuthatch, making its way, head downward, about a bare hickory close by. 'The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat. Only the superfluous has been swept away. Now we behold the naked truth. If at any time the weather is too bleak and cold for you, keep [to] the sunny side of the trunk, for there is a wholesome and inspiring warmth such as the summer never afforded. There are the winter mornings, with the sun on the oak wood tops. While buds sleep, thoughts wake.' ('Hear! hear!' screamed the jay from a neighboring copse, where I had heard a tittering for some time.) 'Winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel if you know where to look for it.'
"And then the speaker shifted to another tree, further off, and repeated his assertions, and his mate at a distance confirmed them; and I heard a suppressed chuckle from a red squirrel that heard the last remark, but had kept silent and invisible all the while. Is that you? 'Yes-sir-ee,' said he. Then, running down a slanting bough, he called out rather impudently, 'Look here! just get a snug-fitting fur coat and a pair of fur gloves like mine, and you may laugh at a northeast storm,' and then he wound up with a slang phrase, in his own lingo, accompanied by a flourish of his tail, just as a newsboy twirls his fingers with his thumb on his nose and inquires, 'Does your mother know you are out?'
"The wild pear tree on Ponkawtasset has some yellow leaves still. The now more noticeable green radical leaves of the buttercup in the russet pastures remind me of the early spring to come, of which they will offer the first evidence. Now, too, I can see (for the same reason) where grows our only patch of broom, a quarter of a mile off, it [is] such a distinct, somewhat yellowish, green. Already the creeping juniper is a ripe glaucous green, with a distinct ruddy tinge to the upper surface,-the whole bush a ripe tint like a fruit.
"I stand in Ebby Hubbard's yellow birch swamp, admiring some gnarled and shaggy picturesque old birches there, which send out large knee-like limbs near the ground, while the brook, raised by the late rain, winds further than usual through the rocky swamp. I thought with regret how soon these trees, like the black birches that grew on the [Hubbard's] hill nearby, would all be cut off, and there would be almost nothing of the old Concord left, and we should be reduced to read old deeds in order to be reminded of such things,-deeds, at least, in which some old and revered bound trees are mentioned. These will be the only proof at last that they ever existed. Pray, farmers, keep some old woods to match the old deeds. Keep them for history's sake, as specimens of what the township was. Let us not be reduced to mere paper evidence, to deeds kept in a chest or secretary, when not so much as the bark of the paper birch will be left for evidence, about its decayed stump.
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"The sides of the old Carlisle road where it is low and moist are (and have for a long time been), for many rods together and a rod in width, brown or cinnamon-colored with the withered dicksonia fern, not like the brown of trees (their withered leaves), but a peculiar cinnamon-brown. The bare huckleberry bushes and the sweetferns are draped with them as a kind of mourning....
"Looking from Pratt's windows at sunset, I saw that purple or rosy light reflected from some chestnut rails on the hilltop before his house. Methinks it is pinkish, even like the old cow-droppings in the pastures. So universally does Nature blush at last. The very herbage which has gone through the stomachs and intestines of the cow acquires at last a faint pinkish tinge."
Nov. 9, 1653. Bullocks wigwam. [106] In the probate records of Middlesex County, the inventory of the estate of first settler Thomas Flint includes the first known reference to Estabrook Country:
"An inventory of all that whc was the Estate of Mr Thomas Flynt of Concord,
at the time of his death. Taken on the 9th Mo. ye 9 day of Aº Dm. 1653....Item-THREE SCORE ACRES AT BULLOCKS WIGWAM........015£...00s...00d.
/s/ Simon Willard, William Wood, Samuel Basse, Prizers [Appraisers]"Nov. 9, 1857. Thoreau: "Surveying for Stedman Buttrick and Mr. Gordan. [107] Jacob Farmer says that he remembers well a particular bound (which is the subject of dispute between the above two men) from this circumstance: He, a boy, was sent as the representative of his mother, to witness the placing of the bounds to her lot, and he remembers that, when they had fixed the stake and stones, old Mr. Nathan Barrett asked him if he had a knife about him, upon which he pulled out his knife and gave it to him. Mr. Barrett cut a birch switch and trimmed it in the presence of young Farmer, and then called out, "Boy, here's your knife;" but as the boy saw that he was going to strike him when he reached his hand for the knife, he dodged into a bush which alone received the blow. And Mr. Barrett said that if it had not been for that, he would have got a blow which would have made him remember that bound as long as he lived, and explained to him that this was his design in striking him."
Nov. 14, 1857. The chestnut in a quarry drill-hole and a mouse. Thoreau: "Ride to limestone quarries on old Carlisle road with E. Hoar. [fn.49] This morning it was considerably colder than for a long time, and by noon very much colder than heretofore, with a pretty strong northerly wind. The principal flight of geese was November 8th, so that the bulk of them preceded this cold turn five days....
"In the most southeasterly quarry, I noticed in the side of an upright sliver of rock, where the limestone had formerly been blasted off, the bottom of the nearly perpendicular hole which had been drilled for that purpose, two or three inches deep and about two and a half feet from the ground. In this I found two fresh chestnuts, a dozen or more amphicarpæa seeds, as many apparently either prinos (?) or rose (?) seeds (single seeds and fresh), and several fresh barberry seeds mixed with a little earth and rubbish. What placed them there? Squirrel, mouse, jay, or crow? At first I though that a quadruped could hardly have reached this hole, but probably it could easily, and it was a very cunning place for such a deposit.
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"I brought them all home in order to ascertain what the seeds were and how they came there. Examining the chestnuts carefully in the evening and wondering if so small a bird as a chickadee could transport one, I observed near the larger end of one some very fine scratches, which it seemed to me might have been made by the teeth of a very small animal when carrying it, but certainly not by the bill of a bird, since they had pricked sharply into the shell, rucking it up one way. I then looked to see where the teeth of the other jaw had scratched it, but could discover no marks and was therefore still somewhat in doubt. Coming up-stairs an hour afterward, I examined those scratches with a microscope, and saw plainly that they had been made by some fine and sharp cutting instrument like a fine chisel, a little concave, and had plowed under the surface of the shell a little, toward the big end of the nut, raising it up; and, looking farther, I now discovered, on the larger end of the nut, at least two corresponding marks made by the lower incisors, plowing toward the first and about a quarter inch distant. These were a little less obvious to the naked eye, but no less plain through the glass. I now had no doubt that they were made by the incisors of a mouse, and, comparing them to the incisors of a deer mouse (Mus leucopus) whose skull I have, I found that one or two of the marks were just the width of its two incisors combined (a twentieth of an inch)....I have but little doubt that these seeds were placed there by a Mus leucopus, our most common wood mouse.... There was no chestnut tree within twenty rods. These seeds thus placed in this recess will account for chestnut trees, barberry bushes, etc., etc., growing in chinks and clefts where we do not see how the seeds could have fallen. There was earth enough even in this little hole to keep some very small plant alive." [108]
Nov. 18, 1857. Thoreau: "How singularly rivers in their sources overlap each other! There is the meadow behind Brooks Clark's and at the head of which Sted Buttrick's handsome maple lot stands, on the old Carlisle road. The stream which drains this empties into the Assabet at Dove Rock. A short distance west of this meadow, but a good deal more elevated, is Boaz's meadow, whose water finds its way, naturally or artificially, northeastward around the other, crossing the road just this side of the lime-kiln, and empties into the Saw Mill Brook and so into the river." [109]
Nov. 24, 1860. Thoreau's last words from Easterbrooks Country. "To Easterbrook's. Under the two white oaks by the second wall southeast of my house [the removed Walden cabin], on the east side of the wall, I am surprised to find a great many sound acorns still, though every one is sprouted,-frequently more than a dozen on the short sward within a square foot, each with its radicle two inches long penetrated into the earth, But many have had their radicle broken or eaten off, and many have it now dead and withered. So far as my observation goes there, by far the greatest number of white oak acorns were destroyed by decaying (whether in consequence of frost or wet), both before and soon after falling. Not nearly so many have been carried off by squirrels and birds or consumer by grubs, though the number of acorns of all kinds lying under the trees is now comparatively small to what it was in early October.
"It is true these trees are exceptions and I do not find sound ones nearly as numerous under others. Nevertheless, the sound white acorns are not so generally and entirely picked up as I supposed....It will be worth the while to see how many of these sprouted acorns are left and are sound in the spring. It is remarkable that all sound white oak acorns (and many which are not now sound) are sprouted, and that I have noticed no other kind sprouted,-though I have not seen the chestnut oak and little chinquapin at all. It remains to be seen how many of the above will be picked up by squirrels, etc., or destroyed by frost or grubs in the winter. [110]
"The first spitting of snow-a flurry or a squall-from out [of] a gray or slate-colored cloud that came up from the west. This consisted almost entirely of pellets of an eighth of an inch or less in diameter. These drove along almost horizontally, or curving upward like the outline of a breaker, before the strong and chilling wind. The plowed fields were for a time whitened with them. The green moss about the bases of trees was very prettily spotted white with them, and also the large beds of cladonia in the pastures. They come to contrast with the red cockspur lichens on the stumps, which you had not noticed before. Striking against the trees on the west side they fell and accumulated in a white line at the base. Though a slight touch, this was the first wintry scene of the season. The air was so full of these snow pellets that we could not see a hill a half a mile off for an hour. The hands seek the warmth of the pockets, and fingers are so benumbed that you cannot open your jack-knife. The rabbits in the swamps enjoy it, as well as you. Methinks the winter gives them more liberty, like a night. I see where a boy has set a box trap and baited it with half an apple, and, a mile off, come across a snare set for a rabbit or partridge in a cow-path in a pitch pine wood near where the rabbits have nibbled the apples which strew the wet ground. How pitiable that the most that many see of a rabbit should be the snare that some boy has set for one!
"The bitter-sweet of a white oak acorn which you nibble in a bleak November walk over the tawny earth is more to me than a slice of imported pineapple. We do not think much of table-fruits. They are especially for aldermen and epicures. They do not feed the imagination. That would starve on them. These wild fruits, whether eaten or not, are a dessert for the imagination. The south may keep her pineapples, and we will be content with our strawberries." [111]
And these, fittingly, are the last words Thoreau wrote about his Easterbrooks Country. Absorbed, determined, he knew that wild fruits that very day had fed both his palate and his imagination. He must have literally been on his knees as he counted the acorns beneath those oaks and puzzled about their secrets. The next day he would say, "How is any scientific discovery made? Why, the discoverer takes it into his head first. He must all but see it." The following week, he spent a bitter afternoon counting more tree rings on his beloved Fair Haven Hill near Walden, trying to understand his world and what it represented. He came down with the illness that reawakened his tuberculosis. He was to linger for eighteen months but he rarely walked far afield again. He died at forty-four in 1862.
Thanksgiving, 1871. Louisa May Alcott wrote in her journal: "Thanksgiving dinner at the Pratt farm. All well and all together. Much to give thanks for."
Dec. 15, 1912. Reginald Heber Howe, Jr., naturalist and teacher at Middlesex School, wrote in The Auk, the journal of the American Ornithologists' Union:
"On December 15, 1912, Bateman's Pond froze over with black ice, but a thaw and rain resulted on the 17th in covering the ice with nearly an inch of water. During the moonlight night that followed, a Holboell's Grebe (Colyumbus holboelli) [fn.50] attempted to light in the pond and, I believe, settling on the ice was unable again to take wing. On the following morning, it having turned cold during the night, the bird was found with its breast feathers frozen in the ice. The wrists of its wings were badly lacerated by beating against the ice to free itself, but in other respects the bird was uninjured. After much piteous squawking, its feathers were cut from the ice and the bird liberated. Its wings, however, were injured so badly that it was killed and is now preserved in [the Thoreau Museum of Natural History at Middlesex School]." [112]
Dec. 20, 1852. Ellery Channing wrote in his pocket diary:
"A gray day, rather soft & warm; am bound for the North....A singularly warm winter thus far. I almost invariably come into the north such afternoons as this....Cocks crowing lustily at Clarke's At least, however much may disturb us in the house, let our out-doors be as good as the cock's....I see the house where I once dwelt [on Punkatasset]...Saw a fine white rabbit in a deep swamp, dog tracks also. Jays several waking the silence of the swamp with their sharp, acrid cries or screams. A pretty little forest brook, in which Ferns perfect green & in shape. Little birds picking off birch-seeds. Handsome shields & other congeries [?] of ice at Hubbard's falls; long candles of it, & foolscaps, & plaited jellies, & transparent globes with the black water passing through, & very thin delicate coatings where black water continually broke under."
Dec. 22, 1853. Christmas in Concord. Thoreau: "Got a...spruce for a Christmas tree for the town out of the spruce swamp opposite J. Farmer's. It is remarkable how few inhabitants of Concord can tell a spruce from a fir....Neither do the spruce trees know the villager."
Dec. 24, 1853. Thoreau wrote two days later: "In the town hall this evening, my...spruce tree, one of the small ones in the swamp...looked double its size....It was lit with candles, but the starlit sky is far more splendid tonight than any saloon."
Dec. 28, 1998. Professor Ernst Mayr, at a gathering of some of Estabrook's friends in December 1998, smiled as he read aloud the final paragraph of his 1960s proposal to create an ecology study area-a Field Station-in Estabrook Woods. He said the paragraph was just as true in 1998 as it was when the Museum first acquired the core of the Woods, more than thirty years earlier:
"The [Estabrook Woods] would serve ideally as a natural area where Harvard's scientists can carry on ecological researches. The special significance to society of preserving this unspoiled area is that it will not only enhance the value of historical Concord, one of the finest heritages of America's colonial past, but that it will also greatly benefit future generations of students and teachers whose work is vital to the general welfare." [113]
EPILOGUE
In 1991...
"Estabrook Woods"
By Christopher Roof of ConcordAt Punkatasset enter nature's realm-
a friendly wilderness of woods and swamps,
abandoned apple orchards, walls of stones
(those ancient walls meander everywhere),
endowed with ponds and brooks and vernal pools,
the home of foxes, owls, white-tailed deer,
producing lady's slippers every May.
Explore the miles of trails that branch and loop,
or lose yourself within its tangled depths.
It might be called our Thousand Acre Wood,
containing more than one enchanted place.
Foundations here and there can be discerned
of houses long deserted or destroyed,
and traces of a quarry and a kiln
(colonial in origin, I'm told).
The Minutemen came marching through here once.
Their destination was the Old North Bridge.
The fields and pastures which existed here
reverted back to forest by degrees.
Today this territory is enhanced
by farms and open space along its edge.
The air is vibrant with the songs of birds
from early spring through summer into fall,
with warblers, blackbirds, chickadees, and wrens,
thrushes, sparrows, vireos, and mockingbirds.
From time to time the aristocratic hawks
appear against the ever-changing sky.
It seems to me that pines predominate,
surpassing every other kind of tree
in numbers and majestic height and girth.
The forest floor is littered with their cones.
Their needles form a carpet soft and brown.
The wind produces sweetly subtle sounds
among the upper boughs, while underneath
a crowd of seedlings reaches toward the light.
I'm also struck by those morainal rocks
which one encounters every now and then-
colossal, hulking trollish-looking slabs,
and isolated cliffs of fractured stone.
Whenever I go walking in these woods
I find exhilaration and delight.
Amazing that so much remains intact,
considering the pressures which exist.
I trust we will continue to defend
This forest from encroachments large and small,
not only for ourselves, of course,
but for those generations yet to come. [114]
Footnotes and EndnotesFootnotes
Footnote 49. Edward Hoar was Thoreau's neighbor and contemporary, and he had been Thoreau's companion both in the Maine woods and on the day when in 1844 they had carelessly set afire more than a hundred acres of Walden Woods. For this, Thoreau had been called a "damned rascal" (Cruickshank (1964], p. 6). [Back to text.]
Footnote 50. Now called a Red-necked Grebe. [Back to text.]
Endnotes
105. Wild apples. Thoreau is talking here about his personal harvest--one of ideas and experiences in nature. He believed that nature was a complex system of wondrous beauty (even its moments of terror and grief), the high laws and harmonies of which could be approached by the human mind through close (what he called sympathetic) observation and an intuitive or illuminative experience. The passage appears as the opening paragraph of the section "The Last Gleaning" in the essay "Wild Apples" (p. 205 of Natural History Essays, Salt Lake City, 1980). (In the essay, Thoreau edited the journal entry to insert the phrase [included above] "in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home.")
At a more literal level, the wild apple tree of which he speaks was not the "native and aboriginal crab apple," which apparently had been almost extirpated. He then expanded the thought: "But our wild apple is wild perchance like myself who belong not to the original race here--but have strayed into the woods from the cultivated stock--where the birds where winged thoughts or agents have planted or are planting me. Even these at length furnish hardy stocks for the orchard" (May 23, 1851). [Back to text.]
106. Three score acres at Bullocks wigwam. In 1653, original settler Thomas Flint owned a parcel of this name. It is listed in the 1653 inventory of his estate (Middlesex County Probate records from Margaret and Warren Flint, pers. comm. 1999; and E. F. Flint Jr. and G. S. Flint, Flint Family History [Baltimore: 1984] I, 25, 28). This name or a derivation of it also appears three more times in Concord deeds between 1667 and 1680, and locate the parcel as being deep in Estabrook Country north of the Twenty Score. One Flint deed refers to this parcel as being part of the first division of town properties ("Concord Ancient Records" [1935] I:177b; see also I:176b; I:2, 221b; I:2, 286a). What was "Bullocks Wigwam"? A wigwam could be of either native or of colonial origin. For example, wigwam had been a term applied to the dugouts of Concord's earliest settlers off Lexington Road. There were settlers named Bullock or Bulloch or Bullocke in eastern Massachusetts as early as 1635, though I have found no record of one in Concord, and no native of that name.
It is possible that it had a utilitarian use, but it was, however, a significant enough feature to have been referred to in deeds for at least thirty years. It may also have given Estabrook's Saw Mill Brook its seventeenth century name of Wigwam Brook. Intriguing hints exist. There is, for example, a handsome, oblong, corbelled stone chamber in Estabrook, apparently on the old Flint lot, but its age and use have not been determined; one amateur archaeologist advocated a Native American origin (Letter, Mark Strohmeyer to Dr. C. Richard Taylor, January 3, 1995), I have not, however, found the chamber described in any journals or diaries as an old feature of the landscape, though there is one reference in Hosmer's diaries to visiting a charcoal kiln in the area. [Back to text.]
107. This dispute is the subject of the Nov. 9, 1857 Thoreau survey of "Bateman Woodlots (so called) Belonging to Charles Gordon" The original of this survey is at the Concord Museum. This lot lies approximately between the old Bateman's Pond road and the Michael Christian house. [Back to text.]
108. Thoreau's essay "Dispersion of Seeds" in Faith at 147-48 substantially quotes this passage about the chestnuts and the mouse. Robert Richardson says that "Dispersion of Seeds" is an argument against the then-prevalent concept that some plants spring up "spontaneously"--that is, not from a root, cutting, or seed (Intro., Faith). Beneath his careful observations, Thoreau was constructing a metaphor of the seed as a symbol of rebirth, a constant new creation. [Back to text.]
109. Watersheds. Estabrook's irregularities produced some gerrymandered watersheds of which these are examples. On the forest floor, there is evidence of the ditching and dams by which farmers may have captured these small streams' natural watersheds and diverted their flows toward the mills. [Back to text.]
110. Evolution as a constant new creation. [Back to text.] What had caught his intentional looking "southeast of my house" that day in November were a surprising (to him) number of sound acorns under these particular Estabrook oaks. He had been puzzled that fall by the rotting and the worms that had destroyed so many millions of the acorns. He had inferred a purpose for some of the profligacy--excess seeds to feed the planters; to extend the plant's range; and to occupy every bit of habitat, where evolutionary "peculiarities more or less considerable" might be produced "in consequence of their various conditions" ("Dispersion of Seeds," Faith, 101). Was the mass death of these acorns, however, the sign of some "glaring imperfection"? It was hard to see, he had said, what "great purpose" was served by this seeming waste (Oct. 19, 1860). In Darwin's world, individual death has meaning--an evolutionary significance (its role in natural selection) as part of a constant creation. Evolution depends upon death--selective, premature death. Thoreau had said, "Nature works with such luxuriance & fury that she follows the least hint" (Jan. 2, 1853). Each death, a man's or a maggot's, is some part of nature's "vital [selective] force" of evolution; and it is the creative force of evolution in the wild which is the preservation of the world. He also wrote approvingly that the theory of evolution "implies a greater creative force in Nature, because it is more flexible and accommodating, and equivalent to a sort of constant new creation" (emphasis in original, Oct. 18, 1860.) The thought of a vital and constant renewal was of great significance to a transcendentalist, for whom creation was constant. So he kept observing, as he was doing that day "southeast of my house."
Was he curious about whether these particular oaks were somehow peculiar "in consequence of their...conditions" so that a higher percentage of their acorns might survive? Was he curious about the possibility of Darwinian variation in a species near his old house? This day, he called these Estabrook acorns--these wild fruits--"remarkable" and looked forward to seeing "how many of these sprouted acorns are left and are sound in the spring."
Rachel Carson quotes Nobel laureate George Wald's description of the illumination that can come through close study:
"The biologist George Wald once compared his work on an exceedingly specialized subject, the visual pigments of the eye, to a very narrow window through which at a distance one can only see a crack of light. As one comes closer, the view grows wider, until finally through this same narrow window one is looking at the universe" (R. Carson. "Through a Narrow Window." Silent Spring. [Greenwich:Fawcett, 1970] p. 179). [Back to text.]
111. November 24, 1860. The final paragraph (slightly modified and less effective) also appears in "Wild Fruits," the beginning of a book-length manuscript Thoreau wrote during the summer of 1860 and winter of 1860-61 (Faith in A Seed, 180, and Wild Fruits, ed. Dean, 3.) [Back to text.]
112. Dr. Reginald Heber Howe, Jr. and the Thoreau Museum of Natural History at Middlesex School. [The citation is Howe, Jr., R.H. , Holboell's Grebe in Concord, Massachusetts, Auk XXX (1913): 267.] An original faculty member of Middlesex School, Dr. Reginald Heber Howe, Jr. was a naturalist and educator who created a tradition of natural history studies at the school. For example, in 1905 he discovered at Bateman's Pond a rare dragonfly that is now a state-listed, globally-endangered species. In addition to publishing books on lichens, birds, and dragonflies, he raised funds among the friends of the School to build in 1905 the School's Thoreau Museum of Natural History. This was located next to the old causeway at the School's entrance to the Estabrook Country. This museum issued natural history studies of local and regional fauna (see, bibliography). In 1904, the School also created a Middlesex School Natural History Society, which maintained records of observations and published natural history "Bulletins." (One such student Bulletin, for example, recorded a notable sighting in 1904--a surf scoter on Bateman's Pond.)
In addition to the Holboell's Grebe report quoted, Dr. Howe published in the journal of the American Ornithologists' Union, The Auk, additional bird observations in Estabrook Country, such as (in the 1908 Auk) those of a rare Great Gray Owl and an American Goshawk (shot in "Hoar's woods," which is perhaps the Hoar woodlot Thoreau surveyed) and of a Prairie Horned Lark on the school grounds. He also published Mrs. Russell Robb's observation at Punkatasset of the state's second female Cardinal (Auk, 1905), which was evidence of the northward expansion of this species' range. Dr. Howe's records of mammals observed in Estabrook Woods was in 1967 compiled for the MCZ (P. Arnold. "[Checklist of Mammals Seen In Estabrook Woods By Peter Arnold and Reginald Heber Howe]" Report MS at CFS). Howe was a member of the Nuttall Ornithological Club (as was William Brewster and, fifty years later, Ernst Mayr, and, fifty years later, the author [who was associated through shared interest rather than expertise]). In the 1930s, Dr. Howe became the first headmaster of Belmont Hill School and also created there a strong program of natural history studies.
The Thoreau Museum was demolished in 1948 and its collections dispersed. Sophia Thoreau's herbarium, which she had given to Eliza Hosmer after Henry's death and which was thereafter given to Middlesex School by a Hosmer descendent, was put on the market by Middlesex ca. 1948 and was purchased by the Thoreau Society (R. Wheeler, "A Thoreau Herbarium." Thoreau Society Bulletin, 29 [October 1949]: 2). [Back to text.]
113. One who attended the meeting described this act of preservation as a magisterial example of a global thinker acting locally (Lucille Daniel, "Renowned biologist maps solutions to survival," Lincoln Journal, Jan. 21, 1999 and Concord Journal, Feb. 4, 1999). [Back to text.]
114. This poem was written at a time when Estabrook had been under assault by proposed big developments at the Brooks Clark place and at various places on Monument Street. The former was thwarted but some of the latter were not. [Back to text.]