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Discover a forgotten landscape:
Published in 1999 about Thoreau's wild tract

THE SEASONS IN ESTABROOK COUNTRY

This is an anthology of writings by Henry Thoreau and fifty others about the cycle of the year in this historic landscape, which is now known as Estabrook Woods. The author-editor is Stephen F. Ells. The 1200-acre Estabrook Country was one of Thoreau's "great wild tracts" in Concord and Carlisle. Remarkably, much remains wild. The anthology celebrates this place by gathering the words of fifty people who over three and a half centuries have written or spoken about life here. Some tell of the passage of the seasons; some write of the impact of the place on them; some tell about what this place has meant to them; and some tell how this landscape (and by extension potentially any landscape) can connect to science and to spirit.

Seventy of the selections are generous quotes from Thoreau's journal. He found here both natural diversity and a spiritual metaphor, the old Carlisle road (earlier a Minute Man path and still a dirt road).

The other hundred selections include those by a settler; a Minute Man; a British officer at the North Bridge; schoolchildren; farmers; a philosopher; housewives; a ne'er-do-well; botanists and teachers; an evolutionist; authors; naturalists; and others who have written about this tract over 350 years.

Extensive notes describe Thoreau's philosophy; the area's natural, social, and conservation history; and the current, unfortunate development plans of the Middlesex School. 110 pages, 40 pictures and maps, walking guide, bibliography, and indices.

• Reviews by E. O. Wilson and others
  
• List of Fifty Authors from 1653-1999
  
• Selected Quotations from "The Seasons in Estabrook Country"
  
• The bibliography in "The Seasons in Estabrook Country"
  
• The text of the "Introduction"
  
• For a hyperlinked text of the entire document for on-line reading or download, please click HERE.
  

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