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Walking Notes to Estabrook Woods
Thoreau’s Easterbrooks Country, a “great wild tract,” was a rocky muddle of moor-like pastures, swamps, and woods. Emerson called it “the savage, fertile [with wild fruits], houseless land.” Daughter Ellen called it “dear Easterbrook.”
• Punkatasset is the native people’s name (meaning broad-topped hill) of this glacial drumlin. Minutemen hurried through Estabrook’s paths to muster here before the North Bridge fight, April 19, 1775. Concord owns most of this historic hill.
• Hutchins Pond was made in 1906 as an ice pond, to keep milk and produce cool for market. A native people’s village had earlier existed for centuries not far away on Wigwam (Saw-mill) Brook. The old Two Rod Road (path) crosses the dam. Bear lived nearby in 1998. Listen for wood and hermit thrushes.
• "Was that a large shad bush where Father’s [pencil] mill used to be? There is quite a waterfall beyond." For 300 years, settlers harvested every bit of energy from Estabrook’s tiny brooks as they would milk a cow. In 1820-30s, Henry’s father briefly cut up cedars from the old pastures nearby for the family pencil business. The mill may have been much older. Botanists have long loved the misty habitat. Look for the mill pond and the dying cedars, reminders of the-pastures-that-were.
• Just to the south of the glacier-made Esker trail was the old Oak Meadow, one of the earliest lots chosen by settlers in the 1630-40s, probably for its rich hay, peat, or cranberries. It is now Mink Pond (children called it Stump Pond), flowed in the 1940s for goose-hunting. Now, it grows wood ducks & white water lilies. Prof. Donald Griffin listens & watches beaver in-side their lodges. Look for their chews & dikes & large glacial boulders. Harvard MCZ owns 700-acres for ecology research, the vision of Harvard’s Ernst Mayr and Concord’s Tom Flint.
• At the south end of the dirt Estabrook Rd. at #393 is the Brooks Clark house site, now the rebuilt 1757 Stratton Tavern (from Northfield MA). Thoreau’s Walden cabin was in 1849 hauled here to be the dwelling of a ill-fated, farmboy Thoreauvian. It rotted away a few rods north of Raymond Emerson’s summer bachelor cottage. Go N at the 4-way corner in woods.
• The Estabrook road (path) was the old Carlisle road, a height-of-land way for at least 350 years. Down it the minute-men came to the North Bridge. For Thoreau, the road was a metaphor for the journey of life and a spiritual path. His saunters were not only nature walks but were also pilgrimages and meditations. About this road he said, "My steps are symbolical steps, and in all my walking I have not reached the top of the earth yet." Here he also wrote, on one spring equinox, "All nature rejoices with one joy." Admire the double stone walls.
• Visible to the east of the Estabrook Rd. is a lime kiln said to have been in use by the 1690s. Here limestone was heated and turned into plaster, which prized to caulk chimneys and surface walls and perhaps to slake bog iron. Watch out for poison ivy. A few rods off the Esta Rd. to the west are the quarries, slits in the ground showing how farmers labored hard to chip out the marbleized stone. Watch for the sprouts of the American Chestnut.
• At a junction in the middle of the Woods is the Estabrook cellar hole, where Thomas and Sarah Estabrook settled in 1683, only a few years after the King Phillip’s War, which wiped out all settlement to the west. It is not known how long Thomas and Sarah lived here, but at least 4 generations of Estabrooks lived here or in the Woods near Bateman’s Pond until 1838. This al-most became the site of Carlisle’s first meeting house and thus the center of the new town. Nearby are various jumbles of stonework, including 33 puzzling stone circles. Hidden away are five other old cellar-sites. Thoreau raged about the waste of spiritual life that could occur in such a place: "And so men lived and drank & passed away—like vermin." Imagine the life here. Ellery Channing’s touching poem "The Lonely Road" (1845-46) bids it: "A long farewell, thou dim and silent spot."
• The Middlesex School property line, at risk of being unwisely developed, is visible thru the trees to the NW. Citizens are now appealing a wetlands permit which would permit the School to construct more than 2000' into the Woods. But "We are all schoolmasters, and our schoolhouse is the universe." The Farmyard trail (an old right-of-way) west through the Estabrook door yard brings one (through Middlesex School land so be respectful of their privacy) to a promontory over Bateman’s Pond (a great pond); to the corn hills (hundreds of low mounds carpeting the forest, made by Thomas Estabrook in the mid-1700s, in which he planted corn & beans, perhaps over a native field; found by Thoreau they were then forgotten; & to the Paul Adams-Rebecca Estabrook farmstead site (where Rebecca, the last Estabrook of Estabrook Woods probably died in 1832). The latter two are National-Register-eligible historic sites. Watch (out for!) nesting goshawks and remember how to get home.
• In the N part of Estabrook Woods (& E of E.Rd.) is the cellar hole of Samuel Kibbe. In 1779, he was so upset that the a shift of the town line would "move" his house to Carlisle, that he & his neighbors petitioned the legislature. They argued that Americans were fighting and bleeding "not to have their Rights taken from them without their Consent." Kibbe’s place thus became an island of Concord within Carlisle, set off by four stone "C" bounds (still there, hidden in the woods). Kibbe & his children were so heavy that not more than one could ride the family horse to town down the old Estabrook road. When the dead from the old houses here were carried to the graveyard on Monument Square, it is said the bearers would rest the coffins on "mort stones" beside the old road. Imagine which stones they might be. Look for the Kibbe well. Some believe this landscape & another in Estabrook have mystical significance.
• Remember, this is not a public park but is mostly an ecology research area and is mostly privately owned. Respect it by loving the landscape and not disturbing the wildlife or research. Protect it by defending it and enlarging its borders. Walk softly.
• More needs to be done to save Estabrook. Those concerned about the Middlesex project can contact the Thoreau Country Conservation Alliance (H. Bowdoin 978-369-3565 or M. Kellett 978-287-0320) or local citizen opponents. Middlesex School graduates can contact Middlesex Graduates for Estabrook, POB 174, Sullivan NH 03445. The Concord Land Conservation Trust and the Carlisle Conservation Foundation also do fine work.
• For more, see my "The Seasons in Estabrook Country," an anthology of Thoreau & 50 others who wrote about Estabrook Woods from 1653—1999 (112 pp. at local bookstores); or "Thoreau & the Estabrook Country" in the 1996 Concord Saunterer (70 pp at the Shop at Walden Pond); or <http://home.earthlink.net/ ~steveells>. I’m happy to answer questions at 781-259-8982 or <sfe@ post.harvard.edu>. Stephen F. Ells (May 2000).