This is a replica of the cabin on Walden Pond that Thoreau built and lived in for two years. When winter came, he plastered the walls, lay a stone hearth, and built a fireplace with a chimney. Inside were a bed, a table, three chairs, and a desk. His possessions were basic: frying pan, skillet, kettle, books, flute, umbrella, and a broom. Henry David Thoreau, at age 28, retreated from civilization to live alone in the “wilderness.” That was 1845, a peaceful time between the forming of the American nation and the impending Civil War. The young environmentalist Transcendentalist pacifist-scholar had built a one- room cabin for $28.12 on the bank of a deep kettle pond one and a half miles from Concord.

Thoreau was born in Concord, graduated from the local academy and Harvard University, became a teacher in Concord but quit after two weeks because he couldn’t discipline the students. He worked at his father’s pencil-making business for a while then tried teaching again.

Warner with Henry at Walden Pond. He started writing due to the influence of his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had introduced him to the Transcendentalist Movement which combined romanticism and social reform, and celebrated the individual over society, emotion over reason, and nature over man. After his first poem, “ Sympathy,” was published in the first edition of Emerson’s The Dial magazine, the puffed-up writer gave up teaching all together and fell in love with words.

And a woman…

But she broke his heart, accepting his proposal of marriage then disappearing into the mist. Deeply depressed and increasingly obsessed with death, Thoreau was rescued by Emerson who took the young scholar under his wing and allowed him to wallow in self- pity on his land at Walden Pond.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) – surveyor, pencilmaker, teacher, writer, abolitionist, nature lover. Thoreau found new life in nature, scavenging for wild fruits and vegetables, growing his own beans, catching fish, fighting wild animals, meditating, and taking notes on everything he saw and did. The result was Walden, 18 essays on his solitary life, his experiment in basic living. Thoreau emerged from his cabin after two years and Walden became a literary classic.

Thoreau’s second major work, Civil Disobedience ( 1849), was the result of his run-in with the law for not paying his taxes while living at Walden Pond. This essay’s message is “there is a higher law than the civil one, and the higher law must be followed even if a penalty ensues. So does its consequence: ‘Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.’”

Walden Pond became a state reservation in 1922 and a National Historic Landmark in 1962. Visitors enjoy swimming, canoeing, fishing, picnicking, and walking. Henry David Thoreau wrote and lectured against slavery and supported abolitionist John Brown. When he heard that Brown had been hanged after the Harpers Ferry raid, Thoreau went into shock and never recovered. He died in 1862, eight months before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Needless to say, I had to see Walden Pond where, Thoreau, one of my favorite literary and historical heroes, lived and recorded ideas that have changed history – individualism, libertarianism, civil disobedience, and conservation.

Next week: Lexington Liberty Ride