Elise Lemire

ASA 2005

Note: two-sided handout appears at the end of this file.

The Racialized Geography of Wilderness in Concord, Massachusetts

In 1853, Henry David Thoreau identified four “great uninhabited tracts,” or as he also called them “great wild tracts,” in his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts: “Easterbrooks Country,” by which he meant what is now called Estabrook Woods, the Great Fields, Old Marlborough Road Country, and Walden Woods.[1] (The locations of these four areas are indicated on the 1852 map handout.) Today, these areas are considered sacred because of their links to Thoreau and much of the land there has been saved from development in his name. My talk today is about the constructed and political nature of these sacred spaces. I consider the links between Thoreau’s designation of these areas as “wild,” the status of these spaces today, and the history of slavery and its aftermath in Concord.

The Great Fields were first cleared and farmed by Native Americans. After Concord was incorporated in 1635 by white settlers, individual lots within the Fields were parceled out to them. For three generations, the town or the proprietors of the Fields oversaw joint management of the fence that enclosed the fields and various byways within it. By 1778, the proprietorship was dissolved. Farmers had broken enough ground near their barns that they didn’t need to rely on the Great Fields for tillage.[2] Families still owned individual parcels within the Great Fields but these were used less and less. And so it was that in the mid nineteenth century, Thoreau journeyed often to this, in his mind, “great wild tract” to record changes in the flora and fauna and to meditate over the view the upland Fields provided him of the Great Meadows, those low-lying areas bordering the slow-moving Concord River that were full of native grasses in the summer and fuller still every August of overly busy farmers and their hired help harvesting these grasses for animal fodder.

By 1944, well after Concord farmers had switched from meadow grass to English hay, Concord son Samuel Hoar had amassed 250 acres of the Great Meadows, including the portion of the Great Fields that bordered the Meadows, all of which he donated to the U.S Government to be preserved as a National Wildlife Refuge.[3] This Refuge is considered important, if not sacred, today not only because of its environmental importance within a corridor of protected habitats along the Sudbury River-Concord River Valley and by extension within the Atlantic Flyway, but also because it was Thoreau who inaugurated a now long and famous history of botanical and ornithological research there. Literature about the Refuge inevitably asks us to consider that it was Thoreau who first recognized the area’s diversity and beauty.[4]

In addition to the Great Fields, Concord’s early white settlers attempted to farm the uplands surrounding Walden Pond. The soil there is so sandy, however, that they quickly abandoned their attempts, instead designating upwards of 2,000 acres there as one of the town’s principal sources of fuel and dividing it into privately-owned woodlots. Walden Woods is now considered sacred because it is where Thoreau lived alone for two years in the 1840s in a small cabin he built on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lot. The account of this sojourn in the book Thoreau named after Walden Pond has been embraced globally as a manifesto for living purposefully and close to Nature. This sacred version of Walden Woods was granted state sanction in 1922 when 80 acres of privately held land there was granted to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts with the stipulation that the land be managed “to preserve the Walden of Emerson and Thoreau.” The Walden Pond State Reservation is currently maintained by the Department of Conservation and Recreation. That Thoreau has faithfully been made the centerpiece of the Reservation is made clear by the sites the DCR has chosen to designate on the map distributed to visitors, by the signage pointing visitors to the site of Thoreau’s cabin and the cairn there, some of which includes quotations from Thoreau, by the paths that lead to the original cabin site, and by the replica of the cabin that sits near the parking lot. In all of these ways, the state consecrates the reason pilgrims journey to the Reservation: to honor Thoreau and his views and to revel in their nostalgia for the pure relationship to an unspoiled natural environment that Thoreau arguably enjoyed. Indeed many pilgrims to Walden report renewing their commitment to the ethical positions of environmentalism and conservation that were spawned by Thoreau’s writings. Edward O. Wilson, for example, begins his recent book The Future of Life with an imagined conversation at Walden Pond with Thoreau, writing that he has come "to explain to… [him], and in reality to others and not least to myself, what has happened to the world we both have loved."[5]

Estabrook Woods has also come under conservation restrictions, again largely on the strength of Thoreau’s appreciation of its muted beauty. Local activist Stephen Ells notes on the website he devotes to Estabrook Woods that “There still is a place in Concord and Carlisle within which, because of its essential wildness, beats the spiritual heart of Henry Thoreau.” This link to Thoreau is part of Ells’ argument for why a nearby school should not be permitted to build there. Thoreau’s Old Marlborough Road Country, by contrast, is now largely residential zoning, although it too is sprinkled with conservation parcels.

For the better part of the past century, the town of Concord has reaped untold financial benefits from the creation, possession, and maintenance of much of this space as sacred space. There are the tourist dollars collected from the over half a million pilgrims who journey to the Walden Pond State Reservation annually and who also take in the Great Fields and Meadows, the Old North Bridge, the Wayside, and Orchard House, as well as local restaurants and inns. The town benefits even more from inflated residential property values, wealth that is state-sanctioned insofar as part of the value of Concord real estate comes from the amount of government-owned open space residents enjoy. And while arguably any and all visitors benefit from access to these so-called national treasures, it’s clear that Concord property owners benefit the most financially.

The politics of sacred space in Concord is, however, even more complicated. For a book I’m writing on slavery in Concord, I’ve been able to determine that there were at least thirty two slaves in Concord in 1771, a number of whom, after emancipation, ended up living in the areas Thoreau would later designate as “uninhabited” and “wild.” The town’s slaves stayed in Concord after gradual emancipation took place in Massachusetts in the 1770s and 1780s because they received some protection and a modicum of assistance from their former owners, including permissions to live on their owners’ outermost lands. One or two even inherited a little bit of money from their former owners and were able to purchase small lots. Others, however, were left to squat on public byways. Stories that have survived in the archives and in Thoreau’s writings about these former slaves reveal that whites used various means to insure that all of the former slaves, squatters and owners alike, were confined to areas that had long been or were becoming agriculturally less central to local farmers. On the flip side of the 1852 map you have, I’ve provided you with a list of the black inhabitants in each of three of the areas Thoreau described as wild. As you can see, Thoreau’s “great wild tracts,” much of which is now considered sacred ground on the strength of his designation, were also at one time black enclaves. (While there were a very few former slaves who lived outside of these enclaves, in every case they were single, childless, and isolated on white-owned farms.)

In the Walden Woods enclave, from at least 1785 until 1822, there were three black homes with as many as thirteen residents. During this time, a few one-acre fields were all that remained of earlier attempts to farm the sandy soil there. These were some of the only field lots in Concord available to former slaves, both because they were relatively inexpensive to purchase and because whites weren’t interested in contesting black inhabitation on such agriculturally and geographically marginal land. Late eighteenth-century land deeds describe the fields there as “old,” a designation that hints at soil infertility and which Thoreau confirms in his chapter “The Bean-Field” in Walden.

In another Walden chapter, “Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors,” Thoreau describes the location of his bean field as lying within the triangle comprised of three tiny houses along the Walden Road that once belonged to former slaves. For Thoreau, the fact of a black community’s existence leant his own experiment a certain hopefulness. He imagines, not a little sentimentally, that those who had lived at Walden self-sufficiently found a kind of joy that he then writes onto the landscape all around him, thereby investing it with sacredness. Further, it’s arguable that he modeled his own experiment in self-sufficiency, itself an important reason Walden Woods is regarded as sacred today, on the black subsistence farming that once occurred at Walden and that continued in Thoreau’s day in the Old Marlborough Road Country and on the edge of the Great Field.[6]

Old Marlborough Road Country was, like Walden, a sandy area covered in pines. Meadows and pastures were scattered thinly amongst the dense forestation and sandy plains. Here, too, land was cheaper in the years of gradual emancipation. Thomas Dugan, a runaway slave from Virginia, was thus able to settle his family here in 1788. He and his children were, like the Walden Woods residents, on the margins of town in every regard: geographically, economically, and socially. In 1848, Emerson wrote in his diary that he and Ellery Channing had walked on “the Duganne trail” and he termed it a “barbarous district.”[7] For Thoreau, however, it was the fact of the area’s relatively undisturbed beauty coupled with the marginalized, self-sufficient lifestyle of Thomas Dugan’s son Elisha that made the area both “wild” and spiritually salubrious. In “Walking,” Thoreau pays tribute to the Elisha Dugan in a poem.

… Elisha Dugan –

O man of wild habits,

Partridges and rabbits,

Who has no cares

Only to set snares,

Who liv’st all alone,

Close to the bone;

And where life is sweetest

Constantly eatest.

The Dugans appear frequently in Thoreau’s journal as models for the sort of self-sufficiency he sought at Walden.[8] So, too, does Peter Hutchinson, another black contemporary of Thoreau’s who was known for his encyclopedic knowledge of the area’s wildlife.[9] Hutchinson lived on the border between the Great Fields and the Great Meadows in a small house once crowded with former slaves and their children. When Thoreau gazed out on the Great Meadows, it was usually from the vantage point of this home.[10] This area, too, had been a black enclave because the Great Fields were largely abandoned by whites prior to gradual emancipation, making land available there for squatters and those who could only afford cheap, marginal land.

Concord’s black history has, however, largely been erased. There is very limited signage in Concord regarding the sites of black residents, even as Thoreau devoted the bulk of a chapter in Walden, much of his journals, and part of his essay “Walking” to them. Nor is there much else in the town that marks their existence. What signage and attention does exist generally celebrates the life of former slave “John Jack,” who is erroneously said to have achieved freedom and independence on his own by 1761, a myth meant to make the fact of his enslavement secondary to that imagined achievement.[11] It seems the facts of slavery and later segregation in Concord are regarded as incompatible with the sacred nature of certain Concord spaces, undoubtedly because the nostalgia for paradise that these spaces evince is linked to nostalgia for spaces free of the nation’s long history of race conflict. This other nostalgia is fueled particularly well in Concord by the fact that the town claims to be the birthplace not only of environmentalism but also, in 1775, of the nation itself and, later, of some of the nation’s most committed abolitionists, Thoreau among them. In short, it’s no accident that Walden Woods, the North Bridge, and the homes of famous activists form a kind of holy trinity within Concord’s tourism industry. Each inflates the meaning of the other in an endless circle linking patriotism, equality, and landscapes imagined as unspoiled, as if the former two sprung fully formed from the latter. We are all familiar with this conflation as it happens on the national level. Recall, as an example, the song “America the Beautiful,” in which the fact of wide open spaces is said to be precisely what has birthed the nation and the nation’s democracy.[12] Concord’s is simply a local version of this dynamic whereby the US is understood as “Nature’s Nation.”[13]

That Concord’s black history has been erased from the landscape means that visitors are not apprised that the very spaces they deem sacred were first regarded as such by Thoreau in part because of their histories as black enclaves. Nor are visitors given the opportunity to expand their own sense of sacredness to include reverence not only for the fact of one man’s survival in the woods but for the survival of many former slaves in the segregated years that followed their abandonment by former owners. Perhaps it is time, then, to rewrite the Concord landscape yet again. Scholars might take the lead by appropriating the very means used in 1945, when, as Professor Joy Ackerman notes, the excavation of Thoreau’s cabin’s foundations and the establishment of a monument there served as “a marker of resistance to the dominant recreational use of the land” that dated from the arrival of the railroad in Concord in 1844.[14] In other words, perhaps we should be asking the DCR at Walden and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the Great Meadows to erect replicas of the small houses or huts that so many former slaves and their families lived in once. At Walden, pilgrims would then be forced to see the way in which Thoreau purposefully placed himself in a formerly black part of town and they could appreciate the black roots of Thoreau’s endeavors. The key, of course, would be to avoid Thoreau’s sentimentalizing of former slave life by countering it with sound historical and archeological research of the sort that has begun to take place at Monticello and a few other sacred spots in the American landscape. To be sure, the town of Concord would lose the old mythological connection between open space and freedom on which it takes its stand as a symbol of the nation. But that would be precisely one of the points of such an endeavor.

Works Cited

Ackerman, Joy. “A Politics of Place: Reading the Signs at Walden Pond.” Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture.” Reconstruction 5.3 (Summer 2005). < http://www.reconstruction.ws/053/ackerman.shtml>.

Blanding, Thomas. “Historic Walden Woods.” Concord Saunterer 20.1-2 (December 1988): 3-74.

Channing, William Ellery. Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist. New, enlarged edition. Ed. F. B. Sanborn. Boston, 1902.

Chidester, David and Edward T. Linenthal. “Introduction.” American Sacred Space. David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal, eds. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1995: 1-42.

Donahue, Brian. The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2004.

Ells, Stephen. “All About the Estabrook Woods or Thoreau’s Easterbrooks Country.” http://homepage.mac.com/sfe/henry/estabrook/index.html.

__________. Letter to Lindsay Krey, Planning Team Leader, Us Fish and Wildlife Service. 1 September 2003.

Gross, Robert A. The Minutemen and Their World. New York: Hill and Wang, 1976.

Keyes, John Shepard. Houses & Owners or Occupants in Concord, 1885.

Miller, Perry. Nature’s Nation. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967.

Wilson, Edward O. The Future of Life. Vintage, 2003.

Woodson, Thomas. “Thoreau on Poverty and Magnanimity.” PMLA 85.1 (January 1970): 21-34.

[Insert “Lemire ASA 2005 Map” here as side one of two-sided handout.]

Elise Lemire

ASA 2005

[Side Two of Two-Sided Handout]

Dates and Locations of Black Enclaves in Concord, Massachusetts

Walden: 3 houses

1. Brister and Fenda Freeman Family, 1785-1822 (death); ½ house, owned 1 acre; 7 in household in 1790, 4 in 1800.

Charlestown Edes, 1785-1791 (death); other ½ of house; number in household unknown.

2. Cato and Phillis Ingraham Family, 1795-1805 (death); ½ house; rented 1 acre; 4 in household in 1800.

3. Zilpah White, n.a.-1820 (death); squatted on roadway; 1 in household.

Old Marlborough Road Country: 3 houses

1. Thomas and Catherine Dugan Family, 1788-1827 (death); owned 6 acres; 4 in household in 1800.

Jenny Dugan (Thomas’s 2^nd wife), 1827-1853; owned 5 acres; 5 in household in 1830.

Isaac Dugan, 1853-1855; purchased 5 acres from his mother (Jenny); 3 in household in 1855.

2. George Dugan, 1841-1851; owned 9-10 acres; 2 in household in 1855.

3. Elisha Dugan, 1841-1896; owned 1-13 acres between 1841-1855 then squatted; 1 in household throughout.

Border of the Great Field: 2-3 houses

1. John Barron (“John Jack”), 1761-1773 (death); owned 6 acres; 1 in household.

2?. Caesar Robbins Family: c. 1779-1822 (death); 1/2 house; squatted with permission on 11 acres; 9 in household in 1800.

Jack Garrison Family, c. 1812-1837; ½ house; squatted with permission; approx. 6 in household in 1830.

Peter then Fatima Robbins, 1823-1852; owned 13 acres dwindling to 5; 11 in household in 1850.

Susan Garrison, c. 1812-1841 (death); deeded ½ of house for duration of her natural life.

Peter Hutchinson Family, 1852-c.1871; owned 11 acres; 7 in household in 1840, 8 in household in 1855.

3. John Garrison Jr., 1837-1873: 1.25 acres; 4 in household in 1840.

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[1] William Ellery Channing writes in his biography of Thoreau: “Three spacious tracts, uncultivated, where the patches of scrub-oak, wild apples, barberries, and other plants grew, which Mr. Thoreau admired, were Walden woods, the Estabrook country, and the old Marlboro’ road.” Thomas Blanding reasons that Channing “probably has in mind an entry for June 10, 1853, in which Thoreau specifies the same three wild tracts and adds a fourth not mentioned by Channing” (Blanding, 3). Thoreau writes in his journal on that date: “A second great uninhabited tract is that on the Marlborough road, stretching westerly from Francis Wheeler’s to the river, and beyond about three miles, and from Harrington’s on the north to Dakin’s on the south, more than a mile in width. A third, the Walden Woods. A fourth, the Great Fields. These four are all in Concord.”

[2] See Donahue.

[3] Donahue notes that only “A few meadows remained in production into the early twentieth century” (233).

[4] In his September 1, 2003, letter to Lindsay Krey, Stephen F. Ells notes the ecological importance of the GMNWR in the Sudbury River-Concord River Valley and its uniqueness as the object of botanical and ornithological study for 175 years, beginning with Thoreau. He quotes Emerson in a letter to Elizabeth Hoar: “Henry T. occupies himself with the history of the river, measures it, weighs it, and strains it through a olander to all eternity.” Similarly, on the official website for the Refuge, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service notes:

Refuge landscapes inspired the thoughts of such storied environmental philosophers as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. More than a century and a half later, summer recreationists sun themselves along the shores of nearby Walden Pond--now protected as a state park. Paddling through the refuge along the Concord River, canoeists may pass below the Old North Bridge--the site of America's birth that is now managed by Minute Man National Historical Park.

[5] Wilson, page xiii.

[6] On Thoreau’s tendency to sentimentalize poverty, see Woodson.

[7] Emerson diary, October 28, 1848. Emerson added that Ellery Channing “proposed that we should send the Horticultural Society our notes, ‘Took an apple near the White Pond fork of the Duganne trail, an apple of the Beware-of-this variety, a true Touch-me-if-you-dare, -- Seek-no-further-of-this.’”

[8] See, for example, Thoreau’s journal entries for October 31, 1850, June 22, 1851, December 28, 1851, March 25, 1853, and March 30, 1853.

[9] J. S. Keyes, in his Houses & Owners or Occupants in Concord, 1885, wrote of Peter Hutchinson, “He was a ‘good nigger’ and had more local knowledge of wood lots and meadow bounds than any man in town, and much of it died with him” (vol 1, 151).

[10] See Thoreau’s journal entries for, for example, April 3, 1852, April 21, 1852, August 9, 1853, and August 7, 1854.

[11] For this account of John Jack, see, for example, Gross, 95.

[12] O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

[13] This term was coined by Perry Miller.

[14] Ackerman, 22.