A Poor Man’s House
Henry had returned from Staten Island with the prospect of becoming, like his father, a respected local businessman. Finally the Thoreau family was prospering. By 1844 the Concord-based firm of J. Thoreau & Son (sometimes identifying itself as Thoreau & Co.) was established as a maker of some of the finest pencils in America. Henry and his father had figured out that by varying the amount of clay mixed with the plumbago, they could produce pencils in a variety of hardnesses, “graduated from 1 to 4.” They advertised “improved drawing pencils, for the nicest uses of the Drawing Master, Surveyor, Engineer, Architect, and Artists Generally.” Some were marked S for Soft,1 H for hard, and so on, with extremes in the spectrum marked S.S and H.H. They produced red pencils as well.
“Henry Thoreau has made, as he thinks,” Emerson wrote to his friend Caroline Sturgis, “great improvement in the manufacture, and believes he makes as good a pencil as the good English drawing pencil.” He enclosed a packet of four drawing pencils as evidence. She replied, “The pencils are excellent. . . . I shall certainly recommend them to all my friends who use such implements & hope to destroy great numbers of them myself.”
An advertisement in 1844 declared,2
john thoreau & co.,
concord, mass.
manufacture
a new and superior drawing pencil,
Expressly for artists and connoisseurs, possessing in an unusual degree the qualities of the pure lead, superior blackness, and firmness of point, as well as freedom of mark, and warranted not to be affected by changes of temperature . . .
J. Thoreau & Co. also manufacture the various other kinds of black-lead pencils; the Mammoth or Large Round, the Rulers or Flat, and the Common of every quality and price; also, Lead-points in any quantity, and plumbago plates for Galvanic Batteries. All orders addressed to them will be promptly attended to.
After the disastrous fire he had helped cause, however, instead of a respected member of the community Henry soon became a pariah. For most of his adult life he had been looking for the ideal wooded or lakeside land on which to find solitude and concentration, and apparently the forest fire sped up his efforts. He was denounced so much around the village that he may have sought a sylvan refuge in part to escape censure or even reprisal.3
Over the years, he had sometimes looked for a hut and sometimes for land on which to build a hut. “I only ask a clean seat,”4 he had written in his journal as early as April 1840. “I will build my lodge on the southern slope of some hill, and take there the life the gods send me.” Preoccupied as always with the way that etymology fossilizes ideas from the past, he wrote a few months later, “The rich man’s house5 is a sedes—a place to sit in—the poor man’s a tectum—a shelter. So in English we say a gentleman’s seat or residence, but a poor man’s house or roof.” Identifying with poverty, and poor himself in worldly terms, he knew that in his own modest home he would feel like landed gentry.
He had made no serious move toward a home of his own, yet often he gazed longingly at sites that struck his fancy. “I have thought,” he sighed to his journal6 in late 1841, “when walking in the woods through a certain retired dell, bordered with shrub oaks and pines, far from the village and affording a glimpse only through an opening of the mountains in the horizon, how my life might pass there, simple and true and natural, and how many things would be impossible to be done there. How many books I might not read!”
He became known in the region for his curiosity about each plot of land, as he cultivated acquaintance with all sorts of landowners. While nibbling a wild apple or discussing crop planting or the care of livestock, he interviewed farmers about the virtues and shortcomings of their own sites. In imagination he surveyed each plot, decided which few pines or oaks would need to be sacrificed to make room for a hut, or where he might plant an orchard or pasture a cow or provide chickens with scratching ground.
Each site had good points and bad. Used to imitating others, Henry considered building at Flint’s Pond, where Charles Stearns Wheeler had built the shanty in which he and Henry spent some weeks in the summer of 1837, between Harvard’s graduation and commencement. He found land he coveted near Flint’s and sought permission but was denied. The orchard side of Fair Haven Hill—often called locally the Cliffs—looked promising, a half mile southwest of Walden Pond, on the bank of the Sudbury River. In Lincoln, about two miles southeast of Concord, lay James Baker’s substantial farm on the eastern shore of Fair Haven Bay, and Henry considered renting or trying to buy land there.
He found one place he particularly liked, the broken-down old Hollowell farm,7 near Hubbard’s Bridge on the western bank of the Sudbury River, two miles from the village. The site had stayed romantically evocative in his memory from his young days on the river, when from his boat he could see no house, only a phalanx of red maples, but could hear a dog barking as if guarding something. As he considered the farm for a home, he decided he liked its seclusion, its tumbledown fences, and his awareness that there had been a long period between its last inhabitant and himself—the same reasons why it would have appealed little to others and been available for less money. A broad field between house and road kept passersby at a comfortable distance. In the gloomy orchard, the trunks of the tired old apple trees were overgrown with lichen that, Henry noticed, had been gnawed by rabbits.
Henry made a modest offer on the run-down plot of land, and the owner accepted it. Henry decided that he would leave the sad apple trees to their fate, permit the rocks to stay where they were in the garden, and not cut down the adolescent birches that had usurped the pasture. As he began to gather wood to build a wheelbarrow with which he could haul materials to and from the farm, he was certain that this secluded, dilapidated farm would repay many times his investment of attention.
But before Henry could pay over the money and receive a deed, the owner’s wife talked him out of selling. He came to Henry and offered ten dollars to let him out of the deal. Henry released the family from their commitment without any charge and went his way, as poor as ever, but a little richer in experience.
He kept looking at sites and gathering ideas. In August 1844, he and Ellery Channing boarded an excursion boat to the Kaatskill Mountains, a hundred miles or so north of New York City, planning a walking tour that would cost them very little. On the Hudson River, they stood at the prow at night, admiring how moonlight caressed the mountains. Henry was wearing his usual urchin’s garb. A fellow passenger mistook him for a deckhand, cleared his throat a couple of times, and finally asked, “Come, now, can’t you lend me8 a chaw o’ baccy?” Henry was unable to help.
Later, among the raspberry and blueberry patches of a high mountainside, he and Channing lodged briefly in the home of Ira Scribner, a sawmiller on the Kaaterskill Falls, a 260-foot two-step waterfall in beautiful countryside in upstate New York. They were only the latest pilgrims to this site famous for inspiring writers and painters. The pioneer naturalist John Bartram had visited the falls almost a century earlier with his son, later writing up a brief account, “A Journey to Ye Cat Skill Mountains with Billy,” that had become celebrated in the United States and Europe for its ode to an unspoiled Eden. Then Washington Irving set his 1819 story “Rip Van Winkle” near there, calling it “a region full of fable” although he had never actually glimpsed the area. Inspired by Irving’s story, painter Thomas Cole first visited the falls in the mid-1820s and soon began producing paintings of the region and of Kaaterskill Falls in particular.
It was a shadowed perch where morning and twilight looked the same, where Baucis and Philemon might sit at their cottage door and unwittingly entertain Zeus and Hermes. The cottage itself, lathed but not plastered, was serenaded all day by crickets. This was the kind of divine hideaway that Henry dreamed about for himself. Long after he left the Kaatskills, it lingered in his mind.
“Friends and fellow citizens,” Emerson began, “we are met to exchange congratulations on the anniversary of an event singular in the history of civilization; a day of reason; of the clear light; of that which makes us better than a flock of birds and beasts: a day, which gave the immense fortification of a fact,—of gross history,—to ethical abstractions. . . . The institution of slavery seems to its opponent to have but one side, and he feels that none but a stupid or a malignant person can hesitate on a view of the facts.”
On the first day of August 1844, just before the Kaatskills excursion with Channing, Henry was witnessing Emerson’s first public commitment to the abolitionist cause, on the tenth anniversary of the historic end of slavery in the British Empire’s dominions in the Caribbean. The anniversary of this act was being celebrated in many parts of the United States, to add fuel to the abolitionist fire by demonstrating just how far America was behind its rejected mother country. The push toward abolition wasn’t entirely moral; the revolution in industry and improvements in trade gradually made alternatives to slavery more palatable to businessmen. The empire’s9 traffic in slaves had been abolished in 1808, although illegal traffic in human beings continued. Not for a quarter century was slavery itself actually ended throughout the empire. Under this sweeping and controversial act, which went into effect on the first of August 1834, slaves were turned into indentured apprentices, a program that was dissolved after four years. Even then exceptions were made for the East India Company’s territories and a few other places, until as late as 1843, the year before Emerson’s speech. Slaveholders were offered millions of pounds in compensation for their financial loss. “The sugar they raised was excellent,” Emerson declared. “Nobody tasted blood in it.”
For a month, the abolitionist weekly The Liberator had been promoting the anniversary celebration. This periodical was the pulpit of the legendary abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, the founder of both10 the New England Anti-Slavery Society in Boston and the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia. Ever since its debut issue, on the first day of 1831, it had been the voice of a crusade. “I will be as harsh as truth,” Garrison proclaimed, “and as uncompromising as justice.” Arguing that slavery was a damned sin in the eyes of God, Garrison refused to actively enter politics because he saw it as the field of compromise. “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and i will be heard.”
Garrison’s life encapsulated the history of abolition. Pro-slavery factions fought him furiously. The summer after Garrison founded The Liberator, a slave named Nat Turner led a violent rebellion in Virginia, freeing slaves and killing their white masters. Garrison was one of the many abolitionists blamed for inciting the rebellion. The Georgia state senate offered a $5,000 reward for anyone arresting and successfully prosecuting under Georgia law “the editor or publisher of a certain paper called the Liberator,” and similar bounties were placed on other abolitionists. Slavery had been illegal in Massachusetts since 1783, but in Boston in 1835 a nine-foot-high double gallows was built before Garrison’s house to warn him and his colleagues. In Charleston he was burned in effigy.11
The Concord Freeman advertised the August 1844 gathering as “a collation in the woods.”12 To defray the costs of promoting the event and bringing in speakers, Henry’s neighbors, visiting abolitionists, and others paid a quarter apiece to attend.13 The owner of Sleepy Hollow, a quiet glade whose oaks and chestnut trees often overheard public gatherings in warm weather, had granted permission for this particular assembly. Then, probably in response to the disapproval emanating from many local churches and other institutions—some of which claimed to stand outside politics, and some of which simply refused to oppose slavery, which after all was common in the Bible—he withdrew permission, leaving the organization with no venue. Shy Nathaniel Hawthorne stepped up to offer the lawn and avenue of his parsonage by the river. But the first of August pummeled the celebration with rain and wind, sending the crowd to the courthouse vestibule.
Over the last few years, Henry had joined with his family in becoming ever more passionate about the sin and blight of slavery. In May, his mother and both sisters had journeyed to Boston14 to lend their voices to the New England Anti-Slavery Society convention. They had even scandalously supported a resolution to “agitate for a dissolution of the Union.” At an abolitionist gathering the following month, Cynthia had met Frederick Douglass, a former slave and one of the most powerful writers and orators on behalf of abolition. It may have been she who arranged for Douglass to speak at the upcoming Concord gathering on the first of August. Scheduled speakers included Douglass, Samuel J. May, and Emerson, but apparently Douglass did not show up.
On that rainy day Henry took it upon himself to get last-minute permission for Emerson to speak in the courthouse, and once he had done so, he scurried from house to house in the wet to alert his neighbors about his mentor’s speech on this important topic. The usual public notice was the loud town bell in the steeple of the First Parish Church. For this radical gathering, however, the sexton refused to ring the bell, denouncing these shenanigans as “irresponsible.” Nor were the Concord selectmen willing to exercise their option to order him to do so. Various abolitionists present were asked to go and ring the bell, but they couldn’t muster the courage. Finally Henry himself ran to the steeple,15 grasped the rope firmly in his calloused hands, and kept the bell ringing until its peals drew a crowd.
The audience was mesmerized by Emerson’s eloquence and also by his physical presence—the handsome face and sculpted lips, the famous dreaming eyes. He stood tall and slender, smiling benevolently on the crowd and the world. This was not Emerson in his abstract or contemplative style. Those who expected an intellectual disquisition on justice or freedom were surprised to find themselves deeply moved by a sermon on brotherhood. One observer, twenty-year-old George William Curtis—another16 former Brook Farmer who had settled in Concord—thought that Emerson’s recent careful reading of the history of abolition, and particularly of the Caribbean triumphs, had lit a fire under him. Emerson spoke passionately for almost two hours, and by the end he held his audience so completely in his palm that there was a staring, respectful hush when he stopped. Finally applause ignited here and there, only to die out as inappropriate to the somber topic.
As the abolitionist movement gained force in the United States, and particularly in Concord, Emerson had grown more and more uncomfortable about his position of public silence on the topic. Like Henry, Emerson was nudged and inspired by the women around him. Lidian had long encouraged her husband to use his growing fame as an essayist and lecturer to address what she felt was the great moral issue of their time. But Emerson had been loath to join the fray. He hesitated in part because, despite Transcendentalism’s insistence upon an individual’s ability17 to triumph over circumstance, he considered Negroes distinctly inferior to himself and others of European ancestry. “I think it cannot be maintained18 by any candid person,” he complained to his journal in 1836, “that the African race have ever occupied or do promise to ever occupy any very high place in the human family. Their present condition is the strongest proof that they cannot. The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race all the other races have quailed and done obeisance.”
Gradually his opinion of Africans was improving, but he also disliked climbing aboard a bandwagon and was wary of the heady emotions stirred by the evangelical style of reformist speakers. In 1840 he had described the Convention of Friends of Universal Reform in Boston in terms that dramatized his distaste for movements and crowds: “Madmen, madwomen, men with beards,19 Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day-Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and Philosophers.”
Yet he had long believed that slavery was an abomination, as he declared on the first of August. “There is no end to the tragic anecdotes in the municipal records of the colonies,” he said simply, and provided examples that had been proven to Parliament—hundreds of slaves at a time thrown overboard to reduce a ship’s weight while fleeing from a man-of-war, a boy forced to strip and flog his own mother for a minor offense. “Their case was left out of the mind and out of the heart of their brothers,” he said of the slaves.
The prizes of society, the trumpet of fame, the privileges of learning, of culture, of religion, the decencies and joys of marriage, honor, obedience, personal authority, and a perpetual melioration into a finer civility, these were for all, but not for them. . . . It became plain to all men, the more this business was looked into, that the crimes and cruelties of the slave-traders and slave-owners could not be overstated. The more it was searched, the more shocking anecdotes came up—things not to be spoken.
It became clear to those who had braved the rain for this cause that Emerson had abandoned his pose of philosophical distance and had rolled up his sleeves and joined the fight.
Over the decades, there had been many inhabitants of Concord for whom slavery was not an abstract concept, and a number of those took refuge near Walden Pond.20 In the last half of the eighteenth century, many former slaves and free black families eked out a scant living as squatters near the little-traveled road through the woods around the pond. Brister Freeman, who had been a slave of Squire Cummings, had planted the apple trees on Brister’s Hill that Henry still enjoyed. Henry had seen his gravestone in the Lincoln cemetery—identified as “Sippio Brister, a man of color”—near those of grenadiers who died during the British retreat from Concord.
Squire Cummings left the country, and in doing so abandoned not only Brister but his sister Zilpah. Unlike many other women in her position, Zilpah did not seek a position as a meagerly paid servant, the common situation of freed slaves, which sometimes resulted in their laboring in the same position in the same household as before, with only nominal wages. Instead, Zilpah chose the precarious and dangerous path of independence. She did what Henry himself imagined doing—she built or rented a small hut in the woods near Walden and there contrived to survive on her own wits.
Naturally Zilpah had learned spinning while a slave. Living near Walden, she wove flax and wool with raw cotton that had been shipped from the West Indies. Wealthier Concord families kept a spinning room, in which they stored several cradles so that laboring former slaves could tend their own sleeping infants in their rags while spinning finer coverings for employers. Zilpah was known for her loud singing voice. Naturally, a woman living alone in the woods acquired the reputation of being a witch, and a local man claimed that he had once overheard her chanting over a boiling kettle, “Ye are all bones, bones!” During the War of 1812, one day while Zilpah was away, British soldiers on patrol torched her hut. Henry himself had seen only her hut’s bricks grown over with weeds, but her spirit spoke to his own.
In 1844 the prominent factory owner David Loring, who had bought the Heywood farm west of town, beyond the Concord Academy and past the railroad station, began selling building lots. Although not a mile from the bustling village, and alongside the tracks of the new Fitchburg and Boston railroad, the neighborhood seemed so distant and quiet it was nicknamed Texas. The actual Republic of Texas was often in the news, with discussion of annexation by the United States bandied about among Whigs and Democrats.
Cynthia Thoreau was determined that the family should build their own home. Despite her husband’s doubts, she examined Loring’s land, chose a lot, and personally measured out the site for the house. Although the area was a bit treeless for Henry’s taste, Cynthia selected an otherwise appealing spot21 not far from the Concord River, with a pleasant view toward the southwest. In September they purchased the land. To finance construction, John Thoreau borrowed five hundred dollars from the Concord businessman Augustus Tuttle and signed a mortgage on the property.22 The whole family was present for the mortgage signing—John and Cynthia, Sophia and Helen, and Henry. Cynthia worked with a carpenter to loosely develop a blueprint for the house, although both demonstrated their ignorance by forgetting at first to include stairs.
Eager as usual to learn new skills, Henry was soon digging the basement for the house and lining it with stones. Together, he and his father built a square ordinary-looking home with a front door off center. Sam Staples, the local constable, conducted an auction of huts left behind by the Irish laborers on the Fitchburg railroad, and Henry and his father bought a couple. With the wood they built a shed near the house, which could serve as headquarters for their pencil business. Although he had always been considered clever with tools, this was Henry’s first extensive experience in constructing a house.
Even as he was building for the future, some of his neighbors were abandoning their homes. Nearby Pittsfield housed the headquarters of the evangelist William Miller, who had been claiming for months that the twenty-second of October would be the end of the world, with the return of a triumphant Christ. All around Henry, some country people and townsfolk joined the Millerites—abandoning crops and livestock, closing shops, waiting for the Second Coming. Henry witnessed these events with fascination. Like the thriving utopian communities around Concord, this vast revival demonstrated a yearning latent in the breasts of his neighbors—a restless desire to transcend the limitations of society and mortality.
One day in early October 1844, Emerson went for a ramble alone in the colorful autumn fields, naturally wending his way toward Walden Pond. Along the northeast shore, on a little rise above the pond’s largest cove, he encountered a couple of men who were walking around appraising the land. It was an area Emerson was fond of, where he had strolled many times over the years—only a mile and a half from Bush and two miles from his old home, now inhabited by Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne. Pitch pines and hickories covered the slight rise, and he could see the pond down a narrow path between their trunks, a hundred feet away. The wooded far shore was half a mile distant.
Explaining that they were there to appraise and sell a field, the men invited Emerson’s bid. He made an offer. Later he went home to tell Lidian that he had paid $8.10 per acre for eleven acres. The next day, he brought family along to explore his new property. The site was not isolated. Less than half a mile in any direction, a walker would encounter shanties owned by free Negroes and Irish laborers. Bordering the land was a three- or four-acre pine grove belonging to Hartwell Bigelow, owner of a tavern on Main Street. Emerson’s companions pointed out that if Bigelow logged his woods, it would make Emerson’s new land far less pleasant. So Emerson bought Bigelow’s parcel as well, but at a considerably higher price—$125. To his brother he wrote that he was “landlord & waterlord of 14 acres,23 more or less, on the shore of Walden, & can raise my own blackberries.”
No one knew Walden Pond better than Henry. He was familiar with every cove and hill and woodchuck burrow, the nest of every squirrel and the hunting ground of each red-tailed hawk. He knew this shore’s life-everlasting and johnswort, its sumac and scrub pine, high blackberry vines and low creeping strawberries. After Emerson’s purchase of the land, however, Henry must have looked at this spot with a different eye. The hut of his dreams had been a castle in the air, glimpsed like a mirage at Flint’s Pond and Kaaterskill Falls and the Hollowell farm, but Henry had made little real effort to make the dream a reality. Emerson’s purchase put a foundation under it.
Of Emerson’s scattered acolytes Henry was the great man’s favorite. He was used to asking favors of him and Emerson was used to granting them—and Henry had returned in kind, from carrying coal and tending children to plowing gardens and occasionally helping edit The Dial. He went to Emerson and asked if he might have permission to build a small hut on the new property. Naturally Emerson, who had listened to Henry’s dreams of the ideal monk’s cell for seven years, said yes. Because of the Irish laborers and the former slaves, as well as the indigent and shiftless who could be found in its quiet coves and banks, Walden Pond was not considered a place where a gentlemanly white man might live. But Henry did not think of himself as a gentleman.
“I see nothing for you in this earth24 but that field which I once christened ‘Briars,’ ” Ellery Channing wrote to Henry from a trip in early March 1845; “go out upon that, build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no alternative, no other hope for you.”
Henry must have agreed. Shortly after he received Channing’s letter, amid occasional snow flurries but mostly sunny days, he started clearing enough of Emerson’s land at Walden Pond to make room for a cabin. The ice was beginning to melt, creating a few open spaces, and the pond’s surface looked darker than it had in months, because the thin ice had water under it. An early meadowlark whistled see-yoo, see-yee-hee-heer.
Just as he had borrowed the land, Henry began construction by borrowing an ax.25 It was his rule to return a tool in better condition than he received it, if possible, so he was not averse to borrowing. The Thoreau family must have owned felling axes for hewing trees. To square the timbers to frame a cabin, however, Henry needed a large broad ax, the kind that was being used by the Irish workers for squaring railroad ties. Its heavy head lent force when the ax was swung and its broad blade had a straight side for edging and a beveled side for wedging the blade into a log. He would have first marked the split line with a lighter ax and stood upon the log to swing the ax along the line, then rolled the log and repeated the procedure to get a full square timber. The same kind of ax could be used to cut flooring planks. The daily lumber work required strength and expertise, but Henry had a fair quantity of both, and his experience helping build the new Thoreau house came in handy. He labored for hours in the warm sun and at midday sat among the aromatic chips to eat his bread-and-butter lunch with hands redolent of pine resin. Apparently he had to return the broad ax before he was finished, because he did much of the later work with his narrow felling ax, cutting down the arrowy pines and hewing the timber into rafters and studs for the house.
He was in no hurry. On occasion someone who heard his ax might stop by to chat. It took him to the middle of April to finish the preparations, to cut enough boards and lay a foundation. The soil here was soft and pliable and he needed only a couple of hours to dig a cellar six feet square, during which process he unearthed a woodchuck burrow. His cellar had devoured the home of a neighbor, like a rich man’s estate.
Once the Fitchburg railroad was completed through Concord, its builders moved on, following the new industry’s insatiable appetite for trees and cheap labor. For a few dollars, the workers sold their slapped-together huts to locals who could use the lumber. The shanties bought by Henry’s father26 now helped form the pencil business office next to their Texas Street house. Most builders reused whatever materials they could find, and Henry planned to do the same. During his rambles through woods and fields, consulting with landowners, speculating about possible sites, he had quietly assayed several huts.
An Irish railroad worker named James Collins owned a shanty that was better than most, and he was willing to sell. It was small, with a steep cottage roof and a single high window above the five-foot-high mound of dirt that covered the house’s walls on three sides as if it had grown out of the earth like a dwarf’s cottage in a fable. The roof was brittle and warped from baking in the sun, but its boards seemed stronger than the others.
Collins was away when Henry called to look over the shanty from within. A small flock of hens, alarmed by Henry’s approach, squeezed under the door—there was no sill—and hid inside. Henry knocked and Mrs. Collins came to the door and invited him in. The single dirt-floored room was gloomy and dank, with a bare open hole for a cellar. The hut seemed to Henry like a good place to contract the ague. When his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could see a chair, a stove, a bed, an incongruous duo of gilt-framed looking glass and silk parasol—perhaps from better times in the old country—and a quiet baby. A shiny new coffee mill, with its long-handled grinder, was nailed to an oak sapling. Coffee had gained in popularity in the United States ever since the high tax on teas had helped fuel the Revolution.
One of the window’s two panes was missing. The cat broke it, Mrs. Collins explained. She lit a lamp and held it up to show off the ceiling and walls. “Good boards overhead,”27 she said. “Good boards all around—and a good window.”
James Collins returned and he and Henry settled on a price—$4.25 for the whole building. The family would be out by six the next morning. After Henry paid over the money, Collins warned him to arrive early and to expect trouble from lying scoundrels who might claim that Collins owed them rent or fuel costs.
Early in the morning Henry passed the Collins family on the move, complete with hens and looking glass and coffee mill. Driving a small cart, Henry went on to the hut. He began by drawing out the spikes, nails, and staples, putting aside those that were reusable. Gradually the pile of lumber in the cart grew. Then Henry varied his labor by driving the load of bent and splintery boards to the cabin site, where he spread them on the ground to bleach in the sun.
When he returned to the shanty, a small Irish boy told him that one of the Collinses’ neighbors, an Irishman man named Seeley, had stolen the nails and staples that Henry saved. Although machined at this time instead of hand-made28 as they had been for centuries, nails were nonetheless valuable. Seeley himself wandered back to stand around watching Henry. There wasn’t much work to be had, he said blithely. Apparently Henry didn’t confront Seeley about his thievery.
At dawn one morning in early May,29 Henry arrived at the Hosmer farm. Edmund Hosmer was one of Henry’s closer friends30 among the Concord farmers, a man he respected for his intelligence and level head. Awaiting Henry’s arrival were Hosmer himself and his three older sons—Andrew, Edmund, and John. Hosmer’s sons may have assisted in part because Henry specifically stated that he needed the strength of the young. More help came from young George William Curtis,31 who worked for the Hosmers. He found the cabin raising a pleasant diversion, although the previous autumn he had severely cut the joint of his right thumb when his hat fell off and in grabbing for it he swiped his thumb against the blade of a scythe.
Hosmer swung an ax up on his shoulder. With axes and other tools in hand, the group set off down the turnpike to Emerson’s house and across fields and woods along the Walden Road to the pond. The Hosmer family knew and loved Henry. Aware that stormy weather might keep Edmund indoors, Henry would choose such days to drop by the farm. He and Hosmer discussed Scandinavian mythology until the listening children considered themselves experts in it. Sometimes they argued about such topics until the clock surprised them by chiming midnight, and now and then Henry went home and thought about the discussion and came back next day with a new argument.
The smaller children especially enjoyed Henry’s appearance on their doorstep in his gray homespun, although their father felt that youngsters should mostly be seen and not heard, and Henry himself did not permit too great familiarity. He would read the Canterbury Tales to the Hosmer children, declaiming Chaucer’s foreign enunciation, as in his portrait of the Squire: “ ‘He koude songes make and wel endite, / Juste and eek daunce, and weel purtreye and write.’ You can sometimes,” Henry added in an aside to the children, “catch the sense better by listening than by reading.” He also told them fanciful stories about his encounters in the woods with various wild animals, claiming that he knew a partridge neighbor that brought its brood to meet him. “The best part of an animal32 is its anima—its soul,” he explained, “—but the scientists never get any further than its shell.”
With the Hosmers, Henry arrived at Emerson’s land beside the pond. Other friends joined them, including Bronson Alcott, brothers George and Burrill Curtis,33 and possibly Emerson himself. By nightfall Henry’s house was framed and standing by the pond—fresh-looking white hewn studs, the straight lines of rafters and window like a sketch of a house, and the roof raised high and firm.