Meadow River
Some of the boarders in the Thoreau house were strangers who needed temporary residence, and occasionally Mrs. Thoreau even took in a transient who came to the door with a reference from a mutual acquaintance. Most, however, were relatives or friends who lived there for years. The majority were women. Cynthia Thoreau’s maiden sister, Louisa Dunbar, had moved in after the death of their mother in 1830.1 Two maiden aunts from the Thoreau side, Maria and the almost deaf but still talkative Jane, boarded there at times. Other resident boarders included Mrs. Prudence Ward, widow of a Revolutionary War soldier, and her daughter Prudence, who were friends of Aunt Maria. The younger Prudence was known for her love of plants; she identified wild ones, sowed and raised domesticated ones, and painted accomplished portraits of them.
Aunt Louisa spent much of her time rushing from one meeting to another,2 to battle what she saw as the unnecessary pain that people inflict on each other. Both of Henry’s parents were known as “comeouters”3 on various issues. Ever since abolitionists had boarded with the Thoreaus4 in the mid-1830s the entire family had opposed slavery. The past few years had seen an international growth of abolitionist support by strong women such as Louisa and Cynthia, who organized rallies and kept up an onslaught of petitions to legislators. Mrs. Ward and Prudence had been reading the abolitionist organ the Liberator for two and a half years prior to their arrival in Concord in 1833.
Henry regularly saw one of the venerable, and considerably less progressive, spirits of Concord’s past strolling down Monument Street in black stockings and broad-brimmed hat, his ancient black cloak swirling—the Reverend Ezra Ripley.5 The balding and bespectacled minister liked antique fashions in ideas and clothing. He remained loyal to the Puritan notion of a hands-on deity who received thanks for every time an overturned carriage did not kill anyone but never received blame for toppling the carriage. He also remained loyal to the most recent style in coats he had admired—from the Revolutionary War when he was in his mid-twenties. In front the lapels couldn’t meet across his considerable belly, so Ripley wore an heirloom waistcoat that swathed his trunk from neck to thigh.
Ripley was Emerson’s step-grandfather. In his mid-eighties in 1837, Ripley had been minister of the First Parish Church almost sixty years, since 1778, two years after graduating from Harvard, where he had been nicknamed Holy Ripley. When General Washington commandeered Harvard’s dormitories6 to house troops during the Revolution, young Ripley invited his alma mater to continue classes down the road in the Concord Meeting House. Two years after returning to town and boarding with Phebe Bliss Emerson—the widow of his predecessor and Emerson’s paternal grandmother—he had married her. In 1812 he performed the marriage service for John Thoreau7 and Cynthia Dunbar, and five years later he christened Henry. Over the decades he had provided ready counsel and stern admonition to Concordians, while always finding time to chat gallantly with the ladies, and he was renowned for his lively stories around the fire.
His church was one of the town landmarks. Above its fluted white columns, above the dark faces of its faithful clock, above its open bell tower and restless weathervane, a spire towered over the Common. Inside the bare, uncarpeted meetinghouse, Ripley climbed a long flight of stairs8 to his high pulpit, which looked down on the four deacons’ seats and the ranks of square, un-cushioned pews with their old-fashioned high wooden backs. There was little leg room between pews, so when the congregation rose for a prayer they raised the hinged seats as well, and Ripley’s “amen” signaled a gunshot volley of seats slamming down as people sat. Like most regions of the country, Concord had its unique pronunciations; some veterans of the Revolution, for example, still called bayonets “bagnets.” When the congregation sang Isaac Watts’s joyful late-seventeenth-century hymn “Let Every Creature Join,” Ripley’s antique diction rang out from the sounding boards on three sides of the church: “Let every critter jine. . .”9
From his vantage point, Ripley could look down upon the history of Concord, with several Revolutionary veterans gazing back at him. The now wrinkled and bent Amos Barrett,10 who had been a spry corporal in Captain David Brown’s Concord Minute Man Company, described seeing the redcoats’ first volley of shot splash into the water to his right as he approached along the river road, with his musket freshly loaded and ready to fire, while in the village black smoke hovered above carriages set afire by the plundering soldiers.
Over time, Ripley came to think of himself as God’s regent in Concord. Little acquainted with other literature and resistant to ideas beyond his ken—parishioners knew they could visit him at any time, because he was seldom caught reading—he concentrated on an ancient Hebrew view of the world. He was famous for his prayers to coax rain and repel maladies. When Emerson was a child, Ripley drove him about the parish in a carriage, pointing out the homes of people who had broken off from his church and emphasizing that divine misfortune had dogged each thereafter. Once, during a drought, when a junior colleague offered to lead the congregation in prayer, Ripley said slyly, “This is no time for you young Cambridge men. The affair, sir, is getting serious. I shall pray myself.”
Although they passed each other on the streets, Reverend Ripley seldom saw young Henry Thoreau in a pew. He had a provocative habit of walking in the woods on Sunday morning, cheerfully enjoying God’s creation instead of hearing His word.
Musketaquid,11 the Massachusett Indians had called the river, for the grassy fields that surrounded it. It meant “meadow river” or “grass-ground river,” adapting the Algonquian word for grass, muskeht. European settlers optimistically renamed it the Concord, but Henry preferred the original name. Its current was so slow that newcomers had trouble deciphering its direction of flow, and a fisherman piloting a skiff might find it as easy to row against the current as with it. In summer, yellow water lilies12 stood on their unobtrusive stalks, just above the surface, surrounded by leathery flat leaves on which frogs perched, and blue pickerelweed stood up from leaves shaped like arrowheads.
Founded in 1635, Concord was the first inland English settlement in the New World. Two centuries later, with the population nearing two thousand, mail arrived and departed sixteen times a week.13 The Mill Dam was the center, crossing over Mill Brook, which ran through the village between Walden Road and the Cambridge Turnpike. The Mill Dam had anchored Concord since the Reverend Peter Bulkeley had built a gristmill on the site in the seventeenth century. The bustling Anderson Market was there, along with an array of businesses essential for a modern society—milliner, tinsmith, barber, currier, tanner. During Henry’s life great changes had taken place in this part of Concord, thanks to the formation in 1826 of the Mill Dam Company, which had torn down older buildings, drained the venerable mill pond, divided up land and sold lots, and set itself up as landlord of new buildings. While Henry was at Harvard, the Company headed the building of a temple to the village’s mercantile ambitions, the Concord Bank and Middlesex Mutual Fire Insurance Company,14 whose four Doric columns now lent gravitas to Main Street.
Loafers sprawled around the town pump, from which boys measured local distances; it was half a mile, for example, to Thayer’s swimming hole.15 Able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five were required to muster for militia inspection16 in May each year, and usually they did so on the Common. Dressed in old clothes and with only token training, most made poor soldiers and were chaffed by critical boys. Artillery and infantry kept up a good-natured competition, with rival companies importing bands from Boston. People still talked about legendary bugler Ned Kendall, who led a marching band in a quickstep three-quarter-time version of a polonaise. Even a small muster was accompanied by fife and drum, their volume rising and falling17 as the militiamen marched behind a barn and out again. Boys played soldier.18 Those pretending to be marauding Indians wore long white shirts adorned with strips of red flannel and carried makeshift wooden spears with which to gig settlers.
Concord had been the site of the first Provincial Congress and in 1792 served as the capital for some months. Ever since the early 1690s, it had been a shire town, a seat of county government. Its courthouse, which dominated the Common, saw trials from across Middlesex County, whose population in 1837 was approaching one hundred thousand. Within the courthouse lurked relics of Concord’s past. In the basement stood an old array of stocks before which offenders had sat, knelt, or stood with head and arms immobilized between wooden bars, exposed to weather and humiliation, with passersby allowed to throw rotten eggs, offal, even manure. The basement housed a gallows used to hang the only man executed in Concord. Out front stood an elm that tradition claimed had been planted on the nineteenth of April19 1776, the first anniversary of the Concord battle. From 1790 to 1820, three years after Henry’s birth, the tree served as the town’s whipping post. An iron staple anchored eight feet above the ground had secured the hands of felons receiving lashes, but in the last seventeen years scaly gray bark had grown over it. The courthouse faced across Monument Square toward the red-brick Masonic Hall. Down the block, the Middlesex Hotel stood across the Common from the tall brick chimneys of Wright’s Tavern, where Minutemen had gathered in 1775 after learning that British troops were approaching. Behind the hotel rose the yellow spire of the Unitarian Meeting House.
Main Street in Concord was a buzz of commerce, as manufacturing began to catch up with agriculture in economic importance. Since his move to Concord two decades earlier, the businessman David Loring had manufactured first lead pipes and then wooden pails,20 evolving into a major employer and an influential citizen. The cotton mill employed dozens of locals. Most were women, but their numbers didn’t compare with the more than seven thousand women who worked in the nearby Lowell textile mills, whose thirteen-hour days had been revealed recently in a newspaper exposé.
A parade of flatbed wagons convoyed dry goods from Boston to New Hampshire and Vermont, stopping overnight at Concord’s rowdy taverns. So many public and private coaches came through town that tavern barns soon filled with horses.21 As long lines of coaches stretched down the streets near taverns, their animals spent the night hitched to the back of the conveyance they had pulled into town. Drink was rampant. Temperance leaders made no more headway22 in Concord than elsewhere in the nation. The prominent Concordian Nathan Brooks23 admitted that, after he delivered a lecture (requested by the selectmen) on temperance, he and other town leaders strolled to a tavern for a drink. It wasn’t unusual to find prominent, highly regarded farmers staggering down a Concord street or even lying drunk beside it.
Each drinking spot drew its own clientele. The three-story Middlesex Hotel, with its portico under which mail and passenger coaches lined up, catered to locals and stage travelers,24 leaving for rowdy teamsters the coarse fare at Hartwell Bigelow’s tavern on Main Street above the burial ground. Patrons gathered around a stove large enough to accommodate massive logs, from whose red coals protruded iron loggerheads to use in heating flip.25 A decoction of fermented roots, hops, and spruce, flip was mixed in a pewter mug, filled two-thirds full of weak local beer, sweetened with molasses, laced with a gill of rum, and heated by plunging a red-hot loggerhead into it—causing it to seethe like a witch’s brew and acquire a scorched bitter taste. At night a walker on the street could hear the clatter of a toddy stick frothing sugar and rum inside the bar.
Periodically the village routine was enlivened by a quack medicine salesman in his long schooner of a wagon that rattled with heavy glass bottles of tinctures and elixirs—nostrums for gout, quinsy, tissick, and dropsy; miraculous water from the Dead Sea and herbs of mythological potency; tonics to banish languor and philters to dissolve romantic qualms. There were some national brands of alleged medicaments, such as Samuel Lee’s Bilious Pills, whose patent dated to 1796, but many were concocted in the back of a wagon. Usually the hucksters had moved on to Lincoln before disillusionment arrived in Concord.