Postscript

William Brewster’s personal diaries, field journals, letters, books, and an extensive collection of his own photo albums are located in the Ernst Mayr Library at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the former Museum of Comparative Zoology.

In 1998, the Brewster and Gilbert glass plate negatives were removed from the attic in Lincoln and placed in a climate-controlled art storage facility at the Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Visual Art Center, in Canton, Massachusetts.

In 2002, George Alexander, the last relative (by marriage) of Robert Gilbert, died at home at the age of 101.

October Farm is still privately owned, but the lands are being restored, and many of Brewster’s artifacts, including his old Rush-ton canoe, have been preserved.

In the mid-1990s, after Sanfred Bensen’s death, Colburn Bensen put the property up for sale. After much negotiation and many offers and counteroffers, the town of Concord purchased most of the riverfront land for conservation. The old house, which was determined to be an early eighteenth-century structure with a gunstock stud wall, was carefully dismantled piece by piece and now languishes in storage in two truck containers, waiting to be reborn.

In the autumn of 2001, carrying my old camera, I went down to the former house site. The tangle of bittersweet, arborvitae, maples, and blackberries that once threatened to overwhelm the homestead had been cleared away, along with the house, and the grounds had been regraded and planted to grass. All that was left to photograph in place of Sanfred Bensen and his dog was the wind and the empty sky.