Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  Cynthia also remembered Cold Friday: January 19, 1810, when “the people in the kitchen . . . drew up close to the fire, but the dishes which the Hardy girl was washing froze as fast as she washed them, close to the fire. They managed to keep warm in the parlor by their great fires.”25 Jack Garrison, one of the laborers keeping warm that night in Cynthia’s kitchen, was new in town, an escaped slave from New Jersey. Soon he would marry and establish his own farm nearby; he and Henry Thoreau would often work together. John Thoreau was not by Cynthia’s fire that night, for his store was still disintegrating and he still had ahead of him his adventure selling to the Indians in Bangor. But by 1811, John was back in Concord, and the romance quickened through the harvest and into the winter months. By February 1812, Cynthia was pregnant with Helen. Three months later, on May 11, Rev. Ezra Ripley married Cynthia Dunbar and John Thoreau at the First Parish Church. By the time Helen Louisa Thoreau was born on October 22, her parents were living in the Virginia Road farmhouse and carrying on the farm, while John clerked at Josiah Davis’s store in town. The years ahead were crowded with uncertainties, but from then on, John and Cynthia Thoreau faced them together.

  The Early Years of John and Cynthia Thoreau

  John Thoreau would be remembered as a quiet man, unambitious and too decent to press the hard bargains needed for success in the cash-poor early republic. But time and again, he met defeat by taking a forward leap, such as opening his own store, and when it failed, trying again in Maine. Now, back in Concord, he was again looking to the future. For her part, Cynthia had grown into a shrewd observer of humanity. Horace Hosmer, who knew them both, always insisted Cynthia was “a most exacting woman, who never would accept a second rate article of any kind if a better was obtainable, but that John Thoreau satisfied her.” There was a certain quality to John: Hosmer said he was “French from the shrug of his shoulders to his snuff box. . . . healthy, fine boned, fine trained, well bred, a gentleman by instinct, so clean hearted and clean tongued that his wife recognized his superiority.” And she, being Cynthia, “was not afraid to speak her mind.”26 For if few noticed John, everyone noticed the indomitable Cynthia, who stood a head taller than her husband and was one of the most famous talkers of the day, full of wit and anecdote spiced with sarcasm, and blessed with that brisk efficiency New Englanders called “faculty.”

  If the refined John and fearless Cynthia had looked forward to some quiet years on the farm, events proved otherwise. Five weeks after their wedding, on June 18, 1812, the United States declared war on Great Britain in retaliation for the British depredations on American trade strangling American commerce. The war dragged on for two and a half years, choking off imports and creating chaos along the coastline; British ships raided American ports at will, climaxing with the burning of the White House and the attack on Baltimore memorialized in “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Up north, the Thoreau relatives lived through days of terror as the British reclaimed Maine, invading Bangor in the fall of 1814 and setting all the ships in the harbor ablaze—in one stroke reducing Bangor’s transportation system and economic base to ashes. Aunt Nancy, pregnant with their first son, survived the attack only to die with infant Caleb in childbirth. The British also harassed ships in Massachusetts Bay, but thanks to the guns of Fort Independence, Boston stayed secure. Just as Jean had done before him, John Thoreau took a turn as commissar at the fort, supplying groceries to the soldiers.27

  Back on the Virginia Road farm, Helen was only five months old when the bottom fell out from under them: on March 20, 1813, Captain Jonas Minott died in the night, and Cynthia’s mother Mary awoke to find herself widowed a second time. As before, this spelled calamity for mother and children. By English common law and American legal practice, women could not inherit personal property, so instead of passing to his widow, all of Captain Minott’s effects were auctioned off less than a month after his death, stripping the house virtually bare. Mary managed to buy back a bedspread and some green-edged china. As for real estate—the farm, woodlot, house and outbuildings—the custom of “widow’s thirds” gave sixty-five-year-old Mary the right to use one-third of her deceased husband’s property until she died or remarried. Surviving legal documents spell out in excruciating detail exactly what that meant: Mary and her family were allowed to use the east end of the house, including the front room and chamber and the garret above; they could go in and out of one-half the grand front entry and all the back door; they could use the oven, the well, the backyard, half the wood, and the upstairs bedroom facing the sunrise, the room where her grandson Henry would be born.28

  Mary walked away from it all. She mortgaged her right to the property for $129 to Joe Merriam of the musical whistle and moved, with her bachelor son Charles and her unmarried daughter Louisa, into the “Red House” on Lexington Road, rented from the storekeeper Josiah Davis, her son-in-law’s employer. Years later, Emerson’s apple orchard would stand across the street. Eventually Mary repaid the mortgage, allowing Cynthia and John to return to her third of the farmhouse. Where had they gone in the meantime? Henry had the impression they decamped to Boston, from where John wrote a letter to his Bangor relatives sometime in 1815, with baby John (born July 5, 1814) “on his knee.” Meanwhile, Mary had to plead for charity to the Reverend Ripley. In a letter on her behalf, the minister pointed out that she had been “peculiarly unfortunate” in the settlement of her late husband’s estate and in her straitened circumstances, “feeling the weight of cares, of years and of widowhood to be very heavy, after having seen better days, she is induced by the advice of friends, as well as her own exigencies, to apply for aid to the benevolence and charity of the Masonic Fraternity.”29 The Masons passed the hat, and with their help Mary lived on just long enough to impress her grandson Henry, who collected her stories in his Journal. When she died in 1830, Aunt Louisa and Uncle Charles would move in with John and Cynthia.

  But not to their home on the farm. Commerce had brightened once the war was over, but still, life on Virginia Road required John to split his time between working the farm and tending store in town—and with two young children, the widows’ third was growing cramped. Had the crops been good, perhaps they might have made a go of it. But everything they planted in the spring of 1816 was doomed. By May the farmers complained of a “backward” spring, with daily temperatures below freezing; early in June, an Arctic cold front froze the ground solid from Ohio, across New England, and as far south as New Jersey, with snow across the northern tier. The apple crop was destroyed, and the corn, potato, and vegetable crops were devastated. As one historian has written, “No one was ready. People donned winter clothes and watched the blackened fields and gardens or gathered in dismay around fires.”30 Whatever survived or was replanted was hit again by hard frosts in July and August; on September 28, a hard killing frost destroyed what was left. After that, the weather turned mild, mocking the blackened and ruined fields. With nothing left to feed the livestock, hogs and cattle were slaughtered, glutting the markets and driving down prices that rebounded to record levels as winter approached. New England was still a relatively local economy, and crop failures meant starvation.

  The strange weather was worldwide: 1816 was the notorious “Year without a Summer,” a global climate collapse unaccountable then, but explained today by the 1815 eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora, the largest volcanic event in over 1,300 years. The following spring, a strange high fog dimmed the sunlight, reddening sunsets and making sunspots visible to the naked eye—a weird spectacle that Concord’s newspaper said was “the burthen of almost every conversation.” Average global temperatures dropped by nearly 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit, a seemingly trivial amount, but enough to make the difference between prosperous harvests and famine from Europe to North America to China. An estimated 200,000 New Englanders had to sell or abandon their farms and move west.31

  By the autumn of that terrible year, Cynthia was pregnant for the third time. Under these unprecedented conditions, keeping her family fed and her
self healthy through the winter must have taxed even her famous thrift. She once told Henry that she bought “no new clothes for John until he went away into a store, but made them of his father’s old clothes,” causing Henry to remark that in a pinch, country boys could always rob scarecrows. Thanks to such economies they made it through, and on July 12, 1817, Cynthia gave birth to a healthy baby boy. They called him Henry, but then, only six weeks later, John’s little brother David died, just after coming of age at twenty-one. So on October 12, when it came time to bring their infant son to the First Parish Church for baptism, they followed family custom and kept the name alive: the Reverend Ezra Ripley baptized their second son David Henry Thoreau. Remarkably—at least, the family remarked on it—little Henry “did not cry.”32

  Henry Thoreau’s first biographer thought it “lovely he should draw his first breath in a pure country air, out of crowded towns, amid the pleasant russet fields.” Lovely indeed, but he would not grow up amid the farm’s pleasant fields.33 John and Cynthia survived one more crop cycle, but the world climate in 1817 was hardly better. In March 1818, as spring planting approached, they gave up the farm for good. For a time the young family rented the other half of the Red House, where Grandmother Jones was living out her final years in genteel poverty. Henry recalled that Aunt Sarah taught him how to walk here, at fourteen months of age. While the family recuperated, John tidied up his precarious finances and planned their next move. He’d finally paid off the vexed loan on his inheritance the previous August, giving up his share of the Prince Street house in Boston, and in September 1818 he sold their share of the Virginia Road house to pay off funds due to Jonas Minott’s estate. Perhaps that was when John sold even his gold wedding ring.34

  It was time for a fresh start. John decided to return to the business he knew best: keeping store. In October 1818 they moved ten miles north to the quiet rural village of Chelmsford, renting a house and shop next door to the village church, where the town stored their gunpowder in the garret. In those days no store could attract trade without selling rum; as Horace Hosmer remarked, “Church buildings were cold, and sermons were long,” and everyone, even the ministers, drank it. The reliable Reverend Ripley helped out by certifying John had “sustained a good character” and was “a man of integrity, accustomed to store-keeping, and of correct morals.”35 That got John his liquor license, and on November 15 he opened for business, selling groceries and spirits and painting signs while Cynthia waited on customers.

  John and Cynthia lived in Chelmsford for two and a half years. They never quite forgave the town for not removing the gunpowder next door, but other than that, stories show the young family coming to life. Here Sophia was born, on June 24, 1819, making four children in all, born regularly two years apart. All four grew to adulthood, though Henry, a toddler now, gave the family plenty of scares. Once, he swung from the stairs, fell, and knocked himself out, “and it took two pails of water to bring me to.” Another time, while playing with an axe, he cut off part of a toe. He got himself tossed by a cow, “knocked over by a hen with chickens, etc., etc.” Best was the story about the cow they took on trial. When Cynthia tried to milk her, the cow kicked over the pail. The neighbor laughed at Cynthia as a city girl, but when he tried, the cow “kicked him over, and he finished by beating her with a cowhide shoe.” By the time John got home, the cow “needed much to be milked,” so he thought he’d “‘brustle right up to her’”—but she kicked him “‘fair and square right in the muns,’” knocked him flat, and broke his nose “which shows it yet.” John drove her home to the seller, the blood still running down his face, as passersby scrambled over walls to save themselves from her horns. It was a barefoot, knockabout childhood—rough, unfussy, and close to the soil, with animals everywhere. Livestock roamed freely in those days, and Henry always remembered when the cow wandered into the house after the pumpkins.36

  Had they stayed, Henry Thoreau would have gotten his first lessons from Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1825, Emerson spent autumn and winter living on a Chelmsford farm, recovering from the eyestrain that had temporarily blinded him and teaching thirty or forty boys at the Chelmsford school. Years later he looked back fondly on the village’s “plain homely land, sandy fields which the Merrimack washes,” where apples covered the ground and “the chestnut forest spread its brown harvest on a frosty morning.” Those Chelmsford farmers were the “original authors of liberty,” but, added Emerson, they were also “all orthodox Calvinists, mighty in the Scriptures” who “read in no romances, but with the pulpit, on one hand, & poverty & labor on another, they had a third training in the town meeting.”37 Whether it was the poverty, the Calvinism, or the intransigence at town meetings isn’t clear, but something brought the Thoreaus’ rural idyll to an end. In March 1821, they once again pulled up stakes, moving this time into “Pope’s House,” a ten-footer in the south end of Boston. Here John tried schoolteaching, and Henry started school; in September, with winter coming on, they moved to “Whitwell’s House” at 4 Pinckney Street, staying until March 1823.38 In contrast to the Chelmsford years, the two years in urban Boston left barely a trace in Henry Thoreau’s memory.

  What Henry did remember was a vision of still, clear water among the pines. During a visit to Grandmother Jones, the Thoreau family took an outing to Walden Pond. Looking back, Henry dated his life from this moment: “Twenty three years since when I was 5 years old, I was brought from Boston to this pond, away in the country. . . . That woodland vision for a long time made the drapery of my dreams.” Even as a child, his spirit longed for “that sweet solitude,” for “that speaking silence that my ears might distinguish the significant sounds.” Not in Boston, “that tumultuous and varied city,” but here on the outskirts of Concord, where “sunshine & shadow were the only inhabitants that varied the scene,” would this wild child find the nursery for his spirit.39

  Making Concord Home

  Uncle Charles made it all possible. Cynthia’s elder brother had grown into an eccentric bachelor with a habit of disappearing for weeks or months at a time, “cutting hay on a farm in northern Vermont . . . or wandering through a village on the coast of Maine,” reappearing without warning to play card tricks in the tavern, twirl his hat up to the ceiling and catch it on his head every time, or “burst” the tough local farmers in wrestling matches.40 In October 1822, on one of his rambles, Charles came across a plumbago deposit in Bristol, New Hampshire, in the foothills south of the White Mountains. The term plumbago, for lead, is now obsolete; what Charles had found was a greasy, slate-gray form of carbon that we today call graphite. Mixed with clay, it makes crucibles for molten metals. In an age of heavy industry, graphite lubricant stands up to high heat and keeps ball bearings rolling smoothly; in an age of iron, graphite paint prevents rust and polishes wood stoves. Above all, as suggested by the word’s derivation from graphein (Greek for “to write”), graphite is the key ingredient in pencils.

  Charles had stumbled upon black gold. He staked a mining claim and sent off some samples for testing. A Dr. Mitchell in New York certified the Bristol graphite’s high quality and value, congratulating Charles on “the discovery of such a treasure in our country.” James Freeman Dana, Dartmouth College’s first professor of chemistry and mineralogy, declared Charles’s graphite to be far superior to any other found in the United States, as fine as England’s peerless Borrowdale ore.41 Back in Concord, Charles formed a partnership with Cyrus and Nathan Stow, manufacturers of soap and candles, and they started to work the mine. Unfortunately Charles had acquired mining rights for only seven years. He needed help, someone with marketing experience and ingenuity, able to drop everything and jump onto a new enterprise fast. He called upon John Thoreau. In March 1823, the Thoreaus moved into the “Brick House” on the corner of Walden and Main, next to Concord’s Mill Dam. Charles passed the business over to his brother-in-law, who named the fledgling firm “John Thoreau and Co.” and set up shop on the corner of Walden and Everett Streets overlooking the millpond. J
ohn knew exactly what to do with this rare, pure graphite of such extraordinary quality: pencils. On this flash of insight he built the Thoreau family fortune.

  The Industrial Revolution was about communication as much as machinery. Everyone needed a reliable, cheap, and portable writing instrument, something better than quill and ink. Since the sixteenth century, the Borrowdale mine in England had supplied the British, then all of Europe, with graphite, starting with simple sticks of it encased in wood. Horace Hosmer, a pencil-maker who worked for John Thoreau, thought the American pencil started with a Concord woman who pushed the pith out of elder twigs with a knitting needle, to fill them with pencil leads made from Borrowdale graphite scraps pounded fine and mixed with glue. Given the exorbitant cost of imported British pencils, it was better than nothing. William Munroe, a Concord furniture maker, took the next step: after sales slumped during the British embargo leading to the War of 1812, he started casting around for alternative products. Munroe ground the graphite with a hammer, mixed it into a paste in the head of a spoon, and encased the leads in cedar. When he had thirty pencils, he brought them to Boston. They sold immediately.

  Munroe returned home with an order for five gross more; over the next year and a half he cleared over $4,000 on 1,200 gross of pencils—a stunning profit. Terrified of competition, he kept his process secret from everyone but his wife. But once the war ended, the British flooded the market with the stockpiles jamming their warehouses, including pencils far better than Munroe could make. He went back to crafting cabinets and clock cases, but on the side he kept fiddling with pencils, haunted by that giddy profit margin. By 1819 Munroe had something workable, and he opened up a pencil factory on Concord’s Mill Dam. Soon he was marketing pencils as far away as Kentucky. By 1825 he’d relocated his factory to Barrett’s Mill and was turning out more pencils in four days than he’d made in a month before. Thus was born the first industrial pencil factory in the United States.42