Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  The mystery is how John Thoreau caught up so fast. Like Munroe, he kept his trade secrets to himself. But where Munroe had spent years developing his process, only seven months later, in October 1823, Thoreau pencils won a premium at the Massachusetts Agricultural Fair. John sold six gross of them to Moses Prichard, whose store became his major local retail outlet. By October 1824 John was displaying his pencils at the Massachusetts Agricultural Society, earning words of praise from the New England Farmer: “The Lead Pencils exhibited by J. Thorough & Co. were superiour to any specimens exhibited in past years.” Such stunning progress indicates either a brilliant engineering mind, cheap imitation (as Munroe complained), or collusion with someone who broke Munroe’s trade secret. Two years later Munroe countered by unveiling his new, improved, and elegantly packaged pencils, winning a silver medal and a stack of endorsements. Soon he was marketing three grades of pencils—“best quality,” “premium,” and “common”—and John Thoreau was pressed to upgrade his own product. Competition pushed them both to success, and by the 1830s, “the two firms together were manufacturing 3,000 to 6,000 gross of pencils annually.” Although Munroe fretted about overproduction, the market kept expanding and both firms prospered, making Concord, for a time, the center of American pencil-making.43

  By today’s standards, early American pencils were crude affairs. The graphite was ground and mixed with bayberry wax, whale spermaceti, and glue, heated and pressed into grooves cut in a slab of fine-grained cedar wood, dried, covered with a second slab, cut, and shaped. Edward Emerson remembered them as “greasy, gritty, brittle, inefficient.”44 But John’s graphite pencils sold well enough (along with red and blue pencils, stove polish, battery plates, sandpaper made of white Walden sand, and fine, marbled paper for bookbinding, plus a side in clock repair) to lift the Thoreau family into the respectable middle class. Of John’s two sons, it was Henry who got involved in the business; like his father, he was intrigued with machinery and loved to work with his hands. Thanks to Henry’s improvements, for a time Thoreau pencils were the best in America, sought by artists, engineers, surveyors, architects, carpenters, and writers—everyone who depended on a good pencil. Thoreau’s own working method coevolved with the family pencils. Selling them helped fund his writing, but more important, the pencil allowed him to take notes out in nature, in wind or heat or bitter cold—notes he inked into his notebooks back home. Quite literally, Thoreau’s writing career rested on the humble pencil, so much a part of him that, when he drew up a list of travel essentials, he forgot to mention a pencil, the same way he forgot to mention air to breathe or water to drink.

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  John may have been too gentle to drive hard bargains in a general store, but he “loved to sit in the shops or at the post-office and read the papers,” and he spent the rest of his life happily ensconced in the heart of town, offering fellowship to everyone. His business allowed him to socialize, drawing on his knowledge of markets and men, while devoting himself to making things both useful and beautiful. Henry said his father studied “how to make a good article,” refusing to make “a poor one” for money, “as if he labored for a finer end.”45 John loved music and played the flute—his elegant flute books from around 1800, filled with music transcribed by a journeyman, still survive—and his name, in exquisite copperplate handwriting, is inscribed in some of the finest books in Henry’s library. Horace Hosmer said, “He was an Artist . . . even if he never touched a brush or chisel.” John avoided town politics and never joined Concord’s elite Social Circle, yet whenever the Circle launched a new project, John pitched in, donating books to the library, joining the Society of Middlesex Husbandmen and Manufactures, becoming secretary of the Concord Fire Society (the volunteer fire department), and giving time and money to the Ornamental Tree Society, which lined Concord’s streets with elms, sycamores, and maples to make “the barren spot and way-side smile and blossom” for future generations.46

  If John avoided controversies, Cynthia, the vocal defender of liberal causes, courted them. Her sharp eye and caustic wit delighted her friends but provoked her more conventional neighbors. Despite the “edge” of what Ralph Waldo Emerson called her “malicious wit,” his son Edward never forgot her great kindness, “especially to young people, often shown with great delicacy.” One neighbor averred Cynthia’s readiness to condemn a fault “was done in all honesty to bring about a reform.” Those reforms started at home: though her table was attractive and the food abundant, they did without such luxuries as tea, coffee, and sugar to afford a piano for the girls and a Harvard education for their talented younger son. To bring in extra money, Cynthia ran the family home as a boardinghouse, yet neighbors who could afford no return were always welcome at her table. Like John, she sought out community service, joining the Concord Female Charitable Society and regularly hosting their meetings, at which ladies sewed clothing and linens for families in need while they talked over who could use a gift of shoes or schooling, payment of a doctor’s bill, extra food, or a little tobacco to make the day go easier. From this busy group (the “chattable society,” some of the men unkindly called it) evolved the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, one of the earliest and most active in the nation.47 Before abolitionism reached the media and the lecture hall, it lived in family homes where mothers and wives, sisters and daughters met to stitch together the fabric of their community.

  Helen, the eldest, grew into a bookish young woman—elegant, graceful, earnest, and quiet, the family’s moral lodestar. She was the first teacher in the family, setting the career path followed by her siblings, and she took the outrages of social injustice most deeply to heart, dedicating herself to ending slavery in America. She became a friend of Frederick Douglass, and at her tragically early death, William Lloyd Garrison eulogized her in the Liberator. Sophia, the youngest, had her mother’s wit, tempered with her father’s sweetness. In her gravity, speech, and appearance, many thought she resembled Henry, with whom she shared many interests. In later years, whenever Henry found something interesting, he called Sophia to come look. She loved plants and filled the house with sunshine and flowers; her conservatory by the dining room became a neighborhood showpiece. She knew the wild plants, too, and more than once beat her brother to a rare wildflower. Sophia was also an artist of limited training but real talent, whose drawing of Henry’s house at Walden became the famous frontispiece of her brother’s book.

  But all that lay in the future. For now the star of the family was John Jr. He was gregarious, bold, charismatic; Horace Hosmer declared that John Jr. was “his father over again with the sunny side turned to the world where all men might see it.” He was strong and quick, a natural athlete who would “throw somersaults, wrestle with the boys, jump high, walk on his hands, laugh, shout, and roll over on the grass in mock fights at recess,” or regale them by the hour with stories so funny their sides ached with laughter, “as chock full of fun as an egg is of meat.”48 But while John dove into boyhood games with zest and uninhibited glee, his little brother held back, observing with a sober gravity that Horace’s brother Joseph called “perfectly unaccountable and disgusting.” Young Henry puzzled everyone. He was gentle and obliging to the boys, even as they mocked him as “the Judge,” “the old maid,” or “the fine scholar with a big nose,” and they shied snowballs at him as he stood by the brick schoolhouse watching their pranks. Yet though they could scoop him every time at high-spy, standing on their heads, or “in a good square yell,” Henry scooped them all in class: “He had a better understanding of the subject matter of the books at twelve than most of the class at sixteen.”49

  What was this quiet, watchful boy thinking? In adulthood he remembered being quite capable of defending himself when he thought it mattered, as when he found a potato that had sprouted and, on his mother’s advice, planted it in his own little plot in their kitchen garden. Soon afterward, John came in holding his sprouted potato, then Sophia, then even Helen—until Henry came in crying that someone had taken
his potato, whereupon “it was restored to me as the youngest and original discoverer,” and it grew “in my garden, and finally its crop was dug by myself and yielded a dinner for the family.” He also recalled the dreamy child who would stare out the window, gazing upon the clouds “and, allowing my imagination to wander, search for flaws in their rich drapery that I might get a peep at that world beyond.” His mother told a friend how, when Henry and John still slept together in a trundle bed, “John would go to sleep at once, but Henry often lay long awake. His mother found the little boy lying so one night, long after he had gone upstairs, and said, ‘Why, Henry dear, why don’t you go to sleep?’ ‘Mother’ said he, ‘I have been looking through the stars to see if I couldn’t see God behind them.’”50

  Henry’s journeys were not always taken alone. He reminisced in college that “in the freshness of the dawn my brother and I were ever ready to enjoy a stroll” to Fairhaven Hill, climbing the highest rocky peak together to “catch the first ray of the morning sun.” From childhood on, nature structured and furnished Thoreau’s inner mindscape. His friend Ellery Channing said that in their walks together, Henry never remarked on the childhood houses they passed, but he did recall a particular field as the one to which he drove the family cow to pasture, returning, like the other barefoot village boys, to drive her home again for milking. And he often “let fall some memory of the ‘Milldam’ when he was a boy and of the pond behind it, now a meadow.”51 Though the millpond was long since drained, Henry’s friends recalled that in wintertime it made “a skating ground for the older boys and a sliding place for us youngsters,” where the boldest boys would play “kittlybenders,” crowning with victory the last one to safely skate across the thinning ice.52 Thoreau never wrote an autobiography (Channing said he didn’t like to dwell on the past), but around 1837 he sketched some notes for a memoir: “Gardening—Chickens—First ramble a graping—First fishing expedition—skaiting—berrying—hunting—Bare Garden hill &c—fireflies—Indian wigwam—old mill—music—Squantum feasts in the fields with one companion only—Bread and butter on the garden fence—Books and Reading—Sleepy Hollow—Character of my companions—Visit to Walden—Drive to lecture—birch swinging and potatoe roasting—.”53 What pages he could have written of his earliest years.

  Nature, to Thoreau, began as a family, communal event. Dr. Josiah Bartlett, the village physician, often led neighborhood children on swimming and fishing expeditions; and on summer afternoons, young men and women got up “walking parties” to climb Fairhaven Hill or stroll around Walden Pond.54 Cynthia and John, renowned for taking long walks together, fit right in: rumor had it one of their children was nearly born on Nawshawtuct Hill. A neighbor recalled how Cynthia set off on grand picnics, cooking supper on an open fire and boiling water in a little tin teapot, and leading them all home by twilight. Cynthia, “with her keen delight in nature . . . trained her children’s eyes and ears.” She would take them outside and make them listen to the birds, “framing little verses of exclamation cheerful or plaintive to fit the accent of the outbursts from the various little feathered throats.” Soon the boys were out on their own: “when John and Henry came running into the house slamming the doors,” Cynthia reminisced, “I knew that Ben Hosmer or Joseph had come, and that the boys would take their luncheon and not be home till night, being off for Walden, Fairhaven Cliffs, Egg Rock or down the river.” Decades later, when Horace Hosmer saw Henry and Sophia ramble out together, he with his notebook, she with her sketchpad, he thought “they were father and mother over again, Nature and Art lovers, son like the mother, daughter like the father.”55

  But life couldn’t be all skating contests and picnic suppers. One day Cynthia led John, Henry, and little Sophia to Miss Phoebe Wheeler’s “infant school,” startling Miss Wheeler’s other pupils with the entrance of her “big barefoot boys.” Mothers routinely sent their young children to such neighborhood “school dames,” spinsters or widows who supported themselves by running what amounted to daycare centers, teaching their charges the ABCs while baking bread or working at the spinning wheel. Young Henry spent many days in the bare rooms of Phoebe Wheeler’s “old unpainted weather beaten house” shaded by big buttonwood trees, furnished with unpainted seats and stools, a bed in the corner for tired children to nap on, and a row of half-eaten apples “turning rusty in the sunshine,” waiting to be returned at recess. The children learned their lessons pinned to Miss Wheeler’s knee by their aprons. Henry Thoreau remembered asking Miss Wheeler the prescient question, “Who owns all the land?”, as well as winning a medal for geography, only to ask his mother afterward, “Is Boston in Concord?” He was quite sure that had he remained with Miss Wheeler a little longer, he would have received “the chief prize book ‘Henry Lord Mayor.’”56

  To a small boy, Concord must have seemed huge. Living by the Mill Dam put the Thoreaus next door to a thriving industrial park, where the clang of the blacksmith’s trip hammer rang out over ramshackle shops built on pilings and squeezed between factories and foundries. Here Henry could watch the gristmill’s great stone wheels grind flour for “rye ’n’ Injun,” peer behind the stacks of raw cowhides into the stinking tannery vats, and feel the scorching heat of the foundry fire, where men cast molten brass into bells for horse-drawn sleighs and fittings for the clockmakers across the street. Out on the street were mounds of leather scraps, horse stables, teams of oxen in front of busy stores, raucous taverns, and the old Thoreau home, which Henry’s aunts, “the Misses Thoreau,” ran as a popular boardinghouse, with many a party catered by Shattuck’s store next door. On the corner next to the grand Middlesex Hotel, with stagecoaches at the door and the jail behind, were the irresistible windows of Montefiori’s candy store. Four times a year on court days, the town bells summoned a parade of sheriffs, judges, and lawyers from the Middlesex Hotel across the commons to the courthouse. Concord center was a microcosm of the world: young Henry, roaming free, would have absorbed more in a day on the Mill Dam than in a month in the schoolroom.57

  Sometimes the world came to Concord, too—like the time the Marquis de Lafayette, the hero of the Revolution, passed through town during his farewell tour. This was rather more interesting than it sounds. On August 31, 1824, a cavalcade of Concord’s worthies ushered the aging Lafayette to Concord’s town square, announcing his arrival with a twenty-four-gun salute and the pealing of bells. Dignitaries were shepherded to a posh reception under a tent by the First Parish Church, where they munched delicacies and listened to a succession of fine speeches. The space around the tent was supposed to remain open, but the townspeople, anxious to see the great man, pressed past the barriers. As armed militia pushed them back, the crowd raised a chorus of angry voices: Didn’t they have a right to be there, too? Perhaps their clothes were not so fine or their manners so polished, but hadn’t their fathers fought in the Revolution? What, after all, had they been fighting for? A riot was barely averted, and though Lafayette’s party deep inside the tent never noticed, the anger and bitterness festered for years, kept alive by what some thought were “crafty demagogues” using social alienation to further their own selfish purposes.58 Such mounting resentment against the rising elite led by the wealthy Samuel Hoar and the powerful John Keyes—whose sons were among Henry Thoreau’s playmates—meant the boundaries being drawn were unavoidably personal.

  Young Henry witnessed Concord’s jubilee as well, the fiftieth anniversary of the Concord Battle, held on April 19, 1825, around the corner from his home. The logical site by the Old North Bridge, where the battle had been fought, was mired in debates with Ezra Ripley, who lived in the Old Manse, even as commercial interests in the village pushed for a monument in the town center. So instead, after a thirteen-gun salute and the pealing of the town’s bells, Concord’s Masonic leaders laid, with due ceremony, the foundation stones for a mighty monument in the town square. Speeches followed in the First Parish Church (including a toast by Ralph Waldo Emerson honoring his grandfather William, who had rallied th
e minutemen fifty years before). Late one night soon afterward, town dissenters heaped on the cornerstone a twenty-foot mock-monument of tar barrels. The next night, town rowdies set it ablaze. The huge bonfire delighted the children, alarmed their parents, and cracked the foundation stones, ruining the monument. The ignominious heap stood for years, a favorite climb for schoolboys and, for their parents, a troubling reminder of the cracks in their community.59

  While the mild-mannered John Thoreau steered clear of such conflicts, Cynthia soon found herself and her family square in the bull’s-eye, torn between two factions.60 Since its foundation, the church—still an official branch of town governance—had held Concord together. Every Concord household was taxed to pay Reverend Ripley’s salary and maintain his meetinghouse; no other church was permitted or even contemplated. But the old-time Puritanism had liberalized over the years. Church membership had once required a full confession of one’s sins; now it asked only a public profession of one’s faith. Cynthia had done this in 1811, and at various times so had Henry’s aunts Betsy, Jane, and Maria. But beyond Concord, protests were mounting against such liberalizing moves, and the evangelist Reverend Lyman Beecher (father of Harriet Beecher Stowe) rose to leadership in Boston by mustering the saints against the sinners, even as Boston’s liberal icon, the Reverend William Ellery Channing, pleaded for tolerance and unity. The Reverend Ripley finally lost control of his flock in May 1826, when nine unhappy members of his congregation banded together to found a new, more conservative church of their own, a “Trinitarian” church standing for the full divinity of Christ within the mystery of a triune God. The liberals, in response, rallied under the banner of “Unitarianism,” insisting that God could only be One, single, infinite Being.