Thoreau's house at Walden

Then, with a very little money, a ducal estate may be purchased, and by a very little more, and moderate labor, a family be maintained upon it with raiment, food and shelter. The luxurious and minute comforts of a city life are not yet to be had without effort disproportionate to their value . . . cannot these be given up once for all?(86)

Thus, the contemporary habit of wilderness rustication, popularized by printed accounts, afforded precedent for Thoreau's lake-in-the-woods life at Walden - although his wilderness was mostly one of the imagination, given his location on a recently cleared suburban site just a mile and a half from Concord.

Revelation in the Catskills

An immediate and decisive stimulus for Thoreau's Walden experiment - one little noticed by scholars - came in the form of his 1844 trip to the Berkshires, in Massachusetts, and (joined by Channing) to the Catskills, in New York. This journey provided inspirational firsthand encounters with the rustic architecture of the wilderness, as well as with a memorable lake that awakened Thoreau to the possibilities latent in his familiar Walden Pond.(87)

Thoreau's first journal entry at Walden reads, "Walden Sat. July 5th - 45 Yesterday I came here to live. My house makes me think of some mountain houses I have seen, which seemed to have a fresher auroral atmosphere about them as I fancy of the halls of Olympus." There had been two "mountain houses," the first that of "a rude and inhospitable man" named Rice, high in the hills near Mount Greylock, Mass., "where the shaggy woods almost joined their tops over the torrent." "I was very much pleased with my host's residence," Thoreau wrote.(88) Apparently of greater significance was the second house, in the Catskills near Kaaterskill Falls, that mecca for the Picturesque tourist. In the first journal passage written at Walden, Thoreau described this dwelling, home to sawmiller Ira Scribner:

I lodged at the house of a saw-miller last summer, on the Caatskills mountains, high up as Pine orchard in the blue-berry & raspberry region, where the quiet and cleanliness & coolness seemed to be all one, which had this ambrosial character. He was the miller of the Kaaterskill Falls[.] They were a clean & wholesome family inside and out like their house. The latter was not plastered - only lathed and the inner doors were not hung. The house seemed high placed, airy, and perfumed, fit to entertain a travelling God. It was so high indeed that all the music, the broken strains, the waifs & accompaniments of tunes, that swept over the ridge of the Caatskills, passed through its aisles. Could not man be man in such an abode? And would he ever find out this grovelling life?(89)

For Thoreau, Scribner's house offered the instant revelation of a rustic architectural ideal: rough, unplastered, open to nature, clean, and healthful. It even resonated with the extraordinary virtues of the Parthenon, as he hints by calling it "high placed, airy, and perfumed, fit to entertain a travelling God" and by referring to its "aisles." For the classically inspired young writer with an enthusiasm for the primitive hut, Scribner's evidently seemed a latter-day Doric cabin.