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Thoreau's house at Walden
Art Bulletin, The, June, 1999 by W. Barksdale Maynard
3. PJ, vol. 1, 296 (Apr. 5, 1841). In 1837 (see Borst [as in n. 1], 27), Thoreau had lived for a summer at Flint's Pond with his college roommate, Charles Stearns Wheeler (1817-1843). Wheeler "spent several college vacations in the hut from 1836 to 1842"; John Olin Eidson, Charles Stearns Wheeler, Friend of Emerson (Athens, Ga.: University, of Georgia Press, 1951), 50. William Ellery Channing the Younger recalled in 1883, "As Mr. Thoreau was not too original and inventive to follow the example of others, if good to him, it is very probably this undertaking of Stearns Wheeler, whom he regarded (as I think I have heard him say) a heroic character, [that] suggested his own experiment on Walden. I believe I visited this shanty with Mr. Thoreau. It was very plain, with bunks of straw, and built in the Irish manner.... It seems to me highly probable that Mr. Wheeler's experiment suggested Mr. Thoreau's, as he was a man he almost worshiped"; Channing to F. B. Sanborn, 1883, in Eldson, 51.
4. "I want to go soon" in PJ, vol. 1,347 (Dec. 24, 1841); "cabin or a turret" in Emerson to Thomas Carlyle, Sept. 30, 1844, in Joseph Slater, ed., The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 369. Emerson bought 13.5 acres from Cyrus Stow on Sept. 21, 1844 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 9 OMITTED]; Middlesex South District Deeds, bk. 449, p. 515; see also Emerson to William Emerson, Oct. 4, 1844, in The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), vol. 3, 262-63. Emerson bought "Emerson's cliff" across the pond from Abel Moore and John Hosmer on Nov. 29, 1845; Middlesex South District Deeds, bk. 473, p. 351; see also Emerson to Carlyle, May 14, 1846, in Slater, 399. The above deed records are cited in "Deed of Gift to Commonwealth of Mass. by Forbes and Heywood et al.," June 1922, Concord Free Public Library. For the history of the land around Walden, see Thomas Blanding, "Historic Walden Woods," Concord Saunterer 20, nos. 1-2 (Dec. 1988): 2-86.
5. William Wordsworth, "When, to the Attractions of a Busy World" (1800-1802), lines 1, 53-54, in Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 160-61; James Malton, A Collection of Designs for Rural Retreats, as Villas: Principally in the Gothic and Castle Styles of Architecture (London: J. and T. Carpenter, 1802), i; Andrew Jackson Downing, "On the Mistakes of Citizens in Country Life," Horticulturist 3 (Jan. 1849): 306.
6. Thoreau, "Chesuncook" (1858), in The Maine Woods, ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 124. Descriptions of log buildings are also to be found in "Ktaadn" (1848), in ibid., for example, 25-26. "Of the nearly one hundred references to his abode which he makes in Walden, eighty odd of the number are 'house.' He says 'lodge' three times, 'dwelling' twice, 'apartment' twice, 'homestead' once; and on only one occasion does he use the word 'hut' "; Robbins, 10.
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