Thoreau's house at Walden

21. Downing, 39; idem, "Hints to Rural Improvers," Horticulturist 3 (July 1848): 11-12; idem, "A Few Words on Our Progress in Building," Horticulturist 6 (June 1851): 249.

22. William Bailey Lang, Views, with Ground Plans, of the Highland Cottages at Roxbury (Boston: L. H. Bridgham and H. E. Felch, 1845), n.p.

23. Downing, 41; Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel (London: Saunders and Otley, 1838), vol. 2, 182-83. The Pine Bank estate is discussed briefly in Tanya Boyett, "Thomas Handasyd Perkins: An Essay on Material Culture," Old-Time New England 70 (1980): 45-62.

24. Willis, 91, 133.

25. Loudon (as in n. 17), 763; Downing, 58; Abraham Rees, Cyclopaedia (Philadelphia: Samuel F. Bradford, 1810-24), vol. 31, s.v. "retreat."

26. PJ, vol. 2, 215 (winter 1845-46); see also Walden, 264.

27. Richard Elsam, An Essay on Rural Architecture (London: E. Lawrence, 1803; reprint, Westmead, Eng.: Gregg, 1972), 8; Brown, 92-95.

28. Sixty rods is about a thousand feet. The path Thoreau took to the highway covered more than twice this distance, however, being "about half a mile long" (265). Walking to his parents' "Texas House," he generally avoided the highway altogether, preferring the shortcut provided by the railroad tracks.

29. James Randall, A Collection of Architectural Designs for Mansions, Casinos, Villas, Lodges, and Cottages (London: J. Taylor, 1806), v; Brown, 91, 93, 103.

30. PJ, vol. 1, 296 (Apr. 5, 1841).

31. On Thoreau's 1846 manuscript map of Walden in the Concord Free Public Library, his house is shown oriented to about 145 degrees (between southeast and south-southeast). Modern archaeological findings agree with the map; "Compass readings taken of the chimney foundation when it was uncovered, showing the direction in which it faced, tally perfectly with readings from the 1846 map. . . . The 1846-1946 comparisons were made after the compass declinations for those years had been corrected"; Robbins, 59.

32. In the text of Walden (113), Thoreau gives his distance to the pond as "half a dozen rods" (99 feet). Given his expertise as a surveyor, this is a puzzling misstatement. The distance is shown more accurately on the map in Walden (286) and on the manuscript of that map in the Concord Free Public Library. On the latter, the distance appears to be 11.5 rods (190 feet). Robbins's archaeological investigation identified the site as being 204 feet from the lake.

33. Brown, 95.

34. W. F. Pocock, Architectural Designs for Rustic Cottages, Picturesque Dwellings, Villas, &c (London: J. Taylor, 1807; reprint, Westmead, Eng.: Gregg, 1972), 6.

35. William Howarth, "'Where I Lived': The Environs of Walden," in Approaches to Teaching Thoreau's "Walden" and Other Works, ed. Richard J. Schneider (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1996), 61.

36. Downing, 59.

37. On Thoreau and Gilpin, see William D. Templeman, "Thoreau, Moralist of the Picturesque," Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 47 (1932): 864-89; Gordon V. Boudreau, "H. D. Thoreau, William Gilpin, and the Metaphysical Ground of the Picturesque," American Literature 45, no. 3 (Nov. 1973): 368; and Sattelmeyer (as in n. 1), 185-87. For more on the Picturesque, see Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 408-12.