Thoreau's house at Walden

Thoreau lived at Walden for two years, two months, and two days, his return to town life being tied to the completion of the manuscript he had been writing at the pond (A Week) and to an invitation to manage Emerson's household while the older writer toured Europe. It is not surprising that Thoreau chose to return to "civilized life again" (3), for rustic retirement, as contemporaries conceived of it, was frequently short-term. William Wordsworth, for example, in escaping "the busy world" had allowed himself but "an allotted interval of ease,/Under my cottage-roof," and in this spirit Malton in 1802 had devoted a section of his Collection of Designs for Rural Retreats to "Reflections on the Necessity and Advantage of Temporary Retirement." To see Thoreau's sojourn in the context of the retirement phenomenon helps resolve a number of problems that have long troubled readers of Walden, including the apparent hypocrisy of the "solitary" author's frequent visits to town. In the course of retirement - always a genteel habit - one was expected to maintain close ties with friends and relatives. Downing recommended that persons planning to retire should by no means forsake the "charms of good society" and "should, in settling in the country, never let go the cord that binds them to their fellows. "(5)

Popular misconceptions notwithstanding, Thoreau did not live in a "hut" or a "cabin" but in a tidy, one-room "house" - so he nearly always called it, with pride in its design and significance as a miniature country house. Nor was it a log house; he had not yet explored the Maine wilderness, where he would discover that logs provided "a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weatherboards."(6) As described in Walden (40-49, 240-46), his dwelling measured 10 by 15 feet, with two windows and a door. With his own hands he fashioned the frame of main timbers, floor timbers, studs, rafters, and king and queen posts. Certain parts he frugally recycled: boards from an Irishman's shanty (42-44), bricks from a 1790s chimney (240-41). Some have expressed surprise at his use of traditional framing rather than the innovative balloon frame, but in fact it took decades for the new technology, developed in Chicago in 1833, to supplant mortise-and-tenon construction countrywide, and R. G. Hatfield's The American House-Carpenter (1844) makes no mention of the method.(7)

The Walden house existed in two distinct phases: the breezy shelter of the summer of 1845, which Thoreau glowingly described in the language of the rustic, and the well-built, winterized home completed late that fall, with a chimney, plastered interior walls, and siding of shingles. That financial distress may have contributed to his departure from Walden is suggested by the fact that he sold the house to Emerson in 1847; eventually it was moved to a farm where it served as a grain storehouse until being dismantled in 1868. No photograph was taken of it, nor is there a fully reliable sketch; Thoreau complained of slight inaccuracies in its depiction on the frontispiece of Walden [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]: "I would suggest a little alteration, chiefly in the door, in the wide projection of the roof at the front; and that the bank more immediately about the house be brought out more distinctly."(8) The remains of its foundations at the pond were discovered in the course of a 1945-46 archaeological investigation by Roland Wells Robbins (1908-1987). Several replicas of the house stand in the Concord area today [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 6 OMITTED], and the actual site, on a gentle hillside in the wooded Walden Pond State Reservation, is marked by granite posts.(9)