Thoreau's house at Walden

77. "Kindred spirit" in Ricketson to Thoreau, Aug. 12, 1854, in Ricketson and Ricketson, 29. In fact, there were two Ricketson shanties. He purchased the New Bedford estate Woodlee in 1846, selling it and moving to Brooklawn in 1854; Cornelius Robert Driscoll, "Daniel Ricketson and His New Bedford Camelot," New Bedford (Mass.) Standard-Times Bowsprit (June 25, 1978). Ricketson's first shanty, a small one, stood at Woodlee; at Brooklawn he built a larger one. The latter stood in the city's Brooklawn Park until demolished sometime after 1962. On Ricketson, see Earl J. Dias, "Daniel Ricketson and Henry Thoreau," New England Quarterly 26 (Sept. 1953): 388-96; Thomas Blanding, "Daniel Ricketson's Sketch Book," in Studies in the American Renaissance, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: Twayne, 1977), 327-38; and Don Mortland, "Approaching an Idol: New Light on the Ricketson-Thoreau Friendship," ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 32, no. 4 (1986): 213-24. Among several 1996-97 proposals for a Ricketson Memorial in New Bedford was to reconstruct the Brooklawn Park shanty.

78. Ricketson to Thoreau, Aug. 12, 1854, in Ricketson and Ricketson, 26-28.

79. Ricketson, "A Diurnal Rhyme: Time, Evening," Mar. 1856, in Ricketson and Ricketson, 368.

80. Ricketson to Thoreau, Oct. 12, 1854, in Ricketson and Ricketson, 33; Thoreau, Apr. 10, 1857, in Journal (as in n. 10), vol. 9, 324.

81. The Home of the Late A. J. Downing" (as in n. 71), 21-22. See also Francis R. Kowsky, Country, Park, and City: The Architecture and Life of Calvert Vaux (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 24-25.

82. Thoreau, Apr. 10, 1857, in Journal (as in n. 10), vol. 9, 322.

83. Thoreau to Ricketson, Mar. 5, 1856; Ricketson to Thoreau, Feb. 26, 1856; Thoreau to Ricketson, Mar. 5, 1856; all in Ricketson and Ricketson, 55-58.

84. Downing, 1848 (as in n. 21), 9; "Winipissiogee" in Downing (as in n. 5), 306.

85. Joel Tyler Headley, Life in the Woods; or, The Adirondack (Dublin: James M'Glashan, 1850), 115, 160, 193, 200. Harding, 1995 (as in n. 1), 1, notes that Thoreau had already chosen "Life in the Woods" for the subtitle of Walden before Headley's book appeared.

86. Fuller (as in n. 54), 58-59.

87. This outing "has not received the attention it deserves"; Thomas Woodson, "Thoreau's Excursion to the Berkshires and Catskills," ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 21, no. 2 (1975): 82. Almost alone among scholars, he argues that there was an important link between this trip and Thoreau's Walden sojourn.

88. First Walden entry in PJ, vol. 2, 155 (July 5, 1845); Greylock house in PJ, vol. 2, 96-99 (after Aug. 1, 1844). On the latter, see Thoreau (as in n. 2), 203-9; William Howarth, Thoreau in the Mountains (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982), 59; and Donald M. Murray, "Thoreau's Uncivil Man Rice," New England Quarterly 56, no. 1 (Mar. 1983): 103-9.

89. PJ, vol. 2, 155 (July 5, 1845). Silas Scribner, father of Ira, owned "a large tract in the vicinity of South Lake" as early as 1823; Roland Van Zandt, The Catskill Mountain House (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1966), 33. When Thoreau visited, Ira Scribner was in the process of enlarging his house into an inn, later called Glen Mary; Howarth (as in n. 88), 80; see also Arthur G. Adams, The Catskills: An Illustrated Historical Guide with Gazetteer (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990), 182. No trace of Scribner's remains today in the sunny forest clearing it once occupied (explorations were made by the author and Susan E. Matsen in Aug. 1997 and May 1998), but the stone piers of the sawmill may be seen nearby, beside Lake Creek.