Each year, half a million people visit Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. Most come to pay homage to Henry David Thoreau, who for two years lived a quiet, contemplative life in a small cabin he built not far from the pond’s shores. And yet in Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), his famous account of his experiment in subsistence living, Thoreau asks us to experience the Walden landscape as a rich repository of a long and complicated human history that began well before his arrival in 1845. He devotes the better part of a chapter to a community of...

In the town of lincoln, much of which was a part of Concord until 1754, a story has been passed down through the generations about a local white woman who, shortly before Lincoln’s incorporation, journeyed to Cambridge to sell produce from her husband’s farm and came home with something besides currency in her saddlebags. Although little is said in the story about anyone besides the local woman, who told her descendants only what she herself endured, the details indicate that the events of that day most likely began in one of the many lavish mansion houses that formed a distinct...

In july 1755, two years after his wedding to Abigail Wesson, John Cuming was at home in Concord when shocking news broke from Charlestown and spread like wildfire across the countryside. As far as twenty-two miles inland, in Westborough, the Reverend Ebenezer Parkman interrupted his usual journal entries about his family, his farm, and his congregation to report the story on everybody’s lips: “Captain Codman of Charlestown was poisoned lately by a Negro.” Ebenezer Parkman may not have known who exactly Captain Codman was, but he knew he was a gentleman, as indicated by the title that made his murder...

A decade after the codman murder, during which time John Cuming began to preside handily over Concord, British officials decided to levy taxes on the colonists in an attempt to pay the substantial debts the government had incurred during the French and Indian War. It was a disastrous move. Colonists once proud to have assisted in the expansion of the British empire now raged against the government they had fought for so valiantly. By way of protesting the various taxes imposed on them, the incensed colonists boycotted imported goods, harassed stamp distributors, and destroyed the personal property of government officials....

Early in the morning of april 19, 1775, British officers Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith and marine Major John Pitcairn surveyed upward of seven hundred of their troops marching into Concord. They chose the same vantage point used by William Emerson and the Concord militia earlier that day. Atop Burial Hill, they stood amid the tombstones, Helen Cuming’s among them, looking toward the northern of the two bridges that spanned the Concord River (Figure 7). Three companies of light infantry had the task of securing it while four others proceeded across it to search for secreted military stores at James Barrett’s...

Not long after the revolutionary war ended, John Cuming’s health began to fade. On March 3, 1788, at the age of sixty, he felt it prudent to resign the position of town meeting moderator “for now and future.” His sister Elizabeth had been begging him since 1784 to retire and “enjoy the fruits of your labor,” noting in a letter from Halifax that it pained her “much to hear your health declines.” John continued, however, to ride out to see patients and make the rounds of the county court. On one such trip, four months after resigning as moderator, John...

After she was abandoned by charles russell, Brister’s sister, Zilpah, could have opted for a life similar to the one she led under slavery. Many former slave women, Cate Bliss among them, stayed on with their owners, performing as ostensibly free women the same domestic duties they performed when enslaved. Of course Zilpah’s former owner had left the country, but there were still ample numbers of well-to-do white families looking for live-in female help. Former slave women and their unmarried daughters often took such work because it was the surest means of putting a roof over their heads. Elsea Dugan,...

The slaves who remained with their owners after the Revolution began to pass away. Boston Potter’s wife, Cate, who stayed on with the Bliss-Emerson family, died in 1785 at the age of fifty. Four years later, Susanna Barron’s slave Violet died at the age of eighty. Rose, the slave of John Cuming’s Harvard classmate Dr. Timothy Minot, died from burns in 1800 at the age of seventy-four. Boston Potter died in his eighties in 1809, having managed to outlive his master. With their passing, Brister Freeman became increasingly noticeable as a departure from the general rule. Not only was he...

Since 2006, visitors to walden woods can hike a new path in addition to the well-trodden one that ends at the site of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin. Thoreau’s Path at Brister’s Hill is on part of an eighteen-acre parcel, not far from the pond, that was purchased in 1993 by a nonprofit organization intent on saving the area from development as an office park. The Walden Woods Project eventually decided to use the site to honor Henry’s global reach as a “social reformer, naturalist, philosopher, and one of America’s most powerful and influential writers.” To that end, the organization created...