INTRODUCTION
The Mememory of These
Human Inhabitants
    
             
 

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 former Concord slaves who lived not far from his cabin during the first four decades of the United States’ existence. Their experiences after emancipation were one reason Thoreau was drawn to live in Walden Woods himself. He regarded the former slaves’ persistence in the face of isolation and harassment as heroic, and like them he sought to live independently. He also enjoyed living in a part of town where,because of its past association with former slaves and other outcasts, few of his white contemporaries chose to linger.

  
      Mary Minot was one of those people who avoided Walden Woods when she could. Her story, which Thoreau uses in Walden, is a good place to start a book that investigates the long forgotten connection between Walden Woods and Concord’s slave history. Mary was born in Concord, six years after her father Ephraim fought the British at Concord’s North Bridge in 1775. While her father could say he helped set in motion one of the great political revolutions in western history, Mary led a relatively quiet life. She never married and lived with her younger brother George and her business partner Elizabeth Potter in an unpainted, four-room cottage. George Minot, who also never married, spent his days farming and fishing, rarely venturing from the town in which his ancestors had lived since the mid-seventeenth century. Only once did he go as far as Boston, even after tracks were laid in 1844 and the port city became reachable in an hour by train. Mary made a meager living as a seamstress, sewing clothes with Miss Potter’s assistance for the town’s second-class laboring men. She was rarely asked to make anything for her neighbor, Concord’s wealthiest resident, the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who lived diagonally across the road from her and to whom the Minots regularly sold eggs and cream. Henry David Thoreau, a dear friend of George’s and just as eccentric, was a more frequent customer. The Harvard graduate famously shunned the black suits worn by the educated men of his day, requesting of Miss Minot clay-colored corduroy clothes with overly large pockets for his daily walks so he could carry his notebook and spyglass easily and be “less conspicuous in the fields” as he tracked Concord’s wildlife. Mary also sewed for her younger sister Lavina Minot Baker who, with her husband Joseph, had five children. Mary would walk two and a half miles to the Baker farm on the Lincoln side of Walden Woods and stay for a day or two.  
             
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