Years later, George Minot told Thoreau about a particular August day Mary spent in Lincoln sewing for their sister. After hours spent bent over her needle, Mary attempted to carry home what her brother told Thoreau was “the rather onerous present of a watermelon,” prompting Thoreau to recall in his journal “the old saying” that a person “cannot carry two melons under one arm” and to note that “it is difficult to carry one far, it is so slippery.” Mary was seventy-eight when Thoreau recounted her attempt in an 1859 journal entry. The day she set off through Walden Woods with a heavy watermelon in her arms must have taken place years earlier, probably in the 1820s or 1830s when Lavina’s children were growing fast and their wardrobes thus in constant need of attention. Mary, then in her forties or fifties, set out holding the tricky fruit as best she could, eager to share this favorite summer treat with her brother and Miss Potter. Called the Great County Road in its heyday, the road she followed is known today as Walden Street or Route 126. The stagecoach used to rumble along this way, as did numerous farmers’ wagons and rich men’s chaises, all conveying goods and people either north to New Hampshire or east to Boston via its connection to the mainland at Roxbury Neck. But since the completion of a bridge that connected Charlestown to Boston in 1785, the majority of traffic ran farther to the east along the Lexington road, formerly called the Bay road, which now ran directly into Boston. The Walden road had since become a mere shadow of its former self, used by Concord and Lincoln residents mainly to access their woodlots.

    On this particular day, however, the farmers who normally filled the woods with the ringing of their axes must have been celebrating the end of haying season with their annual fishing trip to Dorchester. And although Mary sometimes brought her partner with her to Lincoln, she had made this visit alone. There was no one to help carry the watermelon or any of the other items Mary toted. Nor was there anyone to keep her company as the silence closed in around her. All she could hear were the whispering of the pines Thoreau described as so close to the road they would “scrape both sides of a chaise at once.”

    As Thoreau well knew and as he points out in his journal on the occasion of reporting what happened next, “Walden Woods . . . had a rather bad reputation for goblins and so on in those days.” As a young child, he had heard reports from other children about an Indian doctor living there who “caught small boys and cut out their livers to make medicine.” More recently, Mary’s brother George had told him of once hearing a “colored woman . . . somewhat witch-like,” mutter something like an incantation over the contents of a cauldron she was stirring in a small hut in Walden Woods. “Ye are all bones, bones!” she cackled in what George described as a “shrill” voice. Thoreau had heard too of a “large, round, and black” fortune-teller who had lived just down the road from the witch. Having presumably heard these same stories from her brother or other locals, Mary became anxious as she approached the remnants of the dwellings in which these notorious characters once lived. The watermelon, Thoreau notes, “did not grow any lighter, though frequently shifted from arm to arm.” Quickening her pace, Mary failed to keep her grip on the slippery melon. It smashed to pieces “in the middle of the Walden road.” Thoreau muses only half seriously that the accident might have been caused by “one of those mischievous goblins.” Certainly Mary thought so. Her brother reported to Thoreau that, “trembling,” she stopped only to gather the choicest pieces of fruit in her handkerchief before she “flew rather than ran with them to the peaceful streets of Concord.” In Walden, Thoreau draws on Mary’s experience of the Walden road, writing that “women and children who were compelled to go this way to Lincoln alone and on foot did it with fear, and often ran a good part of the distance.”