The segregation imposed in slavery’s wake set the stage for Henry David Thoreau’s experiment in independent living. In seeking to escape capitalism, war making, and other evils of modern life,Thoreau sought what he called a “wild” place where he could escape into nature and himself. By “wild,” he meant a place with relatively few people and little or no cultivation of the land. Walden Woods, the edge of the Great Field, and the Old Marlborough Road were three of the four “wild” tracts he identified in Concord. These places had remained uncultivated and uninhabited because the soil there was poor and because whites like Mary Minot avoided lingering, let alone building and living, in what they perceived as an impoverished and later haunted part of town. But for Thoreau, it was the marks left on the landscape by the former slaves and other outcasts as much as the plants and animals that made these areas so interesting and he thus devotes a section of Walden to their memory. That chapter, “Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors,” makes the case that the green spaces cherished in Concord today are not solely products of nature. They are the result of a highly stratified social order in which the highest echelon was comprised of Concord’s wealthiest residents, more than half of whom were slaveholders, and the bottom echelon of slaves who were shunted by their former owners onto Concord’s margins and left there to make a life for themselves as best they could. To put it more concisely, the history of slavery and its aftermath reveals that at least some of our nation’s cherished green spaces began as black spaces, with Walden Woods a particularly striking case in point.

    In what follows, I have reconstructed the life stories of several of Concord’s former slaves, both before and after their freedom, with a particular focus on the former slave who made the most lasting impact on the Walden landscape. Brister Freeman, as he named himself upon taking his freedom, seems to have been born at the Chambers-Russell estate, now called the Codman estate. (I say seems to have been because what little evidence survives about his childhood is largely, although not entirely, circumstantial.) But while relatively little is known of his early life, bits and pieces of his life after thirty-five years of slavery were widely known during his day and remembered long afterward. Stitching them back together reveals an exceptionally ambitious man. Understanding full well that social acceptance, economic prosperity, and even civil rights required property, he was the second former slave in Concord to purchase land there. He spent the rest of his life defending his right to own that land and to bequeath it to whom he pleased. It was a constant battle against town officials and other white men, one of whom almost cost Brister his life. The story of that life is told here for the first time.