By necessity, however, Black Walden is also the story of Concord’s slave owners. Their needs, real and imagined, fueled and shaped slavery and ultimately the Walden landscape. As such, the first half of this book is mainly concerned with the many intimate details of their lives that made slavery seem imperative to them. This part of the book is centered on John Cuming, one of the wealthy gentlemen whose vast estates dotted the landscape and whose large, opulent mansion houses presided over it. He and the town’s other gentlemen residents were afforded the time to practice their professions and rule the town’s and eventually the nation’s civic affairs by the slaves, servants, and hired hands who did the necessary work of raising food for their owners. John Cuming was wealthier and more prominent than most. Long after his death, the town went so far as to declare holidays in his honor. John Cuming was also Brister Freeman’s master for a quarter of a century. It seems more than coincidental that the town’s leading patriarch was also the owner of the slave who cut the widest swath in Concord. Left to manage John Cuming’s estate during his master’s many absences, Brister Freeman learned a wide array of farming and other survival skills. And in watching his owner rule a town, he learned what it takes to navigate local politics.

    Unlike Brister Freeman, whose name survives in Walden the book and at Walden the place, where a hill bears his name, John Cuming has been largely forgotten. His reputation was first eclipsed when Ralph Waldo Emerson moved to Concord in 1835. It was buried soon thereafter when the minutemen became the nation’s symbol of all that was independent and good in the United States. John Cuming was not the sort of independent farmer memorialized in the Minuteman Statue. His vast estate was tilled by slaves and hired men. Broken up long ago, it is now the site of a state prison and his mansion house the site of a prison office building. The Cuming name survives locally only on a medical building, a small tribute to John’s career as a doctor. But until his story and those of his gentlemen contemporaries are fully told, Walden Woods will continue to appear wholly separate from the estates, or plantations, whose slaves seeded its black enclave. This is especially true in so far as the largest Concord slave estate, the Chambers-Russell-Codman estate, has been separated from Walden Woods since 1754 by a redrawn town boundary line that has long obfuscated the deep ties between the two.