His friend and fellow Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had recently purchased 14 acres of woodlot on the northwestern shore of Walden Pond, agreed to let the young writer conduct his "experiment in simplicity" there.
Near the end of March 1845, Thoreau borrowed an axe and began cutting and hewing the timber for a small, one-room house. With help from friends, he raised and roofed the simple building and, on July 4, 1845, he moved in.
When Thoreau chose a site for the one-room house in which he would live, he decided on a slightly overgrown slope above a cove. He had "a distant view of the railroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the fence which skirts the woodland road on the other."
Although less than a half hour's walk along the tracks to his parents' house, Thoreau's spot in Walden Woods was nevertheless a solitary place in the 1840s.
For the next two years, Thoreau spent most of his time studying the natural world around him.
He kept a regular journal, completed a draft of his first book, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", and made the first accurate survey of Walden Pond.
He took daily walks through Walden Woods, often stopping to visit family and friends in Concord village; on other occasions, he entertained visitors at his house in the woods.
Having, in his own words, "as many trades as fingers," he took on odd jobs as a carpenter, mason, and surveyor to earn the small amount of cash he needed to buy what he could not "grow or make or do without."
After two years, two months, and two days, Thoreau closed up his little house and returned to live in the village.
Thoreau's timeless account of his life at Walden would not be published until 1854.
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| A 1908 postcard showing the site of Thoreau's house |
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