Literary
LEGACY
Henry David Thoreau’s Green Desk
Excerpt from: An Observant Eye: The Thoreau Collection at the Concord Museum (2006)
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A simple green desk made in Concord, Massachusetts, in about 1838 by a cabinet-maker who charged perhaps one dollar for it, had a career in America’s intellectual history entirely out of proportion to its humble origin, because it was Henry Thoreau’s desk. Since it entered the Concord Museum collection, the desk has become a cornerstone of the Museum and a treasured American icon. Henry Thoreau is best known as the author of Walden, universally acknowledged to be one of the great books of American literature, and of “Civil Disobedience,” one of the most influential essays in the worldwide democratic tradition. Both were written at this desk. Henry Thoreau used this desk as schoolmaster. Shortly after graduating from Harvard in 1837, Thoreau began to teach school in Concord, first at the Central School and then in a school he set up with his brother John in the fall of 1838. This desk has an inscription on the inside of the backboard that reads “Summer of 1838.” For two years, John and Henry taught up to twenty students at a time, first at the Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau’s home (known Desk, about 1838 as the Parkman House, after an chair also in the Concord earlier owner), Museum collection. where some of the Thoreau took this desk students boarded. with him to the Emerson Later the school house, where he stayed for a was conducted at while after leaving Walden. the former Concord Thoreau wrote to Emerson Academy building. in 1847: “I sit before my The Thoreau green desk, in the chamber school, which was Henry D. Thoreau, 1862 at the head of the stairs, and called the Concord attend to my thinking….” Academy (it was neither the first nor the Thoreau was also attending to his last school of that name), was successful. writing. “Lectures begin to multiply on my Frank Sanborn, a friend of Thoreau’s desk,” he wrote to Emerson in 1848. For and his second biographer, wrote of the the rest of his life, Thoreau maintained school: “There every green desk was as regular a regimen of walking outdoors soon filled with pupils.” and reading and writing at home as he John Thoreau’s failing health made it could. The majority of Thoreau’s writing impossible for him to continue to teach – a draft of A Week on the Concord past the 1840 academic year, and in and Merrimack, the multiple drafts of 1842, he died. It was in part to write a Walden, the thousands of pages of the book in tribute to his brother that Henry journal, inspirational letters to Harrison Thoreau went to live at Walden Pond Gray Otis Blake, wearisome letters to in 1845, in a house he built himself on book publishers, as well as lectures, land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo magazine articles, and graphite invoices – Emerson. He had this desk with him was done at this desk. at Walden, as well as a bedstead and
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Photos Courtesy of the Concord Museum
BY DAVID F. WOOD, CURATOR
