Today, you can see replicas of Thoreau’s house near Walden Pond in Massachusetts. In 1875, the rest of the structure was used as a shed before its timber was used to fix Clark’s barn. In 1868, the roof of the building was removed from the base and used to cover a pigsty. Clark moved it to his nearby farm and used it to store grain. The gardener never moved in, so the house was empty until a farmer named James Clark bought it in 1849. He sold the house to Emerson (it was on land that Emerson already owned), and Emerson sold it to his gardener. Henry David Thoreau's house at Walden Pond later became a pigsty.Īfter Thoreau left the home he built in Walden Woods in 1847, the structure went through multiple iterations. In an 1850 journal entry, Thoreau described how the earth was “uncommonly dry”-there hadn’t been much rain-and how the fire “spread rapidly.” Although he initially felt guilty, he wrote that he soon realized that fire is natural, and lightning could have sparked a fire in the woods just as easily as his cooking accident did. Even years later, his neighbors disparagingly called him a rascal and a woods burner. The grass around the fire ignited, and the flames burned between 100 and 300 acres of land, thanks to strong winds. In 1844, a year before moving into a house in Walden Woods, the 26-year-old Thoreau was cooking fish he had caught with a friend in the woods outside Concord.

Henry David Thoreau accidentally burned hundreds of acres of woods. After his father died, Thoreau ran the family’s pencil company. After researching German techniques for making pencils, he invented a grinding machine that made better quality plumbago (a mixture of the lead, graphite, and clay inside a pencil). Between teaching students, surveying land, and working as a handyman, Thoreau made money by working for his family’s pencil business. In the 1820s, Thoreau’s father started manufacturing black-lead pencils. Henry David Thoreau invented a machine to improve pencils. Although most people today pronounce Thoreau’s surname with the emphasis on the second syllable, he most likely pronounced it “THOR-oh.” Ralph Waldo Emerson’s son, Edward, wrote that the accent in Thoreau’s name was on the first syllable, and other friends called him “Mr. His legal name, though, was always David Henry. You're probably mispronouncing Henry David Thoreau's name.īorn in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817, David Henry Thoreau switched his first and middle names after graduating from Harvard. Here are some things you might not have known about Henry David Thoreau, who was born on July 12, 1817. Although most people know about Thoreau’s time in Walden Woods, as well as his Transcendentalism, abolitionist views, and writing on civil disobedience, there’s a lot more to uncover about him. In his book Walden, Henry David Thoreau declared his love of nature, simplicity, and independence.

Henry thoreau