The river is now open

March 27.

Uncle Charles died this morning, about midnight, aged seventy-six. 

The frost is now entirely out in some parts of the New Burying-Ground, the sexton tells me, — half-way up the hill which slopes to the south, unless it is bare of snow, he says. 

In our garden, where it chances to be bare, two or more rods from the house, I was able to dig through the slight frost. In another place near by I could not.

The river is now open in reaches of twenty or thirty rods, where the ice has disappeared by melting. 

Elijah Wood, Senior, about seventy, tells me he does not remember that the river was ever frozen so long, nor that so much snow lay on the ground so long. People do not remember when there was so much old snow on the ground at this date.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 27, 1856

The river is now open in reaches of twenty or thirty rods, where the ice has disappeared by melting. Elijah Wood does not remember that the river was ever frozen so long. See March 20, 1856 ("The river has just begun to open at Hubbard’s Bend. It has been closed there since January 7th, i. e. ten weeks and a half"); March 24, 1856 ("Go everywhere on the North Branch — it is all solid Yet last year I paddled my boat to Fair Haven Pond on the 19th of March! "); April 2, 1856.(" I returned down the middle of the river to near the Hubbard Bridge without seeing any opening. "); April 7, 1856 ("Launched my boat, through three rods of ice on the riverside, . . . . Surprised to find the river not broken up just above [Hubbard] bridge and as far as we can see, probably through Fair Haven Pond. Probably in some places you can cross the river still on the ice. . "); April 8, 1856 (" the pond and river still frozen over for the most part as far down as Cardinal Shore. "). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, A Book of the Seasons: Ice out