Interesting to me are their habits and conversation who live along the shores of a great river.

April 27.

Haverhill. — The warbling vireo.

Talked with a fisherman, who was cracking and eating walnuts on a post before his hut.

He said he got twenty cents a stick for sawing marked logs, which were mostly owned at Lowell, but trees that fell in and whatever was not marked belonged to them. Much went by in the ice and could not be got.They haul it in and tie it.

He called it Little Concord where I lived. They got some small stuff which came from that river, and said he knew the ice, it was blue (it is not) and was turned over by the falls.

The Lawrence dam breaks up the ice so now that it will not be so likely to jam below and produce a freshet.

Said a thousand dollars' damage was done by a recent freshet to the farm just above, at the great bend. The wind blowing on to the shore ate it away, trees and all. In the greatest freshet he could remember, methinks about ten years ago, the water came up to his window-sill.

His family took refuge on the hillside.

His barn was moved and tipped over, his well filled up, and it took him, with help, a day or more to clear a passage through the ice from his door to his well. His trees were all prostrated by the ice. This was apparently between twenty and thirty feet above the present level.

Says the railroad bridge hurts the fishing by stopping the ice and wearing away and deepening the channel near the north shore, where they fish, — draw their seines. Call it sixty rods wide, — their seines being thirty rods long, and twenty-five feet deep in the middle.

Interesting to me are their habits and conversation who live along the shores of a great river.

The shore, here some seventy or eighty feet high, is broken by gullies, more or less sandy, where water has flowed down, and the cottages rise not more than one sixth or one seventh the way up.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 27, 1853

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The warbling vireo. See May 6, 1852 ("Hear the first warbling vireo this morning on the elms. This almost makes a summer."): May 10, 1853 ("New days, then, have come, ushered in by the warbling vireo, yellowbird, Maryland yellow-throat, and small pewee, and now made perfect by the twittering of the kingbird and the whistle of the oriole amid the elms")

Haverhill. —  See April 11, 1853 ("To Haverhill via Cambridge and Boston."); April 13, 1853 (" First shad caught at Haverhill to-day.");April 19, 1853 ("Haverhill. — Willow and bass strip freely."); April 21, 1853 ("Haverhill. — A peach tree in bloom."); April 23, 1853 ("Haverhill — Martins."); April 24, 1863 ("Sunday. To and around Creek Pond and back over Parsonage hill, Haverhill."); April 29, 1853 (" Return to Concord."); May 16, 1853 ("Had thunder-shower while I was in Haverhill in April.")

They got some small stuff which came from that river. See November 4, 1858 ("When the Haverhill fishermen told me that they could distinguish the Concord River stuff (i. e. driftwood) I see they were right, for much of it is chestnut rails, and of these they have but few.")