A Ramble over the Peterboro Hills.

Spikenard, Mt. Prichard

September 6, 2020

September 6. 

Girls picking hops in Townsend.

Some fields are completely yellow — one mass of yellow — from the solidago. It is the prevailing flower the traveller sees.

Walked from Mason Village over the mountain tops to Peterboro.

Saw, sailing over Mason Village about 10 A. M., a white-headed and white-tailed eagle with black wings, —  a grand sight.

The “doubly compound racemed panicles” of the spikenard berries, varnish-colored berries, or color of varnished mahogany.

Met a crazy man, probably being carried to a hospital, who must take us both by the hand and tell us how the spirit of God had descended on him and given him all the world, and he was going to make every man a present of half a million, etc., etc. 

High blackberries by the roadside abundant still, the long, sweet, mulberry-shaped ones, mostly confined to the road, and very grateful to the walker.

A stone by the roadside in Temple, whitewashed, with an inscription in black, evincing the vulgarity of the Yankees, “Here Jesse Spofford was killed,” etc., etc., not telling how. Thus we record only the trivial, not the important event, as the advent of a thought. Who cares whether Jesse Spofford was killed or not, if he does not know whether he was worthy to live?

A man in Peterboro told me that his father told him that Monadnock used to be covered with forest, that fires ran through it and killed the turf; then the trees were blown down, and their roots turned up and formed a dense and impenetrable thicket in which the wolves abounded. They came down at night, killed sheep, etc., and returned to their dens, whither they could not be pursued, before morning; till finally they set fire to this thicket, and it made the greatest fire they had ever had in the county, and drove out all the wolves, which have not troubled them since.

He himself had seen one wolf killed there when he was a boy.

They kill now raccoons, hedgehogs, and wildcats there.

I thought that I did not see so great a proportion of forest from their hilltops as about Concord, to which they agreed. I should say their hills were uncommonly rocky, more stone than soil.



H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 6, 1852

Girls picking hops in Townsend. See September 5, 1856 ("Hereabouts women and children are already picking hops in the fields, in the shade of large white sheets, like sails.")

Some fields are completely yellow — one mass of yellow — from the solidago. September 7, 1858 ("It is an early September afternoon,. . . the field is yellowed with a Xerxean army of Solidago nemoralis between me and the sun . . .The dry deserted fields are one mass of yellow, like a color shoved to one side on Nature’s palette."); September 12, 1859 (" Many a dry field now, like that of Sted Buttrick's on the Great Fields, is one dense mass of the bright golden recurved wands of the Solidago nemoralis, waving in the wind and turning upward to the light hundreds, if not a thousand, flowerets each. It is the greatest mass of conspicuous flowers in the year,")

A white-headed and white-tailed eagle with black wings, — a grand sight. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The White-headed Eagle

The spikenard berries, varnish-colored berries, or color of varnished mahogany. See August 21, 1854 ("Spikenard berries are now mahogany-color. "); September 4, 1856 ("Aralia racemosa berries just ripe . . . not edible. "); September 4, 1859 ("See a very large mass of spikenard berries fairly ripening, eighteen inches long.")

High blackberries by the roadside abundant still. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Blackberries

Walked from Mason Village over the mountain tops to Peterboro. See September 7, 1852 ("Across lots to Monadnock, some half-dozen miles in a straight line from Peterboro"); September 27, 1852 ("Who can believe that the mountain peak which he beholds fifty miles off in the horizon, rising far and faintly blue above an intermediate range, while he stands on his trivial native hills or in the dusty high way, can be the same with that which he looked up at once near at hand from a gorge in the midst of primitive woods? For a part of two days I travelled across lots once, loitering by the way, through primitive wood and swamps over the highest peak of the Peterboro Hills to Monadnock, . . .I cannot realize that on the tops of those cool blue ridges are in abundance berries still, bluer than themselves, as if they borrowed their blueness from their locality. From the mountains we do not discern our native hills; but from our native hills we look out easily to the far blue mountains, which seem to preside over them. "); See also  February 21,1855 ("I look at the Peterboro mountains with my glass from Fair Haven Hill. I think that there can be no more arctic scene than these mountains in the edge of the horizon completely crusted over with snow, with the sun shining on them, seen through a telescope over bare, russet fields and dark forests, with perhaps a house on some remote, bare ridge seen against them.") 

They set fire to this thicket . . ., and drove out all the wolves, which have not troubled them since. See March 23, 1856 ("But when I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here, — the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverene, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc., etc., — I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country.")