August 24.
A. M. – Ride to Austin Bacon’s, Natick.
On the left hand, just this side the centre of Wayland, I measure the largest, or northernmost, of two large elms standing in front of an old house. At four feet from the ground, where, looking from one side, is the smallest place between the ground and the branches, it is seventeen feet in circumference, but there is a bulge on the north side for five feet upward. At five feet it divides to two branches, and each of these soon divides again.
A. Bacon showed me a drawing apparatus which he said he invented, very simple and convenient, also microscopes and many glasses for them which he made.
Showed me an exotic called “cypress,” which he said had spread from the cemetery over the neighboring fields. Did not know what it was. Is it not Euphorbia Cyparissias? and does it not grow by the north roadside east of Jarvis's [Also at J. Moore's front yard]?
I measured a scarlet oak northeast of his house, on land of the heirs of John Bacon, which at seven feet from the ground, or the smallest place below the branches, was ten feet eight inches in circumference, at one foot from ground sixteen and one fourth feet in circumference. It branched at twelve feet into three. Its trunk tapered or lessened very gradually and regularly from the ground to the smallest place, after the true Eddystone Lighthouse fashion. It has a large and handsome top, rather high than spreading (spreads about three and a half rods), but the branches often dead at the ends. This has grown considerably since Emerson measured; vide his account. Bacon says that E. pronounced it the largest oak in the State.
Showed us an elm on the north side of the same field, some ten feet in circumference, which he said was as large in 1714, his grandmother having remembered it nearly so long. There was a dead Rhus radicans on it two inches in diameter.
In the meadow south of this field, we looked for the Drosera filiformis, which formerly grew there, but could not find it. Got a specimen of very red clover, said to be from the field of Waterloo, in front of the house near the schoolhouse on the hill. Returned eastward over a bare hill with some walnuts on it, formerly called Pine Hill, from whence a very good view of the new town of Natick.
On the northeast base of this hill Bacon pointed out to me what he called Indian corn-hills, in heavy, moist pasture ground where had been a pine wood. The hillocks were in irregular rows four feet apart which ran along the side of the hill, and were much larger than you would expect after this lapse of time. I was confident that if Indian, they could not be very old, perhaps not more than a century or so, for such could never have been made with the ancient Indian hoes, – clamshells, stones, or the like, — but with the aid of plows and white men's hoes. Also pointed out to me what he thought the home site of an Indian squaw marked by a buckthorn bush by the wall.
These hillocks were like tussocks with lichens thick on them, and B. thought that the rows were not running as a white man's with furrow.
We crossed the road which runs east and west, and, in the low ground on the south side, saw a white oak and a red maple, each forty or fifty feet high, which had fairly grown together for three or more feet upward from the ground. Also, nearby, a large white ash which though healthy bore a mark or scar where a branch had been broken off and stripped down the trunk.
B. said that one of his ancestors, perhaps his grandfather, before the Revolution, went to climb this tree, and reached up and took hold of this branch, which he stripped down, and this was the scar!
Under the dead bark of this tree saw several large crickets of a rare kind. They had a peculiar naked and tender look, with branched legs and a rounded incurved front.
Red cohosh grows along a wall in low ground close by. We ascended a ridge hill northeast of this, or east by south of Bacon’s house, on the north end of which Squaw Poquet, as well as her father, who was a powwow, before her, lived. Bacon thought that powwows commonly withdrew at last to the northeast side of a hill and lived alone. We saw the remains of apple trees in the woods, which she had planted.
B. thought apple trees did not now grow so large in New England as formerly, that they only grew to be one foot in diameter and then began to decay, whereas they formerly grew to be two or three and even sometimes four feet in diameter.
The Corallorhiza multiflora was common in these woods, and out.
The Galium circæzans leaves taste very much like licorice and, according to B., produce a great flow of water, also make you perspire and are good for a cold.
We came down northward to the Boston and Worcester turnpike, by the side of which the Malaxis liliifolia grows, though we did not find it.
We waded into Coos Swamp on the south side the turnpike to find the ledum, but did not succeed. B. is sure it grows there. This is a large swamp with a small pond, or pond-hole, in the midst and the usual variety of shrubs. I noticed small spruces, high blueberry, the water andromeda, rhodora, Vaccinium dumosum (hairy) ripe, Kalmia glauca, Decodon verticillatus, etc.
B. says that the arbor-vitae grows indigenously in pretty large patches in Needham; that Cochituate Pond is only between three and four miles long, or five including the meadows that are flowed, yet it has been called even ten miles long.
B. gave me a stone with very pretty black markings like jungermannias, from a blasting on the aqueduct in Natick. Some refer it to electricity.
According to Guizot at the Montreal meeting the other day, Mt. Washington is 6285 feet above high water mark at Portland.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 24, 1857
The Corallorhiza multiflora was common in these woods. . . See note to
August 13, 1857.
From the
New York Times August 12, 1861 ("In 1851, Prof. GUYOT established the height of Mount Washington at 6,291 feet, by the most careful barometrical observations; and subsequently, in the same year or next succeeding one, the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad Company caused a measurement by the spirit level, by W.A. GOODWIN, Esq., Civil Engineer, who fixed the height at 6,285 feet. The engineers of the Coast Survey, in 1853, found the height of Mount Washington 6,293 feet, by a similar measurement. These slight differences arose from a variation of the base line or the different methods of ascertaining the sea level. The mean of the two measurements by GUYOT and GOODWIN, 6,288 feet, has been adopted as the true height of the summit of Mount Washington.")
B. says Cochituate Pond is only between three and four miles long, or five including the meadows that are flowed. See November 7, 1851 ("It must be the largest lake in Middlesex."). See also
Annual Report of the Cochituate Water Board For 1851. ( The Pond within the towns of Framingham , Wayland and Natick is nearly three and one half miles long. It naturally discharges into the Sudbury River about 14 miles above Concord where the Sudbury joins the Assabet to form the Concord River.)
