![]() ![]() Today, local residents are working to amplify those stories of Black Walden, a little-known chapter in the legacy of the antislavery movement. ![]() He devotes nearly half a chapter in Walden, titled “Former Inhabitants,” to telling their stories. Thoreau, the famous dissident and outspoken abolitionist, felt a certain kinship with this community and their lives on the fringes of society. They chose the place in part because of what it lacked: With its infertile soil, Walden Woods wasn’t considered valuable land and thus became a place for the town’s outcasts to live more freely. More than a dozen formerly enslaved Black Concord residents made Walden Woods their home decades before Thoreau’s arrival in 1845. ![]() Before the writer drew attention to this hallowed green space, it had already earned a place in America’s Black history. The now-famous stretch of idyllic woodland is where writer, philosopher, and iconoclast Henry David Thoreau went to live deliberately, commune with nature, and ultimately pen what would become his most famous work, Walden.Īs the legend is most often told, it was a solitary experiment-just Thoreau and the trees-in a stretch of what’s assumed to be previously untouched wilderness. It looms even larger, perhaps, in the lore of environmentalism. The legend of Walden Woods looms large in Concord, Massachusetts. ![]()
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