Thoreau's Map of the Concord River

From Kristen Case, Kalender:

Thoreau's data gathering for the farmers overlapped with his creation of a seven-and-a-half-foot-long scroll map, copied from a map drawn in 1834 by B. F. Perham and filled in with Thoreau's personal notations. These include not only descriptions of the river's current in various places but also more subjective data: the good swimming holes, as well as the location of his "boat place." Finally, the map identifies "what plants grow where: individual oak and ash trees, polygonum, bulrush, and many others." In this way, the river survey is analogous to the charts of general phenomena. Both projects seek to unite the methods of science with personal, subjective experience—to attain the double perspective of the poet-naturalist.

 

from other source, Daegan Miller

in July 1859

It had been drawn in 1834 by B. F. Perham, under the supervision of the highly regarded surveyor Loammi Baldwin, and in 1859 it was still considered legally up to date. Its greatest strength was its generic beauty. It was a map that looked like any other, a map that outlined the river’s arcing course, the area’s political boundaries, the towns’ notable buildings. It had five bridges and, at the very top, the river’s notable statistics: length, 22 miles, 802 feet; vertical fall, 2.865 feet. It confidently offered itself as objective, naturalistic, reliable, passive, a true transcript of raw, uninhabited space. All of it aggravated Thoreau.....

Thoreau began by tracing the outlines of Baldwin’s and Perham’s map and then reusing them for his own. 74 But the similarities end at the sketched-in river’s banks, for Thoreau’s map is alive with a riot of thousands of tiny notations — most in variously hued pen’s ink, but some, ghostly, in pencil — including particular comments about the river’s current: “shallow and quick” in some places, “sandbars and grass,” “soft banks,” in others. And there’s a sense of the river’s human use. Thoreau notes, just downstream from the Turnpike bridge, “1st cottage,” and just a little below, the “boat pl.,” from where he and his friend Channing began their riverine explorations. Elsewhere he marks the good swimming holes. He points out the cultural and historical geography of the river: where an old hay bridge once stood, where one might find freshwater clams, the monument to the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1776. And he carefully details, in scores of places, what plants grow where: individual oak and ash trees, polygonum, bulrush, and many others. 75 The sharp-eyed Thoreau had gained his townspeople’s respect as an exacting surveyor, but here he was after something wilder. His map plunges its viewer headfirst into the chaotic mystery of a river called Concord, and it all begins in a cloud of cartographic disorientation with Thoreau’s refusal to give the map a coherent name.

The map is overwhelmingly long — seven-and-a-half feet — which means that its viewer actually has to walk its length, must reenact, in miniature, an afternoon’s boating trip.