Thoreau's country
Subtitle: journey through a transformed landscape
By: David R. Foster.
Contributors: Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 270
Subjects: Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862 -- Homes and haunts -- New England.; Foster, David R., 1954- -- Travel -- New England.; Authors, American -- 19th century -- Biography.; Landscape changes -- New England.; Natural history -- New England.; New England -- Intellectual life -- 19th century.; New England -- Description and travel.
Description: In 1977 David Foster took to the woods of New England to build a cabin with his own hands. Along with a few tools he brought a copy of the journals of Henry David Thoreau. Foster was struck by how different the forested landscape around him was from the one Thoreau described more than a century earlier. The sights and sounds that Thoreau experienced on his daily walks through nineteenth-century Concord were those of rolling farmland, small woodlands, and farmers endlessly working the land.

As Foster explored the New England landscape, he discovered ancient ruins of cellar holes, stone walls, and abandoned cartways - all remnants of this earlier land now largely covered by forest. How had Thoreau's open countryside, shaped by ax and plough, divided by fences and laneways, become a forested landscape? Part ecological and historical puzzle, this book brings a vanished countryside to life in all its dimensions, human and natural, offering a rich record of human imprint upon the land.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [250]-259) and index.