Thoreau family moves from Concord to the Proctor house next to the church in Chelmsford (The Days of Henry Thoreau, 11-12). They live there until about April 1821 (Journal, 8:65).
In a journal entry of 7 January 1856, Henry D. Thoreau recalls some events at the house:
  They tell how I swung on a gown [?] on the stairway when I was at Chelmsford. The gown [?] gave way; I fell and fainted, and it took two pails of water to bring me to, for I was remarkable for holding my breath in those cases.  Mother tried to milk the cow which Father took on trial, but she kicked at her and spilt the milk. (They say a dog had bitten her teats.) Proctor laughed at her as a city girl, and then he tried, but the cow kicked him over, and he finished by beating her with his cowhide shoe. Captain Richardson milked her warily, standing up. Father came home, and thought he would brustle right up to her for she needed much to be milked, but suddenly she lifted her leg and struck him fair and square right in the muns, knocked him flat, and broke the bridge of his nose, which shows it yet. He distinctly heard her hoof rattle on his nose. This started the claret, and, without stanching the blood, he at once drove her home to the man he had her of. She ran at some young women by the way, who saved themselves by getting over the wall in haste.
Father complained of the powder in the meetinghouse garret at town meeting, but it did not get moved while we lived there. Here he painted over his old signs for guide-boards, and got a fall when painting Hale’s (?) factory. Here the bladder John was playing with burst on the hearth. The cow came into the entry after pumpkins. I cut my toe, and was knocked over by a hen with chickens, etc., etc.
William Ellery Channing recalls hearing stories of the Thoreaus’ time in Chelmsford from Thoreau’s mother:
. . . being complained of for taking a knife belonging to another boy, Henry said, I did not take it, and was believed. In a few days the culprit was found out. He then said,I knew all the time who it was. The day it was taken I went to Newton with father. Why did you not say so at the time I did not take it was the reply. At the earlier age of three, being told that he must die, like the men in the catechism, he said, as he came in from coasting, that he did not want to die and go to Heaven, if he could not take his sled with him; the boys said it was not worth a cent, because it was not shod with iron.
(Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist, 18-19)
