Thoreau writes in his journal:
11 A.M.—To Framingham.
A Lincoln man heard a flock of geese, he thinks it was day before yesterday. Measured a white oak in front of Mr. Billing’s new house, about one mile beyond Saxonville,—twelve and one twelfth feet in circumference at four feet from the ground (the smallest place within ten feet from the ground), fourteen feet circumference at ground, and a great spread. Frank’s place is on the Concord River within less than ten miles of Whitehall Pond in Hopkinton, one of [the sources], perhaps the principal source, of the river. I thought that a month hence the stream would not be twenty feet wide there. Mr. Wheeler, auctioneer, of Framingham, told me that the timber of the factory at Saxonville was brought by water to within about one mile of where the mill stands. There is a slight rapid. Brown says that he saw the north end of Long Pond covered with ice the 22d, and that R.W.E. [Ralph Waldo Emerson] saw the south end entirely open.