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March 1823. Concord Mass.

The Thoreau family moves to the Josiah Jones house, a brick house on the corner of Walden Road and Main Street, after Henry D. Thoreau’s maternal uncle, Charles, had discovered a graphite mine nearby and asked Thoreau’s father to join the business of manufacturing pencils.

(Journal, 8:65; The Days of Henry Thoreau, 16; The Life of Henry David Thoreau, 36)

Henry D. Thoreau recalls, in a journal entry dated 7 January 1856, some events at this house:

  Mother tells how, at the brick house, we each had a little garden a few feet square, and I came in one day, having found a potato just sprouted, which by her advice I planted in my garden. Ere long John came in with a potato which he had found and had it planted in his garden,—“Oh, mother, I have found a potato all sprouted. I mean to put it in my garden,” etc. Even Helen is said to have found one. But next I came crying that somebody had got my potato, etc., etc., but it was restored to me as the youngest and original discoverer, if not inventor, of the potato, and it grew in my garden, and finally its crop was dug by myself and yielded a dinner for the family.  I was kicked down by a passing ox. Had a chicken given me by Lidy—Hannah—and peeped through the keyhole at it. Caught an eel with John. Went to bed with new boots on, and after with cap. “Rasselas” given me, etc., etc. Asked P. [Phebe] Wheeler, “Who owns all the land?” Asked Mother, having got the medal for geography, “Is Boston in Concord?” If I had gone to Miss Wheeler a little longer, should have received the chief prize book, “Henry Lord Mayor,” etc., etc.
(Journal, 8:94-95)
March 1847.

Part 1 of Thoreau’s “Thomas Carlyle and His Works” is published in Graham’s Magazine.

Walden Pond. Thoreau writes the Hannah Dustan section of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers while continuing revisions (Revising Mythologies, 255).

Concord, Mass. A. Bronson Alcott writes in his journal:

  I was conversing last evening with Thoreau, and it appears to us that, save for Emerson, we have no masters of pure thought and composition on this side of the Atlantic in these days. Nor were Emerson’s merits of the higher order. Continuity and flow were wanting, as we find them in some of the older poets . . . Thoreau’s is a walking Muse, winged at the anklets and rhyming her steps. The ruddiest and nimblest genius that has trodden our woods, he comes amidst mists and exhalations, his locks dripping with moisture, in the sonorous rains of an ever-lyric day. His genius insinuates itself at every pore of us, and eliminates us into the old elements again. A wood-nymph, he abides on the earth and is a sylvan soul. If he could but clap wings to his shoulders or brow and spring forthright into the cope above sometimes, instead of beating the bush and measuring his tread along the march-sides and the river’s sedge and sand, and taking us to some Maine or indian wilderness, and peopling the woods with the Sileni and all the dryads.

  But this fits him all the better for his special task of delineating these yet unspoiled American things, and of inspiring us with a sense of their homelier beauties—opening to us the riches of a nation scarcely yet discovered by her own population . . .

  Thoreau took his position in Nature, where he was in deed and in spirit—a genius of the natural world, a savage mind amidst savage faculties, yet adorned with the graces of a civilization which he disowned, but celebrating thereby Nature still.

(The Journals of Bronson Alcott, 192-194)
March 1848. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau reworks the “Friendship” section and corrects other parts of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Revising Mythologies, 255).

March 1849. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau receives the proof sheets of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Revising Mythologies, 255).

March 1853. New York, N.Y.

The third of five installments of Thoreau’s “An Excursion to Canada” appears in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine.

March 1855. New York, N.Y.

Knickerbocker Magazine reviews Walden.

John Lewis Russell writes an article entitled “Visit to the Locality of the Climbing Fern” in the Magazine of Horticulture. [See 16 August 1854].

March 26. Walden Pond. 1846.

Thoreau writes in his journal:

The change from foul weather to  fair, from dark, sluggish hours to serene, elastic ones,  is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. The change from foulness to serenity is instantaneous. Suddenly an influx of light, though it was late, filled my  room. I looked out and saw that the pond was already calm and full of hope as on a summer evening, though  the ice was dissolved but yesterday. There seemed to  be some intelligence in the pond which responded to the unseen serenity in a distant horizon. I heard a robin  in the distance, the first I had heard this spring, repeating the assurance. The green pitch [pine] suddenly looked brighter and more erect, as if now entirely washed and cleansed by the rain. I knew it would not rain any more. A serene summer-evening sky seemed  darkly reflected in the pond, though the clear sky was nowhere visible overhead. It was no longer the end of a season, but the beginning. (Journal, 1:400)
March and April 1851. Concord, Mass.

Thoreau surveys land on Virginia Road for James McCafferty (A Catalog of Thoreau’s Surveys in the Concord Free Public Library, 9; Henry David Thoreau papers. Special Collections, Concord (Mass.) Free Public Library).

May 1837. Cambridge, Mass.

Thaddeus William Harris and Henry David Thoreau, along with some other friends, found Harvard’s Natural History Society

(Henry David Thoreau: A life, 68)

May 1845. Walden Pond.

Thoreau writes in Walden:

  At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some of my acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for neighborliness than from any necessity, I set up the frame of my house. No man was ever more honored in the character of his raisers than I.
(Walden, 49)

Thoreau’s helpful acquaintances were Ralph Waldo Emerson, A. Bronson Alcott, William Ellery Channing, George William Curtis, Burrill Curtis, Edmund Hosmer, John Hosmer, Edmund Hosmer Jr., and Andrew Hosmer (The Days of Henry Thoreau, 181).

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