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Backhoe work done in 2002 at Thoreau's Beech Spring in Walden Woods, Lincoln, Mass.

Comparison of conditions before and after the excavation.

1995

 The wild Beech Spring
The above picture of the site of the Beech Spring was taken July 15, 1995, when Cathleen C. found a rare hybrid warbler on an overhanging bough, the Lawrence's Warbler (at left). Click images for larger. The old beech is at the right.

1995

 Beech Spring in Walden Woods - middle distance

The Beech Spring emerges from between the roots of the old beech on the right. The pool appeared to be about two feet across.

The private property on which the spring is located is the subject of a ca. 1980 conservation restriction held by the Lincoln Land Conservation Trust. Public access is permitted under a separate easement granted ca. 1982. Town conservation land is adjacent in the upper right of the photo and Thoreau Institute-Walden Woods Project boundary is about thirty yards uphill.

1995

 
Approaching closer, this view above has been the look of Thoreau's Beech Spring: small, secret, natural, and quite wonderful. It comes out from under the same giant beech as in Thoreau's day.

The next two pictures were taken in June and July of 2002 from approximately the same point, but they show a very different scene.

June

2002

 Backhoe work ar beech spring in spring 2002
Above is a picture of back-hoe work at Thoreau's Beech Spring, taken June 6, 2002.

Recent track marks of a backhoe are evident. The bank to the left is bare ground. The backhoe has scooped out the spring, creating a new rectangular pool ca. 6 feet wide and 10 feet long. The excavated material is piled nearby in the ferns. The roots of the adjacent old beech have been exposed. The Lincoln Conservation Commission said that the owner did not apply for a wetlands permit for this work or work on the nearby dam, and did not obtain permission from the Land Trust under the conservation restriction.

The conservation commission met with the owner in June 2002..

July

2002
Further digging was done in the next six weeks. Above is the condition of the Beech Spring on July 28, 2002. This is the same view as in the prior photos.

The pool has been further excavated to 7 x 15 feet. The roots of the beech have been further exposed, and the bole has been further undercut. A small "dam" has been built. It looks like an ornamental pool or a wading pond and not like a natural spring.
  

Also a worrisome issue:
The old beech tree's roots are now much more exposed
and the bole has been undercut.

Roots

in

July

2002

 July 2002 more exposed beech tree roots
  On July 28, 2002, this shows the further exposure of the roots at right and the apparent undercutting of the bole at left. For other root pictures, click here.
 

Not having heard anything from the Lincoln Conservation Commission since early June, I called on August 8 and was told they had visited the spring and had decided to do nothing to restore the spring. A Lincoln naturalist visited the spring on September 15, 2002 and took the picture below of the ugly, dried-up mud hole. He deplored the work "at that beautiful and historic place."

Sept.
2002
Also about September 15, 2002, the Lincoln Land Conservation Trust decided not to take action under its conservation restriction.
 
The Beech Spring was a unique natural and historic feature of the town worthy of protection independent of its Thoreau connection, but the Thoreau connection is surely an important additional attribute. It is not clear to me what the Beech Spring looked like in Thoreau's time. Thoreau says (below) that he removed the accumulated leaves (a good thing to do), but I'm confident he didn't use a backhoe. I don't think there is (or was) another spring like this in Lincoln. It had returned to its wild state and is (or was) a natural and historic resource of the community (which the conservation commission and the land trust are both charged with protecting). But the excavation is now so large I can't even discern that the water is the result of a spring, rather than being a depression that has simply been filled with surface flow. And those exposed roots and undercut bole look like a bad idea.

I think the spring should be spring-like, and as natural and traditionally historic as possible. And the old beech should be treated conservatively. In absence of evidence to the contrary, the site should not vary too much from a natural appearance. And the site should be restored.
 
Thoreau's Journal, May 15, 1856. "Cleared out the Beech Spring, which is a copious one. So I have done some service, though it was a wet and muddy job. Cleared out a spring while you have been to the wars. Now that warmer days make the traveller thirsty, this becomes an important work. This spring was filled and covered with a great mass of beech leaves, amid and beneath which, damp and wet as they were, were myriads of snow-fleas and also their white exuvii; the latter often whitening a whole leaf, mixed with live ones. It looks as if for coolness and moisture --which the snow had afforded-- they were compelled to take refuge here."
 

A fine article about the Beech Spring and its environs is reproduced below:

(Thoreau Society Bulletin Editor's Note: The following article appeared in The Concord Journal [and The Lincoln Journal on July 7, 1994] and describes the property that the Society's current headquarters—the Thoreau Institute—is located on [which is adjacent to the property on which is located the Beech Spring]. Probably no one else knows Thoreau's haunts so well as Walter Brain, who is a resident of Lincoln in addition to being a member of the Thoreau Society, a director of the Thoreau Country Conservation Alliance, and a landscape architect.)
Beech Spring, Thoreau Institute description [This article was also printed in the Thoreau Society Bulletin Issue 211 (spring/summer 1995). Printing errors were corrected by author in 2002.]

Thoreau's Beech Spring
still flows in Walden Woods'
old Jacob Baker Farm

by J. Walter Brain

[Photo Caption from Concord Saunterer: "Thoreau would revisit this beech tree on the edge of Institute property to clean the spring at its roots." Photo by Jason Taylor.]
Thoreau's Beech Spring, "which is a copious one," the bard entered in his journal for May of 1856, still flows today, even as summer crests, and feeds a little bourne that winds between shallow banks to an impoundment down a short run. Thoreau cleaned this spring once, "a wet and muddy job," he confessed in the same 1856 journal entry, feeling that he had "done some service." As the poet-philosopher put it, "Cleared out a spring while you have been to the wars. Now that the warmer days make the traveler thirsty, this becomes an important work." The spring, he tells us, "was filled and covered with a great mass of beech leaves," just as it appears today.
The spring, and the beech grove it issues from, which Thoreau "discovered" in 1850, lie in the glacial channel at Jacob Baker's Farm in the Lincoln side of Walden Woods. A substantial part of what was known in Thoreau's time as the Jacob Baker Farm (not to be confused with the Baker Farm of Walden fame, also in Lincoln, owned by James Baker, brother to Jacob) is currently in the process of acquisition for conservation purposes.

Seat of the New Thoreau Educational Center
The 18-acre property, with the grand Tudor-style mansion in it, is being purchased from the Adams family of Lincoln by the Walden Woods Project, culmination of a protection effort initiated in the summer of 1993 by the Thoreau Country Conservation Alliance and supported by the Thoreau Society and the Lincoln Conservation Commission. Don Henley, founder of the Walden Woods Project, once again comes to the rescue of historic Walden Woods. The Tudor-style mansion, built in 1905 by Alexander Henry Higginson for his own residence and seat of his Middlesex Hunt Club, will now become the seat of the newly-founded Thoreau Educational Center, to be managed and operated by The Thoreau Society under a special agreement with the Walden Woods Project.

The Glacial Channel

The Glacial Channel at Jacob Baker's Farm, with Thoreau's beechen grove and Beech Spring in its secluded lap, is a glaciated wooded valley lying between Pine Hill and Bare Hill, in Lincoln, within the historic and physiographic boundaries of Walden Woods. The deep ice-age valley was the channel through which Glacial Lake Concord spilled into Glacial Lake Sudbury. The valley is of historical, geological, and botanical interest, and lies contiguous to Lincoln conservation lands on Pine Hill, Bare Hill, and, across Sandy Pond Road, with the woods surrounding Flint's Pond. The valley merits protection as an integral part of the ecology and history of Walden Woods.
The Glacial Channel runs for about one-half mile on a roughly northeast to southwest gradient from Sandy Pond Road to the Adams impoundment above the meadows and fields of the old Jacob Baker Farm, of which the channel was also part in the middle of the 19th century. The channel valley, although first carved by ice as the glacier pushed its way south, plucking rock along an old fault line, was later reshaped and aggraded by water after the ice retreated north and the valley became a spillway between glacial lakes. The valley was further aggraded and molded by erosional processes into its present smoothly contoured cross-section, with gentle to slightly steep valley slopes, and a wet, narrow bottom which widens as the valley gradient dips, braided with rills, seepage pools, and a spring.

Oaks, Maples, Ferns
Red and scarlet oaks, white ashes, and sweet birches rise from the valley slopes, with tall arrowy white pines shooting up among them, over an understory of common witch hazels. Red maples rise from the valley bottom, mixed with sweet birches and white oaks, and, in wet places, with slender black ashes. A dense fernery creeps up the slopes from the wet, sphagnum-covered bottom, among thickets of silky cornel, clethra, clammy azalea, spicebush, arrow-wood, witch-hazel, and great panicled hydrangeas. Slender New York ferns grow densest along the narrow path at the foot of the western valley slope together with lace-like spinulose wood ferns; with ranks of marsh ferns like plumed soldiery below the path, with the larger cinnamon and interrupted ferns down in the valley floor. Extensive beds of hay-scented ferns creep up-slope from the path, affording the traveler a whiff of their fragrance. Wild sarsaparilla and Indian cucumber-root also line the path. Indian poke and skunk cabbage grow in the bottom, among the rills and pools. Hermit thrushes nest in these slopes, as they do all over Walden's wooded hills. Scarlet tanagers, wood pewees, wood thrushes, towhees, catbirds, red-eyed vireos, and pileated woodpeckers also make abode in this wooded dale.

Thoreau's Beeches
An extensive beechen grove of old and young trees, with saplings and whips suckering from the mesh of old roots, clads the slopes to both sides of the valley bottom, about half-way down the length of the channel. This large stand is an extension of the smaller but older stand further down valley which Thoreau knew as The Beeches, and celebrated in his journal.
Thoreau observed of the native beech that it had "almost disappeared from Concord woods," and listed it "among our rarer trees," together with the black or sweet birch and the hornbeam, all three far more common today, and vouched upon his discovery of this "small grove of breeches. . .standing by a little run which at length makes its way through Jacob Baker's meadow," that is was "worth the while to go some mile only to see a single beech tree." The little run mentioned by Thoreau flows from the spring that issues from under the bole and roots of a massive old beech tree, lowermost in the small grove, which consists today of seven venerable old trees. The beechen grove, regenerated from its own mesh of roots, may be well be the oldest station of American beech in the Concord region.

A Spring for a Parched Soul
On a hot forenoon last summer I set out for the Beech Spring. What a destination for a man with a parched soul! The very thought of a source from the cool caverns of the earth, the anticipation of coming by a sparkle of water flowing out of the ground quenched at once all my thirsts. The spring issued from a cavity under the bole of an ancient, gnarled beech tree and trickled over a bed of sand and pebbles. I wetted my palms and face and neck in humble ablution as a wood pewee sang from near the source a lyric strain as pure and transparent as the rill that flowed by my knees. Catbirds poked about, mewing from the hydrangea coverts which arched down the brook. Chewinks sang too, that tinkle of a song which sparkles in the ear. Chickadees, their ranks replenished with young and novel cheer, descended to the spring and sought there the same refreshment I had.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Other articles about the Beech Spring in Walden Woods:

Foundations for the Castle:
Building the Thoreau Institute

[The following extracts concerning the Beech Spring and beech grove are from “Foundations for the Castle: Building the Thoreau Institute,” which was compiled by Jason Taylor in The Concord Saunterer, N.S. vol. 6 (1998): 6–24.]

.... The Walden Woods Project acquired the Thoreau Institute property [in Lincoln, Mass.] in 1994 because of its historical and environmental significance. ...  During Thoreau’s lifetime the land was owned by Jacob Baker, who lived at the entrance to the road now called Baker Farm....Throughout his life, Thoreau came back to the area now surrounding the Institute, sometimes to take in the view from Pine Hill toward Flint’s Pond to the east and Walden Pond to the west, other times to gather berries and nuts, or again to study the flora and fauna. His interest in these grounds rose considerably when, on January 5, 1850, he “discovered,” as he termed it, the “small grove of beeches … between Walden and Flint’s Ponds, standing by a little run which at length makes its way through Jacob Baker’s meadow and a deep broad ditch which he has dug and emptied into the river.”
            He was a frequent caller from then on, for the once-plentiful beech was “a tree which has almost disappeared from Concord woods.”  Thoreau’s small beech grove occupies a part of today’s Institute grounds.  At its foot, a few feet from the southern boundary, is Beech Spring, which Thoreau periodically visited and cleaned: “Cleared out the Beech Spring, which is a copious one,” he wrote.  “So I have done some service, though it was a muddy job…. Now that warmer days make the traveller thirsty, this becomes an important work.”
            The beech grove furnished a striking encounter on June 12, 1852.  Thoreau had walked from his home on Main Street in Concord to Bear Garden Hill, Walden Pond, and Pine Hill, where he “disturbed a partridge & her brood”; then he walked down to where the Institute now stands to check up on the beech trees and, in particular, a hawk’s nest.  Thoreau stated in his journal that a “young hawk was perched now four or five feet above the nest,” that the mother would not go to the nest while he was in sight, and that she “pursues me half a mile when I withdraw.”,,,

To attend chiefly to the desk or schoolhouse, while we neglect the scenery in which it is placed, is absurd. —Henry David Thoreau

From President’s Column by Elizabeth Witherell, Thoreau Society Bulletin 221/222 (fall 1997/winter 1998):

What is the Thoreau Institute?

The Thoreau Institute is a center for research and education focused on Henry D. Thoreau, his literary achievements and philosophy, and his influence on environmental and social movements. The physical property on which the Thoreau Institute sits is located just across the Concord town line, in Lincoln, Mass., between Pine Hill and Beech Spring; the land was purchased by the Isis Fund/Walden Woods Project in 1994 because of its historical and environmental significance and because it was vulnerable to development.

From an undated Thoreau Institute brochure:

Thoreau Institute: Research Center

A walk to the Beech Spring in autumn inspired the design of the Walden Woods carpets [in the Henley Library], hand-knotted by Mansour. The sub-dappled forest floor was littered with fallen leaves of maple and oak, the holly berries ripe. the pinecones full and open, the ferns lying down at the end of their season.

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