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Fall in Reading, Vermont
 

What's new on Steve Ells's two sites?

[Note: I retired this page in Sept 2005. If you get here, please click on one of the two links above. Thanks.]

This is a combined "What's New" site chronology log for both my personal site and my Thoreau research site (including the Estabrook Woods section). It's an update aid and is not a table of contents.

The most recent material is posted at the top:

* Updated September 7, 2005. Brace yourself. The orcs are in the Estabrook Woods. Middlesex School trustees have started clear-cutting 1200 feet within the Estabrook Woods. Their new permit pushes the soccer fields deeper into the Woods, allows Astroturf, doubles the number of tennis courts, and a 300' bridge provides access to tens of acres of other developable upland. Details and photos here.

Stunningly, the school trustees have turned down an offer of $5 million for an endowed environmental studies program, joint with Harvard (!!), in the Estabrook Woods. Click here for information.

Our flag is still flying in the dawn's early light.

* Updated June 1, 2005. I posted a family history page at http://home.earthlink.net/~ellsfam/index.html on Maine and Vermont folks, including William Witherell Eells & Sarah Eells of Hanover MA, whose six daughters and one younger son all migrated to Freeport, Maine 1783-1825. Go, gals!

* My separate Thoreau research site is back on line at <http://homepage.mac.com/sfe/henry/index.html>.

*Updated Feb. 27, 2004. On my research page is posted biographical info on American composer Ernest Trow Carter, 1866-1953. His comic opera "The Blonde Donna, or the Fiesta of Santa Barbara" was performed in concert version in Montpelier on Oct. 15, 2003 by the Vermont Opera Theater. One reviewer notes that one of Carter's operas, "The White Bird," made the first use in American opera of wild nature as a setting:

* Sept. 22, 2003. Family pictures added: a Hoisington family gathering at Windsor VT in September 2003. And new spring 2003 pictures are in the personal photo gallery of Dave's new digs on the Piscataqua, and on a different server for Jon's 37th birthday at the Black Cow in Newburyport, my grandchildren on Nate's and Perry's Maine sheep farm.

* Oct. 11, 2003. Thoreau's woodlands were full of the American Chestnut, a principal tree of the northeastern forest. A century ago, they were felled by a disease, though struggling sprouts can still be found in Walden Woods. Almost all die while still shrub-size, but rarely one flowers. This summer, a large (in modern times) specimen magnificently flowered, and its nuts are being harvested to add their genes to the chestnut restoration project. In October, some of the nuts were harvested for the restoration project (see the photos), and some were left for the squirrels.

* Updated March 30, 2004. It is possible that this is the first map showing the boundaries of the woods at Walden pond in Thoreau's time. Comments would be appreciated.

* Updated May 16, 2003: Hundreds of large wind towers are proposed for the waters off Crane's Beach, Cape Ann, Quissett (Falmouth), Highland Light (Truro), and Nantucket Sound and Shoals. Public comments were due May 16. Click here for maps and a copy of my comments to MEPA and the Corps of Engineers. One island birder says:

"The windmill thing is out of control and like a goldrush for developers with massive tax breaks, credits, incentives and free 'land' if you will. Impacts on wildlife, especially birds, not really identifiable until they are built and it is too late! Depressing all around."

* Does anyone have information about an interesting Revolutionary War diary of Edmund Gale from 1780-81. Where is the complete diary? (Updated 6 Mar 2004.)

* Updated January 25, 2003. The journal Appalachia is now on the street with my article on Frank Bolles (1856-1894), an almost-forgotten American author and naturalist. An interesting man of action and passions, he wrote of Chocorua and the Boston environs, researched birds, was an opinionated newspaperman, and served as Secretary of Harvard University. Houghton Mifflin once billed Bolles on a par with Thoreau and Burroughs, but Bolles died suddenly and young. It is the first comprehensive treatments of the man to be published. Click here for a collection of photos and materials on Bolles. Some of his writings are also posted here. I'd love to see Bolles's books back in print.

* Updated March 6, 2004 with an old and only photo of the lost Concord-Lincoln town boundary in Walden Pond: The granite post that once marked the Concord-Lincoln town boundary in Walden Pond may have been rediscovered. When re-erected, a historic feature will have been restored and the custom of perambulation memorialized. It will also be a reminder that Walden was a pond within the boundaries of both towns in Henry Thoreau's day, as it had been since 1754. Though only a small part of the pond was in Lincoln, this fact is of historic and legal interest, and is pertinent as to how Thoreau, a surveyor, naturalist, author, and mystic, viewed his world. Since the stone post has disappeared, the memory of the boundary has faded. The selectmen have asked the cooperation of the Walden Pond State Reservation in erecting the stone in a proper location. I hope this can be accomplished before the celebrations in 2004 of both Lincoln's 250th anniversary and the 150th anniversary of the publication of Walden. And before the next perambulation, which is due in 2005.

Also added, my image Walden Pond awaiting winter, November 2002:

Walden Pond panorama in late fall

* Update on September 15, 2002. Unfortunately, Thoreau's beautiful, natural Beech Spring on Pine Hill in Lincoln's part of Walden Woods has been back-hoed by its private owner to the size of a large wading pool or mud hole, despite the supposed protection of the wetlands law and a conservation restriction.

* Posted August 17, 2002 & updated. Almost fifty years ago I photographed the American Impressionist painter Morris Hall Pancoast. I had not seen his work since then, but today on the web I came across this luminous work. Click for my portrait of Pancoast and examples of his work.

 * In September 2002, a fine letter was written by the student organization Common Sense to the Middlesex School's trustees. It says, "We maintain that the [trustees'] proposal is ill-conceived. We believe that alternative building plans have been both poorly researched and prematurely rejected. The Estabrook Woods are too valuable a resource to dispense with so quickly and thoughtlessly....There is great irony in the fact that Phillips Exeter Academy finds itself constructing its own artificial wetlands in order to better serve its students, while Middlesex seems so willing to part with one of its most precious endowments....The project's proponents claim that a bridge into the Woods would ensure that Middlesex "keeps its options open." In fact, the only way we can ensure that no course of action remains closed to us is to consider carefully what is at stake, and act accordingly." Click here for a description of the Middlesex School's unfortunate development proposal in Estabrook Woods.

* Update of three items during 2002-2004 on Mina Goddard's 1889 paintings of Nantucket. Out of the internet blue I received interesting information about a livesaving award given to "Fred White and Jennie V. White Master of the schooner Mary E. Crosby," for saving three men at sea. This is the Nantucket tern schooner (above left) that was painted by Mina Keyes Goddard in ca. 1889. Her paintings were in our Vermont attic. To see more, scroll down this page.

Last year, the libraries at Mystic Seaport and Peabody Museum had confirmed that Nantucket was the 1880s-90s home port of the schooner, then it went to Portsmouth and Exeter NH, probably to work and die. On Labor Day, 2002, I noticed, in a book given me by my son David, a photo (above right) of another work-horse tern schooner on a tiny river near Exeter, New Hampshire (center, above) (2002)

The third item (right, above) was the discovery at the Boston Athenaeum of an 1897 book of photos of Nantucket, one taken from a view identical to Mina's painting of Straight Wharf. (April 2004)

* Posted on May 12, 2002, is the start of a gallery of nature photos; also, posted are a few family pictures for 2001-3, plus granddaughter Emery's visit to see Pedro Martinez pitch at Fenway Park. Other pictures are in the personal photo gallery.

* On April 17, 2002. I published my biodiversity bibliography. It is a natural history bibliography in the Sudbury River-Concord River valley, including the Great Meadows, Walden, and Estabrook Woods. I was surprised to find 400 data-rich studies of animals and plants in this part of the valley from Wayland to Carlisle. It is available both on the web or at local bookstores. More than 65 articles are about the natural history of Estabrook Woods alone. (Updated through April, 2004.)

   Also posted here for convenience is a fine bibliography of the Walden Woods ecosystem, made available by Dr. Edmund Schofield. It is more comprehensive in subject matter than mine but is more focused in area. The two make good companions. Now for the first time there are more than seventy pages of citations to all kinds of natural history, to maps and aerial photos, and to other bibliographic resources about this area.

* On Feb. 5, 2002: Data (principally from Ken Harte, Ron Lockwood, and Dick Walton) was compiled to create the first comprehensive list of the birds of the Estabrook Woods. 159 species have been seen in Estabrook Woods over the last 36 years. This is a large, varied, and interesting list for a forest. This is a large, varied, and interesting list for a forest. It contains birds of great visual beauty: for example, 32 species of warblers--the jewels of springtime. And great aural beauty: the Winter Wren and six species of thrush, including the Veery and Wood and Hermit Thrushes. And of predatory drama: four species of owl and nine of hawks, including breeding Great Horned Owls and Goshawks. 5 of these species are state-listed by the Natural Heritage Program, and 40 are listed as of conservation priority by Partners in Flight. Attached is a 1904 list made by Middlesex School's Natural History Society. This checklist is included in an nationwide list of bird checklists that have quantified seasonal abundance: <http://www.flyingemu.com/checklst.html>.

* Added Feb. 10, 2002. An appreciation of the 1896 edition of Thoreau's "Cape Cod" with sketches by Amelia Watson:

*Added are these short pages on various Thoreau country locations, on my Thoreau research page.

* Updated Feb. 5, 2002. Another piece of old Concord has been torn down-- the  1724-1740 Bensen-Tarbell-Ball house and barn. Henry Thoreau wrote of it fondly: "Tarbell's hip-roofed house looked the picture of retirement--of cottage size under its noble elm with its heap of apples before the door and the wood coming up within a few rods--it being far off the road. The smoke from his chimney so white and vaporlike, like a winter scene." And its loss  happened on our watch. Applaud those that tried to save it (and help them find a home for the now-dismantled house and barn) but ask how could this have happened? Just added: a photo of the final owners, the Bensons and their dog Muffin, and an essay by John Hanson Mitchell: click here to see.

* Updated Jan. 12, 2002. The new banner photo at the top of this page is in Reading, Vermont, looking west to our cabin on Shedd Hill and the now-empty quarter called Chase Four Corners, where then-young U.S. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase bid his mother goodbye and departed westward into history. For large, interesting 150K panorama of the above, click here.

* Updated, Dec. 30, 2001. Good news: Massachusetts has designated the entire Estabrook Woods in its new BioMap to be one of the state's Core Habitats, which should be preserved in order to protect biodiversity.

*Updated Nov. 26, 2001 in gallery. A new picture of Nate, Perry, and Emery at Thanksgiving, 2001, on their old blueberry pasture on Clarry Hill, Union, Maine.

* Updated Nov. 19, 2001: Ed Renehan, a biographer of John Burroughs, comments on the identity of the musing man in an appealing old photograph of a poor hamlet in a glen. Where was the mystery photo taken?

* Updated, Sept. 26, 2001. The Phillips Library at Peabody Essex Museum and the White Library at Mystic Seaport solve the mystery of when Mina Goddard probably painted her lovely watercolors of Nantucket. It was in 1889.

* Aug. 10, 2001. Here is new support for the lore that on April 19, 1775 some women, children, and infirm took shelter in Estabrook Woods while the British regulars occupied the town and the minute men and militia gathered at Estabrook's Punkatasset Hill.

* Aug. 8, 2001: Brad Dean suggested I post this note on an eccentric character in the book Walden: the crazy uncle and his hole to China. This hole was located in Estabrook Woods, and some think they know where it is.

Willard Uphaus after jail

* July 26, 2001. My article about my neighbor at a summer pond in New Hampshire, "Willard Uphaus: Prisoner in Thoreau Country." Uphaus was jailed for a year for refusing, as an act of conscience and civil disobediance, to divulge the names of those who had attended his summer-discussion camp "World Fellowship." The issues of freedom and governmental power are current today. Uphaus lost in the U.S. Supreme Court on a 5-4 vote. The photo was taken just after release from a year's imprisonment, which had been the result of petty political persecution.


* July 20, 2001. Also posted is a spectacularly critical letter to the school's trustees from a Middlesex graduate and architect entitled "Middlesex's Bridge to Nowhere." And Lucille Daniel, Appalachia's editor, writes about being lost in Estabrook Woods in "Lost and Found: The Pleasure of Finding Your Way."

* June 20, 2001: Thoreau scrawled in the corner of a penciled draft survey of the Hunt land in Estabrook, "Upernavik, the most northerly inhabited spot upon the globe." Why? And at last, the correct location of Thoreau's Yellow Birch Swamp, incorrectly shown on other maps. And there are stepping stones there, across Thoreau's "wine colored brook."

* May 25, 2001. Middlesex School students dress up as salamanders and parade to protest their school's plans to develop up to 70 acres of upland in Estabrook Woods. Pictures here and here. Student magazine article titled "Convenient Amnesia" comments on the forgetfulness of school trustees. Other letters of protest were presented at the school's Centennial In June, 2001.

*April 4, 2001. Estabrook Woods is named a Biodiversity Site in the "SuAsCo Biodiversity Protection and Conservation Plan" (2000), which was just published on the website of the Sudbury Valley Trustees <http://www.sudburyvalleytrustees.org>. The Middlesex project, however, makes the Biodiversity Site skinny; see annotated map.

*March 29, 2001. Just discovered-- Middlesex headmaster Monk Terry's commitment in the 1963 Alumni Bulletin to a 1400-acre woodland wildlife preserve in Estabrook Woods: click here. This contradicts the School's repeated denials that there was anything in writing that contradicted their plans to develop up to 70 acres of these woods. Don't they read their own Alumni Bulletin?

*Jan. 1, 2001: Steve's article, Estabrook Woods, A Rediscovered Great Wild Tract is published in Appalachia (text here). Appalachia is the conservation and mountaineering journal of the Appalachian Mountain Club.

* For a list of Steve's publications.

* For earlier topics and writings, see my two home pages below.

  | To go to Steve's Personal Home Page, click here | OR

| To go to Steve's Research Site (& Estabrook Woods), click here |