A Walk to Wachusett

Henry David Thoreau
Core works and topics Civil Disobedience Herald of Freedom The Last Days of John Brown Life Without Principle Paradise (to be) Regained A Plea for Captain John Brown Reform and the Reformers Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown The Service Sir Walter Raleigh Slavery in Massachusetts Thomas Carlyle and His Works Walden A Walk to Wachusett A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau Thoreau Society
Related topics Abolitionism Anarchism Anarchism in the United States Civil disobedience Concord, Massachusetts Conscientious objection Direct action Ecology Environmentalism History of tax resistance Individualist anarchism John Brown Lyceum movement Nonviolent resistance Ralph Waldo Emerson Simple living Tax resistance Tax resisters Transcendentalism The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail Walden Pond

A Walk to Wachusett is an essay penned by Henry David Thoreau accounting an excursion he took with a companion, Richard Fuller, from Concord, Massachusetts to the summit of Mount Wachusett located in Princeton, Massachusetts. Their journey, by foot, began on July 19, 1842. Traveling through Acton, Stow, Bolton, Lancaster and Sterling, they arrived in West Sterling by sunset and lodged overnight at a local inn, most likely the Milton Buss Inn and Tavern.

Reaching the summit the following day, the pair had traveled a distance of approximately 34 miles (55 km). Their time on the summit was spent exploring, relaxing and pondering the landscape and its inhabitants. On the third day, they traveled to Harvard, Massachusetts, leaving in the morning of the fourth day as "one bent his steps to the nearer village of Groton, the other took his separate and solitary way to the peaceful meadows of Concord ...."

The signature line of the essay, "Wachusett is, in fact, the observatory of the state" was rewritten from a similar line by Princeton native Charles Theodore Russell in his book ″History of Princeton″ published in 1838.

First published in the January 1843 issue of The Boston Miscellany, this was perhaps the first of Thoreau's works describing excursions he took over the years. Later trips, including a return to Wachusett in October 1854 as well as trips to Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont are documented in his journals.

External links

• An online copy of the text is maintained by The Walden Woods Project.