Decades before Thoreau’s move to Walden, more than a dozen formerly enslaved Black residents of Concord made Walden Woods their home. With its infertile soil, Walden Woods wasn’t considered valuable land and thus became a place for the town’s outcasts to live more freely. Thoreau felt a certain kinship with this community living on the fringes of society. He devoted nearly half a chapter in Walden, titled “Former Inhabitants,” to telling their stories.
Born around 1744, Brister Freeman was one of the first known inhabitants of Walden Woods and the second Black man to own property in Concord.
Freeman fought as a soldier in the American Revolution. He spent the first 30 years of his life in Concord, enslaved by the prominent John Cuming, a doctor in Concord. He went to war on three separate tours while still legally designated as property. On his final tour in 1779, he self-emancipated by declaring his last name as “Freeman” on his military papers. This was an incredibly risky move as enslaved soldiers took the last names of their owners as a means of protection, the assumption was that there was a white person who would come to his aid as a way to protect what they viewed as their property.
Unable to prove this new freedom outside of Concord and barred from assimilating into the city itself Freeman pooled his resources with one of his Black comrades, Charlestown Edes, and bought a one-acre tract of land in Walden Woods.
He built a home for his three children and wife, Fenda. With farming and survival skills accrued from time on Cuming’s land, the Freeman’s family grew what they could in the sandy soil, fished, and gathered other foods in the woods.
Around the time Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1783, the community of Black Concord residents living freely in Walden Woods grew. Freeman’s sister, Zilpah White, moved into a one-room house at the edge of what would later be Thoreau’s bean field. She continued to live in the woods into her 80s.
Ultimately, few could survive on the lands of Walden Woods. Freeman’s wife and his friend Edes died of diseases related to malnutrition. Freeman is thought to have died in 1822. Over time, the other Black residents in their community left for cities with more opportunity. Many houses in Concord were stops on the Underground Railroad. Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Lewis Hayden, William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown all visited and spoke there.
When Thoreau arrived in 1845, all the Black residents had moved on. He was intentional about building his cabin within these original homesteads. As he began piecing together the stories of the inhabitants who’d come before him, he was very much inserting himself into that community.
Thoreau was staunchly and vocally opposed to slavery. He made it clear that he had admiration for not only their independence, but their ability to withstand a constant onslaught of racist harrassment.
