Table Of ContentThoreau the Land Surveyor
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF FLORIDA
Florida A&M University, Tallahassee
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers
Florida International University, Miami
Florida State University, Tallahassee
New College of Florida, Sarasota
University of Central Florida, Orlando
University of Florida, Gainesville
University of North Florida, Jacksonville
University of South Florida, Tampa
University of West Florida, Pensacola
Detail, preliminary draft of Walden Pond
survey. In the winter of 1846, Henry Thoreau began
the composition of Walden, not with the drafting of sen-
tences but with the drafting of a landscape. The line from
point A at the southern extremity of the pond was the
first measurement in his Walden survey. Point B is where
he stood with a tripod-mounted surveying compass on
the pond’s frozen surface. Radiating outward from point
B are lines of bearing, labeled A through Z at the far
edges of the full-size document. The genesis of Walden
was a materialization of the earth’s magnetic field, a
merger of mathematic and linguistic symbols transcribed
in physical contact with the pond itself and authored as
much by the compass needle as by Thoreau.
PATRICK CHURA
THOREAU
THE LAND
SURVEYOR
university press of florida
Gainesville · Tallahassee · Tampa · Boca Raton
Pensacola · Orlando · Miami · Jacksonville
Ft. Myers · Sarasota
Copyright 2010 by Patrick Chura
Printed in the United States of America
This book is printed on Glatfelter Natures Book, a paper certified under
the standards of the Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC). It is a recy-
cled stock that contains 30 percent post-consumer waste and is acid-free.
All rights reserved
First cloth printing, 2010
First paperback printing, 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chura, Patrick, 1964–
Thoreau the land surveyor/Patrick Chura.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8130-3493-5 (cloth: alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8130-4147-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862—Knowledge—Surveying.
2. Authors, American—19th century—Biography. 3. Surveyors—
United States—Biography. 4. Surveying—United States—His-
tory—19th century. I. Title.
ps3053.c47 2010 818.’3099–dc22
[B] 2010007782
The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for
the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M
University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University,
Florida International University, Florida State University, New Col-
lege of Florida, University of Central Florida, University of Florida,
University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and Univer-
sity of West Florida.
University Press of Florida
15 Northwest 15th Street
Gainesville, FL 32611-2079
http://www.upf.com
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
1 The Surveyor and the State 1
2 Material to Mythology 22
3 Walden,Cape Cod, and the
Duty of the Coast Survey 45
4 The Skillful Engineer 71
5 Serving Admetus 92
6 The Science of the Field Notes 107
7 The Concord Surveyor
and the Kansas Surveyor 135
8 “I am a surveyor” 155
Notes 177
Bibliography 199
Index 205
This page intentionally left blank
Illustrations
frontispiece. Detail, preliminary draft of Walden
Pond survey, 1846
figure 2.1. Preliminary draft of Walden Pond
survey, 1846 26–27
figure 2.2. “Walden Pond. A Reduced Plan.” 36–37
figure 2.3. Schematic of the Walden survey, showing
Thoreau’s method of angle intersection 42
figure 3.1. “Preliminary Chart of Ship and Sand
Shoal Inlets, Coast of Virginia” 62
figures 4.1a and 4.1b. Thoreau’s surveying compass
and detail of the compass card 75
figure 4.2. Chaining pins and sighting pin made by
Thoreau 79
figure 4.3. Plan of land in Lincoln, Mass. 82–83
figure 4.4. Broadside advertising Thoreau’s services
as a professional surveyor 85
figure 6.1. Sighting Polaris, February 7, 1851 117
figure 6.2. Detail, survey of White Pond, Feb. 17,
1851 120
figure 6.3. Completing the Walden survey 125
vii
viii g illustrations
figure 6.4. Moore and Hosmer woodlots by Walden 130
figure7.1. Directing John Brown to the Free State Camp 144
table 2.1. Reconstructed field notes for the Walden
survey 43–44
Preface
Thoreau once told a surveying client that the essence of his job was find-
ing what predecessors had left behind. All his life, as he explained to Abel
Brooks in 1857, he had been “making bounds, or rather finding them, re-
making what has been unmade.” This book remakes some of Thoreau’s
boundaries—not the many physical property lines he created while sur-
veying but intangible markers, remnants of his life and character that
have been lost or neglected. In part, it is a book about the recovery of
history, a difficult but exhilarating process.
It began with a desire to know more about nineteenth-century sur-
veying itself—about what Thoreau actually did to earn money from 1849
to 1861. In the chapters that follow, I reconstruct essential processes of his
work in the field and explore their meaning. This nontraditional critical
approach was taken in preparation for the book’s other and more con-
ventional aspect: a contextualized study of Thoreau’s journals, letters,
field notes and published works for what they reveal about his use of
land surveying as both a method of environmental inquiry and a primary
source of income over the last dozen or so years of his life.
Since my father was a land surveyor and I, like my three brothers, ac-
companied him on many surveying outings in the 1970s and 80s, I had
a strong sense of what Thoreau’s fieldwork involved. My father, now
retired, was a good surveyor and civil engineer, but his theodolite was not
much more technologically advanced than Thoreau’s compass. His steel
measuring tapes were not much different from the sixty-six-foot iron-
and-steel Gunter’s chain Thoreau used. The orange-and-white-striped
range pole and philly rod I carried while helping my dad lay out park-
ing lots and strip malls in the suburbs of Saint Louis thirty years ago
ix
