PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN: JOHN WYMAN OR WAYMAN (1730?-1800) THOMAS WYMAN (1774?-1843) JOHN WYMAN THOMAS WYMAN AND HIS SON

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1 : JOHN WYMAN OR WAYMAN (1730?-1800) AND HIS SON (1774?-1843) JOHN WYMAN NARRATIVE HISTORY AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project The People of Walden

2 1730 It would have been in about this year that John Wyman or Wayman was born.

3 1774 In about this year, Thomas Wyman was born. NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT The People of Walden Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project

4 1787 In this year, at the age of 40, Thomas Dugan ran away from a white man named either Whittaker or Solomon Ward, on the James River, a man who evidently was still supposing that human beings could own other human beings. Here is a PRAYER for a Negroe : 1 O Thou great God, the Maker and Lord of all creatures, I, a poor sinner, black in body, and still blacker in sin, would humbly try to worship thee, and glorify thy name, that I am allowed to pray to thee... Lord give me grace to love thee, and thy dear Son, and thy blessed ways, and thy holy law, and to love all that love God, and make the land of my slavery, the place of my true freedom. Lord, pity poor Negroes, that are living without God in the world, and turn and convert them to thee. Bless my master, and all that are his. Make me a faithful servant; and teach me to remember, that what good thing soever any man doth; the same shall he receive of the lord, whether he be bound or free... Amen. SLAVERY This fugitive from human possessiveness would eventually wind up in the vicinity of Walden Pond, where in this year John Wyman or Wayman was building a home and pottery manufactory just where there is now the regraded entrance to the State Reservation parking lot. This land at the northeast end of the pond was at the time owned by Dr. Abel Prescott, so very clearly he would have been squatting with permission. Henry Thoreau eventually would be talking to this man s son Tommy the potter (Thomas Wyman, see journal entry for June 16, 1853) WALDEN: An old man, a potter, who lived by the pond before the Revolution, told him once that there was an iron chest at the bottom, and that he had seen it. Sometimes it would come floating up to the shore; but when you went toward it, it would go back into deep water and disappear. I was pleased to hear of the old log canoe, which took the place of an Indian one of the same material but more graceful construction, which perchance had first been a tree on the bank, and then, as it were, fell into the water, to float there for a generation, the most proper vessel for the lake. I remember that when I first looked into these depths there were many large trunks to be seen indistinctly lying on the bottom, which had either been blown over formerly, or left on the ice at the last cutting, when wood was cheaper; but now they have mostly disappeared. PEOPLE OF WALDEN JOHN WYMAN 1. Pattillo, Henry. THE PLANTER S FAMILY ASSISTANT... ADDRESS TO HUSBANDS AND WIVES, CHILDREN AND SLAVES... Wilmington NC, 1787.

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6 1794 Henry Thoreau would report, in regard to the Walden Pond of approximately this period, that: WALDEN: An old man, a potter, who lived by the pond before the Revolution, told him once that there was an iron chest at the bottom, and that he had seen it. Sometimes it would come floating up to the shore; but when you went toward it, it would go back into deep water and disappear. I was pleased to hear of the old log canoe, which took the place of an Indian one of the same material but more graceful construction, which perchance had first been a tree on the bank, and then, as it were, fell into the water, to float there for a generation, the most proper vessel for the lake. I remember that when I first looked into these depths there were many large trunks to be seen indistinctly lying on the bottom, which had either been blown over formerly, or left on the ice at the last cutting, when wood was cheaper; but now they have mostly disappeared. PEOPLE OF WALDEN JOHN WYMAN DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD. The People of Walden Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project

7 1800 In Concord, John Wyman (or Wayman) the potter, one of Brister Freeman s neighbors in Walden Woods, a person who like Brister would be mentioned in Thoreau s WALDEN, died. WALDEN: An old man, a potter, who lived by the pond before the Revolution, told him once that there was an iron chest at the bottom, and that he had seen it. Sometimes it would come floating up to the shore; but when you went toward it, it would go back into deep water and disappear. I was pleased to hear of the old log canoe, which took the place of an Indian one of the same material but more graceful construction, which perchance had first been a tree on the bank, and then, as it were, fell into the water, to float there for a generation, the most proper vessel for the lake. I remember that when I first looked into these depths there were many large trunks to be seen indistinctly lying on the bottom, which had either been blown over formerly, or left on the ice at the last cutting, when wood was cheaper; but now they have mostly disappeared. PEOPLE OF WALDEN JOHN WYMAN The new census of Concord, Massachusetts recorded four residents in the Freeman household on Brister s Hill. We know this included Brister, Fenda, and their son Amos, age 16. The identity of the 4th person is, however, uncertain; it might be Charlestown Edes. POPULATION. Concord possesses few of those advantages of waterpower, peculiar to many manufacturing towns, which favor a rapid growth. It is dependent on the industry of its inhabitants, its improvements in agriculture and the mechanic arts, and the general advancement of the surrounding country, for its increase in wealth and population. The incorporation of other towns, principally within it original limits, has, at various times, reduced its population and resources, and renders it difficult to estimate its growth with accuracy. In 1706 the polls were 230, nearly half as many as they now [1835] are; but they were scattered throughout six now incorporated towns. In 1753, just before the incorporation of Lincoln, the polls were 442, greater than at any other period in our history prior to 1820; and it is probable the population and wealth of the town was proportionably great. The population in 1764, including part of Carlisle, then belonging to Concord, was 1584, of whom 736 were white males, 821 white females, and 27 negroes. There were 6 slaves in 1725; 21 in 1741; and 19 in September 1, 1783, three years after the town was reduced to its present [1835] territorial limits, it contained 1321 inhabitants, of whom 15 were blacks. In 1790, there were The following table give

8 the number at three different periods since Male. Female. Male. Female. Male. Female. Under 10 years From 10 to From 16 to From 26 to and upwards Blacks Total In 1820 there were 9 foreigners not naturalized, 262 engaged in agriculture, 16 in commerce, and 140 in manufactures. From the above statement and a subsequent one on the valuation, it will appear that the town, from 1800 to the close of the war in 1815, remained nearly stationary. Since that time it has had a slow but gradual increase. The proportion of births to the deaths is estimated at about 3 to 1, producing a large redundant population, which is scattered in every state in the union. The associations with Old Concord are dear to many in distant lands, who owe their ancestral origin to its inhabitants Lemuel Shattuck s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry David Thoreau would indicate a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study. On July 16, 1859 he would correct a date mistake buried in the body of the text.)

9 1810 Evidently, by this point in time, John Wyman or Wayman having deceased in 1800 and his son Thomas Wyman not continuing in the trade, pottery was no longer being made in Walden Wood. WALDEN: Farther in the woods than any of these, where the road approaches nearest to the pond, Wyman the potter squatted, and furnished his townsmen with earthen ware, and left descendants to succeed him. Neither were they rich in worldly goods, holding the land by sufferance while they lived; and there often the sheriff came in vain to collect the taxes, and attached a chip, for form s sake, as I have read in his accounts, there being nothing else that he could lay his hands on. One day in midsummer, when I was hoeing, a man who was carrying a load of pottery to market stopped his horse against my field and inquired concerning Wyman the younger. He had long ago bought a potter s wheel of him, and wished to know what had become of him. I had read of the potter s clay and wheel in Scripture, but it had never occurred to me that the pots we use were not such as had come down unbroken from those days, or grown on trees like gourds somewhere, and I was pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever practised in my neighborhood. PEOPLE OF WALDEN CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT The People of Walden Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project

10 1843 Thomas Wyman died. It was at the settlement of the Wyman estate that Waldo Emerson purchased his plot of woodland with its point touching the shore of Walden Pond, where Henry Thoreau would squat. WALDEN: Farther in the woods than any of these, where the road approaches nearest to the pond, Wyman the potter squatted, and furnished his townsmen with earthen ware, and left descendants to succeed him. Neither were they rich in worldly goods, holding the land by sufferance while they lived; and there often the sheriff came in vain to collect the taxes, and attached a chip, for form s sake, as I have read in his accounts, there being nothing else that he could lay his hands on. One day in midsummer, when I was hoeing, a man who was carrying a load of pottery to market stopped his horse against my field and inquired concerning Wyman the younger. He had long ago bought a potter s wheel of him, and wished to know what had become of him. I had read of the potter s clay and wheel in Scripture, but it had never occurred to me that the pots we use were not such as had come down unbroken from those days, or grown on trees like gourds somewhere, and I was pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever practised in my neighborhood. PEOPLE OF WALDEN Wyman Meadow, near the pond by Thoreau s shanty, is named for Wyman the potter: I suspect that a basal lens of silty clay near its edge gave him access to the raw material he needed. The fact that Thoreau inserted the unusual term fictile into the above paragraph in WALDEN tells us a great deal about his intent in the construction of the paragraph. Here is how that term had been defined in Webster s 1828 dictionary: FIC TILE, a. [L. fictilis, from fictus, fingo, to feign.] Molded into form by art; manufactured by the potter. Fictile earth is more fragile than crude earth.

11 About the only thing this unusual term has going for it in this context is that it is a word remarkably similar to fictive. Wyman the potter had been in Walden Woods practicing the fictile art by turning new pots because older ones were cracked. Thoreau was in Walden Woods practicing the fictive art by turning new tropes because older ones were all worn out. Neither pots nor tropes grow on trees, sic, which is why new ones must always be being turned out. Three Gloucester vessels and ten lives were lost this year in the mackerel fishery: the crew of the schooner Byron accounted for nine of these ten. In addition, Joseph Cain of the state of Maine, age 30, was lost at sea. The schooner Henrietta and the schooner Branch were lost in the Bay of St. Lawrence but their crews were saved. WHAT I M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF The People of Walden Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project

12 1844 Late September: Late in the month Waldo Emerson paid $8. 10 per acre for Thomas Wyman s farmed-out pasture of eleven acres more or less behind the poorfarm on the road to Walden Pond. The pasture, which had been logged over but had not been farmed for sixteen years, was overgrown but was more or less level. 3 There wasn t, of course, a whole lot of shade the area was relatively open. According to a letter written by Waldo to his brother William on October 4th, he had paid $8. 10 an acre for this 11-acre plot near Walden Pond when he had met some men walking in the woods (I suppose the similarity between the name Waldo and the name Walden cannot have been overlooked by Waldo, however little he knew about the history of religious dissent on the European subcontinent). The next day he had gone back, he told his brother, with some well beloved gossips and they persuaded him to pay $ for about 3 more acres of pine grove from Heartwell Bigelow to protect his investment by preventing these nearby trees from being logged. This became, of course, the land on which Henry Thoreau built his shanty when he made his agreement to clear the pasture of brambles and turn it into a beanfield, but at the time its owner had other plans for it: 4... so am landlord and waterlord of 14 acres, more or less, on the shore of Walden, & can raise my own blackberries... I may build me a cabin or a turret there high as the treetops and spend my nights as well as my days in the midst of a beauty which never fades for me. THE BEANFIELD TIMELINE OF WALDEN Brad Dean indicated that Sometime later that month Thoreau apparently negotiated with Emerson for the right to squat on the Wyman lot and there conduct his experiment of living. Emerson s permission was apparently attended with two provisos: that the small house Thoreau planned to build would become Emerson s after Thoreau s tenancy, and that Thoreau would clear and plant the cultivatable portion of the lot. MAGISTERIAL HISTORY IS FANTASIZING, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project The People of Walden 3. This land is now near the intersection of Route 2 and Route Later, when Emerson wrote a will, he had willed this woodlot to Thoreau, but since Thoreau was already twenty years dead by the time Emerson died, the property was retained in the family. Eventually, in 1922, the family would sign the lot on the pond over to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

13 COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this read-only computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace resulting in navigation problems allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC Please contact the project at <Kouroo@kouroo.info>. It s all now you see. Yesterday won t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. Remark by character Garin Stevens in William Faulkner s INTRUDER IN THE DUST Prepared: March 3, 2014

14 ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT GENERATION HOTLINE This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot Laura (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

15 Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary writerly process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world. First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with <Kouroo@kouroo.info>. Arrgh.