If you follow the trail signs through the Hapgood-Wright parking lot in Concord, Massachusetts, you will soon find yourself on a curated interpretive trail called, “Thoreau’s Path on Brister’s Hill.” Walking along this path, you are invited to step off to the side where you’ll be guided by 19th century writer, Henry David Thoreau’s own words – discussing nature, education, and social reform. However, Thoreau never lived along this path, and someone else did.
If you follow the trail signs through the Hapgood-Wright parking lot in Concord, Massachusetts, you will soon find yourself on a curated interpretive trail called, “Thoreau’s Path on Brister’s Hill.” Walking along this path, you are invited to step off to the side where you’ll be guided by 19th century writer, Henry David Thoreau’s own words – discussing nature, education, and social reform. However, Thoreau never lived along this path, and someone else did.To some, this may not matter: It’s a pleasant walk with clear directions for unfamiliar visitors, it fuses classic American literature with a town’s rich natural history, and, after all, Thoreau did traverse these woods, even if he never lived in them. However, if you come to this trail as an historian, local educator, or social reformer, you are bound to learn the darker history of “Thoreau’s Path.”
So, what exactly is this darker history? Wasn’t Thoreau a nice man who lived near Walden Pond and wrote poetic prose? Yes, he was this person and did these things. The darker history transcends one man (Thoreau), one trail (Thoreau’s Path), even one town (Concord). The darker history begins with the question: Who was Brister of “Brister’s Hill?”
The “Brister” belongs to Brister Freeman: A man who lived on a parcel of shared land in Walden Woods with his wife, Fenda, and their children, back in the 1820s. Freeman had acquired his land after fighting in the Revolutionary War and gaining his freedom – having previously been chained into slavery after a Concord local purchased Freeman as a friend’s wedding gift. Freeman, being the second man of color to live in Concord, encountered countless instances of extreme racism (yes – this happened in the North too), dangerous harassment, and overall marginalization, all well after he had gained his freedom.
Before his death in 1822, Freeman’s land was taken from him and passed among the white men of Concord for their ownership, thus creating and maintaining a precedent of historical oversight: According to town lore (and at this time, preference), Freeman and his family had never owned land, never lived in Walden Woods, never existed. This was until Thoreau came to Walden Woods – as a town surveyor, creating maps and other geographical documents for the town, – and wrote about Freeman’s obvious presence in the town. Through his documentation of Freeman’s life, Thoreau revived Freeman’s personal history and allowed future historians to expand on it, thereby honoring his legacy.
As a result of Thoreau’s meticulous documentation and brief mention of Freeman’s presence in his own journals, in the 1990s, the Walden Woods Project – a nonprofit organization that promotes Thoreau’s literary works, etc. – created “Thoreau’s Path” on Brister’s Hill.
Now a local attraction and frequently traversed trail, Thoreau’s Path is a serene and educational walk. However, it is Thoreau, not the Freeman family, who serves as the center of the path’s theme. Visitors and locals alike walk the trails, guided by Thoreau’s own words and, though his words do reflect the social reform which Thoreau deeply believed to be necessary, Freeman’s own voice is absent. There are no quotes offered from remaining Brister Freeman journals, letters, town record… Nothing. Even Freeman’s own house site – a small but noticeable stone accompanied by a natural history marker, a ditch fence – is announced with a Thoreau quote. Moreover, in this quote Thoreau accidentally mistakes Freeman for another “Brister” that once lived in Concord.
Thoreau did what he could to honor Freeman’s memory – much more than many of Thoreau’s own contemporaries could claim – however, Brister Freeman need not remain an enigmatic, forgotten man in the history of such an historically-saturated town. So, in May 2011, the museum commemorating Concord’s African American history – The Robbins House – began to explore this history and share Freeman’s story with the public. Unearthing this troubling story, it became clear that Freeman was constantly threatened, harassed, endangered, teased, and much more. In short, he was tormented.
Still, this does not account for the lack of Freeman’s own words along his hill. So, what does?
As was all too common during the era of slavery, African Americans – free and enslaved alike – were not educated. At least, if they were educated, it took place privately and in fear. So, just like his fellow African Americans, Brister Freeman never learned how to read or write. This is why we do not have his words — they were kept from Freeman, too.
While this answers the question, “Why don’t we have Freeman’s words on his own trail?” it does not explain the way Freeman acquired this land if he was clearly ostracized by townspeople. This opens up the unexpected connection between the land and the people. The parched land where Freeman lived is too sandy and gravelly to grow crops successfully, and very early on in the Colonial period had become no-man’s-land. The poor soil quality transformed this area of Concord into the literal and figurative town dump. The land was useless for wealthy white men looking for farmland so it lay abandoned until Freeman chose it as his house site. If no one else wanted it, then perhaps even a man of color could have it. Marginalized land was a perfect fit for a marginalized person.
In the 1990s, this land (not having yet become a recreational trail) was destined to be a corporate lot. It was soon to be leveled (no more trees, native plants, or wildlife), and turned into a parcel of concrete business buildings.“What else would this land be good for if it couldn’t be an agricultural resource?” builders and businesspeople asked each other. However, an effort was made to save this land from destruction and to instead uncover the deep history of Freeman and Thoreau’s times here.
This process began when singer Don Henley founded the Walden Woods Project and began acquiring parcels of land and transforming them into town-protected conservation land. As this project developed, Henley learned about the Brister’s Hill site, its history, and its fate. Henley reached out, held fundraisers, and by the early 2000s, Thoreau’s Path on Brister’s Hill was commemorated and developed into what it is today.
This doesn’t discount this first step in protecting natural and social history in Concord, but in a 2011 Boston Globe article which applauded the Town of Concord for creating this new trail, there was no mention of Freeman or his story on this land.
Even in today’s world of equality, the histories of marginalized people remain marginal to the central narrative that we choose to write.
To combat this inequality and perpetuated discrimination, in 2013 the Toni Morrison Society utilized their program Bench By The Road to honor the memory of Brister Freeman. This program targets locations throughout the world where African Americans have lived and have wrongly been forgotten. To resurrect memories and repair the mistreated humans of the past, the Society places a bench at the site of the chosen figure (typically the figure’s home site or notable place), thus drawing attention to that person’s life and legacy. Toni Morrison – an African American novelist and winner of the Pulitzer Prize as well as a Nobel Prize – organized this project to protect and educate the public about the histories of African Americans that have been otherwise forgotten. Morrison described how America memorializes white male public figures in astonishing volume and glory, yet there are no memorials for the African American figures who, too, deserve recognition. She said, “There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves . . . There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath, or wall, or park, or skyscraper lobby. There’s no 300-foot tower, there’s no small bench by the road.”
This project has caught the attention of many locals and visitors passing through Thoreau’s Path. However, the neglect of 2011 reappeared in a 2014 Globe article that looked specifically at the creation of Thoreau’s Path. Globe correspondent Caitlin Hurley wrote, “Apple trees in Brister’s Orchard honor both Thoreau as social reformer… and Brister Freeman, a freed slave who lived nearby and planted apple trees on his land.” Though an improvement on the total absence of Freeman’s history, is remembering him merely for his apples enough?
This summer, walking through Brister’s Hill, there are unusual colors and shapes that appear around bends and branches. These odd and out-of-place forms clarify into the Art Ramble exhibit, produced by The Umbrella – an organization that promotes artistic expression in Concord. This exhibit specifically promotes the art installations of local youth, promoting the interdisciplinary fusion of art, nature, movement, past, and future. One striking piece is titled, “Black Lives Mattered,” and appears as a mesh fabric, torn and tangled around several trees. It hangs and provokes a sense of discomfort when considering the artist’s intentions in creating this piece. Looking more closely, there is also knotted black rope tied throughout the off-white fabric, evoking a sense of struggle. The artist, Margot Stage, examined her own work and explained that, “this site-specific installation, Black Lives Mattered, pays tribute to the knots that were, and continue to be, tied and untied in the racial history of our nation.”
At the end of the trail, you are lead to a “Reflection Circle,” surrounded by engraven stones that offer quotes from notable historical figures, all influenced by Thoreau — Rachel Carson, Emily Dickinson, John F. Kennedy, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Chief Standing Bear, Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Edward O. Wilson. The longest stones quote Thoreau himself, asking,“[If] a greater miracle [could] take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?” Next to this quote is a blank stone. Often, student groups are asked to imagine what quote of their own they would choose to place on this stone. However, some wonder if this stone remains blank to commemorate all the voiceless people who could have been quoted here. Perhaps Mr. Freeman would have something to say, if only he had been allowed.