![]() ![]() John was quiet, obliging, patient, fond of reading and music (he played the flute, and passed along this love to Henry), observant, and a storehouse of information about those who populated the community around him. John and Cynthia Thoreau differed significantly from one another in temperament. In 1849, John Thoreau bought and renovated a larger home on Main Street (the "Yellow House"), into which the family moved in 1850 and where Henry died in 1862.ĭespite their early financial hardships, the Thoreau family shared a vital and sustaining home life that meant much to all of them - Henry included - as long as they lived. After returning to Concord, John Thoreau rented a succession of houses before he could afford to build a home of his own (on Texas Street, now Belknap Street) in 1844. John Thoreau suffered business difficulties and found it necessary to move his young family several times, from Concord to Chelmsford, Massachusetts (in 1818), from Chelmsford back to Concord briefly (in 1821), then to Boston (in 1821), and finally back to Concord permanently (in 1823). Her mother, Mary Jones, married the Reverend Asa Dunbar in 1772, was widowed, and married Captain Jonas Minott - who owned the farm where Thoreau was later born - in 1798.Ĭynthia Dunbar and John Thoreau were married on May 11, 1812. On her mother's side, she descended from the Loyalist Jones family of Weston, Massachusetts. Henry's mother, Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau (1787–1872), was born in Keene, New Hampshire. ![]() ![]() In 1799, he bought part of what is now the Colonial Inn building in Concord and moved his large family there in 1800. Jean (John) Thoreau (1754–1801), Henry's grandfather, born on the Isle of Jersey, came to America in 1773 and became a successful merchant in Boston. His father, John Thoreau (1787–1859), storekeeper and pencil-maker, was of French Protestant descent. Thoreau was baptized in the First Parish - the church in which as an adult he would decline membership - on October 12, 1817. The scene of the first armed resistance of the American Revolution on April 19, 1775, Concord was, in 1817, a vigorous place, home to the courts of Middlesex County, a beehive of artisan activity, trade, and politics as well as a farming community. In 1635 it was the first inland settlement in Massachusetts. One of the major authors of American Transcendentalism, lecturer, naturalist, student of Native American artifacts and life, land surveyor, pencil-maker, active opponent of slavery, social critic, and almost life-long resident of Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau on July 12, 1817, in his grandmother's house on Virginia Road in Concord, which is close to Boston and Cambridge. Thoreau's deliberately lived life and his writings were dual expressions of the same underlying principles and aspirations. Thoreau's "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"Īlthough an author's biography is always to some degree relevant to the study of his or her writings, a remarkable unity existed between Henry David Thoreau's life and his work.Selected Chronology of Thoreau's Writings.Emerson's "The Divinity School Address".Selective Chronology of Emerson's Writings. ![]()
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