Thoreau the Land Surveyor

Patrick Chura analyzes this seeming contradiction to show how the best surveyor in Concord combined civil engineering with civil disobedience.

Placing Thoreau's surveying in historical context, Thoreau the Land Surveyor explains the cultural and ideological implications of surveying work in the mid-nineteenth century. Chura delineates the ways that Thoreau's environmentalist disposition and philosophical convictions asserted themselves even as he reduced the land to measurable terms and acted as an agent for bringing it under proprietary control.

He also describes in detail Thoreau's 1846 survey of Walden Pond. By identifying the origins of Walden in---of all places---surveying data, Chura recreates a previously lost supporting manuscript of this American classic. This book remakes some of Thoreau's boundaries---not the many physical property lines he created while surveying but rather 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.