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The Accidental Fire That Sparked a Deliberate Life
Did a wildfire help inspire Thoreau’s most important works?
Pigeons and squirrels exploded out of one of New England’s last pristine stretches of woods, fleeing an unholy conflagration.
Residents of Concord, Massachusetts, watched in horror as dark smoke clouds billowed into the April sky above the woods bordering the historic town.
It had been an unseasonably hot and dry spring. The Sudbury River was lower than usual, which made fighting the fire on April 30, 1844, much harder for the neighboring landowners and the frantic citizens of Concord.
High winds had whipped a small campfire, set in an old stump by two local men, into what one of them called “…the demonic creature to which we had given birth.”
The wind carried the flames from the stump into the nearby dried reeds and drove them through parched grassland into the forest.
Henry David Thoreau is considered by many to be America’s first environmentalist. He was undisputedly one of New England’s foremost naturalists. He was also the man who accidentally ignited the…
