If you have ever wanted to build Thoreau’s cabin or just wanted to know more about the original, this is the place to start. You will not only read and discuss everything that Henry Thoreau said about his “house” (he actually referred to it only twice as a cabin, to make puns from “cabin passage” and “cabin fever”) but also you will learn what scholars make of some lingering questions. For instance, what did Thoreau mean when he said that he had a “closet,” since it probably was not what we think of as a closet today? Or, where did Thoreau locate his chimney, inside the wall, as any good New Englander would? Or did he build it against an outside wall, as have the experts at Walden Pond? There is compelling evidence that the experts are wrong!

You will also build your own replica of the writer’s desk, a simple construction from which you will learn things about Thoreau that even his wise but unhandy friend Ralph Waldo Emerson probably did not understand. Constructed like an old-fashioned school desk, its top sloped toward the writer and lifted up, creating a compartment which Thoreau locked, bragging that this was the only lock in his cabin. With the legs placed inside and simply nailed to the apron, this desk is an excellent project for beginning woodworkers and for Thoreau lovers alike. Students interested in seeing Thoreau’s original desk can either visit the Concord Museum in Concord, MA, or open the museum’s website at www.concordmuseum.org.

Hilary Russell, with degrees from Villanova University and a Master’s from Wesleyan University, has taught English for forty years and for the last seven specialized in the life and work of Henry David Thoreau. As part of his one-semester course focusing on Thoreau’s Walden, Hilary studied Thoreau’s cabin closely, reading everything he could find on the subject, visiting three replicas, and inspecting the desk, chair, and bed that Thoreau used in his cabin and that are now housed at the Concord Museum. Then Hilary and his students replicated the cabin including its plastered walls, its post and beam frame, and its furniture, including the cast off, caned couch that Thoreau converted into a bed and the simple desk that the writer built.

Hilary is an experienced boat builder, a veteran outdoor educator, and the author of many poems and articles published in magazines and journals, as well as a book of poems, an anthology of American poetry, and a writing handbook. He teaches English creative writing at Berkshire Community College and directs the Berkshire Boat Building School in Sheffield, MA. He is a member of the Berkshire Woodworkers Guild.