Joseph C. Wheeler and Lucille Stott
The Concord Journal, September 15, 2005

These days, as we raise the money needed to save the Henry David Thoreau birth house on Virginia Road, members of the Thoreau Farm Trust have been looking back at the history of this interesting house. Who owned the land? Who built the house? Who lived in it? Though whole families were involved in the Virginia Road farm where the house eventually sprouted, history records only the male names. That’s why, when the house was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003, it was listed as the Wheeler-Minot Farmhouse/Henry David Thoreau Birth House.

But as we study the house over time, the role of women emerges as a key element in the house’s significance as a Concord landmark. Many people are surprised to learn, for example, that Cynthia Thoreau, Henry’s mother, spent fourteen years of her life in that house before giving birth to her famous son. Her happy reminiscences of life on her stepfather’s farm found their way into Henry’s journals and nourished in him a love of the place and an appreciation of his family’s role in its long history.

Other interesting women were part of that history as well. Following the Native Americans’ habitation of the land on which the farm sits, Sgt. Thomas Wheeler, a First Settler in Concord, obtained most of the Virginia Road land in what are known as the First and Second Divisions [of land] in the mid-1600s. Thomas married a daughter of Joseph and Sarah Meriam, a name all Concordians recognize from Meriam’s Corner off Lexington Road. Thomas’s wife was also named Sarah, and before her death in 1677, she bore ten children on the farm.

After Sarah Meriam Wheeler died, Sgt. Thomas Wheeler married a Lexington widow named Sarah Stearns. Sarah bore three children on the farm.

Things get a bit complicated at this point, though not uncharacteristically so for the times. John Wheeler, one of Thomas and Sarah Meriam Wheeler’s ten children, eventually married Sarah Stearns, one of the widow Stearns’ children by her first husband. In other words, John married his stepsister. Young Sarah Stearns’s father was Isaac Stearns, Jr., the son of a Watertown First Settler. Over the years, the Stearns family became very distinguished. One of the Stearns descendants became president of Amherst College and his brother a distinguished minister and author.

Stearns was also an important name in Thoreau’s day. While at Harvard, Henry roomed with Charles Stearns Wheeler of Lincoln —a descendant of both John Wheeler and Isaac Stearns. Charles had built a cabin on Flint’s Pond. Some say that Thoreau was inspired by this example to build his cabin at Walden. But that is another story.
According to historians, it was John Wheeler, son of Thomas and Sarah Meriam Wheeler, who built what became the Thoreau birth house, and it was his second wife, Sarah Stearns, who, along with the children, inherited it.

Sarah and the children sold the house and farm to a Lexington Road cousin of the Wheelers named Samuel Minot, who gave it to his son, Jonas. Jonas married a Westford girl named Mary Hall, and they had nine children in the house before she died.

Jonas later married Thoreau’s grandmother, the widow Mary Jones Dunbar, who brought up her daughter, Cynthia, on the farm. Cynthia would marry John Thoreau and leave the house where she grew up. But when Jonas died, Mary inherited “widow’s thirds” of the property, including half the house. She moved out of the house and invited Cynthia and John Thoreau to live there with their growing family and manage the farm. It was during the short time that the Thoreaus tried, unsuccessfully, to make a go of the farm that Cynthia gave birth to David Henry (he would change the order of his first and middle names) on July 12, 1817.

Given the important role women played in carrying on the life of this Virginia Road farm, it would seem appropriate to consider the existing farmhouse the Wheeler-Meriam-Stearns-Minot-Hall-Dunbar-Thoreau House.

The poet Ellery Channing, Thoreau’s good friend, certainly gave at least one woman her due when he mentioned the farmhouse in “Channing’s Thoreau: The Poet Naturalist Portrayed by his Nearest Friend.” Channing wrote (emphasis added):

The old-fashioned house on Virginia road,
its roof nearly reaching to the ground in the rear, remains as it was when
Henry David Thoreau
first saw the light in the
easternmost of its upper chambers.
It was the residence of his grandmother, and a perfect piece of our New
England style of building, with its gray, unpainted board,
Its grassy, unfenced door-yard.
The house is somewhat isolate and remote from thoroughfares;
the Virginia road, an old-fashioned, winding,
at-length-deserted pathway, the more smiling for its forked orchard,
tumbling walls, and mossy banks. About the house
are pleasant meadows, deep with their beds of peat,
so cheering with its homely, hearthlike fragrance;
and in front runs a constant stream.

Joseph C. Wheeler and Lucille Stott are officers of the Thoreau Farm Trust, a Concord nonprofit working to preserve and reuse the house where Thoreau was born, located at 341 Virginia Road. For more information, visit www.thoreaufarm.org or contact Wheeler and Stott by email at: office@thoreaufarm.org. Visits to the house are offered by appointment and during scheduled open houses.