The Anatomy of a Desk: Writing with Thoreau and Emerson

“I sit before my green desk, in the chamber at the head of the stairs, and attend to my thinking…” Henry Thoreau, 1847

A new exhibition at the Concord Museum brings focus to two iconic desks that played a major role in America’s literary tradition. The first, a Windsor writing-arm chair, was the desk at which Ralph Waldo Emerson penned his first book, Nature. The second, the humble green desk of Henry David Thoreau, became no less a literary star as it accompanied Thoreau from the schoolroom where he taught with his brother to the pond where he drafted his most influential work, Walden. These two desks from the Concord Museum collection are exhibited side by side in the gallery.

The treasured desks have also been reproduced for this exhibition by Dan Faia, Head of the Cabinet and Furniture Making Program at Boston’s North Bennet Street School. A skilled practitioner of traditional cabinetmaking processes, Faia examined and accurately measured both pieces in consultation with curators from the Concord Museum and the Trustees of Reservations. The re-creations are exact, as nearly like the real thing as present technology allows.

Image: Reproduction of Thoreau’s Desk, By Dan Faia, North Bennet School

Visitors are invited to sit at the reproductions and share their own creative thoughts through writing or drawing. Photography and sharing on social media are encouraged!

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Writing-Arm Windsor

Designed to be used as a desk, this chair has a surface attached to one arm to make it suitable for writing. On this relatively common piece of furniture, one of America’s most influential works was written.

Ralph Waldo Emerson moved to Concord in the fall of 1834, living in the house built by his grandfather. While at The Old Manse (as it later came to be called), Emerson wrote his first book, Nature. The writing-arm Windsor chair that Emerson used as a desk was probably first acquired by his step-grandfather Ezra Ripley, who would have made good use of it in writing the sermons he delivered from Concord’s pulpit at First Parish over sixty years as minister. The Windsor chair was given to Cummings Davis (founder of the Concord Museum collection) in 1884.

The Emerson writing-arm chair had some interesting alterations that were accounted for in the Faia reproduction. The writing-arm surface had been modified, with a second surface added at a different angle from the first, probably at the request of Ezra Ripley. The color of the chair had also changed. Underneath the present black paint, which was probably added after 1850, the chair, except for the secondary writing surface, was painted a vivid green, a color typical of Windsor chairs in the 18th and 19th centuries. For the purposes of the 2017 reproduction, the decision was made to recreate what the chair most likely looked like when Emerson wrote on it in 1834.

Henry David Thoreau’s Desk
This desk is simply made and purely functional, made for use at a small-town New England school. We see a slanted writing surface, green paint, a keyhole, and few other distinguishing characteristics. How did this desk come to be where one of the great works of American literature was written?

Henry Thoreau acquired this desk in 1838 when he and his brother John established a school in Concord. Four years after John’s untimely death in 1841, Henry moved to a small house he built himself at Walden Pond on land belonging to his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, taking this desk with him. The relatively isolated house was a sort of writer’s retreat, because Thoreau’s intention on moving there was to write a book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, about a trip he and his brother had taken in 1839. In the two years he was at the Pond, Henry wrote that book, along with hundreds of journal entries and numerous letters to friends and family, and also drafted his second and most famous book, Walden, on this desk. With the exception of some minor wear and small losses, the Thoreau desk is essentially unchanged from the day it was made in 1838.

Also in the gallery is Walden, A Game, a video game experience enabling visitors to immerse themselves in Thoreau’s physical and conceptual worlds. The experience simulates Thoreau’s experiment in living at Walden Pond, allowing players to walk in his virtual footsteps, attend to the tasks of living a self-reliant existence, and cultivate through the gameplay their own thoughts and responses to the concepts discovered there. The Game Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California designed Walden, A Game, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The game will remain an important educational tool at the Concord Museum after this exhibition has concluded.

The Anatomy of a Desk: Writing with Thoreau and Emerson is part of the Concord Museum’s celebration of the bicentennial of the birth of Henry David Thoreau. This year-long initiative for 2017, “Be Thoreau.,” encourages an exploration of the writer’s work from a historical and contemporary perspective through special exhibitions and public programs:

• Walden: Four Views / Abelardo Morell (February 10-August 20, 2017)
• This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal, a major collaborative exhibition with The Morgan Library & Museum (on view in New York from June 2-September 10, 2017; at the Concord Museum from September 29, 2017-January 21, 2018).
• A variety of public programs that explore Thoreau’s thinking in a contemporary context, aligned with This Ever New Self and presented in coordination with local organizations.
• Be Thoreau, a day-long public symposium with leading scholars exploring Thoreau’s ideas and their relevance today. (at the Fenn School, October 28, 2017)
• Teacher-training workshops on Thoreau funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, for 72 K-12 teachers. (July 2017) www.concordmuseum.org/neh-landmarks-2017.

Information on Concord Museum exhibitions and programs can be found at www.concordmuseum.org.
Additional information on Thoreau bicentennial events—presented locally, nationally, and internationally—can be found at http://thoreaubicentennial.org.