5 November 1860 – 11 November 1860

P. M. — To Blood’s oak lot. Measure the great white oak near the bars of the bridle-road just beyond the northeast corner of the Holden (?) farm. At the ground it is about nineteen feet in circumference. At three feet from the ground it is eleven feet and seven inches in circumference, and the same at five feet and apparently more above this. It is about sixteen feet to the lowest limb. The whole trunk standing aslant. It has a black and quite rough bark, not at all like that of the white oaks of Wetherbee’s and Blood’s lots. There is a large open space amid the huckleberry bushes beneath it, covered with a short and peculiarly green sward, and this I see is the case with other oaks a quarter of a mile off. There is a large chestnut in the lot east of this, and I observe that its top is composed of many small branches and twigs disposed very regularly and densely, brush- wise, with a firm, distinct, more than semicircular edge against the horizon, very unlike the irregular, open, and more scraggy-twigged oak. ‘Blood’s oak lot may contain about a dozen acres. It consists of red, black, white, and swamp white oaks, and a very little maple. The following are some of the largest that Isaw. I measured one black oak which was, at three feet high, four feet eight inches in circumference; another, five feet six inches; and another the same. A red oak was six feet three inches; another, seven feet four inches; another, seven feet four inches; another, seven feet. One swamp white oak was six feet four inches. A white oak was seven feet seven inches, and another the same. ‘The diameter of a third at one foot from ground (sawed off) was thirty-one and a half inches average. This is quite a dense wood-lot, even without consider- ing the size of the trees, and I was rather surprised to see how much spread there was to the tops of the trees in it, especially to the white oaks. The trees here rise far higher before branching, however, than in open land; some black oaks (if not others) were very straight and thirty to forty feet high without a limb. I think that there was not so much difference in color between the trunks of black and red oaks as commonly. The red oaks were oftener smooth, or smoothish, the largest of them. I saw very little decay. Considering their num- ber and closeness, the trees were on the whole larger than I should have expected, though of course not nearly so large as the largest pasture oaks, — one to two and a half feet in diameter, or say generally (the sizable trees) ~ a foot and a half in diameter. This will probably do for a specimen of a primitive oak forest hereabouts. Such probably was the size and aspect of the trees. As for its age, I saw the stump of a white oak (not quite so large as those I measured) which had been sawed off at about one foot from the ground within four or five years, perfectly level and sound to the core, and thirty-one and a half inches in diameter. The first thirty-three (?) rings were so close and indistinct as to be impossible to count exactly (occupying three quarters of an inch of the centre); the rest was perfectly distinct. In all one hundred and forty-seven rings; or, by inches from middle, thirty-nime, nine, six, seven, five, eleven, six, four, four, five, six, nine, ten, twelve, and then three quarters of an inch left. From which it appears that it grew much the fastest at about the age of eighty-nine years and very much the slowest for the first thirty-three years. I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings. We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidi- fied and perfected. Such trees continue to expand with nearly equal rapidity to an extreme old age. Another white oak stump, not so large but somewhat decayed, had one hundred and sixty and more rings. So that you may say this wood is a hundred to a hundred and sixty years old. I was struck by the orderly arrangement of the trees, as if each knew its own place; and it was just so at Wetherbee’s lot. This being an oak wood, and like that, somewhat meadow [s7c] in the midst, the swamp white oaks with a very few maples occupied that part, and I think it likely that a similar selection of the ground might have been detected often in the case of the other oaks, as the white compared with the red. As if in the natural state of things, when sufficient time is given, trees will be found occupying the places most suitable to each, but when they are interfered with, some are prompted to grow where they do not belong and a cer- tain degree of confusion is produced. That is, our forest generally is in a transition state to a settled and normal condition. Many young white pines — the largest twenty years old — are distributed through this wood, and I have no doubt that if let alone this would in a hundred years look more like a pine wood than an oak one. Hence we see that the white pine may introduce itself into a primitive oak wood of average density. The only sounds which I heard were the notes of the jays, evidently attracted by the acorns, and the only animal seen was a red squirrel, while there were the nests of several gray squirrels in the trees. Last evening, the weather being cooler, there was an arch of northern lights in the north, with some redness. Thus our winter is heralded. It is evident that the pasture oaks are commonly the survivors or relics of old oak woods, — not having been set out of course, nor springing up often in the bare pasture, except sometimes along fences. I see that on the outskirts of Wetherbee’s and Blood’s lots are some larger, more spreading and straggling trees, which are not to be distinguished from those. Such trees are often found as stragglers beyond a fence in an adja- cent lot. Or, as an old oak wood is very gradually thinned out, it becomes open, grassy, and park-like, and very many owners are inclined to respect a few larger trees on account of old associations, until at length they begin to value them for shade for their cattle. These are oftenest white oaks. I think that they grow the largest and are the hardiest. This final arrangement is in obedience to the demand of the cow. She says, looking at the oak woods: “ Your tender twigs are good, but grass is better. Give me a few at intervals for shade and shelter in storms, and let the grass grow far and wide between them.” No doubt most of those white pines in pastures which branch close to the ground, their branches curving out and upward harpwise without one erect leading shoot, were broken down when young by cows. The cow does not value the pine, but rubs it out by scratching her head on it.

Sawed off half of an old pitch pine stump at Tommy Wheeler’s hollow. I found that, though the sur- face was entire and apparently sound except one or two small worm-holes, and the sap was evidently decaying, yet within, or just under the surface, it was extensively honeycombed by worms, which did not eat out to the surface. Those rings included in the outmost four or five inches were the most decayed, — including the sap- wood.

To Cambridge and Boston.

2p.mM.— To Mt. Misery va sugar maples and Lee’s Bridge. The white oak near the English cress at three feet is nine feet and one twelfth in circumference and has a rough and dark bark. By its branching so low, it sug- gests that it may have stood in comparatively open ground most of its life, or such as the outmost oaks in Blood’s wood toward his house. I notice along the Corner road, beyond Abiel Wheeler’s, quite a number of little white pines springing up against the south wall, whose seed must have been blown from Hubbard’s Grove some fifty rods east. They extend along a quarter of a mile at least. Also a wet and brushy meadow some forty rods in front of Garfield’s is being rapidly filled with white pines whose seeds must have been blown an equal distance. We need not be surprised at these results when we consider how persevering Nature is, and how much time she has to work in, though she works slowly. A great pine wood may drop many millions of seeds in one year, and if only half a dozen are conveyed a quarter of a mile and lodge against some fence, and onlyone comes , up and lives there, yet in the course of fifteen or twenty years there are fifteen or twenty young trees there, and they begin to make a show and betray their origin. It ~~ does not imply any remarkable rapidity or success in Nature’s operations. In the wood north of the sugar maples a hickory but two feet in circumference has eighty-six rings. A white oak twenty-six inches [in] diameter has one hundred and twenty-eight rings. The sugar maples occupy, together with oaks of the same size, about thirty rods, or say ten rods by three. The largest about five inches [in] diameter, but gener- ally quite small. They have sprung from quite small stumps, commonly not bigger than themselves at most. They are peculiar among maples in retaining yet a part of their leaves, —a delicate fawn(? )-color, pale brown. There is quite a pitch pine wood on the lane beyond the second Garfields, but though there are very few little white pines under it (no large ones), these are under the densest part, and there are no little pitch pines, though they are common in the more open parts. Seed- bearing pines are distant here. I observe on the trunk of one of the largest of these pitch pines (which may be forty years old), standing on the outside the wood, minute or short branches, commonly mere tufts of needles in rings around the trunk, — reminding you even of the branches of the horse-tail, they are in this case so regular, — perfectly horizontal and six to twelve inches apart. Some are two or three years old, but only three to six inches long. These seem to repre- sent the old whorls of branches. Perhaps, the tree growing slowly at the top, the dormant buds here are stimulated. I afterward see in another wood an outside pitch pine, a tall one, on which some of these tufts had apparently developed into branches four or five feet long, in imperfect whorls, the top being partly dead. A white oak stump, roadside west of Abel Minott house site, nineteen and one half inches [in] diameter (wood), sixty-five rings. A pitch pine standing on opposite side more westerly is five and nine twelfths feet in circumference at three feet. I observe on the west side of Mt. Misery, cut off apparently last winter, mulleins, very tall, sprung up, — as well as fire-weed and goldenrods. I sawan abundance of mulleins in a young wood-lot with much bare ground, burnt over a year or so ago, behind Mason’s on the bridle-road, on the 5th, so that the mullein too might be called a fire-weed. But I notice that those plants so called, as the epilobium and senecio, and which are supposed to owe their origin to the fire, generally spring up on a surface made bare by whatever cause. They are the first weeds after a clearing or cutting. On this same Mt. Misery (cut last winter), an oak stump (apparently black) eleven and one half inches [in] diameter, sixty-one rings; a white oak, thirteen inches, fifty-eightrings. I count four or more of these stumps, — which are as plain as usual, — and make from fifty-four to sixty-one rings, say average fifty-eight years. Yet in several of these instances they were manifestly sprouts, and there was the old stump cut 58+ 1 years ago.' These stumps did not show any trace of the axe, but there was one which lay on its side, apparently of the same date, but from which no sprout had come, which was much better preserved and did show the traces of the axe plainly. These recent stumps, though only some sixty years old, had in no case sprouted again, and I think that this is because they are sprouts, and that the vitality of the stock was so nearly exhausted. These old stumps are frequently half inclosed in the recent stump. I think that I readily detected the sprout also by the greater breadth of the rings the first few years. The stumps of trees which were cut in the last century — oaks at least — must be not uncommon in our woods. Looking from this hill, I think that I see considerably more oak than pine wood. Edward Hoar’s pitch pine and white pine lot on the south side of this hill is evidently a new wood. You see the green moss, the cladonia, and birches (which I think do not spring up within an old wood), and even feel with your feet an old cow-path and see an old apple tree inclosed in the wood. Are not birches interspersed with pines a sign of a new wood? When a pitch pine wood is cut, that fringe or edg- ing of little pitch pines which commonly surrounds it may remain to grow up and in a measure represent it. Also, apparently, when for any reason, as from frost, land where the wood has been cut remains compara- tively bare for several years and becomes only grassy, pitch pines (as well as white pines) may catch there thickly. I constantly meet now with those tufts of indigo- weed (turned black) now broken off and dropped exactly bottom up, as it were dropped by a careful hand in woodland paths or in pastures, as if an industrious farmer or a simpler had been collecting it by handfuls and had dropped his parcels thus. The fact is that they grow up many stems close together, and their branches are so interlaced as not to be easily separated; so that the wind operates the more powerfully and breaks them all off together at the ground, and then, on account of their form, these parcels are deposited exactly bottom up commonly, and you see three or four to fifteen or more stems within a diameter of four or five inches, looking just as if somebody had plucked them and laid them together.’ I also see the fly-away grass going over a wall or rock from time to time. The Salix sericea has just blackened the ground with its leaves. These are annual phenomena. Dr. (?}) Manasseh Cutler, in the first volume of the Boston Academy’s Reports for 1785, speaks of whortle- berries only in the half-converted or disparaging way in which the English do, — and have reason to, — say- ing that children love to eat them in milk. His eyes had not been opened to their significance; they were without honor in their native country. But I have no doubt that he ate them himself in secret.

Cheney gives me a little history of the Inches Woods. He says it was a grant to Jekil (John (?) Jekil) by the crown, and that it amounted to half of Boxboro as well as much of Stow and Acton. That Jekil had a summer house where Squire Hosmer’s house stands in Stow, before the Revolution, but at that time withdrew into Boston. It was a great event when he used to come out to Stow in the summer. Boxboro was a part of Stow then. Mr. Hosmer had charge of the lands for Inches, and the kitchen of his house was partly the old summer house of Jekil, and he also remembered an old negro named York, who had been a slave of Jekil, and he, the negro, said that twenty of the thirty acres bought of Inches by Hosmer, behind his house, was once fenced in with a paling or picket fence ten or fifteen feet high, and formed a park in which Jekil kept deer. The neighbors used to come and peep through the paling at the deer. Henderson Inches, hearing of these lands about the time of the Revolution, went to the heirs of Jekil and purchased the whole tract quite cheap, and they had been a fortune to the family since. Many farms have been made of parts of the wood, and thou- sands of dollars’ worth of wood have been sold at a time. Had realized maybe $150,000 from it. Cheney had heard that there were about four hundred acres of the Inches lands left. Henderson Inches died two or three years ago, and now his heirs wished to sell, but would not divide it, but sell in one body. Ruggles, Nourse, and Mason wished to buy, but not the whole. Except what has been sold, or generally, Inches would not have it cut. He was sharp and stood out for his price, and also liked to keep it. Hence it is a primitive oak wood and said to be the most of one in Massachusetts. Collier tells me that his sunflower-head (now dried) measures Just twenty-one and a half inches [in} diame- ter, — the solid part. Most think that Inches Wood was worth more twenty or thirty years ago, — that the oaks are now decayed within. Some have suggested that it would be much for the benefit of Boxboro to have it cut off and made into farms, but Boxboro people answer no, that they get a good deal more in taxes from it now than they would then. How little there is on an ordinary map! How little, I mean, that concerns the walker and the lover of nature. Between those lines indicating roads Is a plain blank space in the form of a square or triangle or polygon or segment of a circle, and there is naught to distinguish this from another area of similar size and form. Yet the one may be covered, in fact, with a primitive oak wood, like that of Boxboro, waving and creaking in the wind, such as may make the reputation of a county, while the other is a stretching plain with scarcely a tree on it. The waving woods, the dells and glades and green banks and smiling fields, the huge boulders, etc., etc., are not on the map, nor to be inferred from the map. That grand old oak wood is just the most remarkable and memorable thing in Boxboro, and yet if there is a history of this town written anywhere, the history or even mention of this is probably altogether omitted, while that of the first (and may be last) parish is enlarged on. What sort of cultivation, or civilization and improve- ment, is ours to boast of, if it turns out that, as in this instance, unhandselled nature is worth more even by our modes of valuation than our improvements are, — if we leave the land poorer than we found it? Is it good economy, to try it by the lowest standards, to cut down all our forests, if a forest will pay into the town treasury a greater tax than the farms which may supplant it, — if the oaks by steadily growing according to their nature leave our Improvements in the rear? How little we insist on truly grand and beautiful natural features! How many have ever heard of the Boxboro oak woods? How many have ever explored them ? I have lived so long in this neighborhood and but just heard of this noble forest, — probably as fine an oak wood as there is in New England, only eight miles west of me. I noticed young white pines springing up in the more open places and dells. There were considerable tracts of large white pine wood and also pine and oak mixed, especially on the hills. So I see that the character of a primitive wood may gradually change, as from oak to pine, the oaks at last decaying and not being replaced by oaks. Though a great many of those white oaks of the Inches Wood branch quite as low and are nearly as spreading as pasture oaks, yet generally they rise up in stately columns thirty or forty or fifty feet, diminishing very little. The black and red and scarlet oaks are especially columnar and tall, without branches for a long distance, and these trees are shaped more in their trunks like an elm than a pasture oak. They commonly stand aslant at various angles. When, in the midst of this great oak wood, you look around, you are struck by the great mass of gray-barked wood that fills the air. The leaves of these old oaks are now fairly fallen, and the ground is densely covered with their rustling red- dish-brown scales. A peculiarity of this, as compared with much younger woods, is that there is little or no underwood and you walk freely in every direction, though in the midst of a dense wood. You walk, in fact, under the wood. The wood not having been cut to any extent, and the adjacent country being very little occupied, I did not notice a single cart-path where a wheel-track was visible, —at most a slight vista, and one footpath. I knew that I was near the southwest edge by the crowing of a cock. This wood is said to have been a great resort for pigeons. We saw one large pigeon-place on the top of the hill where we first entered it. Now used. Seeing this, I can realize how this country appeared when it was discovered. Such were the oak woods which the Indian threaded hereabouts. ™, Such a wood must have a peculiar fauna to some extent. Warblers must at least pass through it in the spring, which we do not see here. We have but a faint conception of a full-grown oak forest stretching uninterrupted for miles, consisting of sturdy trees from one to three and even four feet in diameter, whose interlacing branches form a complete and uninterrupted canopy. Many trunks old and hol- low, in which wild beasts den. Hawks nesting in the dense tops, and deer glancing between the trunks, and occasionally the Indian with a face the color of the faded oak leaf. Grimes said that he could almost clasp the loins of my lynx as it hung up by the heels before it was skinned; it was so slender there that a man with a large hand could have done it. Richardson in his “Fauna Boreali-Americana,”’ which I consulted at Cambridge on the 7th, says that the French-Canadians call the Canada lynx indifferently Ee Chat or Le Peeshoo, and Charlevoix falsely calls it Carcajou, which is the wolverene, and hence much con- fusion and error among naturalists. “Seven to nine thousand are annually procured by the Hudson’s Bay Company. It is found on the Mackenzie River as far north as latitude 66°.” Easily killed by a stroke with a small stick on the back! (?) Breeds once a year and has two young. Never attacks man. A poor runner, but a good swimmer. Audubon and Bachman repeat Rich- ardson. According to Pennant, Lawson and Catesby repeat the falsehoods about its dropping from trees on deer, etc. Observed in the dropping of a fox the other day, with fur, some quarter-shaped (or triangular segments) seeds, and roughish, which may have been seeds of rose hips. They were white. So are the sweet-briar hips, but the common wild rose hips are brownish. Were they prinos seeds? If rose hips, then the fox enjoys what Manasseh Cutler in 1785 called “the conserve of hepps of the London dispensatory”’ without the sugar. Elijah Wood, senior, tells me that about 1814 (or before 1815, in which year he was married, and while he still lived at his father’s on Carlisle road), as he was riding to town on horseback in the evening alone to singing to prepare for Thanksgiving, he stopped to let his horse drink at the brook beyond Winn’s, when he heard a cry from some wild beast just across the river. It affected him so that he did not stop to let his horse drink much. When he returned later, —now with others, — they all heard it, as if answering to their shouts, somewhat further up the river. It was also heard by some teamsters, and also an animal supposed to be the same was said to have been seen by a woman cross- ing the road just west of where Wood now lives. It was thought to be a wolverene. I have now measured in all eight pitch pine stumps at the Tommy Wheeler hollow, sawed off within a foot of the ground.