Cast of neighbors

The three most frequent visitors to Thoreau on Walden pond were Edmund Hosmer, a farmer, Poet Ellery Channing and Bronson Alcott, early vegan, educator and prophet. Emerson would visit, as would French-Canadian woodchopper Alek Therien. Nearby was an Irish sharecropper named John Field, his son and infant and wife Mary. Irish Ditcher Hugh Coyle lived on the other side of the pond. He was an alcoholic and died while Thoreau was living on Walden Pond. Thoreau studied the inside of his house before the town burned it down. Cato Ingraham, a slave of Duncan Ingraham lived nearby even though the house built for slaves was in ruins. John Wyman was a potter who squatted in Hugh Coyle's house before he was there, Wyman's field was sold to Emerson to expand his land. Zilpah White, former slave until the Revolution, had a one bedroom hermitage nearby. She spun flax for brooms and made linen. In 1813 arsonists burned down her house. She rebuilt and lived to 1820 and the age of 82. In 1845, when Thoreau was there, the structure perhaps existed in ruins. Thoreau borrowed a few bricks from the ruins. Brister Freeman, who declared his freedom with his name, bought an acre on what's called Brister's hill. He fought in the Revolutionary War. He planted apple trees, which Thoreau would get apples from. John Breed was the town barber and lived near Brister Freeman. A local boy burned Breed's house down in 1841. The area might have been a small grouping of freed slaves, Thoreau explored ruins and found evidence of larger past population. Since it was marginal land, too rocky to farm, they didn't bother to evict the settlers. Peter Hutchinson the butcher and Jack Garrison and his wife Susan Robbins might have lived there. There might have still be some African American squatters around the time Thoreau was there. The Emerson family later deeded the land to the town as a park. Walden Pond ended up preserved instead of settled.