Thoreau's friends and associates ranged from philosophers and authors to local farmers, whose ingenuity and simplicity he admired, to the outcast Irish who came to town to build the Fitchburg Railroad in the early 1840s. Concord at the time was home not only to Emerson, but also to Bronson Alcott; the poet (William) Ellery Channing (nephew and namesake of the liberal minister who had been so important in establishing American Unitarianism); and Nathaniel Hawthorne (who lived in the Old Manse from 1842 to 1845, while it was vacant following the death of Ezra Ripley). This community of thinkers and writers was extended by the many visitors — Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, and Theodore Parker, for example — who visited Emerson. As his journals indicate, Thoreau enjoyed the company of farmers George Minott and Edmund Hosmer and of Edward Sherman Hoar — brother of Ebenezer Rockwood, George Frisbie, and Elizabeth Hoar (a learned woman, the fiancée of Emerson's brother Charles, who died in 1836, and an intimate of the Emerson family). Thoreau and Edward Hoar accidentally set fire to the woods near Concord's Fairhaven Bay in April of 1844, an event described in detail in Thoreau's journal.
Late in 1844, Emerson purchased land around Walden Pond. Thoreau had for some time been drawn to the idea of living with nature, away from town life. While in college, his friend Charles Stearns Wheeler had built a cabin on Sandy Pond in Lincoln (next to Concord). Thoreau himself had tried unsuccessfully to obtain permission to build a cabin on Sandy Pond. Emerson's purchase of land at Walden provided Thoreau with the opportunity he craved to live simply in nature and to devote himself to writing. He wanted to work the story of his 1839 journey with his brother John on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers into a book.
In March of 1845, Thoreau began cutting pines at Walden for lumber to build his cabin. The cabin was sufficiently finished to live in by July 4 of that year, when he moved in, although the chimney had not yet been built nor the shingling and plastering completed. Between the time he moved in and his departure from Walden on September 6, 1847, Thoreau lived self-sufficiently, as he wrote in the first paragraph of Walden "earning my living by the labor of my hands only." He fished and grew beans, potatoes, corn, peas, and turnips, selling what he did not need for his own use. He focused on the essentials only and spent the time that was not necessary for obtaining them on what was most important to him — observing the world around him and writing. Thoreau looked for the higher laws behind the facts of his existence. He did not, contrary to popular misconception in his own time and ours, live the life of a hermit or misanthrope. He visited family and friends in town often, and they returned the gesture. The experiment at Walden did what Thoreau had hoped and intended it would. He left Walden with the completed manuscript of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and with much material that would eventually form his Walden as well.
