Surveyor for hire

I had gotten the impression somewhere that Walter Harding’s biography The Days of Henry Thoreau was a kind of insanely detailed chronology, providing (as the title suggests) a day-by-day, blow-by-blow description of the man’s life.

In fact, it turned out to be a readable, sympathetic biography that provides more homely detail than Richardson’s Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind—but not too much.

Harding reproduces this handbill that Thoreau used to promote his services as a land surveyor. Thoreau was apparently good enough to justify his claim: “Areas warranted accurate within almost any degree of exactness, and the Variation of the Compass given, so that the lines can be run again.” And he was conscientious in his dealings with clients, as when he helped James Barrett Wood survey a wood lot in Northboro.

On one particular day they had great trouble finding the bounds and it was dark before they were ready to run the final line. Wood wondered how they would be able to see the last bound to take the bearings, but Thoreau quietly continued to work and, when he had his compass set, pulled a candle and a match from his pocket, lighted it, and told Wood to hold it on top of the stick on the last bound. In that way he finished the work and saved Wood not only the trouble of journeying out to the wood lot again but the three dollars he would have paid for another day’s work.