Henry David Thoreau

📍Walden Pond State Reservation, 915 Walden Street, Concord, MA 01742, USA

“I was born in Concord and lived nearly all my life there, working at my family's pencil factory, surveying, and walking the woods, rivers and fields every single day. Near the end of March 1845 I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, on land my friend Ralph Waldo Emerson owned, to cut tall white pines for timber. With my own hands I built a cabin ten feet wide and fifteen long, with a bed, a desk and a table with three chairs — one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. The whole thing cost me twenty-eight dollars and twelve and a half cents. On the Fourth of July I moved in. I wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life. I grew beans, bathed in the pond each morning, watched the seasons and the ice, and wrote. I stayed two years, two months and two days. During that time I spent a night in the town jail for refusing to pay a tax to a government that supported slavery and war, and out of it came Civil Disobedience. The site of my cabin is now marked by a cairn of stones left by visitors.”

Sources: nps.gov mass.gov smithsonianmag.com