An Introduction to the Thoreau Collection

Most of the household and personal objects that can reliably be associated with Henry Thoreau (1817–1862) and his family are in the Concord Museum in Concord, Massachusetts. Remarkably, half of the 250 objects in the Thoreau collection came to the museum, directly or indirectly, through one source, Sophia Thoreau. Sophia Thoreau helped manage her brother’s literary legacy in the years immediately following his death, and she is largely responsible for the preservation of his material legacy as well.

Other than Sophia's, there are three principal names that can be associated with the core of the Thoreau collection: Cummings Davis, George Tolman, and Daniel Ricketson.

• Cummings Davis, the founder of the Concord Museum collection, was given several things by Henry Thoreau himself. He also received some of the more significant Thoreau items directly from Sophia Thoreau.
• George Tolman was a neighbor of Sophia Thoreau, and she gave or sold him a number of items about the time she left Concord in 1873. Tolman's young son Adams was also given a number of things by Sophia, which later came to the collection through Adams’s wife and son.
• Daniel Ricketson, whose fan letter to Henry Thoreau in praise of Walden led to a friendship that lasted the rest of Thoreau's life, received several things from Sophia that had been particularly important to her brother. These and other Thoreau items came to the museum through Ricketson's children, Anna and Walton Ricketson.

The other half of the collection, about 125 additional items, came from individual donors - more than fifty of them over the past 125 years - or through purchase. It is by these means that the collection continues to grow.

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An Observant Eye: The Thoreau Collection at the Concord Museum