Henry David Thoreau
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Book Review:
Thoreau the Land Surveyor

By Patrick Chura. University Press of Florida, 2010. 212 p., $34.95 hardbound. ISBN 9780813034935.

Reviewed by Randall Conrad 

 

The profession Thoreau chose in later life, land surveying, has been variously presented by biographers, mainly positively. It enabled him to spend many hours out of doors, endlessly noting Concord’s flora and fauna cycles.  It is proof of his involvement in the human community and of his service to his fellow Concordians. It brought him a living. Walter Harding found a downside as well: “his surveying was all too often a preliminary to woodcutting on the part of his employers, and thus he was playing his part in the destruction of the Concord woods. That fact was to disturb his conscience for some time.”

Now we have an engrossing study which looks far more deeply into the relation between surveying and conscience, written by Patrick Chura, a literature scholar who teaches at the University of Akron (Ohio), has contributed to the Bulletin and the Concord Saunterer, and possesses a hands-on knowledge of surveying – compass, chain and all. Chura joined his university’s historic surveying team to give himself some training in nineteenth-century techniques, brought his equipment to Concord to retrace some of Thoreau’s work in the 1850s, reproduced from scratch Thoreau’s Walden Pond survey, revisited the old survey sites, and ultimately realized “how much life and mental energy [Thoreau’s] more than 165 land surveys had demanded of him” (xii).

It is encouraging to find a man of letters who fully understands the science and mechanics of the technical subjects which so often present themselves in the course of Thoreau’s life, spent among mechanical devices, mills, tools and gadgets. It is encouraging too to find a critic whose mind so nimbly ranges from the lyric to the dialectical. Evoking “the echoes of the relentless chopping, …the creaking of the shifting ice and the click of the surveying chain,” Chura paints a sensual picture of

 

Thoreau’s physically demanding effort in his very first survey (1846), that of Walden Pond itself. He depicts Thoreau taking compass bearings,

[w]alking and working on the vast open ice, nestling the wooden legs of the tripod into the snow and leveling the compass on the frozen pond surface, squinting through the compass sight vanes at hundreds of points on the horizon and every contour of the Walden shoreline… (24)

Chura’s examination of Thoreau’s draft survey (as well as the famous final map printed in Walden in 1854) reveals “a new form of observation, a merging of manual and intellectual labor previously theorized in transcendental philosophy but now being actually put into practice” (25). Chura consistently brings us outside the perimeter of mere literature, so to speak, and shows us the manual laborer, the better to integrate the seemingly opposite extremes into a unified picture that affords deeper understanding.

Chura offers a radical perspective on Thoreau’s choice of profession, arguing that there is a contradiction between living a life of civil disobedience and plying one’s trade in support of the institution of private property and environmental degradation. In the course of several chapters, Chura explores the possibility that “surveying contradicted the preservationist ethos at the core of Thoreau’s enduring legacy as our greatest nature writer.”  He writes, notably:

Imposing straight lines and mathematical formulae upon natural irregularities, marking off and subdividing the landscape near Walden Pond, laying out houses, barns and roads in Concord, Thoreau undeniably participated to some degree in civilized encroachment and environmental defacement (12).

This is no mere conceit. Chura takes a class-conscious stance, affirming that Thoreau’s antiauthoritarian voice in “Civil Disobedience” may have rung true in 1848, but there was “no viable way for Thoreau to both work as Concord’s land surveyor and avoid a form of association with the state” beginning in 1851, when he earned a good sum from the town for laying out a road and perambulating and mapping town lines. Chura’s words are harsh, yet quite accurate:

By becoming the town’s favored surveyor, Thoreau accepted designation as an employee of the ‘corporation’ he had once shunned, compromised his hard-won noncompliance with civic authority, and forfeited his institutional anonymity. As journal entries on the 1852 perambulation show, he realized at once that he had ‘crossed the line’ and ‘walked not with God but with the devil,’ compromising what he termed the ‘charmed circle’ he had drawn around his life in exclusion of the trivial and superficial. (13)

Chura produces quite a few examples of modern verifications of Thoreau’s technical accuracy as well as praise for his ethical professional standards that have been published by modern historians of surveying. Ultimately, however, Chura wants to get at the sociopolitical dimension of all this – to transcend the contradiction between authoring “Civil Disobedience” and being on the municipal payroll. “Thoreau would have been much more pleased to be classified with John Brown, the most subversive of all surveyors, who [used] the compass and chain as weapons in a war against state-sanctioned injustice,” Chura writes (21).

That’s right, John Brown, antislavery terrorist and hero to the transcendentalists, worked as a surveyor in Kansas in 1856. With two sons and a son-in-law, Brown surveyed legal boundaries on behalf of Ottawa Indians who were being dispossessed by proslavery poachers and claim-jumpers. He also reportedly would bring equipment and an assistant to the camps of proslavery ruffians to spy out their intentions, being taken for a proslavery sympathizer precisely because of his profession. (Surveyors normally were government men.) Thoreau learned somewhat of Brown’s doings when he met him in 1857, and, as Chura points out, refers several times to Brown’s profession and his subversive application of it to the abolitionist cause in his lecture “A Plea for Captain John Brown” (1859). Rhetorically, emphasizing the man’s surveying skills is Thoreau’s way of attesting to Brown’s respectable character, integrity, and indeed his sanity and common sense before an audience of unsympathetic listeners.¹

 In his final chapter, Chura concentrates on Thoreau’s nearly two-year survey of the Concord River (1859-60), undertaken for the River Meadow Association, which was involved in suing dam owners for ruining farmers’ lands by unnaturally controlling the river’s flow rate. (They lost the case.) To support the plaintiffs’ arguments, Thoreau plunged into “an all-consuming, more-than-full-time labor” (156) taking measurements along a 22-mile stretch of the Concord. Supplementing his extensive statistics, Thoreau gained additional data by interviewing farmers. Thoreau may have found higher purposes in his own work as a surveyor after encountering Brown, Chura supposes. In the course of 160-odd jobs as a hired engineer, Thoreau had finally managed to be reconciled to the profession, finally performing along the Concord the “spiritually motivated fieldwork” that he had launched with his very first survey, that of the pond in winter.

Chura devotes thoughtful pages to Thoreau’s deathbed effort to square his employment as a surveyor with service to the higher law in his final essays “Life Without Principle” (once titled “The Connection Between Man’s Employment and His Higher Life”) and “Walking” (a “paean to Manifest Destiny,” perhaps, but surely also a dismal prophecy of a world completely divided up into private properties). Thoreau the Land Surveyor is a study of Thoreau at once robust and subtle, absorbing to read and thought-provoking long after you have laid it down.

¹ Readers may remember hearing Chura speak on this topic at the Thoreau Society Annual Gathering, July 9, 2009, in his panel presentation “The Concord Surveyor and the Kansas Surveyor.”

 Reprinted, with prermission, from Thoreau Society Bulletin, Number 274, Spring 2011

 

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Updated July 15 2011