 |
Reconstructing Thoreau's World Through the Eyes of a Local Photographer
The below is from the text accompanying a collaborative exhibit and lecture series at the
Concord Free Public Library entitled "Reconstructing Thoreau's World," sponsored jointly by, and featuring the holdings of,
the Concord Free Public Library's
William Munroe Special Collections
and the Thoreau Society. The exhibit is free and open to the public in the CFPL Gallery during library hours through December 31, 2007.
The color photographs of Concordian Esther Howe Wheeler Anderson evoke the pure joy that Henry David Thoreau took in the landscape of his hometown, and still elicit an elemental response in today's viewer. Mrs. Anderson brought a thorough knowledge of the author's writings, a life-long familiarity with Concord, and a fine aesthetic sense to bear in creating a body of visual work equal to that of any of the photographic professionals who have chosen Thoreau's Concord as their subject matter.
 Born here in 1891, Esther Howe Wheeler was the oldest child of Frank and Lucie Howe Brigham Wheeler. Her father, a successful market gardener at Nine Acre Corner, died in 1919. After his death, she managed the family farm for many years, relying on foreman Mike Burke and Irish and Nova Scotian farm help for muscle, and on her uncle William Wheeler for financial oversight. At the end of her life, she looked back with some amazement at the responsibilities she assumed as a young woman, as she kept eight greenhouses in operation, purchased tons of soft coal to fuel the farm boilers, and trucked produce to market.
In 1920, Esther Wheeler married Leslie O. Anderson, who first worked for and later owned Towle and Kent's grocery store on Concord's Mill Dam. The couple became acquainted through Leslie Anderson's visits to Nine Acre Corner to pick up produce and make deliveries. The Andersons raised their family in Concord and were active in town life. Esther Anderson was a member of the First Parish, the Concord Art Association, and the Concord Antiquarian Society. She also belonged to the Market Gardeners' Association, the Middlesex Canal Association, and the Massachusetts Herb Society. An avid Thoreauvian, she was a founding member of the Thoreau Society, to which memorial contributions were directed at her death at the age of ninety-three, in 1985.
Over the course of Mrs. Anderson's life, the recognition of Thoreau's relevance to the modern world grew significantly. In an interview done in 1980 through Concord's official Oral History Program (the recorded interviews and transcriptions generated by which are held by the Concord Free Public Library), she commented that her uncle William and his wife tolerated but never understood her early fondness for the author.
Esther Anderson took photographs of the Concord landscape from the 1930s on. Her work survives in the form of thirty-five millimeter color slides. She organized many of them into coherent slide lectures to illustrate Thoreau country as described in the author's writings ("Thoreau Country" was, in fact, the name of what was perhaps her best-known slide lecture), and presented these lectures to friends at her home in Concord, at the Annual Gathering of the Thoreau Society, and in other venues around New England.
 The Anderson name is still closely associated with photography in Concord today. Anderson Photo on Walden Street was established by William Wheeler Anderson, one of Esther's sons.
In 2006, the Concord Free Public Library purchased an extensive collection of Esther Anderson's slide lectures, lecture notes, and loose slides from William Wheeler Anderson, Jr., her grandson. The presence of this collection in the same archive that preserves the photographic legacy of Anderson's forerunners Alfred Hosmer and Herbert Gleason and five Men of Concord paintings by N. C. Wyeth -- all formative visual influences on Anderson -- provides unparalleled opportunity for the informed comparison of key late nineteenth- and twentieth-century representations of Thoreau's world.
After Esther Anderson's death, her grandson Bill -- long the dedicated keeper and interpreter of her photographs -- created a videotape of her slide lecture "Thoreau Country." Walter Harding (Thoreau Society founder, anchor, and long-time secretary) wrote a thoughtful and moving introduction to the video. Harding's commentary emphasizes the knowledge, skill, patience, and sensitivity that went into Esther Anderson's vision of Thoreau's world, which he saw as a reflection of Thoreau's own approach:
In 1854 with the publication of his masterpiece, Walden, Henry David Thoreau boasted that he "traveled much in Concord." "For many years," as he said, "I was self-appointed inspector of [Concord] snow-storms and rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility."
A hundred years later, Esther Howe Anderson, like Thoreau a native and lifelong resident of Concord also "traveled much in Concord," reading in Thoreau's writings and then following in his footsteps with her camera in hand, photographing through his eyes the beauties of the gentle Concord landscape. If Thoreau reported seeing the pink ladyslipper blooming in the pine woods of Conantum on May 31st, Esther Anderson went out to Conantum on May 31st, found the descendants of Henry's flowers and photographed them. If Thoreau reported seeing a double rainbow or a sun dog or a rare albino cardinal flower, Esther Anderson searched, often for years and years and years, until she found one and photographed it. And she was not satisfied with one photograph. She photographed the same scenes over and over until she got exactly the effect she wanted -- the effect that Thoreau had described.
Luckily she did her photographic work in what Thoreau would have described as "the very nick of time." Concord, in Thoreau's day was a sleepy little village of two thousand. Now the population is ten times that. In the great push to the suburbs of Boston of thirty or forty years ago, much of the quiet ruralness of Concord disappeared. Conantum became a housing development. Walden Pond was overwhelmed with as many as fifteen thousand swimmers on a hot summer weekend. A superhighway bisected the countryside. With the coming of the Dutch elm disease, the beautiful wine-glass American elms disappeared from the landscape. Farmers abandoned horses and took up tractors. With the coming of refrigerators, people abandoned the harvesting and storing of ice. The whole way of life changed. But working in the 1930s and '40s and '50s, Esther Anderson caught in her photographs the old ways of life before they disappeared, and the beauties of the Concord landscape before so much of it was destroyed. Thus she enables us to see a Thoreau country that is now gone forever.
Professor Harding understood that the historic landscape anywhere as it appeared at any given moment in its past survives intact only in written and visual documentation such as that found in the Concord Free Public Library and Thoreau Society collections, not in the tangible, ever-changing present.
For information about the lecture series accompanying this exhibit, see the Special Collection's website.
Images courtesy of the Special Collections of the Concord Free Public Library: Top left -- Esther Howe Wheeler Anderson. Photograph, Thoreau's Cove, Walden, snow, from slide set "Walden and Surrounds." Copy image from original 35 mm. mounted color slide. Concord Free Public Library, Esther Howe Wheeler Anderson Slide Collection (purchased from William Wheeler Anderson, Jr., 2006).
Below right -- Esther Howe Wheeler Anderson. Photograph, double rainbow, from slide lecture "Thoreau Country." Copy image from original 35 mm. mounted color slide. Concord Free Public Library, Esther Howe Wheeler Anderson Slide Collection (purchased from William Wheeler Anderson, Jr., 2006).
Art Credits: Page designed by Windfall.
 
 
|
|
