About

The Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods is owned and operated by the Walden Woods Project. It provides the most comprehensive body of Thoreau-related material available in one place. Opening in 1998, the Thoreau Institute’s Library holds 8000 volumes, and upwards of 60,000 items that include manuscripts, correspondence, periodicals, pamphlets, music, graphic arts, maps, and personal histories. It is the mission of the Library to collect, preserve and make available research materials relating to Thoreau, his historical context, and his contemporary relevance to environmental and human-rights issues.

The Thoreau Institute’s increasing collections range from the unprecedented Thoreau Society’s collections, including the personal collection of the dean of Thoreau scholars, Walter Harding, to the environmental writings of Paul Brooks, to the social reform papers of Scott and Helen Nearing.

Some of the highlights of the collections include the thirty-six-leaf manuscript draft of Thoreau’s “Sir Walter Raleigh” essay; an original daguerreotype of Thoreau taken in 1856 in Worcester by Benjamin Maxham; several Thoreau surveys; manuscript correspondence of several of Thoreau’s friends and contemporaries, including Franklin Sanborn, Harrison Gray Otis Blake, and Daniel Ricketson; documentation by archaeologist Roland Robbins on his 1945 excavation of the Walden house site; original issues of such periodicals as The Dial and Æsthetic Papers; scarce Scott Nearing books, including his forthright 1929 exposé of race relations, Black America, and his 1912 book Woman and Social Progress, written with his first wife, Nellie Seeds Nearing; and rare books of environmental literature, such as Buffon’s Natural History (1785), Gilpin’s Remarks on Forest Scenery (1834) and Knapp’s Journal of a Naturalist (1830).