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Thoreau began his formal education at Concord Academy and continued his studies at Harvard College, which emphasized the classics. An avid reader and note-taker, Thoreau was interested in subjects so diverse as Greek mythology and English ballads. While Thoreau attended Harvard, Ralph Waldo Emerson moved to Concord to begin his career as a writer and lecturer. Thoreau admired Emerson's l836 essay, "Nature,"which advanced the then-unique idea that each individual should seek a spiritually fulfilling relationship with the natural world. After graduating from Harvard in 1837, Thoreau returned to Concord, where he taught school, improved and expanded his family's pencilmaking business, and engaged in carpentry, stonemasonry and gardening. He began his lifelong friendship and association with Emerson, who introduced him to other writers and nonconformist thinkers who were making Concord the center of new ideas. Among them were Bronson Alcott, Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Emerson, who valued Thoreau's practical talents and companionship,
invited him to live in the Emerson household. Grief brought them
closer together. The Emersons' first son died just two weeks after
the death of Thoreau's beloved older brother. Three years later,
Thoreau, still suffering from this loss, wanted to live in the
woods and embark on a career as a writer. When Emerson offered
him the use of a newly purchased woodlot at Walden Pond, Thoreau
gladly accepted. Walden Pond was surrounded by one of the few remaining woodlands
in a heavily farmed area. In March of l845, Thoreau began planning
and building his one-room house. On July 4 of that year, he took
up residence at Walden. He studied natural history, gardened,
wrote in his journal, read, and drafted his first book, A Week
on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, about an 1839 trip with his
brother. He also made the first accurate survey of the pond. By
no means a hermit, he frequently walked to the village, entertained
visitors at his house, and hired himself out as a surveyor. In September of 1847, Thoreau completed his experiment in simplicity and became "a sojourner in civilized life again." Walden, the book that describes his experiences at the pond, was published in l854. Thoreau and Emerson agreed that the vacant house should not remain on the site. Thoreau gave the house to Emerson, who sold it to his gardener. Two years later two farmers bought it and moved it to the other side of Concord, where they used it to store grain. In l868, they dismantled it for scrap lumber and put the roof on an outbuilding. After his Walden experience, Thoreau applied his skills as a
surveyor and pencilmaker to earn what little money he needed for
the things that he could not "grow or make or do without."
He spent his free time walking, studying and Thoreau became increasingly involved with the social and political issues of his time. He often spoke out against economic injustice and slavery. With other members of his family, Thoreau helped runaway slaves escape to freedom in Canada. His 1849 essay, Civil Disobedience, eventually brought him international recognition. On May 6, l862, at the age of 44, the "self-appointed inspector
of snowstorms and rainstorms" died after a prolonged struggle
with tuberculosis. He is buried on Authors' Ridge at Sleepy Hollow
Cemetary in Concord.  I
went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,
to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could
not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover
that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life,
living is so dear, nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless
it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all
the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to
put to rout all that was not life,...."   "I
hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs on
two sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side,
leaving the rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight
and much stronger than sawed ones. Each stick was carefully
mortised or tenoned by its stump, for I had borrowed other tools
by this time. My days in the woods were not very long ones; yet
I usually carried my dinner of bread and butter, and read the
newspaper in which it was wrapped, at noon, sitting amid the green
pine boughs which I had cut off, and to my bread was imparted
some of their fragrance, for my hands were covered with a thick
coat of pitch. Before I had done I was more the friend than the
foe of the pine tree, though I had cut down some of them, having
become better acquainted with it."
"Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I loved to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied when I was ploughing, they warmed me twice, once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat." Boards .....................$8.031/2, mostly shanty boards One thousand old
Chalk ..................$0.01 Transportation ....$1.40 - I carried a good part on my back _____________________ "In all ..................$28.12 1/2
 "My furniture,
part of which I made myself, and the rest cost me nothing
of which I have not rendered an account, consisted of a bed,
a table, a desk, three chairs, a looking-glass three inches
in diameter, a pair of tongs and andirons, a kettle, a skillet,
and a frying-pan, a dipper, a wash-bowl, two knives and forks,
three plates, one cup, one spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for molasses,
and a japanned lamp. None is so poor that he need sit on a pumpkin.
That is shiftlessness. There is a plenty of such chairs as I
like best in the village garrets to be had for taking them away.
Furniture Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid
of a furniture warehouse."
"Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my house, which were already impervious to rain, with imperfect and sappy shingles made of the first slice of the log, whose edges I was obliged to straighten with a plane." He refused to pay his poll tax on the grounds that he would not support a government which tolerated slavery and which was fighting an unjust war in Mexico. He was thrown into jail and released the next day when an aunt paid the tax without his consent. From this experience came the essay "Civil Disobedience," Thoreau's classic call for non-cooperation. "Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, . . . or shall we transgress them at once?" He asked. "I say, break the Law." "One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house. I had gone down to the woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society."
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Henry
David Thoreau was born on July l2, 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts.
Under the influence of his brother John, an 
amateur ornithologist, he developed an interest in nature
and spent much of his youth exploring the town's ponds and woods.
This is a view of the furnishings.