Brister Freeman was born into slavery around 1744, separated from his mother as a boy of 9 and given as a wedding gift to his owner’s son-in-law in Concord, Mass. Freeman’s new enslaver was a very ambitious man — a Harvard-educated doctor who rose to prominence in the storied New England town. For 25 years, Freeman aided John Cuming’s climb by sparing him hard labor.
And yet, Freeman, known then as Brister Cumings, was very ambitious as well. Ambitious to be free.
He won his liberty by serving as a soldier in the Revolutionary War, then cast off his enslaver’s surname and declared himself ‘Freeman’ — a risky move at the time.
Next, he sought to win the same civic rights as White property owners, purchasing a parcel in 1785 with a fellow Black soldier and building a home for his family in a largely barren swath of forest known as Walden Woods.
In 1845, two decades after Brister Freeman died, a White man went to live in the very same woods, determined to put his own ideas of independence to the test. His name was Henry David Thoreau, and in his contemplative 1854 classic, “Walden: Or, Life in the Woods,” the famous naturalist, essayist and philosopher described Freeman and some of the other formerly enslaved inhabitants of the land.
Today, in a warming world in which humans yearn to live sustainably on the planet again, the 462-acre Walden Pond State Reservation has become an international destination for more than a half-million nature lovers annually as a birthplace of the modern conservation movement.
Yet, until very recently, there has been little acknowledgment that Walden Woods was first occupied by Black people whose experience of self-sufficiency was harrowingly different from Thoreau’s two-year experiment.
“Walden was a Black space before it was a green space,” said Elise Lemire, a professor of literature at Purchase College, State University of New York, and author of “Black Walden,” which chronicles the lives of the formerly enslaved people of Walden Woods.
The existence of these earlier residents also runs directly counter to the popular myth of Massachusetts as the cradle of American liberty and home to an abolitionist movement that had been untarnished by slavery, Lemire notes.
