Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.
Conduct of Life lectures, 1860

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Perhaps America’s best known thinker,  Ralph Waldo Emerson led a renaissance in American ideas in the 19th Century: a search to realize the high potential of the individual person, to understand the proper role of the individual in society, and to discover and celebrate the interrelation and sacredness of all life.  He was a pragmatist and an idealist, a lecturer, a prolific writer and a poet.

In July 1835 Ralph Waldo Emerson purchased his Concord home, proclaiming it was “the only good cellar that had been built in Concord.”  Along with the house, there was a sizable barn, on two acres of land.  In addition to housing various animals, the barn was used for over a year as a schoolroom for Miss Foord’s school. The Emerson children attended the school along with Lizzy and Abby Alcott, Lizzy and Barry Goodwin and Caroline Pratt, all from Concord.

After he purchases his house a relieved Emerson writes to his brother William:

Concord 27 July 1835
Dear William

Has Charles told you that I have dodged the doom of building & have bought the Coolidge house in Concord with the expectation of entering it next September. It is a mean place & cannot be fine until trees & flowers give it a character of its own. But we shall crowd so many books & papers & if possible, wise friends, into it that it shall have as much wit as it can carry.

Waldo E

The house Emerson brought his bride Lidian to on September 15, 1835 became that "sylvan" home where they would live together for the next forty-seven years.  The Emersons had four children.  Their home became not only a place for Emerson's study and writing, but a literary center for the emerging American Transcendentalist movement.

In the early years the Emersons referred to their home as Coolidge Castle, a reference to the Boston Coolidges, who had it built as a summer house.  In the family the house became known as Bush, and it remained Emerson's "home front" for the rest of his life. 

When I bought my house, the first thing I did was plant trees.

In November 1836, after the birth of his son Waldo, Emerson planted six hemlocks.  In 1837 he planted thirty-one pine and chestnut trees. The chestnuts fronted the house, the last one coming down in a storm in 2012. In 1838 he wrote to Thomas Carlyle, "I set out on the west side of my house forty young pine trees."   Soon the two acres grew to nine and in 1847 Emerson had enough land to plant 128 apple, pear and plum trees.

The house contains Emerson’s original furniture and objects, much as he left it. The Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association (RWEMA), formed in 1930 by family members and others associated with Emerson’s library and work, owns the Emerson House and the Emerson family papers, and is responsible for maintaining the house and for promoting interest in Emerson’s literary works. The RWEMA is a private non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation.

Donations for the Museum are most welcome. We have provided gifts for you to choose from to show our appreciation for donations.

The Wide World

Diamond

In the nursery on the second floor of the Ralph Waldo Emerson House in Concord is a substantially-sized antique wooden rocking horse -- with a rounded base, leather saddle and ears, and a horse-hair mane and tail. It stands about three feet tall and four feet long. By Emerson family tradition, the horse's name is "Diamond." On the base, a carved inscription reads: 

Built about 1750
Bought of Mrs. Sophia Parker
At Woods Hole 1825
By Lydia Jackson of Plymouth

Given to children of N. & C. Russell
And by them returned to her son
E. W. E. Concord 1849
Repaired 1885

For as long as I have been a regular visitor to the Emerson House, the rocking horse has always stood out as a fascinating object: full of character, a bit strange, nostalgic, suggestive of idyllic Victorian childhoods and lost Yankee-pastoral ways.

I've always been curious, too, about its history and provenance. The brief version of this history on the base answers some questions, but raises others. Lydia Jackson was Ralph Waldo Emerson's second wife, who hailed from Plymouth on the Massachusetts coast. "E.W.E." was Emerson's youngest son, Edward Waldo Emerson. But other details and persons are not as well known. I decided to try to chase down some of the history of the rocking horse. What I found was an entertaining and adorable story -- one that follows Diamond all over New England; touches on themes of childhood, illness, family, and domesticity; and involves two dramatic incidents at sea -- one of them a shipwreck.

In 1825, Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, Massachusetts went to stay with her maternal aunt, Sophia Cotton Parker, in Woods Hole, near Falmouth, on the southwestern coast of Cape Cod. It was a three-week trip, one that Lydia, later called Lidian, would for the rest of her life remember fondly -- and to which she would even attach great, if somewhat obscure, significance. Lydia was twenty-three years old at the time, an orphan from the age of sixteen: intellectual, eccentric, sickly, deeply interested in matters of religion and the spirit, and, although not widely considered a great beauty, striking in appearance, with dark brown hair and a complexion of "Cherries in milk," as one admiring female friend had it. She had not yet met Ralph Waldo Emerson, the minister-turned-lecturer-and-essayist who would later become her husband and companion of forty-seven years. 

Ever since the nearly simultaneous death of both her parents in 1818, Lydia had boarded with various relatives in Plymouth, including, since 1821, her uncle Rossiter Cotton and aunt Priscilla Jackson Cotton. Her mother's sister Sofia Parker -- "Aunt Parker" as she was known -- lived 40 miles to the south in the seaside village of Woods Hole, where for years Sofia and her husband Seth Parker kept a local tavern. Seth Parker had died in 1814, and at the time of Lydia's visit to Woods Hole the widow Parker was seventy years old. Lydia counted her stay with Aunt Parker to be "one of the most important and interesting occasions of her life," as she later told her daughter Ellen, although she could never quite pinpoint why. She spent much of her time alone, on the hill behind the house, thinking to herself and reading Walter Scott's novel The Betrothed. "I don't know how it was, it was different from any other experience," she told Ellen. "I felt all the time as if my Mother's spirit was very near me."

The death of her parents was only one of the two major hardships that had afflicted Lydia in recent years. The other was a bout of scarlet fever she contracted in 1821 at age nineteen, which nearly killed her and left her permanently riddled with digestive problems and other mysterious ailments, whether organic or psychosomatic. In the aftermath of her illness, Lydia had developed a strict, ascetic diet; slept four hours per night (in emulation of Napoleon, an improbable hero for a twenty-three-year old woman with reclusive tendencies); experimented with a variety of medical therapies, from hydrotherapy to mesmerism to homeopathy; and observed an exercise routine that included her dancing steps, jumping rope, and leaping over a wooden footstool. The solace she found at her aunt's home in Woods Hole was welcome respite from the privation and anxiety of Lydia's life since the death of her parents.

Still, she needed to keep up her exercises, and it was in this context that Lydia first encountered the rocking horse, already an antique in 1825. Its early history is obscure. The toy had once belonged to Aunt Parker's son John Parker, Lydia's older cousin, who had received it as a gift from family friends in Roxbury around 1800 when he was a boy. Nothing else is known of the rocking horse's earlier history, except for what we are told by the inscription on its base: that it was made around 1750. And so about fifty years of the horse's history are essentially a blank. Given that it came to Woods Hole from Roxbury, it seems reasonable to assume it was fashioned somewhere in Boston or its environs — although who knows? After the Parker children grew up, the horse seems to have stayed in the immediate family. When Lydia saw the rocking horse, according to Ellen's later account, she "took a notion that it would be good exercise for her to ride it every day--almost as good as riding a real horse." Lydia offered to trade a mahogany table she owned back in Plymouth for the horse. Aunt Parker agreed, and, according to Ellen, "the exchange was effected by sea."

If a grown woman buying a child's toy for her own use seems a little strange, Lydia probably had more than just her exercise regimen in mind. Lydia was at that time just warming up to what was evidently her new familial role, that of a spinster-aunt. John Parker remembered that she had bought the horse not for herself, but rather for her niece, Sophia Brown -- the eight-year-old daughter of Lydia's older sister, Lucy Jackson Brown. Lydia was a doting aunt to Sophia and her younger brother Frank, and would become even more involved in their care after Lucy's miscreant husband Charles Brown abandoned the family, running off to Istanbul, in 1834. Regardless of who was its intended recipient, though, the horse was soon bound by ship for Plymouth, and Lydia's cousin John, a sailor and a veteran of the naval war of 1812, agreed to accompany what had once been his own childhood toy on its journey thence.

At this point, the story of the rocking horse takes a picaresque turn. According to a later account by Ellen Emerson, John Parker reported that "some drunken sailors” aboard the ship “pushed it overboard." And what do you do with a drunken sailor? Ellen’s account goes on: "The Captain he scolded them & made 'em look for it, & they found it, only its head was broken off in the fall." After cousin John delivered the broken pieces of the rocking horse in Plymouth, presumably retrieving the mahogany table in the process, Lydia herself returned to Plymouth at the end of her three weeks in Woods Hole. Once home with her aunt and uncle Cotton, she was able to get the toy mended. And indeed if you examine the artifact closely today you can see a fracture line where the head was clearly broken off and reattached.

The details of the next twenty-five years or so of the rocking horse's history are somewhat sketchy, although the object seems to have remained in Plymouth. Sophia Brown presumably played with it as a toy in her childhood. Ultimately it was given -- or possibly sold -- to family friends. The inscription informs us that the horse was "given to children of N. & C. Russell," without specifying exactly when. "N. & C. Russell" were Nathaniel Russell, Jr. (1801-1875) -- the older brother of Lydia's best friend Mary Russell -- and Nathaniel's wife, Catherine Elliott Russell (1807-1884). Nathaniel and Catherine Russell's four children were Elliott (b. 1828), Martha (b. 1830), Francis (b. 1832), Anna (b. 1835), Nathaniel (b. 1837), and Kate (b. 1840). Some or all of these Russell children likely played with the rocking horse.

The larger Russell clan were among Lydia's closest connections in Plymouth. Mary Russell was her friend and confidante. Mary and Nathaniel's father, also named Nathaniel, was an iron manufacturer, local notable, and former ship's captain who in 1827 had purchased a fine Federal-style mansion in downtown Plymouth. "Captain Russell," as he was known, was an ebullient personality and a friend of Lydia's parents before their deaths. It was natural that the rocking horse should be left in the orbit of this prominent local family when, in 1834, Lydia departed Plymouth to begin her new married life with Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord. In fact, it was inside the Russell home on Court Street that Lydia, by then aged 32, first met Emerson, at a social gathering after a lecture he had given in Plymouth in February 1834. A brief courtship and proposal followed. Depending on when the rocking horse was given to the Russell children, it may have been on the premises for Lydia and Waldo's first meeting. Alternatively, if the horse was still in Lydia's possession, it may have looked on during their wedding at Winslow House in Plymouth on September 14, 1835.

In any case, the toy did not follow the newlyweds when they moved to Concord into the house they would call "Bush" (now the Ralph Waldo Emerson House). Waldo and Lydia -- who was now renamed "Lidian" at her husband's prompting -- lived in Concord for the next forty-seven years, as the couple hosted a constant stream of visitors in their home, Waldo became one of the preeminent figures in American literature, and Lidian gave birth to four children: Waldo (b. 1837), Ellen (b. 1839), Edith (b. 1841), and Edward (b. 1844). The rocking horse did not figure into the childhoods of the older Emerson children, although there are glimpses to suggest that other toy horses were present in the home. In July 1839, Emerson writes of Waldo in his journal: "I like my boy with his endless sweet soliloquies & iterations and his utter inability to conceive why I should not leave all my nonsense, business, & writing & come to tie up his toy horse, as if there was or could be any end to nature beyond his horse. And he is wiser than we when he threatens his whole threat 'I will not love you.'" Waldo died of scarlet fever in 1842, at age five -- an event that devastated both parents and inspired Emerson's poem "Threnody." Lidian's old rocking horse, meanwhile, gathered dust in the garret of the Russell house on Court Street.

Rocking horses do not appear again in the historical record of the Emerson household until early 1848 -- a time of great activity for Emerson and the world at large. Democratic revolutions against monarchical rule were exploding across Europe; the potato crop failed in Ireland, leading to the Great Famine and mass Irish emigration to America; Italian unification was heating up; and a women's right's convention formed at Seneca Falls, New York. Emerson was in the midst of an eight-month journey abroad to Great Britain and France, from November 1847 until June 1848. In the course of his trip, his second to Europe, Emerson lectured all over England and Scotland, renewed his friendship with Thomas Carlyle, observed a mass Chartist convention in London, and visited Paris in the recent aftermath of the February Revolution. It was an eventful and formative experience for him, which he wrote about extensively in his book English Traits (1856).

But a more domestic duty also weighed on Emerson as he toured Europe. Before he had left Concord for Europe, the family's youngest son Edward, then aged three, had asked his father to bring him back a "red London orange" (a blood orange? a child's fancy?) and a rocking horse. In January 1848, Emerson was lecturing his way through Yorkshire when he received a letter from his eight-year-old daughter Ellen encouraging his speedy return home and reminding him of his promises to "Eddy." The plea came in the form of a rhyming poem:

Father is absent, at England is he,
He went in a ship a few weeks ago.
His form we do not any one of us see
Except in our dreams, -- when we wake we say, No.
O father, come quickly, bring Edward the red
His red London orange, & rockinghorse too.
For he would not like to know that tis said.
That oranges are no more red than they're blue.

Emerson shared Ellen's poem with Elizabeth Ashurst Biggs, the daughter of a radical lawyer and abolitionist hosted him in Manchester (and later a novelist in her own right). He commented that Ellen's verses were "pretty good for a girl who is not yet nine."

Emerson followed through on his promise, although he did not buy the rocking horse until the summer. His miscellaneous notebook of expenses from July 1848 records transactions with three London merchants -- John Davison of Hatton Garden, Robert Henderson of Snow Hill, and Paul Leach of Holborn -- with the word "rockinghorse" written next to them; it is unclear what part each of these men had in the fashioning of the toy. Although Emerson's notes are fragmentary and ambiguous, the purchase was apparently made for 50 shillings. Nothing is known of this other, English rocking horse that was intended for Edward -- not even its name. (Nothing more at all is said of the red London orange.) Emerson arranged to have the horse -- along with two busts of the Egyptian goddess Isis that he had also purchased on his European travels -- sail back to America aboard the Ocean Monarch, an emigration barque bound for Boston, which departed Liverpool on the morning of August 24, 1848.

But Eddy's London rocking horse never made it. The Ocean Monarch's August voyage, as it happened, turned into one of the most notorious shipwrecks of the mid-nineteenth century. The ship, launched the previous year and built by the Canadian-American designer Donald McKay, of clipper ship fame, was the largest in the American merchant fleet at the time, measuring 177 feet. Eight hours into her journey out of Liverpool, a fire broke out in the stern of the ship, probably caused by steerage passengers who had been smoking and from whom the captain had earlier confiscated smoking pipes. Passengers panicked and began jumping overboard. The ship dropped anchor, and after an extensive rescue effort conducted by nearby ships who had spotted the blaze, the Ocean Monarch sank 14 fathoms to the bottom of the sea, taking 179 souls with her -- as well as Emerson's furniture bound for Concord: the two busts of Isis and Eddy's rocking horse.

We know about the demise of the London rocking horse from a letter by Waldo to his older brother William on October 19, 1848, near the end of his European sojourn, which explains what happened and also efficiently recounts what happened next. "Did I tell you that Eddy's rocking horse & my casts of Isis were lost in the Ocean Monarch?" he asks. "The bill of landing was bro't me by Joseph Lyman. Lidian & the boy received the news at Plymouth, & Nathaniel Russell, to whom Lidian had once sold an old family rocking horse, only junior to the Trojan Horse, magnificently explored his garret, & made it a present to Eddie. The horse arrived in Concord amidst uproarious acclamations of our youngest people." And so there you have the story of how Diamond came back into the family: upon receiving the disappointing news that her son's toy was at the bottom of the ocean, Lidian had gone to her old friends the Russells. Captain Russell had dug out the old antique -- "only junior to the Trojan horse" -- of her young adulthood, told Eddy it was now his, and had the horse shipped to Concord, where it arrived to shouts of joy from the other Emerson children, Ellen and Edith.

It was at this point, according to Ellen Emerson, that the horse was given the name Diamond. The horse remained a beloved object among the Emerson children; this much is evident from the attention Ellen and Edward devoted to gathering and preserving its history when they were both adults. In 1870, after relaying an aging John Parker's memories of the rocking horse's misadventures at sea with the drunken sailors, and its subsequent repair, Ellen wrote to Edward: "Preserve this archive of the horse, I'll have it mended again." And she did, in 1885, if the inscription on the base is to be believed.

A later chapter of Diamond's history is known to me only because of family lore. For I have a more than scholarly connection to this object and its previous owners. Ralph Waldo Emerson was my great-great-great grandfather. Lidian was my great-great-great grandmother. Edward Emerson, "Eddy," their youngest son -- later a doctor and writer in his own right -- was my great-great grandfather. Edward's only surviving son, Raymond Emerson, to whom the rocking horse was passed on after Edward, was my great-grandfather. Raymond and his wife Amelia kept the rocking horse in the front hall of their home in Concord; upon their deaths, the horse was given back to the Emerson House, where it remains today.

I remember the first time I saw Diamond, it was during a tour of the Emerson House sometime around 2013, when I was reading quite a bit of Emerson's writing, becoming acquainted with his life and legacy as I studied American cultural and intellectual history in graduate school, and attempting to reconnect with the Emerson branch of my family history. I brought two nephews of mine -- my sister's sons -- on a tour of the Emerson House, where I had never been before, and where we were greeted graciously at the door by a guide. The guide walked us through the house without realizing that we were all of us descendants. When we reached the nursery, she pointed out the rocking horse and claimed that descendants of Ralph Waldo Emerson were still permitted, to this day, to ride Diamond. I leaned over to my nephews and whispered, "want to hop on, boys?" They smiled and said nothing; the guide looked confused.

After my visit to the house, I asked my Dad if he remembered anything about Diamond. And indeed he had fond memories of "Dinah," as he misremembered the horse's name: romping over it with his siblings and older cousins, essentially manhandling the poor thing in the foyer of his grandparents home during the 1950s. It's lucky, in all that horseplay, that they didn't break off the head again!

Charlie Riggs, PhD,
Great-Great-Great Grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Read more posts

Donations for the Museum are most welcome. We have provided gifts for you to choose from to show our appreciation for donations.