Farm updated with Thoreau’s love of environment in mind

Located on a twisting lane dotted with large swaths of meadow, the farmhouse where Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817, is set back from the road and shaded by a single oak tree. It’s a quiet, solitary, two-story, five-room house with a narrow entrance hall and stairway, and a modest addition out back that’s painted red to distinguish it from the white clapboards of the historic portion.

The house, built by the Wheeler family in the 1730s, will be open Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. through October. Guided tours of the house, priced at $4, will be conducted at 11 a.m., otherwise admission is free. The farm will also offer children’s programming, author visits, nature walks, and other events throughout the year.

“Tourists have been coming here since the 1880s, but it’s always been in private hands,’’ said Grohol. She noted that the former residences of other local authors, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Luisa May Alcott, have been turned into public spaces, but until now Thoreau’s had not. “And he was the only one born in Concord,’’ she said.

The property has been continually farmed for more than 300 years, and is located on one of the oldest streets in Concord, said Marcia Rasmussen, 55, the town’s director of planning. When the previous owner, James J. Breen Jr., died while working in his cornfield in 1995, the town secured an initial preservation grant of $160,000. Then, with the sort of bootstrap effort that would have pleased Thoreau, town selectmen and volunteers raised $960,000 via nonprofit contributions, anonymous donors, and “kids’ lemonade stands’’ to buy the property, thereby saving it from developers, Rasmussen said.