[1] The reservation was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1962 for its association with the writer Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), whose two years living in a cabin on its shore provided the foundation for his famous 1854 work, Walden; or, Life in the Woods.

The Fitchburg Line of the MBTA Commuter Rail passes west of the pond; however, the nearest station is in Concord center, 1.4 miles northwest of the reservation.

Thus, according to Austin Meredith, Thoreau's writing can be credited not only with encouraging a general respect for Nature, but with inspiring special care for and reclamation of land that has in history been abused or exploited.

During the winter he lived at Walden Pond a large group of men decamped from the train to cut ice there for sixteen days.

In his journal, Thoreau philosophized upon the wintry sight of the ice harvesters: "The sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well ...

[citation needed] An amusement park with swings, concession stands and an event hall, located at the western end of the pond, burned down in 1902 and was never rebuilt.

Judge David A Rose, sitting in the Massachusetts Superior Court, ruled that Walden's deed donating the property to the Commonwealth required preservation of the land and barred further development.

[5] In 1977, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts installed a porous pavement parking area at Walden Pond as a special technology transfer demonstration project, following methodology generated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1972.

He details its unparalleled water quality; its clarity, color, and temperature; its unique animal life (aquatic, bird, and mammal); its rock formations and bed; and especially, its mirror-like surface properties.

My townsmen have all heard the tradition -- the oldest people tell me that they heard it in their youth -- that anciently the Indians were holding a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one of which the Indians were never guilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named.

It is very certain, at any rate, that once there was no pond here, and now there is one; and this Indian fable does not in any respect conflict with the account of that ancient settler whom I have mentioned, who remembers so well when he first came here with his divining-rod, saw a thin vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a well here.

[17] Thoreau, who was well read and a transcendentalist, and therefore presumably intimately familiar with Romanticism, relates the stories in a way that could be argued to interpret or reveal the pond as the locale of the Grail Legend in the Americas.

)[19] Thoreau wrote:[17] An old man who used to frequent this pond nearly sixty years ago, when it was dark with surrounding forests, tells me that in those days he sometimes saw it all alive with ducks and other water-fowl, and that there were many eagles about it.

The hills which form its shores are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high, that, as you looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of an amphitheater for some kind of sylvan spectacle.