Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/10/24/new-homeowners-try-to-privatize-a-road-near-walden-pond-that-pre-dates-u-s-founding.html
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The road, per Street View. 
The house, as seen on the Realtor.com listing
I made a gif showing where the public road is, based on this trail map. It’s the wooded line south of the house. Not not literal driveway that appears to extend from the paved road on maps.
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OMG! Has this thing been torched on McMansion Hell? I’m not an architect, but holy hell does it have some hilariously ugly features that make me think the builder was dropping acid while at work.
I hope the final ruling also includes the homeowners having to reimburse the town for its legal expenses.
Easy money (for the lawyer) if you can get it.
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That house is mild by McMansion Hell standards. It is almost symmetrical, and it is not a badly-proportioned mishmash of different architectural styles.
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Maybe I’m just drawn to the tower on the left where the homeowner can cosplay at being a lighthouse keeper. 
Also, ahoy matey!
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In the homeowners’ favor, anyone following the footsteps of Thoreau should probably be stopped. I don’t even know them but dislike them and don’t want them near my own property.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson’s daughter
And to this day, no one knows the name of this mysterious woman
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These are not mysterious “homeowners”. The person named in the suit is Neil E. Rasmussen.
This is public information, we don’t need to kowtow to our “betters” just because they always like to be identified only as “the owner”.
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Yeah I don’t know how I missed that in my (admittedly not close) skimming of the appeal doc. Looks like he’s an MIT grad who made his money in industrialized electricity tech, which tracks.
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Must be friends of this asshole:
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To be fair I would not travel down the road in the first picture unless it was marked as a proper road (or greenway / public access with official signage). You come across plenty of dirt and semi paved roads out in rural areas that are essentially long driveways. And while the trope exists of someone questioning you about being on their land (typically with a gun in hand), it certainly exists for a reason.
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On street view, if you back up a step and look to the left, you can see where the driveway cuts off from the public road.
It may not be marked at the site itself, but the road is marked in public hiking guides published for hikers in the area.
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I fucking hate entitled rich assholes who think their domain extends further than it does. Oh no, hikers or other might use a public road near me? Get fucked.
I have traveled down many back dirt road to get lost in. It’s fun. You don’t own the “country side”.
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While I’m not on the Estabrook trail itself, I live only about a mile from here.
This has been a huge controversy, as you can imagine. This has always been a public way through beautiful conservation land (the VAST majority of which is owned by Harvard University), and these folks moved-in and declared it their property and have done everything possible to keep people out.
In an area where $2M houses are the norm their house and land are frankly nothing special. They’re just being giant assholes and trying to make a land grab.
Here’s an article published just yesterday in one of the local papers, “The Carlisle Mosquito”. Carlisle is a township of its own now but was originally “North Concord” - the Estabrook trail basically starts at the Carlisle town line and runs nearly two miles south through Concord.
https://carlislemosquito.org/judge-affirms-estabrook-trail-access/
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Asking the owners to take it down seems futile. Did the town forget that bulldozers exist?
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Trying to make this a road less travelled? They’re mixing up Emerson and Frost methinks.
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From the street view, what’s remaining is a pair of posts. You don’t need a bulldozer, just a chainsaw.
It’s also damn clear from the view that this gate was far enough away from the driveways on either side that there’s simply no way they actually thought the road was on either of those properties. I am quite sure, however, that they thought they could get away with blocking the access to it.
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