Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods(New York: New American Library, 1960 [1854]), 30. 

Famous Pumpkin:
Henry David Thoreau's Walden

Yet when Americans thought about the pumpkin as a part of nature and the rural past, as Thoreau did in Walden, they embraced the vegetable’s earthiness and rusticity, envisioning it as an anecdote to the hectic way-of-life of the modern, industrialized world. So in the first half of the nineteenth century, people thought of the pumpkin and pumpkin farming as both awe-inspiring as well as backward.