Rocks

I like rocks. Always have. They're solid. They're old. Each one has a story millions, even billions of years old. If I see an interesting rock small enough, I'll sometimes take it home. If it's too large, I'll photograph it.Saw this one on a hike up Whiting Hill in Lovell, Maine last week. It's white quartz with light brown feldspar - pretty typical for a hilltop in western Maine.Here it is closer up. The black outline of weathering around the crystals pleases me.Like to climb over rocks too, especially along Maine's coast. This is part of the bedrock near Biddeford Pool on the southern Maine coast. Maine has some of the most varied geology to be found anywhere on earth. It's not only interesting; it's beautiful. The amateur geologist in me thinks this is sedimentary, metamorphic, turned up 90 degrees and weathered by the surf.This is just a few yards away, but from another age entirely, and that's how Maine bedrock is. This rock heated and swirled more than the one above it.Only about four feet away is this one in a seam where iron oxidized, creating dark red staining.Looks like chemical reactions I don't understand at all are creating different textures as well.Albany, Maine stone wall I found in an abandoned neighborhood last spring.Carrickabraghey Castle on Isle of Doagh, Donegal where we visited two years ago. My ancestors built this "keep" - all that remains of the 14th century castle that was about ten times bigger than what you see here.It's mostly limestone around that area, but some granitic outcrops are scattered about. Glashedy Island is offshore. Glashedy means "green on top." It's a big rock with ten acres of grass on it. Locals brought sheep out there to graze.View out to sea from inside the keep. I love the way the limestone weathers inside - so different from the granites and feldspars of Maine. Easier to work as well.View out another window.And another.And out a door with my wee wife outside.And a high window.A long beach nearby deposits weathered rocks in terraces. When waves recede, millions tumble against each other. The sounds they make are as charming to the ear as the polished limestone specimens are to the eye. The wee wife has found a beauty to smuggle home. Ireland won't miss it.

Prehistory of My Place - Part 2

Part 1 last week (scroll down below) dealt with the prehistory of Lovell, including the work of the late amateur archaeologist Helen Leadbeater of Fryeburg citing an article by William Rombola called, “The Ceramic Period in the Upper Saco River Drainage: An Analysis of the Helen Leadbetter Collection” in the Maine Archaeological Society Bulletin for Fall, 1998.Helen Leadbeater’s extensive collection also contained artifacts the age of which Rombola doesn’t guess at, including what he calls “groundstone” tools like “half-channeled gouges” he says “are thought to have been used for some specialized form of woodworking.” By groundstone, I assume he means polished. There have been several polished slate artifacts similar to what he describes found in Red Paint sites all over the northeast and as well as sites in northwestern Europe dating from the same periods. “One,” Rombola says, “was recovered from the north end of Kezar Lake in Lovell, Maine.”North end of Kezar Lake

In July of last summer, fellow teacher Terri McDermith and I arranged for several of our students to assist Maine’s senior archaeologist Dr. Arthur Spiess and his team as they excavated a portion of the area behind the Fryeburg Harbor Church. That’s just across the Old Course of the Saco River from the Kezar Lake outlet dam. Many other locals have extensive collections of artifacts gathered from there during the 20th century. With help from a local archaeologist, Lovell’s Jane Dineen, we found chips and scrapers of hornfels and Munsungan Chert as well as pottery sherds and fire pits surrounded by fire-cracked rock. Dr. Spiess said they all probably date from around 1200 AD. Time and funds ran out just as we were digging the most promising pits and Spiess said that almost always happens. If we can raise enough money - about $6000 for a week’s work - we can resume. That whole area would seem to have been used continually from about 4000 years ago until the Pequawkets (who were Abenaki) cleared out nearly three centuries ago.In the Fall, 1986 Maine Archaeological Society Bulletin, Dr. Spiess published a study titled: “The Kimball Collection From Bear Pond Inlet (Site 22.8).” Locals know that’s in nearby Waterford. The artifacts were gathered prior to World War II by Harold Kimball as he walked by the area where Mill Brook enters the pond on his way to and from work every day. Spiess said, “ . . . the collection . . . apparently includes Early Archaic material (circa 9000 B.P.). B.P. means “Before Present.” He goes on to state that “Abrasive stones are present in a variety of forms.” By “abrasive” I assume he means what Rombola referred to as “groundstone” and other archaeologists call polished slate. Most old stone wood-working tools are made of polished slate. The grainy images of them in the article look like the polished slate tools I’ve seen depicted in Red Paint sites in northeastern North America from Maine all the way to northern Labrador. Spiess states later that, “[this] heavy woodworking equipment, we suspect, belongs with the Early Archaic, Middle Archaic, and Laurentian Late Archaic.” That would mean they were between 3000 and 9000 years old.Also in the Maine Archaeological Society Bulletin for Fall, 1998 was an article by Craig Norman called, “Controlled Surface Collection And Artifact Analysis Of The Stevens Brook Site, Presumpscot Watershed.” Craig Norman, also, was alerted by reports of local amateurs collecting artifacts, this time on the shore of Long Lake where Stevens Brook enters and forms a sand bar. Here also, both stone and ceramics were recovered. The stone was made mostly from the same materials as those in the Leadbetter and Kimball collections. As with the Fryeburg Harbor site, there was much evidence in the form of what archaeologists call “lithic debitage” (lots of stone chips) that stone tools were created on the site over several millennia beginning during the Middle Archaic Period, 7200 years ago.Jane Dineen and Art Spiess

So it seems the earliest evidence of human activity within a 20 mile radius of Lovell is in the form of stone tools 9000 years old when the whole area would have been treeless tundra. They must have hunted animals, some of whom would now be extinct. The tools they made were of materials from as far away as Northern Labrador. Some sites were continually occupied, at least seasonally, for many millennia. We don’t know who the earliest people were, but the latest occupants before European settlement were Pequawkets - the local branch of Abenaki Indians. People around here used pottery for at least three millennia. They planted and harvested corn during the last millennium. The Pequawkets were aggressive, raiding English settlements in Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.Terri McDermith and daughter Emily seated

There are many gaps to fill in my quest to understand everything that ever happened around here, and I’ve only got about 25 years left to do it. A few thousand dollars for more digging would help a lot, so if there are any pecunious readers out there who want to help, let me know. I promise to spend your money more wisely than government would, and I’ll also report back about how it was spent without your having to file Freedom of Information Act requests.

More of Maine's Abandoned Neighborhoods

I. Saunders cellar hole

Soft, white-and-yellow flowers poked up through last fall’s leaves and contrasted with hard, gray granite. Whoever lived there had been very good with stone, and with flowers. The people who positioned each were long dead. Their house had fallen in and rotted away, but I knew I would have liked them if only for where and how they chose to live. The cellar hole still perched beside the steep dirt road. Holes don’t usually perch but this one did. Through deep woods, I pulled my ATV into what would have been their dooryard on the uphill side. From there, I could oversee what would have been the view from the house when it stood. Hardwoods across the road were bare of leaves and a mountainous horizon was visible to the west. The view would have been unobstructed when the farm operated back in the nineteenth century and sunsets must have been stunning. That was my second indication of how much intelligence and planning went into laying out that farmstead. Getting off my machine, I was careful not to step on more beds of flowers the like of which I’d never seen before. Next, I noticed a dug well covered with an old piece of galvanized steel roofing. Then I walked down to the cellar hole for a closer look. It was impressive. Massive chimney bases told me the house had probably been a cape with large fireplaces on the gable ends. From one uphill corner a galvanized, steel pipe stuck out - a gravity feed from the uphill well still trickled after all these years.

When I got home I pulled out my maps. One old Oxford County map told me that someone named “I. Saunders” lived there in 1858. Another showed him still there in 1880.

It was spring vacation and I’d finally found time to renew one of my favorite pastimes - exploring abandoned neighborhoods. I had focused on Albany Township, Maine. It’s not a municipality anymore, but it was once. Judging from the 1858 map, it had almost as many people as Lovell did, but seems to have lost many more in the post-Civil War outmigration to the west - so many that it ceased being a town and gave over control to the State of Maine. I’d looked it over from my pickup truck over the past ten years when I felt like driving around on Friday-night dates with my wife, and noticed some building going on. Some of the old neighborhoods are being repopulated. I saw homes going up next to or behind two-hundred-year-old cellar holes. People today obviously agree with 19th century pioneers about the best places to site a house.
1858 Map

Nobody built near the Saunders cellar hole though - too steep for them I’d guess. There are ledges on the hillside above and it looks like Mr. I. Saunders pulled some large flat stone down for his house foundation. He used two massive 5X5-foot slabs to form one corner and a few others to form parts of the cellar walls. Don’t know exactly how long they’ve been in place, but they haven’t moved after at least a century-and-a-half of freezing and thawing. As I said, he was good with stone. He might have been assisted by relatives as the 1858 map shows other Saunders farmsteads above and below his. Brothers perhaps? The Saunders farm above had disappeared on the 1880 map. Did that brother seek his fortune in America’s west as so many others from western Maine did?1880 Map

Looking at a 1915 USGS map to be found online on a University of New Hampshire web site, I could see there was still a house there where I. Saunders had built it and quite a few acres were still clear on both sides of the steep dirt road.1915 USGS map

On the 1943 map, some of the land was still clear but the house was gone. The 1963 map shows the forest having overtaken everything.1941 USGS map

As of last week, a few trees left from his apple orchard stood here and there between stone walls, and those delicate, white-and-yellow flowers were still blooming.

Old New England

New England is old, and that’s one of the things I like about it. As most people learned in school, it was one of the first places in North America to be settled by English-speaking people and they left their marks almost everywhere you look. Many of the houses they built are still standing, sometimes with their descendants still living in them. Even where the houses have disintegrated, cellar holes remain.

There’s nothing I like better than to explore the back roads of New England. I keep DeLorme Atlases of four states on the back seat of my car to guide me if I’m lucky enough to find a few hours and indulge my wanderlust. As family obligations or medical treatment force me to drive to Massachusetts several times a year, I try to work in some side trips whenever possible on the way back. I’ve already taken every possible north to south route where the roads are numbered highways, so now I try to plot back-road detours along each of them. As I investigate those, I find many other intriguing, dead-end side roads too. I intend to examine them all before I die.

Usually, I don’t know how long it’s going to take to explore a road, because I don’t always know where it will lead. Many are not in the DeLorme Atlas. If my wife happens to be with me, that may limit how far down a particular road I can go or how many side roads I can take before she loses patience. If I’m traveling alone, I usually get home late. She doesn’t worry so much anymore because she knows what I’m likely to be doing. and the next time we’re passing through the area I’d been exploring, I can show her some the best out-of-the-way places I’ve found.

English-speaking people have lived in the area for over four hundred years and they’ve altered the landscape. In addition to houses and fields, they built stone walls which remain long after the house has fallen in and rotted away, and the fields have grown up to forest again. While driving along, I look for old gnarled maple trees near the road as signs for where an old farmhouse may have been located. Usually, I find a cellar hole nearby.

The earliest evidence of human habitation in northern New England goes back only about nine thousand years. Those people were probably very different from the Abenaki and other tribes encountered by European colonists. They were likely nomadic hunters of big herd animals like mammoths and mastodons, and it’s quite possible they hunted those animals to extinction. Otherwise, they left very little evidence of their stay here. Only careful archaeological investigation produces whatever artifacts they left and those can only be seen in museums or private collections. The next inhabitants, eastern woodland Indians, didn’t leave much behind either. There are some pictographs on a cliff in Lovell, some petroglyphs on rocks in the Penobscot, and some shell middens on the coast, but not much else. Their descendants still live in New England, but they’re largely assimilated, living pretty much the way I do.

Also interesting is evidence of the prehuman geology all around us. Maine, actually, is one of the most geologically varied places on earth. At Border’s recently, I purchased Roadside Geology of Vermont and New Hampshire and I found Roadside Geology of Maine online. It should be arriving in the mail any day now. I’m already trying my wife’s patience when I pull over to examine road cuts along the highway. Especially interesting are the fresh ones, like those exposed during the recent Maine Turnpike widening.

Many of us around here were forced to learn about geology back in 1988 when the US Department of Energy considered trying to bury high-level nuclear waste in the Sebago Batholith. I never heard of a batholith before that, but I read their literature and found out that a huge mass of granite formed under us millions of years ago when some magma tried to break through the earth’s mantle. It couldn’t quite break out into a volcano and cooled underground instead. The DOE said the batholith, or pluton, extended from Westbrook to Lovell and it was seamless - there were no cracks in it. That was surprising news to the dozens of well drillers who had been boring into it for decades and finding lots of cracks. Otherwise they would not have been able to find any water. Lots of angry New Englanders persuaded the Energy Department to look elsewhere for a nuclear waste dump, but my interest in local geology was reignited.

Ever since, it’s taken me a lot longer to get from place to place in New England, because I have to pull over so much and check out the evidence of history.

Published March, 2004

Abandoned Neighborhoods in Maine

I’m not sure if we’re following an urge to escape from the modern world, but for a few hours each weekend, my wife and I have been exploring abandoned neighborhoods around our home in Lovell. In the eastern and western corners of town, networks of dirt roads, lined with old stone walls, snake through thick forest. Recently, we started exploring the old Patterson Hill neighborhood in east Lovell.

The older I get, just thinking about how much work went into building these roads makes me long for a nap. Using only hand tools and draft animals, the settlers hacked and smoothed roads that climb steep hillsides, then maintained them through winter frosts, spring floods and mud, and summer thunderstorms. They also cleared forests, built houses and barns, planted and harvested crops, raised animals, raised children, and just plain lived. In the pristine forest settlers first met, the trees towered well over a hundred feet and were often up to six feet around at the trunk. Consider what it took to chop through an oak that massive with an ax! Then, once the trees were down, they still had to be cleared to make way for crops. The huge stumps were often left in place for the first few harvests, leaving them to be dealt with after a house and barn were built. Again using only hand tools and draft animals, the stumps were pulled to the edges of fields to serve as fencing. Some old-timers around town still use the expression “ugly as a stump fence”—once to describe the wife of a former Post Office clerk—which is something less than politically correct in these enlightened times.

Recent theory has it that the stony New England soil was not a problem for that first generation of farmers. The topsoil on the hills, though thin, was still adequate in most places for plowing and planting without hitting underlying rocks. However, because the duff - layers of leaves and pine needles - was plowed under and the topsoil eroded, it could no longer insulate the ground, so frost penetrated deeper, and the glacially-deposited stones in the mineral soil beneath were pushed to the surface. It was the second generation of farmers who had to deal with stones, moving them to the sides of fields to replace the stumps, which by then had largely rotted away.

The emergence of those stones—some of them the size of Volkswagens--may have been what caused the second generation of settlers to abandon the Patterson Hill area. Lovell’s history, “Blueberries and Pusley Weed,” indicates that area families began to move on shortly after the Civil War. In 1858, there was a schoolhouse there with 19 students over behind little Dan Charles Pond. I had driven right past the site of the so-called Dresser School countless times without ever spying a trace of it. Evidently, it was abandoned not too many years after it was established - when area families decided to become pioneers once again, moving to the great American west and starting over.

Such was the pattern in many Maine and New Hampshire towns. The first settlers were given land as payment for their military service in the French and Indian War or, later, in the American Revolution. These veterans and their families carved a farm out of the primeval forest and passed it on to the next generation. The population of rural northern New England continued to grow in this way until peaking in 1861, after which it declined drastically as many families abandoned their farms and moved west. Their houses and barns collapsed, leaving cellar holes and stone walls which were eventually hidden from sight as forests reclaimed the fields.

It appears that at least two generations of forest have grown over the fields and pastures of Patterson Hill since it was abandoned, perhaps even three or four. At the very top of the hill, however, a field has been reclaimed, revealing a breathtaking vista of the New Hampshire mountains to the west, and a well has been drilled. However, there’s no electricity anywhere nearby, since the whole area was already uninhabited long before Franklin Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification program in the 1930s. Here and there on Patterson Hill, faded surveying tape is evident, and I noticed a few small campers, but redevelopment does not appear imminent. Patterson Hill seems likely to remain wild for a while longer.

I wrote a column a few weeks ago about the solitary grave of 17-year-old Marion Abbott next to Union Hill Road near the Stow/Lovell line. John Chandler of Lovell told me he knew where the grave was and had heard that Marion was killed by a bull. He knew of nowhere that that information had been written down; it’s just what people always said about how the young woman under that lonely stone marker protected by a little fence had died 144 years ago.

First published May, 2004

Forgotten Stories in Stone

For over twenty years I’d driven by and never noticed it. Pulling over to study the rocks in an old stone wall, I saw it not ten feet away. A metal fence closely surrounded a single gravestone. The little cemetery was deeply shaded by thick hemlocks on a small knoll that dropped off sharply beside an active little brook. It was the final abode of Marion Abbott - a 17-year-old girl who died in 1860. Alone on the edge of the road - me for the moment; she for eternity - I contemplated Marion and her place. She must have spent time there when she was alive and enjoyed the solitude. The fence suggested that. I wondered if it was her idea - if she’d had time before she died to think about where she wanted to be buried and how her grave would look, or if she passed on too quickly and her family made the decisions.

Was the fence for preserving her privacy in death? Did Marion cherish alone time in her short life? Would she prevent others from sitting next to her grave in her special place? Or was it to stop someone from following her to the great forever?

Looking around, I envisioned the place 150 years ago. The paved road would have been dirt then with the same stone walls on either side, but with sunny, rolling, green pastures behind them instead of dark hemlocks. Did she lie down there alone on the knoll and chew on grass stems, or did she bring a picnic lunch to share with someone else? Did she watch animals graze and drink from the brook now crowded by forest? I climbed over the mossy stone wall and stood on a thick, spongy, hundred-year-old bed of hemlock needles covering the lower part the inscription on the marble headstone. The knees of my pants moistened and the piney smell was strong as I knelt to read the summary of Marion’s life.

MARION
daut of James E & Mary F Abbott
died July 31, 1861 AE 17 yrs 6 mos
Dearest friend, thy pains are ended
Thou hast found a better home
Thy songs are now with angels blended
Where no death nor sorrows come

Climbing back into my truck, I drove off slowly in second gear, thinking about Marion, wondering what she might have looked like, how she dressed. I wasn't in as much of a hurry as I had been. I checked my rearview mirror frequently and pulled over to let others who didn't like my slow pace rush by. I hadn’t gone far when I noticed a big old oak with heavy limbs beside the road - a clue to the location of a cellar hole. Sure enough, on the other side of the road was a line of split granite stones and a break in the wall I could pull my truck into. Again I was surprised to see a family cemetery dominated by an obelisk in the center and surrounded by stone markers. I walked over and climbed the stone stairs leading up the raised earthen platform that comprised the Smith Cemetery. On the base of the tall monument was the following epitaph:

HERBERT
Son of Simon & Mary Ann Smith
Aged 16 YRS 10 M’s
Wounded at Cold Harbor June 3, 1864
Died in Baltimore, Md June 23, 1864
at National Camden Hospital

Why did you go off like that, Herbert? You were too young for battle. Then I remembered that over a hundred thousand boys lied about their age on both sides in the Civil War.

As two crows flew lazily over the surrounding treetops, their caws absorbed by the deep woods, I realized Marion and Herbert very likely knew each other. Did Herbert ever look longingly on the more mature Marion, wishing he were older? He would have been twelve when she died and the war started only two months before. Was his decision to go off and fight before he was old enough influenced by her passing? Had he ever seen her sitting alone by the brook? Did he join her and talk?

Herbert’s grave was the most prominent, but his baby sister, Ella Smith, was born the same year he died. Perhaps he was in camp somewhere in Virginia and read of her birth in a letter from his mother.

The age of trees in and around the Smith cellar hole told me that the Smith family survived in Stow much longer than the Abbott family. Did the Abbotts abandon their farm down the road and join the great migration westward with the dozens of other families from West Lovell and Stow? The woods taking over the Smith farm were less mature than those around Marion’s grave down the street. Herbert’s parents lived on until 1901 and 1903 and were buried next to him. The farm was worked well into the 20th century and the remains of an old automobile were discernible among the encroaching juniper and alders near the barn foundation. His father, Simon, died at 79 on June 26, 1901 - the same time of year Herbert died and the monument marking Herbert's grave was visible from the house. Did painful memories of his soldier son finally get to him? Simon's wife, Mary joined him in the cemetery two years later, also at 79. Three years hence, Ella died an old maid at 42 and is buried nearby. Did she stay and care for her aging parents while Stow’s and Lovell’s eligible men went west? Did anyone live there after Ella? How long before the house and barn fell in and rotted away? I don't know.

The woods and the stones hold many stories. Most, however, are forgotten.

Published April, 2004. Some weeks after it ran in local newpapers, John Chandler of Lovell, who grew up in nearby Chatham, NH told me he knew of Marion Abbott's grave and he'd "heard people say" the teenager died after being gored by a bull.

Feeling Small

Used to be the lawn didn’t grow much in August, but this year is different. There’s so much water in the ground that it still needs mowing every week. The field below it has to be mowed once a year and that requires an industrial-strength mower called a bush hog. Last week, I rented one that you sometimes see advertised on TV. It’s a walk-behind unit, not the kind that is attached to the back of a farm tractor. It’s self-propelled, sort of, but it doesn’t have a steering wheel. Turning the thing around at the end of a pass again and again requires more strength and endurance than is left in my 55-year-old body. It’s a two-acre field on the side of Christian Hill and it’s too steep to go side to side, so I had to walk up and down a hundred times behind the machine and hold on to it as it climbed over and chopped up various plants which had grown as tall as I am. Even with numerous breaks to catch my breath, it took a month off the end of my life to finish.

It’s the field’s second incarnation. A farmer named McDaniels created it a century and a half ago. He cleared it and rolled stones down the hill into a wall. Some were too big, so he drilled and split them into smaller, irregularly-shaped pieces that he maneuvered into place on the wall. He must have run out of energy too because he left two big rocks only partially split. Then he planted apple trees. I don’t know how long he worked the apple orchard but eventually he or someone else abandoned it to the forest. By the time I purchased the property it was all woods again. Among the oaks, ashes maples, and birches a few skeletons of long-dead apple trees remained between the stone walls. It took me about a decade to clear it again, cutting trees and burning brush. Many times I sat on one of the walls McDaniels made and wiped sweat from my face as I looked over my work. I imagined that he must have sat there and done the same generations ago. Eventually I hired someone to stump it with an excavator and replant it into a field.

As it would have for McDaniels, the field provides me a marvelous view to the west and I never tire of watching sunsets over Kearsarge in the spring and Baldface in the summer. On clear days, I can see smoke from the cog railway on Mount Washington. Having trekked up and down those mountains I know how massive they are, but when I’m over there and looking back east toward my property on Christian Hill, I can barely make out the hill, much less my field or my house. It helps me realize that my years of hard work are nearly invisible in the grand scheme of things. The hills and mountains are hundreds of millions of years old and my time on them is not much more than the brief, dim glow from a firefly’s butt. Humility is a good thing and I have much to be humble about. If I should forget, someone or something will usually remind me. It might be my wife. It might be a letter to the editor.

All that remained of McDaniels’ work were a few stone walls hidden by woods. I cleared the trees just as he did and constructed a few smaller walls with the help of a friend. Hopefully, they’ll last as long as his. McDaniels also carved his initials on a granite boundary marker nearby. On the other side of Christian Hill, there may someday be a stone with my name engraved in the Number Four Cemetery and somebody else will probably mow around it, for a while anyway.

Though I can see a long way toward large mountains in New Hampshire, I remind myself that what appears a panorama to me is but a tiny sliver of earth’s surface and earth is a tiny speck in the universe. When George Bailey had similarly insignificant feelings about his place and time here in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” an angel visited to convince him otherwise. I haven’t seen any angels lately and I’m mostly glad I have so little influence on events around me. If it were otherwise, I’d have to take more responsibility for what happens on this planet.

Matthew’s gospel says God knows when a sparrow falls. I’m also aware that He created the hawk and house cat which can hasten the sparrow’s demise. The passage goes on to say that God counts the hairs on my head. It’s also true that He’s making His job easier lately by expanding my bald spot.

Then there’s my philosopher friend, Kevin, who tells me: “Always remember Tom, that you’re unique - just like everyone else.”

Backcountry History

People don’t like to see ATVs coming. The very first time I climbed onto one - my brother’s - an angry land owner waved me down before I’d gone a mile. His wife and daughter came out too and explained how 4-wheelers had raced by his house and trespassed on his property. After he recognized me as the guy in the newspaper who likes to explore old roads, cellar holes and cemeteries, he let me through, but I learned that ATV riders before me had given the machines a bad reputation.

Last spring I bought my own 4-wheeler and I’ve explored much more country than I ever could on foot or in my truck. I’m discovering a lot of old roads, cemeteries, neighborhoods, mines and gravel pits. This probably doesn’t sound like fun for most people, but I’m a history geek and this is how I get my jollies when I’m not teaching.

Before venturing into an area, I study maps, starting with the most recent - usually the DeLorme Street Atlas. From that, I go to USGS (United States Geological Survey) maps, which are the most detailed. These can be purchased from the State of Maine for $5 per quadrangle. Some are updated within the past ten years and others - like the one for my own town of Lovell - go back to 1962. They depict topographic features like elevation, swamps, ponds and lakes, but also fields, woods, orchards, and even buildings. The University of New Hampshire has historic USGS maps available online from the early 20th century for all of New England and New York state. Most towns are depicted in the 1940s and some in the first decade of the 20th century. From Saco Valley Printing in Fryeburg, I’ve purchased mid-19th century maps of every town in Maine and New Hampshire arranged by county. Most recently, I purchased maps of the towns within a 30-mile radius from the Oxford County Atlas of 1880. All these early maps show family surnames of people who lived in every area of town, as well as churches, schoolhouses, saw mills, grist mills, fulling mills, stave mills and cemeteries. From these, I can determine what areas of a given town were once settled and are now abandoned. Studying a succession of USGS maps I can determine when the old settlements were reforested after the descendants of early settlers stopped farming them and moved westward after the Civil War.

Most of the old roads still exist as rugged trails and, if they’re not closed off by the present owners, I can explore them. Some have wires across and others are barred by elaborate gates. Many will have “keep out” signs specifically aimed at 4-wheelers. They let in snowmobilers, but not ATVs and I guess that’s because so many inconsiderate riders have dug up the ground by spinning tires or other reckless behavior. I’ll see a lot of this in gravel pits which interest me because I like to examine layers of sand, clay, gravel and stones deposited by glaciers from 10,000 to 1.5 million years ago. During that time span glaciers came and went at least four times. Maps of glacial activity are available from The Maine Geological Survey in Augusta and I’ve purchased several (called “Surficial Geology” maps) for only $5 apiece. Conveniently, they correspond to USGS quadrangle maps. More detailed geological descriptions are available on each quadrangle for an additional $5. Going back even further in history is a bedrock geology map of the whole state depicting what kinds of rocks and fault lines underlie the glacial sediment we all walk on. Bedrock is exposed in several places like cliff faces, hill tops, mines and road cuts. When I pull over and study these, I’m looking hundreds of millions of years into the past when Maine was attached to northwest Africa - long before there were any humans on earth.

Last weekend, I spent an entire day exploring in Greenwood, Maine. The western half of the town is bisected north to south by an abandoned road that is open to ATVs. There are numerous mines to see as well as settlements. Few parts of west Greenwood ever had electricity and there are very few buildings left standing - mostly hunting camps and a scattering of original homes now used seasonally. I found cemeteries miles from any paved roads and containing veterans of the Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Civil War. These guys cut roads into steep hillsides, built homes and barns with elaborate foundations, cleared land, and died. Their descendants buried them and then moved on to do similar things in America’s west.

Lately I’m realizing that even with my new 4-wheeler, I won’t likely have time to explore all the abandoned places in just my part of Maine before I’m buried under one of those stones myself, but it won’t be for lack of trying.

Exploring Local History

Migrating birds have been looking over my property for nesting places. I’m trying to persuade tree swallows to take up residence in the houses I built for them overlooking my lower field, but they’ve declined so far. Phoebes, however come back every year in places I’d rather they didn’t, like under the eaves on my porch roof. Lately they’re over my wife’s new hot tub, and when the babies are big enough, they’ll hang their rear ends off the the side of the nest and let go on the cover. She’s in the hot tub several times a week, but I join her only once in a while now. I bought a four-wheeler this spring and I’m out on it often. She joins me only once in a while.

I also bought old maps of every county in Maine and New Hampshire. Studying old maps of the western Maine region, it’s evident that early settlers in the steeper hill country around here searched out hidden valleys to set up households the way birds do each spring. They’d clear some land, build a house and barn, and raise families. Cutting roads into the more remote regions with only hand tools and animal power must have been daunting, but they did it. I spent half of my Easter vacation exploring some of the remotest and steepest areas around here and I can only marvel at the work ethic they obviously possessed. I can barely access these places in the 21st century, and I can only imagine how hard it was in the 19th or the 18th. It also helps me understand why they abandoned their homesteads after two or three generations and migrated west.

David Crouse, publisher of Cold River Chronicles, informed me a few weeks ago about historical USGS maps scanned and published online by UNH. Some go back as far as the 1890s. I’ll print out a map for each area I plan to explore and take along hard copies of 1858 maps published by Saco Valley Printing in Fryeburg. The maps show who lived in the houses which where only cellar holes are left. Depending on the region I explore, I can have maps from 1858, 1909, 1941 and 1962. I drive my pickup in as far as I can, then unload the four-wheeler to venture in further. When the terrain is too difficult even for that machine, I go on foot the way the early explorers did. Still, some of the old roads are difficult to make out even in the spring when there’s little foliage to camouflage them. My respect for the pioneers who first carved a home from these areas goes up with each exploration.

While I was in the middle of writing this column Crouse emailed me with a link to aerial photographs of western Maine taken within the last five years or so. They’re published by the Maine affiliate of Global Information Systems (GIS). Clicking on these, I could zoom in closely enough to identify the back roads I’d just traveled on last week in Stoneham, Lovell, Waterford and Sweden. They’re detailed enough to make out existing houses and even individual white pine trees if they’re big enough. I found my house and my neighbors’ houses too. I could see where large parcels were cut over more recently than neighboring large parcels. A definite grid pattern emerge when you see the country from high up.

Crouse sent me the GIS link because I’d just emailed him with the news that the Lovell Historical Society’s Bob Williams and I found what we strongly believe is the actual site of Calvin McKeen’s murder in 1860, about which Crouse and Williams are planning a presentation June 27th at the library here in Lovell. Exploring the area in the spring, I could see features like an abandoned roadbed which provided an additional reference point and made the old maps suddenly understandable. Crouse zoomed in on the aerial photo of the area and saw evidence of the old roadbed.

Exploring further into old West Stoneham neighborhoods puts me in the White Mountain National Forest. There are several abandoned communities even further in that I’m salivating to explore, but the WMNF gates are closed in spring - the best time to look around. Having just written a hefty check to the federal government earlier this month it chaps me that, while private landowners don’t fence me out, “public lands” are off-limits until summer when foliage will hide most of the historical evidence I’m looking for. I’ll also have to pay an additional fee to park and hike in, without my four-wheeler, which is banned.

The birds are still free to fly in there. The early settlers were able to cut roads and build houses in there without government assistance or regulation, but I, a member of the “public,” am not.

A Long Ago Killing

This is the best time of year for exploring lost neighborhoods. The snow has melted and no undergrowth has leafed out yet. Last fall’s leaves are flattened down by the snow pack, though not as much as usual after a mild winter. One can see far into the woods in early spring, and the stone walls, the cellar holes and abandoned roads are least concealed.

Finding old roads can be difficult. Not only are they overgrown, but many have also been used for logging at least once, and sometimes two or three times. Landings were bulldozed and skidders dragged hundreds of twitches along and across them. In some cases, the roads were improved for logging trucks, but not necessarily along the original routes. Conscientious loggers preserved some old roads by constructing water bars at regular intervals where they’re steepest, thus preventing washouts by spring runoff and summer thunderstorms. Trouble is, the water bars are sometimes too big to drive my truck over and I have to hike in with my aging legs. This may be the year I finally buy a four-wheeler.

Stonewalls have been breached in some places by skidders or bulldozers or just plowed under. Cellar holes have been filled in or buried in slash and cemeteries damaged. I ran into all these problems while exploring the abandoned neighborhood on the Lovell/Stoneham town line where Calvin McKeen was killed by John Coffin in 1860.

My first information about the incident came from the August, 2000 edition of “Cold River Chronicle.” It’s an old, but familiar story. Two men were drinking more than they should. One, McKeen, had a reputation as a hothead. The other, Coffin, had a gun. There were rumors that McKeen’s wife was involved with Coffin, an occasional boarder in the household. Over a bottle of rot gut rum, things got out of hand. McKeen evidently went after Coffin with a butcher knife. Coffin, a blacksmith, caved his skull in with a hot iron and then shot him. After a highly-publicized trial, Coffin was found guilty of manslaughter and served five years at the Maine State Prison in Thomaston.

Coffin was defended by Attorney David R. Hastings of Lovell whose photo appeared in Cold River Chronicle. Knowing his descendant and namesake, attorney and current Maine State Senator David R. Hastings III of Fryeburg, I was struck by the strong resemblance between the two though they’re separated by a hundred forty years and however many generations. Coffin’s sister later married the son of Maine’s governor Garcelon and they built an impressive mansion on the opposite shore of Kezar Lake from the abandoned neighborhood which still stands.

David Crouse, publisher of “Cold River Chronicle,” included a map of the old neighborhood. Looking around last spring, I ran across a solitary gravestone. It seemed out of place all by itself on a knoll beside an old road. There was no other indication that a cemetery ever existed there - no fence, no other gravestones, nothing. And it was not a primitive stone. It was innately carved marble on a granite pedestal and inscribed: “Caroline” most prominently, and beneath that was: “wife of William Sawyer. Died June 8, 1882 AE 65 yrs. 5 mos. 11 ds.” Caroline and William Sawyer lived in the house closest to the murder scene and were the first people informed on the night of Calvin McKeen’s death by both his widow and his killer.

Carrying 1858 and 1963 maps of the area as well as a DeLorme Atlas, I found several cellar holes and roads, but so far I’ve been unable to determine for certain which ones belonged to Calvin McKeen and Caroline Sawyer. Using the bridge over Cold Brook as reference point, I was thrown off. It’s a modern bridge and quite elaborate for what is now a sparsely-populated area. I asked Lovell’s John Chandler if the bridge was rebuilt on the site of the one it replaced and he told me it was. Exploring further, I found stonework upstream that may have been part of an older bridge. After the mud dries a little more, I’m going back in there and hopefully reach some conclusions.

But for cellar holes, stone walls, cemeteries and obscured roads, nothing is left of a 19th century neighborhood with at least two schools, a mill, two shops, and many farms. A few camps and houses have sprung up in the past few decades but most of the land is now part of the White Mountain National Forest.

Cold River Chronicle’s David Crouse and Robert Williams of the Lovell Historical Society are offering a program on Calvin McKeen’s murder at the Charlotte Hobbs Library in Lovell June 27th at 7:00 pm.