I am finally back to traveling! Yesterday was my first little adventure of 2019! It’s been raining every week for almost a solid year here, even in the dead of winter when we should have been getting snow. This has not been helpful in making me want to go anywhere or do anything but yesterday was beautiful and I had volunteered to drive a friend to Rhode Island so I figured it was a great excuse to find my first destination of the year.
The GPS brought me to Rhode Island through the back roads and while I was ambling through Princeton Massachusetts I passed Redemption Rock. I said, “On my way back home I am stopping!” I mean how could I not with a name like that??
Even though it was the perfect day for hiking it was still May and in the middle of the week so there was only one other car in the tiny dirt parking lot. And just as foretold there right next to it was indeed a giant flat rock which apparently held some historical significance as it was once used to exchange a hostage in 1676 but we’ll get back to that.
I stopped at the kiosk for a map hoping there was a loop trail here but there didn’t seem to be any maps or mentions of loop trails. I shrugged, slung my camera over my shoulder, and headed into the woods in what looked like a pretty well kept trail. It led me about 250 feet into the woods where it eventually led to the road. Not wanting to cross the road and thinking this was very weird I back tracked. There were indeed trails here, a ton in fact, and there seemed to be about 100 four-way intersections just everywhere. Some looked better traveled than others and I couldn’t be sure which were for humans and which were just deer paths. Below a ledge I found a path that led over a little gully. I found a complete rat’s nest of trails here going in every direction. Half were labelled Midstate Trail with yellow triangles. The other half weren’t marked at all. I was getting uneasy because all these trails couldn’t be the Midstate Trail and even if I could find the one true trail the Midstate Trail is not a happy little day loop – it’s a 92 mile route that ends in Douglas MA. I didn’t want to be stuck on that! So I admit – I didn’t go very far. After so many little turns and then fucking up my knee by tripping over a root on a steep incline I limped back to the parking lot feeling insanely inadequate. It was a beautiful area but I really wouldn’t suggest hiking here – it’s just way too damn confusing.
Which brings me to the history. What’s so amazing about a big flat rock? Initially nothing (although it was fun to scamper to the top of!) Apparently in 1676 the wife of the local Puritan minister Mary Rowlandson along with her three children and twenty other people were kidnapped by indigenous peoples during the King Philip’s War. She was held for six weeks and marched through the woods to raid English villages and evade capture before a ransom was worked out and she was handed over atop Redemption Rock where an inscription still tells the tale. Now this story in and of itself is not particularly unusual – in the early days of New England taking Puritan captives, especially female ones, was pretty common as were hostile interactions with indigenous peoples but what marks Rowlandson’s story as more interesting is the fact that she wrote a book about her experience The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson which was published in 1682 and is now considered a seminal work of captivity narratives and is still available on Amazon at the link above. Not bad for a woman at the time!
I wasn’t on it for long before I hit massive gridlock. There were cars sprawled out for miles and miles. A helicopter flew overhead and people started craning their necks out their windows to see my awesome doodle job on Daisy, which I had recently touched up an added to. She’s been in and out of the shop all winter and spring so this was my first outing with her in a long while. It was unfortunate as it was over 80 degrees that day, in full sun, and Daisy’s AC isn’t functional. I’d also left my water and phone charger in the Prius, having been accustomed to using that car in Daisy’s absence. As traffic ground to an absolute halt I found myself stuck, not for the twenty or so minutes I had expected, but for more than two hours. By this time I was suffering heat exhaustion. I was dizzy, nauseous, and soaked in my own sweat. To make matters worse I was bored because the CD player decided it was also overheated and stopped working along with the radio. I traveled only a little over a mile in those two hours and watched as everyone in a truck just drove over the grassy meridian and sped off in the other direction. My car is tough but too low to the ground for that. I was stuck until I finally made it to the Westford exit and was forced to take it, they had closed down the entire road ahead of me. So I drove into Westford, and the first thing I saw was a Panera’s, so I drove in and used their bathroom to cool down, taking a paper towel and soaking it in fresh cold water, splashing my face in their sink before returning to the counter and buying a smoothie and half a sandwich. I ate before stopping to consider where I was and what I should do. I didn’t want to find some ulterior way to the pet store, still being more than half an hour away, with the 495 still closed, but I was in the same area as a friend so I asked if I could drop by and maybe take a cold shower, when the answer was yes, I then decided I would make my trip out worth something by checking out a local trail I found on previous drives.
I ended up at the Tophet Chasm, travelling along their boundary trail, which was 3.3 miles. It was still well over eighty degrees but the shade of the trees was sufficient enough for me for quite a while. I had heard these woods were haunted and had some link to Native American religious rituals back in the day. I found the trail to be…. exceptionally ordinary. What they were calling a chasm just looked like an average wooded hill. There wasn’t anything particularly interesting on this trail, no weird plant life, no funny little birds, no amazing views. In fact the trail wound its way through the back borderlines of numerous private properties. Had I lived on one of them I might find this very neat, having traveled to hike, I found it… less than interesting. The only thing I found that amused me was a gargoyle placed near the trail by one such private residence that appeared to be waiting in ambush for hikers. Super cute!
By the second mile in I started to suffer heat exhaustion again and wanted nothing more than to be off it. I got super nauseous, dizzy, lethargic, and because the pollen count was so high (with the ground looking as if it had snowed yellow) I was getting some super pissed off sinuses starting to give me a headache on top of everything else. I trudged on. There was one view, at what I think was called Lookout Rock, near the end of the trail, that did in fact look over a good part of the town. It wasn’t amazing but ti was something! Onward I walked, melting… By the time I got back to the car I was sooo ready to be home. I drove to my friends house instead where my heat sickness escalated and I ended up pretty much downed for the next couple hours, trying to regain strength to drive home. Here I learned the traffic jam I found myself stuck in earlier had trapped some cars for up to four hours and was caused by a fire in the power lines. I’ve learned a lot of lessons from this. Always have water in the car. Don’t try to hike in the afternoon when the weather is in the 80’s. Check traffic reports.
It’s the first day of October which means my favorite holiday of the year is coming up – Halloween. In celebration of this I have decided to make this month’s travels themed. So welcome to the first entry of my Haunted New England Tour! I will try my best to go to locations that are haunted, creepy, abandoned, surrounded by local myths and legends, stalked by cryptozoological beasts, or part of our brutal history. Of course there will be a number of cemeteries and this month could be a great way to get all you history and psychology buffs involved as New England is the site of many murders and mysteries! I shouldn’t have any problem finding new places to go!
I am starting out with a familiar stomping ground for me – the graveyard behind the town common in Ashby. If you’re wondering what the difference between a graveyard and a cemetery is I am told cemeteries exist on their own while graveyards are consecrated ground adjoining a church. It took me way too long to figure out what this particular graveyard was called. I had to stare at Google street view for quite a while! But the Church is the First Parish Church (Unitarian Universalists) and the graveyard behind it is called 
But anyway this cemetery is mostly slate stones which are the older stones you can find here, mostly dating to the 1700’s. These stones were particularly beautiful as they clearly had several different artists, all adding their own unique signature styles to familiar symbology. This was the first time I found a triple-headed stone. There’s usually one or two double-headed stones here and there, most often married couples or more grimly the gravesites of slaves, infants, or peasants (as double stones are cheaper than two separate stones…) From what I could guess these appeared to be siblings, all children, all dying in the third year of their life. Another sad find was a double stone for a twenty three year old woman in the late 1700’s who died four days after giving birth and one day after her infant died. Was this due to complications, disease, or a broken heart? We may never know but there did seem an inordinate amount of children here, even considering the time period.
Because of its age this graveyard is littered with Revolutionary War soldiers. I have become accustomed to seeing their stones, usually easy to spot because of their metal war plaques and the small American flags that are placed at each. During my first visit here I noticed a very lonely little stone at the very back left corner. It was just a square marble post, looking more like a property marker than a gravestone. It was showered in pennies. In New England this is an old tradition that denotes respect for an important historical figure. Who could it be? I wandered closer and read the stone, “PRINCE ESTABROOK NEGRO GREATON’S CO. 3 MASS REGT REV. WAR.” I must admit this confused me greatly. Was Negro his last name or was he black? And if he was black… we had black revolutionary war soldiers?! I didn’t have a penny to leave that first time I visited but I did today and it seemed to mean a little more because I knew who it was now after looking his story up.
Prince Estabrook was indeed a black man and also a slave. On April 19, 1775, after requesting and being granted legal permission from his owner, he became the first black man to become a revolutionary war soldier (yes, I said first, not only.) He fought and was wounded in the battle of Lexington and Concord, the first battle of the Revolutionary War. His service was on and off from there until the end of the war. We know shockingly little other than that. We have no idea why he volunteered to fight for a country which was enslaving him, we have pretty much no details of his personal life, only that after he eventually won his freedom he lived in Ashby Massachusetts with the son of his previous owner, dying at around ninety years of age. He does not appear to have been honored in any special way during his life and on his death he was buried outside the graveyard’s official boundaries, forever segregated. This explains why his stone was so… isolated. It was moved at some point in recent history to at least be within the graveyard’s official grounds. Only in 2008 did he get recognition being mentioned on a memorial facing the Lexington Green where he fought.
