Brown’s and Hopkin’s – The US’s Oldest Consecutively Run General Store – Chepachet Rhode Island

I admit it was the Chepachet Cemetery which initially drew us in but after that there was the entire center of this little village was was supposed to be just as haunted and even better it was mostly antique shops that were said to be “very affordable” according to the reviews online. How could we resist?

But before we even got that far we checked out Brown’s and Hopkin’s: the US’s “oldest consecutively run general store.” It started its life as a residence and hattery in 1799 but switched over to a general store with new owners in 1809 which it has stayed until this day.

As you can see the outside of it still screams general store and the inside has a warm and inviting feeling of stepping into the past. It has the sweet worn hardwood floors of a life well lived and I was delighted to find it still had a penny candy counter. In fact the whole place was just adorable with two floors of random country chic products from homemade soaps to farm décor. As always I loved the variety of cast iron items and ended up with a little cast iron hare magnet. My companion gleefully bought some amusing tea towels and we both had fun guessing who the historical figures the little felted dolls were supposed to represent.

And to top of the experience the staff here were as cheerful as the day was sunny. It was al together a great experience even without meeting the ghosts that are supposed to haunt the property. It was only a hop and a skip to the antique stores which made it all the better.

April 11, 2021 2

Glen Farm Trail/Abandoned Ice House – Portsmouth RI

The East Coast got a little bit of a shake-up the other day as a tropical storm hit. Some of us even had tornado warnings. I was in Rhode Island and the damage here wasn’t quite so fierce. There was a lot of wind and then maybe 10 minutes of downpouring rain and then…. massive power outages. Which was the perfect motivation to go back outside on another little side quest. To the Glen Farm Trail!

I’ve never heard of the Glen Farm Trail but seeing as I was being offered to check it out I couldn’t really say no. I have been to a bunch of little trails in populous areas and although the city parks are adorable and well maintained they rarely have much interesting in them. This trail however had a lot of character.

For one going directly after a rain storm made for some interesting lighting that added just the right amount of whimsy. Secondly it cut through a slate forest – this region (and Boston) are where the slate was quarried that would later be made into those beautiful grave stones I am always admiring. So it was interesting to see the rock in it’s natural habitat as it were but it was better than that.

Here I found a bunch of No Trespassing signs and a fence which had been unceremoniously toppled.

“Some guy bought the surrounding property and is being a dick about it. The locals said ‘Fuck this fence’ and now we just walk over it.”

I appreciated the community spirit of mass rebellion. And I can see why they’d be so insistent. There was something really charming about this little forest and the weird slate walls that popped up here and there as well as the small slate bridges. But that wasn’t what we were here for. That would be an old abandoned ice house just sitting here in the woods looking adorable and sad all at the same time.

Now if you don’t know what an ice house is I’ll give you a brief run down. Back before electricity and refrigerators the only way you could get ice would to harvest it in the winter from lakes and rivers and ship it in insulated containers wherever it needed to go. The old “ice boxes” that predated our modern fridges ran off a block of ice replaced every day or so. It was a rich person’s luxury and a whole industry here in the North. A whole industry that died a rather sudden death with the invention of electricity and refrigeration.

I was delighted to find we could skip across the little river and enter this archaic structure. Apparently others had come before and just like the last place I went it was covered in graffiti which is always a source of entertainment for me. Good graffiti artists can do some really impressive work but bad graffiti artists… well they’re just hilarious. And frequently very confusing! But it’s all good fun to try and puzzle out.

After this we found a tiny ocean beach at the end of another of the trails. It’s been a long time since I have been oceanside. The smell of the salt and the lapping of the waves enlivened my spirit. We sat and watched someone flying a kite in the far distance and enjoyed the moment. It was a nice way to keep cool and calm.

I’d suggest this trail to anyone in the area as it seems to have just a little magic in it.

The Ice House:

The Little Beach:

The Trail Itself:

August 7, 2020 0

East Hill Cemetery Peterborough NH

Yesterday I passed this cemetery and noted that I had to go check it out because of all the slate stones I could see from the road. Had I not been running errands I would have stopped right then and there but alas I had to wait until today to satiate my curiosity.

The cemetery is easy to find. It’s on Old Street Road between East Hill Road and Glen Drive. It’s marked by a large green historical marker and has space for a few cars to parallel park in the front of it. The numerous plaques and markers denote this is the resting place of a great many Revolutionary War soldiers, including a famous drummer by the name of William Diamond. It was also Peterborough’s first cemetery and wow, did I hit the jackpot here! This had to be the largest gathering of slate stones I have ever seen. This was a sizable and old cemetery. I would have never guessed Peterborough was this bustling so long ago!

But first I had to get in. A sign out front said the hours and a few limitations (no pets or stone rubbings allowed) but when I got to the gate it seemed to be welded shut. It was weird. There was already a car here so someone was already in the cemetery but I couldn’t see them. How did they get in?? I tugged at the gate. Nothing. I contemplated jumping over the wall but there were too many cars going by and I am rather recognizable with neon orange hair and psychedelic bell bottoms. After getting frustrated I said, “OK. I will be back!”

Later that day I was talking to my mother about all this and she said there had to be a way in. “I bet you that gate opened somehow.” So I put her up to the task and we both headed out for attempt number two. As it turns out the gate isn’t welded shut it’s just stuck – quite stubbornly. With enough wiggling and pulling it finally opened.

By now I had gone online and realized that this cemetery was only 77% photographed and there were five open requests out to find five separate grave markers:

William Wallace (1698 – ??) Jane Mitchel (1721-1791) Jane Chamberlin (1820-1822) Benjamin Chamberlin (??-1819) and William Robbe (1692-1791)

Two of these were babies during their deaths about a hundred years ago. Who is searching for the grave markers of long dead babies!? I mean I understand the adults – it’s probably a genealogy thing, but babies never grew up to have descendants and with almost a hundred years since their death there’s no one in living memory to want to see their memorial either… It sounds really crass but often times the memorials of infants and babies are… ephemeral. They’re small, often lack a lot of information, sometimes they don’t have any writing on them at all. In the case of stillbirths they’re frequently buried without a name. Today the death of a baby is a tragedy but a hundred, two hundred years ago? It was just another every day event.

Still – knowing someone was looking I was determined. I WILL FIND YOU! EVEN THE BABIES! I looked to see if there were any more information on any of these individuals and came up pretty empty handed. In fact the information online about everyone here seemed shockingly scarce for what I felt to be quite a historic place. But alas even the revolutionary war soldiers had only the shortest and most cryptic of descriptions online – birth place, birth and death dates, time of service, if they were married or had kids, and nothing more. Pretty basic stuff. I also found no pennies here. These historical figures were…. completely and utterly forgotten.

It was weird. The cemetery seems like it’s kept really well. Some of the stones were repaired or replaced but most were still in pristine condition. This made the missing stones all the more confusing. It was a bright hot day and almost the whole cemetery is in full sunlight with no shade. I started in the corner and made a beeline for the back where I figured the oldest stones may be. And sure enough I found the Robbe family plot which spanned two centuries and seemed to have all the Robbe’s… except for William. Where are you hiding William? Do you even have a stone here? Or did you ever get one? Or did it somehow get destroyed? There was a rock in the ground which I couldn’t tell if it was just another random rock in the ground or a part of a gravestone that no longer had a top. Hmmmm. The mystery thickens!

And by now the mugginess and heat where getting to the both of us so I had to call it a day. I’m not done yet though. I will be back… perhaps with a map of plots in hand to help guide me. And in the meantime I joined Find a Grave and will offer my photos and finds as they are warranted since I am already touring these places anyway. Might as well make myself useful!

There’s also a two trailheads on the same street and well… I am going to need to check those out too…

TO BE CONTINUED…

August 21, 2019 0

Phineas Gage Memorial – Cavendish Vermont

Vermont in particular seems to have a long and bizarre history when it comes to interesting ordinary individuals. One of those people I just learned was Phineas Gage. If you don’t know who Phineas Gage is you’re not alone. Mostly it’s people in the psychiatric and medical professions that know his name. He was just a normal railway worker living his life when an accident launched him into the pages of history.

It happened in 1848 when he was working on the rails south of the village of Cavendish Vermont. The railways went directly through mountainous areas which meant that workers had to blast their way through in order to put the rails down. This was dangerous work that involved boring a hole in the rock, filling it with explosives, and packing sand on top with an iron rod (called a tamping iron) before lighting a fuse. Phineas was in the process of doing this when his attention was distracted and when he turned his head to speak the tamping iron struck the rock, caused an unexpected spark, and before he had any time to react he had the 13 pound 3 foot rod shot through his head which landed 85 feet away. This would have been the end for most workers but not Gage who convulsed a few times before getting up and staying conscious well past getting to the hospital. Insanely stoic this guy claimed he wasn’t hurt much and should be back to work in a few days. Granted going to the doctors in the 1800’s wasn’t as sterile or educated as it is today. Gage’s recovery was up and down and at one point included the draining of a fungal abscess on his remaining brain issue which may have caused further damage.

Today I visited the spot of the memorial plaque dedicated to this very unlikely survivor. It sits in the Cavendish common which isn’t the site of the accident but is nearby. I parked at the Municipal building which is just behind the monument that is welded to a rock. I’m afraid my photo isn’t fantastic but it shows in brief detail the life of a man that is more of a curiosity now than he was in his own life (and he was very well known then for it.)

If you’re wondering what happened to Gage after his recovery well… that’s where the story gets quite muddy. What is known is that Gage survived his injury and that for what appears a short time afterward he showed symptoms not uncommon among brain-injured patients but remarkably despite his story being repeatedly rewritten for political reasons he seems to have gone on to live a pretty normal life… His intelligence was said to be unaffected, his memory returned, and he even held down numerous jobs before seizures prevented him from keeping them. We don’t know why he died or if his injury had any real lasting effects on his personality because there seems to be a lot of conflicting information.

Other common myths around this one remarkable individual is that his injury gave inspiration for the invention of lobotomies. There’s no written evidence of this but I have to wonder why it’s been linked in the first place. As I read up on this to create this blog entry I was filled with far more questions than answers. Did he have any serious personalty changes after the accident and if so did they get better over time? Maybe the lesson in his story isn’t whether or not brain damage can make someone a different person but to what extent one can expect to recover from such a thing. Maybe this is really about the remarkable plasticity of the brain.

This photo of the man was discovered in 2009. In it he sits with his tamping iron which toured with him throughout New England in the two years after the accident. It’s unsettling to say the least.

After leaving the monument I asked the GPS where to go and by happenstance it dragged me onto a narrow dirt road where the same rail line ran through the woods. It was a strange moment to realize this. All and all today’s visit to the Phineas Gage memorial and the Fort at Number 4 satiated my desire for history. Until next time…

August 9, 2019 2

South Cemetery – Wendell MA

My final stop today was in the South Cemetery in Wendell Massachusetts. It was really weird. I had a moment of deja vu when I saw it. I don’t know when it was but I know I have passed this cemetery before and I knew then I wanted to see it but if I remember correctly it was another hot summer day and I was coming home from somewhere else, again enjoying the back roads. I didn’t stop then but I knew I had to today. Something there was calling me. So I parked badly on the little grass hill in front of the cemetery and headed in with my camera.

The cemetery is located at a fork in the road. There was traffic going by but I have no idea where they were going. This place was sparsely inhabited. Still, the two cars that drove by slowed down to see what crazy person was out here, alone, in an old cemetery in the woods.

For some reason I was being drawn to the back right corner exactly the opposite of where I parked. I passed by an old crypt, took a quick shot, and then noticed something very odd. Here sitting quietly in the shade were two of the most unusual stones I had ever seen in New England. In fact they weren’t stones at all. One was a wooden cross with another chunk of wood sitting at its base, the appropriate details burned into it and laying atop a circle of random rocks. It was a burial that wouldn’t look out of place in the Old West but here in New England it was odd. Even weirder still was the plot next to it which held no cross, just a lump of wood, again with all the usual data seared into it. This was the first time I’d seen a wooden memorial. It seemed so… impermanent. Was that the point? To be remembered and then forgotten entirely once living memory was lost? A dead bird sat in front of them, perhaps left by a cat. It was a bit eerie, certainly the first time I’ve found a headless animal sitting atop a grave.

I couldn’t stop staring at the memorial. The more I looked the more weird details came to the surface. There was a tiny purse hanging from the cross. Why? This was the last resting place of a man. Was it left by an old girlfriend? I don’t know why but I was very saddened by this particular plot. Whoever was here was young when he died – too young. And it was recently. Only 2015. The epitaph read, “Live life real.” I could have seen him alive and never have known it. And the plot next to him read “matriarch” and was only three years later. Was that his mother? Did she die from a broken heart? My own grandmother outlived two of her five children who died in adulthood and… she was never the same.

I sat staring at these two plots for quite a while. So many questions. There were a lot of other Stebbins here. Clearly the family has been buried here for a long time – but they all got stones. It’s odd. The purse seemed to hint someone was still around who cared. Who visited. But the fact that the marker was so… cheaply made and impermanent just didn’t settle right with me. I wondered if they couldn’t afford a stone. It happens sometimes. I looked them up when I got home but none of my questions were answered. If anything their obituaries just brought up more mystery. I eventually pulled myself away.

Not to far away in the same back row another stone caught my eye. It looked pretty typical until you looked closer at it and realized instead of any of the usual motifs it was a hammer with angel wings and an odd inscription, “In peace, through work; joy” And then I realized this was another person who died young. This just made me wonder more. However this person had literally no traces online having died in 1977. So recently and yet not enough.

By now I was feeling pretty strange. Usually as I walk through rows of stones I do have curiosity but this odd sense of being pulled, this mystery, and the overall sadness was new. I don’t know what or who was there but I don’t think I was alone. I wandered through some of the older markers and made note of some of the prose. One was short and cryptic, “Death sure will come, the time unknown.” That is certainly true of Alonzo Granger who “..died from shock from railway accident when his chest was crushed and his feet were cut off.” Brutal. This mixed with my previous experience here today just made me feel like what I was doing right now – living my life to its fullest, exploring, traveling, learning, meeting new people, it’s all the right thing to be doing. I had a moment of gratitude before I finally left and decided to call it a day. I shall be back to this area. It was far to beautiful and poetic to leave behind forever.

August 3, 2019 0

Redemption Rock – Princeton MA

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!

May 22, 2019 0

Stowell Road & Country Farm Covered Bridges

Today I drove out to two covered bridges – one on Stowell Road in Merrimack NH, the other was the County Farm Bridge in Greenfield/Hancock. Both were bridges you can drive over that have no place to park so you can see them – this didn’t stop me. Even though they weren’t pedestrian bridges and lacked some of the charm I’d seen on others they were still both nestled in very beautiful areas, the first hugged on all sides by equestrian farms and the second right next to a wonderful little boat launch on Otter Lake.

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June 26, 2018 0

Fort Knox – Prospect Maine

After failing to find my fall foliage up Mount Battie I continued my journey onward hoping to reach Acadia and go up Cadillac Mountain to see if their foliage was any better, but first I wanted to stop off in Bucksport for some local folklore. So how then did I end up at Fort Knox which wasn’t even on my list? Distraction. That’s how. I saw a sign on the way stating, “Fort Knox, three miles thattta way!” and well… I cancelled my GPS route and the rest is history.

I had been to Fort Knox when I was a tween, several life times ago, and I remember I liked going but not anything I had seen. I just had a vague memory of it being really dark. When I drove in the toll gate operator asked if I wanted to buy a ticket to the observatory for two extra dollars. I was unaware there was an observatory but for two bucks how can you go wrong? She was super excited I sprang for the extra two dollars, far more so than I would expect someone to be… but hey, if I can make someone that happy that easy it’s all good!

I realized when I got there that this was a strange destination for a single woman with no children or military background to go. There were plenty of other people here but most were families or couples and a few single old men who were clearly military buffs at the very least. They gave me a couple odd looks but the staff seemed thrilled to see me so I was content.

I walked around the fort and of course being me I found the dankest hole I could and started there. It was the entrance to the B Battery. I started descending the stairs into a dark brick pit going down, down, down. All of a sudden I felt intensely anxious. It wasn’t pitch black, I could still see, and there was nowhere to hide on the staircase so it’s not as if someone could jump out at me but that’s exactly how I felt. So I did what I always do in this situation. I started talking to the walls. “Heeeeeey, I can sense someone’s here… just wanted to let you know I am not here to disturb anything. Just walking through, taking a few photos, don’t want to bother you but I hope you can forgive my trespass..” Immediately the feeling lifted. You can blame this on psychology or ghosts, I don’t care, I just know it made me more at ease.

After that initial oddness the fort proved to be a fascinating and completely disorienting maze of brick archways and darkened chambers. I didn’t have a flashlight but I am assuming there was nothing in there, maybe a Halloween prop or two. The staff had clearly got their giggles earlier when they spread zombie baby dolls and alien corpses intermittently through out – either in honor of Halloween or to illustrate a forgotten conspiratorial history. Still haven’t figured out if the cockroaches and spiders painted onto a display bed’s canopy was for Halloween or some sort of trite commentary on the state of things back in the day.

Anyway, I was very much alone through most of this tour of lower buildings. Fort Knox is huuuuuuge, utterly enormous, probably the closest thing I can think of to a castle the states has to offer. However very little is marked. On these lower levels I was hard up to find any plaques or explanations, nothing. Occasionally you’ll see label. One such label was “hot furnace” for a strange outside structure. Later I learned that “hot furnaces” were implements of mass destruction. Apparently lobbing cannon balls at invading ships was not sufficient so they started throwing the cannon balls into the furnace, heating them up until they glowed red, and then lobbing them at the enemy. Wooden ships would not only suffer catastrophic holes but also would immediately start bursting into flames from the heat of these cannons. Terrifying thought. Brutal. Gruesome. Perfect for Haunted History…

Took me forever to figure out how to get back up. From what I could gather there seemed to be three, maybe four levels of fort to explore. I went through batteries, powder magazines, a crude kitchen, some barracks. I marveled at some cannons still on the property that were so enormous they took twelve men to maneuver. This fort wasn’t fucking around!

I was struck by the architecture. And the feel of the place… sometimes eerie, other times placid and calm. I thoroughly enjoyed my visit spending more than two hours scuttling around like a half-drown ship rat. I even took what I think is my best marble photo to date. I have no idea how I had forgotten so much of this place. I guess kids being kids they don’t remember a goddamn thing you do for them anyway… “Remember that time we went to Disney?” “I remember that damn mouse that made me cry.” “That’s ALL you remember? We spent thousands on that vacation!” I have heard that conversation so many times I wish I could collect change on it. Ah well, c’est la vie.

This was a great distraction – totally worth the detour. I would even go again if someone else wanted to see it.

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October 6, 2017 0

Kicking Off October with the Old Burial Grounds Cemetery in Ashby MA

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 The Old Burial Grounds. It’s hidden from the street and you can’t get to it from there so I don’t think it has many visitors. I don’t believe the church has a parking lot, which again, is not unusual for New England. Many of the older churches in the center of town have carriage houses or stables to park your horses but no place to park your cars. Such is the march of time! On this particular day I parked behind the 873 Café (which a great place for breakfast!) and walked past two parking lots and over a small stone wall to get into the graveyard. Sadly, since dying my hair an outrageous shade of orange I seem to be attracting attention. A couple, patrons of the café, spied my antics and followed behind me. If I was allowed to take photos of the stones they were going to go check them out too! They took a bit to settle down but ambled from one section to the next calling each other over to share what they found. I am so happy to encourage this sort of exploration and in complete strangers no less!

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.

Though I know a lot of history I am continuously shocked at just what went down in our past. It never occurred to me that such a historical figure even existed and the fact he did and we know almost nothing about him is disheartening. Still, he’s not completely forgotten. A book that took seven years of research is available now. It’s called Prince Estabrook, Slave and Soldier by Alice Hinkle. I ponder what it details it has in it – perhaps where he was from or the circumstances of his enslavement? Or where he got his name… Prince seems such an unlikely name! And Estabrook clearly came from his owners. Did he not have his own name even as a free man? Guess I will have to order the book and find out!

If you are enjoying Catching Marbles please consider adding a dollar or two to my limited gas money fund so I can continue going on adventures and sharing them with you! Thank you!

October 1, 2017 1

Uncle Sam’s House & Adjoining Forest Trail

Today’s my birthday. It’s also the first day in weeks I have been well enough to leave the house for an excursion longer than grocery shopping. Being cooped up, and feeling myself age like a fine wine, I was desperate for some fresh air. Sadly it was raining… apparently everywhere. I wanted to go to the White Mountains, raining, hike up one of the local mountains, raining, go to Vermont for some foliage photos, raining. I wasn’t going to take no for an answer though, I NEEDED TO GET OUT.

So I waited until after noon when it was supposed to stop raining. It didn’t. I munched on a potato sandwich (I wouldn’t ask) and waited some more. Still raining. At two o’clock my patience finally dissolved. I slipped on a hoodie, threw my camera over my shoulder, and headed to the car. Where was I going? I didn’t know and didn’t care. I was just going to drive until I could find some unfamiliar dirt roads to soothe myself with.

That’s how I ended up in Mason NH. I had this gut feeling that I’d just know when to turn off. And wow. Despite spending some of my childhood in Mason I know remarkably little about it. There are winding dirt roads everywhere with just stunning views of forest and trees, hills, pastures, farms, huge farm houses, tiny cabins, just such a wonderful diversity! Yep… this was working. This was feeding something in my soul that was starving. It fit in nicely with the music I have taken up listening to once again – a poignant and heady mix of 60’s folk and classic rock. I’m thirty-two years old today and I feel like I can almost see time passing me by. I don’t have a career, a home of my own, a relationship, or children, I blow effortlessly in the breeze like a leaf gliding to the earth. Perhaps that is why I had the ethereal tune of Can’t Find my Way Home whispering through my mind all day. “Well, I’m near the end and I just ain’t got the time
And I’m wasted and I can’t find my way home.” There is some sort of deeper sadness in that song that I have always connected to – that feeling of belonging nowhere and to no one. Yet strangely hopeful. Maybe there’s still time to find home both physically and metaphorically. For now I wander aimlessly, concentrating on the beauty of the moment, not letting the future crush me as it always seems to be trying to.

I had looped around a great deal of dirt roads and kept coming back to the 143 so I drove that for a little while until I spotted a big green sign aside the road denoting a historical landmark. As it turns out I had driven to Uncle Sam’s childhood home. I didn’t even know he had any connections to New England. I parked aside the road, took a photo of the sign and the house which was obviously owned by someone who I was hoping wasn’t home and watching, and then meandered only about 50 or 100 feet down the road where I noticed a trail head. Yup, this is where I was supposed to be. I could feel it.

I was at the Florence Roberts Forest. There was a trail bulletin board here but I don’t think any of the papers have been changed in a long long time. The mailbox with the maps only contained a used tissue. I hoped this was a loop trail and headed in following the white markers.

It was cold. And wet. And cloudy. My camera wasn’t happy with any of these conditions but I told it to buck up, we’re doing this thing. It actually turned out to be a sweet little trail! The rain made it all the more magical to me, the damp seemed to add a sense of whimsy. Moss covered rocks lined the path to either side, a few stone walls were scattered throughout likely marking property boundaries from a few hundred years ago, and since it was such a wet day there were salamanders everywhere. They were the bright orange kind you see so frequently here if you’re the kind of person who looks under damp logs which I am.

The salamanders weren’t the only critters out today. I also go to see a number of chipmunks. For being so common they sure are hard to photograph! I feel the aggravation of wildlife photographers as I set my eyes on these tiny fuzzy beasts. They chipped and alerted me to a spot a little off the path which had clearly been used as some dumping ground for spare metal and glass at some point. Pieces of cars and machinery I couldn’t identify scattered the ground next to a rusted out metal wash basin filled with broken glass bottles from God knows when. I inched up to it slowly, hoping it wasn’t an active campsite of someone who was just deranged. Luckily it wasn’t and I took a moment to look at the rust and decay. I smiled knowing nature was taking care of this mess.

Towards the end of the trail was I super happy to find a huge cluster of mushrooms which I think were Hens of the Woods, edible. I am not that ballsy to try my hypothesis but I did enjoy finding them! They smelled delicious – which probably means I’ve misidentified them and can kill a small village with them. That tends to be how these things go… In any event I took a photo of this find next to my shoes to compare them for size.

I was soaking wet by the time I took myself out of those woods, my hands were cold enough to hurt, my nose was running, but for the first time in too long I was smiling. This was a great find! With just a little daylight left I continued to go down dirt roads trying to find odd little vignettes. I found a gorgeous cascade waterfall in someone’s front yard, their house perched right next to this natural wonder, I witnessed a bald eagle fly over my car, and I even found some sort of bridge or trellis which was so quaint and sweet on these back country roads!

Once again I was at ease.

If you are enjoying Catching Marbles please consider adding a dollar or two to my limited gas money fund so I can continue going on adventures and sharing them with you! Thank you!

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October 1, 2017 0