Cellar Holes, Stone Walls and Apple Trees

After 23 years of living where we live now, we found an amazing cellar hole on the top of our mountain, and we didn't know it was there, before now. I tried to take pictures of it, but since pictures don't show depth, you really can't see much from the pictures. The foundation is still almost all intact, the front steps are still there, although they are covered with moss and have trees growing through them, and the middle is filled with rocks.

My cousin and his brother-in-law came up and metal detected the front steps, and found four buttons and part of a woman's hair comb – not the kind of comb you comb your hair with but the kind of comb you put in your hair as a piece of jewelry. The consensus seems to be that the rocks are there from the collapse of the center chimney.

 

 

This is a scan of the items they found when they metal detected

the cellar hole.  The plainer buttons are apparently cuff buttons

and the fancier ones are from a coat. You can see where there

was a jewel or some ornament attached to the top of the comb.

Some of the thread that originally attached the cuff button can

still be seen in the shaft of the button.





 



 

I've always been interested in cellar holes, ever since my mother showed my sister and I cellar holes when we went hiking as kids. The Upper Valley is full of cellar holes. It's fun to find them and envision who lived there and what their lives were like. I'm not so interested in metal detecting. When my cousin and his brother-in-law found the buttons it was exciting, but I don't know that I would invest that much time, energy and money into finding four buttons and part of a comb. There is a tombstone on a woman's grave out in the middle of nowhere in Strafford that I have always been obsessed with – I researched the woman on Ancestry.com and found out that she died just after the Civil War, she was born in Royalton but her father was born in my hometown. That is more of a treasure to me than relics found by a metal detector.

For those who don't know, a cellar hole is a place where a house once stood, but the house is gone and all that is left is the hole. Sometimes a cellar hole is just a small indentation in the ground, with a few stones scattered around it in a way that makes you pretty sure they were put there deliberately by people, rather than being part of the landscape. Other times cellar holes are fully intact foundations, with four well defined corners and four complete walls, with a clear entrance and maybe even steps. Ours has a clear entrance, and there are steps up to what was the house, as well. I've seen another one that still has the steps that lead from the ground level into the cellar, what we would think of as the bulkhead but back in the day you would walk from the ground level down a set of steps into a door that would take you into the cellar from the outside. This is where people would keep their root vegetables through the winter and spring.

Cellar holes are most often found on old roads that have been “given up” by the town. In most states, if a road isn't used for a certain amount of time, it ceases to exist as a town road, but in Vermont, a road has to be formally given up at town meeting, otherwise, it continues to be a town road. These roads are called “phantom roads” and can be a huge problem. If you buy land that contains a “phantom road” and there is suddenly renewed interest in that road, even if the road has been forgotten for a hundred years, you may find yourself in the unenviable situation of having a road running through your back yard. Read more about this here:http://www.yankeemagazine.com/article/travel /sleeping-roads-vermont , here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/11/us/11roads.html, and here: http://www.vjel.org/journal/VJEL10020.html.

When you are hiking or riding your ATV on a path through the woods, how do you recognize an old road, as opposed to a new trail that has been made recently? First of all, look for a wide swath of land that has different vegetation than the land around it. New trails are more narrow and have obviously been hacked out of the surrounding landscape. Old roads are wider and will have newer tree and shrub growth in the middle than on either side. Stone walls often run parallel to an old road, sometimes on both sides. If the trail you are on cuts through stone walls on the perpendicular, it is probably not an old road. This is how I found the cellar hole on our property. An internet company put a tower on our mountain so that our neighborhood could – finally – have high speed internet. My husband took me up there to see the tower and told me the internet people had found a new logging road – a new path across the top of the mountain. As we were hiking down this newfound logging road, I noticed that it had smaller, new growth down the center, and older growth trees along the edges. Then I noticed the stone walls right at the boundaries of the new growth and old growth, on both sides, and I knew we were on an old road.

This is not an abandoned road.  But, visualize this

road full of grass, young trees and shrubs. The trees

along the edge would be much bigger and obviously

would be older growth. In this picture, it looks like

this road intersects a stone wall at a perpendicular,

which is another indication that it is not an old road.

An old road would have stone walls running parallel

to either side.

 

If you think you are on an old road, look along the stone walls for openings that look like a driveway. Walk through these openings and look for depressions in the forest floor, or remnants of old foundations. Keep a couple of things in mind. Often loggers create openings in stone walls when they pull logs out, so every opening in a stone wall is not going to lead to a cellar hole. Stone walls were used for pasture fences as well as for front yard fences, so not every stone wall leads to a cellar hole. Stone walls at either side of an old road are likely going to yield at least a couple of cellar holes. Often foundations were made of nice fieldstone, and over time, people have taken the fieldstones from the foundations to use themselves. The reason our cellar hole is still so intact is that no one knew it was there, so no one took the front steps or the stones from the foundation. Although the wood from an abandoned house rots and eventually goes away, the foundations do not. They are removed by people who have a use for them.

You may be hiking or trail riding and see random old apple trees in the forest. Apple trees aren't random and are another good indication that people lived near there at one time. Crabapples are the only type of apple that is native to North America. There are however, “wild” apple trees, in the sense that animals or birds have eaten apples from trees that were planted by European settlers, then excreted or dropped seeds that then germinated and new apple trees have grown. As you are hiking in the woods, though, and see an old apple tree, you can assume that it was planted by someone who lived there or lived near there.

I have heard people say, when discussing cellar holes, and the first settlers of Vermont, that “they did everything for a reason” and planting apple trees was no exception. They didn't just sit at the supper table and say, “Wouldn't it be cool to get some apple trees”. They went to a lot of trouble and expense to obtain or grow apple seedlings to provide a future food supply. Apples were a source of nutrition, and they kept well in cold storage (think cellar) over the winter.

In early New England, people had a much different relationship with food than we do today. They needed food to stay alive, and most of their waking hours were spent making sure they had enough food to eat. They didn't eat apples as a snack, or make them into pies or apple crisp. As delicious as apple pies and apple crisp are, and I am famous for making the best of both, early New England settlers used apples as a food staple. In late winter, and early spring, if they had a good apple crop that preceding autumn, they still had dried or wintered over apples they could eat until they could harvest their first spring vegetables.

Nowadays, in some ways, we work to stay alive or at least stay alive longer, by avoiding food. I consider what the early settlers ate and then what we eat in 2013, and think that if the early settlers could have time traveled to the present day, they wouldn't even recognize most of what we eat as food. I like Doritos as much as anyone else, but they aren't real food. In the early and mid 1800's, when farmers were picking apples off of these trees that you find growing “wild” in the woods, they put them up in the root cellars or dried them and put them up in an attic or loft, and those apples kept them fed all winter long.

As summer draws to an end and we start thinking about fall, a lot of people do a lot of hiking in the fall. When you are out on a hike, look for some of these signs of early settlement, and see if you can find a cellar hole or an old apple tree.