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.
