Rust in
Peace
CREDITS FROM LEFT: PETER ALLEN; ERIN PAUL DONOVAN; MINDY ARLEDGE
he steel-wheeled hay elevator, once used for loading loose hay into a
wagon, now seems out of place in the shade of a mature forest, but
it is preserved in place exactly where the last farmhand parked it
at the edge of a mowing at the end of summer, after the last rack
of second-cut hay was hauled to a barn. The relic reminds us that today’s
forests were once farms where people lived and worked.
Time passes slowly in a forest. Autumn leaves fall and rot while trees
die and decay, and stumps rot away leaving no trace. Not so with the
everyday materials left behind by our predecessors. These cultural artifacts,
man-made fragments of history, are testaments to long-ago work written
in weathered stone and rusty steel. Our forests are open-air museums of
rural history, where we find unexpected stories safely hidden from passing traffic and
the passage of time.
The recent rapid pace of change to the landscape in southern New Hampshire
happened once before. At the end of the French and Indian War in 1760, inland
Colonial settlement boomed. All of the present towns in central New Hampshire
were established in the 30 years prior to 1790. By 1840, an estimated 600,000 sheep
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Northern Woodlands / Summer 2008
By Dave Anderson
There’s a place called Faraway Meadow
We never shall mow in again,
Or such is the talk at the farmhouse:
The meadow is finished with men.
From “The Last Mowing,” by Robert Frost
The woods have grown up around (from left): a rusty old car; lime kiln; and a horse-drawn, ground-driven hay rake.
grazed open New Hampshire hillsides that had been a howling wilderness just a few
generations earlier. By the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in post-Civil War New
Hampshire, hill farmers burned houses to the ground to rake nails from the ashes for
reuse and headed west, trading the impoverished, thin-soiled, stony upland landscape
for the fertile, un-glaciated soils of the Midwest. The same process was taking place
across New England and New York, and by 1900, many cleared farms had begun to
revert back to forest.
Imagine the shock and disappointment of the early nineteenth-century farmers
if they could see their endless ranks of hard-won hayfields and hillside pastures
abandoned to forest. Today, New Hampshire is 83 percent forested, Vermont slightly
less so, Maine slightly more. New York holds on with the most open land in the
region, with forests covering 62 percent of it. The trees gently conceal contours of the
underlying cultural landscape, unlike bulldozers and excavators, which scrape away
and scour out the hidden stories.
I’m fascinated by artifacts I’ve come across at abandoned farm sites. Telltale tokens of
Northern Woodlands / Summer 2008
27
rural toil shed light on how our predecessors lived in our shared landscape of familiar
mountain ridgelines, river valleys, and lakeshores. Local histories are evocative, sometimes romantic, and often grim. The woods contain hundreds of miles of rough stone
walls, deep wells and shallow cellars, crumbling sugarhouses, surface granite quarries,
and old lime kilns. I’ve seen the shrapnel of an exploded iron boiler from a steampowered sawmill. I’ve found wagon wheels, cart springs, and the remains of picking
ladders rotting beneath skeletons of shade-choked, dead apple trees. I’ve found galvanized
sap buckets, steel door hinges, sugaring pans, and bricks from the collapsed arches
of tumble-down sugarhouses. In the rubble of abandoned farms are discarded rum
bottles, patent medicine bottles, harness buckles, and horseshoes. I leave all the artifacts
I find right where I first saw them, to preserve their historical context for future explorers.
Below: This wall was built
circa 1830, when the transition
between flat wedge splitting
and plug-and-feathers splitting
was taking place. The worker
alternated a flat slot with a
cylindrical hole. According to
James Garvin, Architectural
Historian for the State of New
Hampshire, it may be that the
mason did not yet have enough
plugs and feathers to use only
the newer method.
JAMES GARVIN
flat wedge split
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From left: ingrown barbed wire; final resting place for old equipment; old pump
Once, I found the delicate, hand-painted porcelain face of a china doll, her blue eyes
blackened with soot from a fire. On that same forgotten farm deep in the forest, there’s
a child’s grave marked in the family cemetery.
In addition to stone walls, stone-lined cellars, and hand-dug wells at sites of old farms,
you may find small fragments of ceramic china patterns, colored glass, galvanized tin,
kerosene cans, lantern chimneys, and mica “isinglass” windows in rusty woodstove
doors. Preserved in place, these fragments tell the story of farm families at that site and
offer a kind of attic-window view into life on a now-forgotten farm in its heyday.
There are ways to tell how long ago a cellar
was built or a stone fencepost put in place. In
the Granite State, the key is to note how the
quarried granite stone was split, because the
change in splitting methods offers a rough
means of dating when granite was cut. Prior to
1830, granite was split using a cape chisel struck
by a heavy hammer. With the chisel, the stone
splitter would cut a row of thin slots. Then, after
inserting a pair of thin metal shims into each
slot, he would drive a small, flat, steel wedge
between the shims, splitting the stone. The
plugs-and-feathers split
mark on the face of the stone appears faintly
Northern Woodlands / Summer 2008
CREDITS FROM LEFT: MINDY ARLEDGE; TOM KIVLAN VOSS; ELINOR OSBORN
triangular in cross-section. Thus, a stone with flat, triangular marks along split edges
can be dated from the late-eighteenth or early nineteenth century.
More familiar and more easily seen are the round “plug drill” holes along the split
edge, which indicates the granite was split sometime after 1830. A plug drill had a
V-shaped point and was rotated slightly between each blow of the hammer, creating
a round hole two or three inches deep. Instead of the shims
in the earlier method, workers inserted half-round “feathers”
in the hole and wedged them apart with steel wedges driven
between the feathers. Later, use of pneumatic drills at commercial quarries continued with round bits, but these holes tend to
be deeper.
Good fences
Stone walls weren’t the first fences. The earliest ones were constructed of readily available materials: stump fences were first, and when they eventually rotted, they were
replaced by zigzag, split-rail wooden fencing. Once land was cleared and surplus wood
became scarce, stone fences began to be constructed and enlarged with stone removed
from fields during tillage and planting of crops. The peak era of agricultural clearing
occurred between 1835 and 1840 in much of central New England. Simple, singlethickness walls constructed of large, rough fieldstone indicate land that was once
pasture or possibly hay meadow. Parallel outer walls with smaller stones infilling the
center suggest the adjacent land had been picked of stone to facilitate tilling for field
crops such as potatoes or grains.
Just as wooden, split-rail “riders” had once been used to increase the height of stone
walls, barbed wire and then wire ribbon fences began to be added to walls starting in the
1870s. In 1868, inventor Michael Kelly developed a flat wire with points that was widely
used until, in 1874, Joseph Glidden in Dekalb, Illinois, invented the now-familiar,
two-strand barbed-wire fencing. Glidden’s invention of barbed wire launched over 570
different barbed-wire patents, an ensuing three-year legal battle over patent rights, and
the now-infamous range wars in the American West. In Worcester, Massachusetts, the
Washburn and Moen Company purchased patent rights to manufacture barbed wire in
the 1870s and quickly became a prominent manufacturer of barbed wire. By the 1880s,
its use in the Northeast was widespread, and there were approximately 2,000 variations
Northern Woodlands / Summer 2008
29
of barbed wire. With cheap steel available after the development of the Bessemer process
in the 1890s, flat steel ribbon replaced earlier, wrought-iron wire fencing, but the ribbon
proved unreliable for confining livestock. Tacked to a line of trees or posts, barbed wire
fence eventually replaced the venerable stone wall as the fence of choice.
Today, barbed wire is found running through large trees that have completely
engulfed wires tacked to them a century ago. Surveyors locate property-boundary
evidence by finding rusty strands of old wire fence running beneath leaves in a line
linking large, old trees along a former pasture edge. I’ve seen old white oaks where a
linear constellation of rusty dimples reveals where three strands of barbed wire rusted
and broke off. Repainting old blazes along the line perpetuates scant evidence of the
woodland boundaries and clues to former land use.
From left: old hay rake; granite foundation; washing machine; foundation
Barbed wire does not effectively contain all livestock. Where sheep, goats, or pigs
were fenced in pens or fenced out of tilled fields and cultivated gardens, woven wire
“sheep netting” replaced barbed wire by the early twentieth century. More-prosperous
farmland that remained in agricultural use into the 1920s and 30s before reverting back
to forest may be ringed with sagging, woven-wire fence. Woven wire is often found
along edges of pastures adjacent to now-tumbling, frost-heaved stone walls.
On which side of the fence were livestock kept? The side where the wire was stapled
indicates the pastured side.
Full circle
Among more-contemporary artifacts found in the woods are the rusting steel hulks
of cars and farm implements including wagon frames, sickle bar mowers, hay rakes,
and tine harrows. I know where a 1920s-era Chevy is reduced to a steel frame, rusted
engine block, fenders, hood cowling, and a windowless cab with bullet holes in the
doors. Springs poke through upholstered mohair seats, and the ashtray contains
bottle caps and pull-top tabs matching the collection of steel-seamed beer cans falling
through the floorboards. Generations of skunks have prowled inside the trunk while
fallen leaves accumulate against once-shiny hubcaps. Rust never sleeps.
As each artifact becomes part of its local landscape, it serves as habitat, like the living
coral reefs for marine life created from hulks of sunken ships. In the twisted rusty ruins
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Northern Woodlands / Summer 2008
of that exploded, steam-powered sawmill boiler, there’s a porcupine den. Abandoned
apple orchards continue to attract deer, bears, and coyotes. Washed-out granite blocks
of a collapsed mill dam below a former gristmill site offer riffles and shadowy pools for
wary brook trout. Local bobcats favor the ledges and talus rocks at the site of an early
graphite mine. Abandoned houses have bats in their attics.
The interplay of nature and culture weaves a tapestry of repeating patterns in landscapes that stay rural. Where early settlers first read signs in the original landscape to
help lay out their woodlot, sugarbush,
pasture, mowing, and tillage, their land
use choices tell us something about the
original landscape.
CREDITS FROM LEFT: DRAKE FLEEGE; ERIN PAUL DONOVAN; PETER ALLEN; ELINOR OSBORN
Old village cemeteries, for instance, are often located where the digging proved
easiest, often on glacial sand deposits along riverbanks and terraces. Each May, snapping turtles and painted turtles dig their nests and lay eggs on the same sandy hillsides
overlooking the rivers and swamps their ancient turtle ancestors used. Outside the
granite-walled graveyards beyond the village center is where I often find the turtles
digging nests – where the digging has always proved easiest.
The pace of rapid landscape change transforming our rural areas makes the preservation of the hidden historical treasures preserved in place in our region’s forests
even more important with each passing decade.
What will our own cultural legacy be? What artifacts will contemporary culture
leave behind in the forest for future students of land use history to ponder? While it’s
unlikely that asphalt, houses, shopping malls, restaurants, car dealerships, and big-box
discount stores will one day be reclaimed by forests or plowed back to pastures, the
fragments of cement, steel, brass, glass, and porcelain in our daily lives will outlive all
of us and may one day come to rest beneath a thick bed of leaves.
Naturalist Dave Anderson is the Director of Education for The Society for the
Protection of New Hampshire Forests based in Concord, New Hampshire. He may be
reached at [email protected] or through the Forest Society website:
www.forestsociety.org
Northern Woodlands / Summer 2008
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