The Stone Place

A couple of summers ago, Ber and I decided to go for a ride - just jump in the car and go somewhere, without planning. We drove over through Livermore Mills (a village that is barely there anymore) to Peru, and bought a big Italian sandwich at a deli, and ate it while sitting in a cellarhole on the manicured Peru common.

Cellarhole on the Common. Not Tavern on the Green, but a lovely spot for a picnic. 

After our picnic, we drove around on the dirt roads that lace through the woods, and decided to go up to The Stone Place. It is the site of a former farm, now completely wooded over, in the Green Mountain National Forest.

Griffith Brook, running very low.

The road is quite ordinary for the first quarter-mile, a narrow but well-maintained gravel road leading to a house. Beyond the house, however, the road becomes much more interesting. It is one lane, two tire-tracks with a high row of grass and weeds growing between them, and trees and ferns pressing close on either side. For all of its primitive nature, however, it is kept open and passable, to a point, and we were able to drive perhaps another mile into the woods. We parked in a broad clearing and walked the rest of the way, crossing a plank bridge over Griffith Brook, which, in the middle of that dry summer, was reduced to a froggy-smelling trickle. 

The road turns uphill, away from the brook, and toward a stand of young trees growing in a large area that was clear-cut about twenty years ago. It is here that we found the graveyard. Of course we knew it was there, but it is always a little strange to come across a graveyard so far away from habitation.

The Stone Family Cemetery

It is a small plot; only five gravestones stand inside a tiny, fenced area. Five members of the Stone family rest there, surrounded by birches and spruces and ash trees. The Forest Service maintains the plot, clearing it once a year and removing any fallen trees. There is no gate in the spiky iron fence, so unless one wants to risk being impaled, one has to be content with squinting at the inscriptions from outside the enclosure.

We decided to keep going up the hill, following the old road up the side of the mountain. We scuffed through sedgy grass, and stopped to admire the beautiful, rare bottle gentian that grew there. We found a hop-vine climbing a spindly cherry tree, and explored the remains of an old orchard, where gnarled, twisted apple trees dropped their fruit for the benefit of the wildlife. The ground beneath the treees had been cleared; we assume it is the work of the Forest Service, creating good browsing places for the deer.

"Want to keep going?" Ber asked after we had left the orchard, and stood in the road, looking uphill and down.

"Hmm..." I looked up the hill, along the path we had not let trod, and down the hill, the way we had come. My knee ached, and I knew the ball game would start soon. "Let's go up a little farther."

We climbed the hill, and the path soon went under the trees, in a place that had not been cut-over in many decades. The woods were dense here, still and quiet and sweet.

The Doorstep

Looking to the east side of the path, we saw the outlines of some stone walls, and went to investigate. We found that the stones formed a rectangle, and soon realized that we had found the remains of the house - the house the Stone family had built. We stood on the broad, flat doorstep that must have led to the main entrance, and I wondered, how many times dis someone gratefully cross that threshhold, going in after a hard day's work, into the cool house, or out of the cold, to get warm near the fire?

Bricks from the Chimney

We found not only the house, but the foundations of the barn - a much larger square, and the stone walls that formed a kind of funnel leading from the road to the barn. This was where they drove the sheep and cattle into the barn from the pastures, or out to the road, to be carted off to market.

We found bricks, which some previous explorer had pulled from the debris and left piled on a wall. They were weathered, and green with moss, but we could not help thinking of the chimney that must have stood there, long ago.

In poking around the corner of the house foundation, I found a bit of metal protruding from under a rock, and pulled it out. It was a horseshoe, heavily encased in rust. Ber and I passed it back and forth, and then I tucked it back into its hidey-hole, knowing that if I left it in sight, someone would take it away, and somehow, we didn't think it ought to leave this place.

The Cistern, and the Ash Tree that Split It

Ber found a cistern - one of the only pieces of concrete we found there. It was a large square vessel, split in two by the growing of a huge ash tree. The bole of the tree was squared off from having grown in the cistern, and then it had outgrown its dimensions, and split the concrete apart.

"The well can't be far from here," Ber said. "They wouldn't have piped water very far." Within minutes she had found the well, too. It was very near the house foundation, almost built into the cellar wall. It was hooded over with a couple of slabs of rock, to keep unwary people and animals from falling in, but there was enough of a gap to peer in, and see the circular stone wall of the well descending into the earth.

The Well

"Think there's any water in it?" I asked.

Ber peered in, as much as she could. "I can't see any," she said, "But it's been such a dry year..."

Inside the Well

I couldn't see any better than she could, so opened the flash on my camera and stuck my hand in the hole, and snapped a few pictures. Sure enough, beyond the litter of leaves and spiderwebs, there was the glint of water. Whoever had sited that well had chosen a good place.

It was beautiful there - serene and fragrant with the scents of ferns and earth. The woods were almost silent, but for the quiet trickle of a vireo's song. We stood and looked at the traces of the buildings that were just visible - stone walls, slowly disappearing beneath leaf-mold, delineating the footprints of the house and barn, and the outlines of the paddocks and meadows. We looked at the apple trees - no doubt the descendants of the Stones' original trees - and knew that if we looked, we could probably find roses and lilac bushes, and wondered if there were still daffodils that bloomed early in the spring.

"They did so much work," I said. "Think of all the work it took to clear the land by hand, and root out the stumps, and build the walls, and the buildings... and now it's all gone."

Ber climbing out of the barn cellarhole; house foundation to the right

 

It must have been backbreaking, endless work. Cutting the trees, digging and lining the cellarholes and the well, hauling god-only-knows how many tons of rocks to make the walls and foundations, hauling the lumber and bricks to build with. I wondered what the house had looked like - whether it had plaster walls, and if there had been any decoration. There must have been; even the poorest farmers had some kind of color in their homes - stencils on the walls, a glass vase, patterned china dishes, inexpensive framed lithographs, fuzzy gray photos of family members, colorful quilts on the beds. What kind of home had they made here, miles from the village, on a southeast-facing mountainside? Where are their descendants now? Are there any stories in the family of the long-vanished farm, any photos of it, tintypes stashed away in a trunk someplace?

Ber looked off toward the valley. "They must have had a fantastic view."

Indeed - with the spread of the valley below, and the rumpled mountains crowned in the distance by the rounded bulk of Stratton Mt. The view was, of course, blocked now by the dense growth of trees. "I wonder if they had time to look at it," I said.

The farm was abandoned sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. Bricks, window glass and roof slates were probably salvaged or scavenged; meadows went rank with goldenrod, then hardhack, scrubby trees and then encroaching forest. The orchards no longer provided apples for cider and vinegar, but food for deer and bears. The hop vines went untrained and unpruned; their descendants still tangle the trees beside the road. Dad says he remembers going up there when he was a little kid in the 1920s and '30s, and seeing the derelict remains of the house slowly decaying into the ground, before the Forest Service and the CCCs went in and knocked it down and took away the debris.

We left it, left the cellarholes and stone walls and broken cistern to the silence of the woods, where the July evening sunlight was angling through the trees. We walked out past the apple trees, dropping fat yellow apples on the ground, past the hop-vines, past the cemetery where no one places flowers, but where the blue bottle gentian grows wild. Down the long hill, over the bouncy plank bridge, out on the narrow ribbon of road toward the sounds and sights of people.