History in my Backyard

On Mother's Day, I went out behind my house and the quarry to re-examine a cellar hole that remains on what used to be the old military road that ran between Boston and Albany.

Because, when moms do something nice for themselves on that day, they go out in the woods to look at cellar holes, right? I thought so.

Joking aside, this really was something I wanted to take some time to do, and that day was perfect. It meant extending my quarry walk with the dogs, and trying to find this cellar hole that I had only been to twice before.

Each time I go to look for it, I develop an illogical fear that I won't be able to find it. Silly, really. As soon as I find what clearly still looks like a road, going through the middle of the woods, I know I've found the military road, and that the cellar hole is right along it.

In no time at all, I found it. It is a huge mound of rocks with a trench around the sides of it. The most interesting thing about it is that it has a place in the rocks that is shaped like a square. My father told me it was an oven, which probably would make the most sense.

It fascinates me that people lived here. As far as I can gather, from Hiram Barrus' History of the Town of Goshen, it is the cellar hole of a house that was built circa 1768. A man named John Smith lived there with his two sons and eight daughters. It mentions nothing about a wife. A particular passage in Barrus' History caught my eye:

"Five of the sisters...ranging in age from 60 to 73 years, meeting for the first time for a long period, attended church in this town, and occupied the same pew during a Sabbath in the summer of 1844. It was an interesting sight, and rendered still more impressive from the fact that four were widows and the fifth was unmarried" (Barrus, 170).

As I walked around the edge of the cellar hole, I tried to imagine life then. It was hard to do. I'm sure they never pictured someone from the 21st century walking around the remains of their house, more than 200 years after they had lived there.

What will the world look like 200 years from now?

With cellar holes practically in our back yard, letters and deeds in our attic from the 1700s, and an unfinished tombstone from the 1800s in our barn, I can't help but be fascinated by the history around me.



Reference:

Barrus, H. (1881) History of the Town of Goshen, Hampshire County, Massachusetts, from its First Settlement in 1761 to 1881 with Family Sketches. Publisher: Author.