Curious Graves of Massachusetts - Nathaniel Thurston's 7 Wives

This adventure began with a casual conversation between my wife and I one night, involving a subject that is very near and dear to her heart - graveyards and tombstones. In the midst of the chit chat something triggered a memory with me, and I asked her if she'd ever heard about the guy in Massachusetts who was buried with six of his young wives, each of whom had somehow died in their 20's or 30's. She gave me about a five-second blank stare, then made me slowly repeat what I'd just told her - that six of this man's wives mysteriously died at a very young age, and now the whole group of them were buried alongside each other at a cemetery in Massachusetts. There's a boatload of questions a statement like that could lead to, but my wife followed it up with just one.

And we haven't been to see this grave ... why??

I didn't have a good why to respond with, so that's how two days later we found ourselves driving to the Bradford Burial Ground in Haverhill, to look for the grave of Nathaniel Thurston.

If you trust what's written on his epitaph, Thurston was a well respected member of the community who was involved in local legislature for many years, and not the type of person one would suspect of rubbing out a wife every few years or so when he got tired of waking up next to her. Taking everything at face value, he would appear to be just the world's unluckiest man when it came to the life expectancy of the women he wed.

For many years he was a
member of the Legislature,
was distinguished for his benevolence
and greatly lamented by
his friends

Unlucky indeed, for between the years of 1790 and 1808 six of Thurston's wives passed away, an average clip of one death every three years. I'm not looking for any of his descendants to come beating down my door with pitchforks, however, so rather than accuse the man of being New England's version of Henry VIII, let me simply present the facts of Thurston's curious love life as they happened:

1780 - Married Elizabeth "Betsey" Thurston, who died on November 25, 1790 at age 34.

1791 - Married Martha Thurston, who died on May 12, 1799 at age 32.

1799 - Married Huldah Thurston, who died on September 8, 1801 at age 24.

1803 - Married Clarrissa Thurston, who died on November 14, 1803 at age 36.

1804 - Married Martha B. Thurston, who died on July 27th, 1804 at age 25.

















1804 - Married Mary Thurston, who died on March 3rd, 1808 at age 27.









1801 was a particularly cruel year in the Thurston household, for not only is that the year wife Huldah died, but a son she and Nathaniel had passed away also. Benjamin Thurston was only 8 months old when he died on March 7th of 1801, just months prior to his mother's demise.

Between 1803 and 1804 was another flurry of activity, as Thurston was married three times and widowered twice in a period of just over 12 months. As a testament to whatever charisma he had going for him, as quickly as the man could bury one wife he somehow attracted a new one. Not only that, but the older he got the younger the girls were that he landed. Thurston was pushing 50 years of age when he wed wives 5 and 6, each of whom were only in their mid-20's at the time.

A cooling off period followed this sixth marriage to Martha B., and they remained a couple for approximately four years until she too died at 27. This was in 1808, and without skipping a beat the 54-year old Thurston was married for a 7th time to 25-year old Frances Fletcher in 1809. That is where the craziness finally came to a stop, as Thurston passed away in 1811 with wife number 7 still alive and well.

I'd bet my Jeep there's a whole lot more to this story, but I don't know how to investigate a 200 year old cold-case therefore it ends with Frances having done something none of the other wives were able to do - outlive Thurston. And as a result of that accomplishment Frances distinguished herself from the others in another way as well, she is the only wife who will not be spending eternity next to Thurston, alongside wives 1 through 6 at the Bradford Burial Ground in Haverhill Massachusetts.

Links:

Unedited Group Photo

The Georgia Guidestones

Most of what we write about is here in New England, but sometimes we visit a place that is just so darn cool we need to share it, even if it is a thousand miles away. Such is the case with this next adventure. Do a Google search on this monument and you'll see it referred to as everything from instructions on how society should recover from an apocalyptic nuclear war, to a series of messages from the Illuminati on how they plan on taking over the world, and even as the ten commandments of the Antichrist and something that should be destroyed immediately. If you're a fan of late night radio shows about the unusual you will already aware of this place, and need no introduction to the Georgia Guidestones.

It's hard for me to imagine anyplace in the United States more shrouded in mystery and controversy than the Georgia Guidestones, starting with the question of who it was that even masterminded their construction. To hear that we don't even know who had the thing constructed might put images in your head of it being hundreds or thousands of years old, but here comes your first twist. The Georgia Guidestones were built in 1979 and unveiled in 1980, well within just my own lifetime. We even know who physically built it, that was the Elberton Granite Finishing company out of Elbert County Georgia. But with that statement you are now fully up to speed on how this thing got here, for nobody knows who it was that hired Elberton Granite to build it. And don't bother knocking on their door, they don't have any more of an idea than the rest of us. Money and very specific instructions were given to them through a series of third party transactions, and like any good business they honored their customer's wishes and built the structure accordingly.

Let me start at the beginning. In 1979 a man under the admitted alias of Robert C. Christian walked into the Elbert Granite company and said he wanted to hire them to construct a monument, featuring several massive stones that would stand as tablets and have messages carved into them. Each stone would be much larger than anything the company had dealt with in its history, and in addition there were several astronomical requirements for how the stones needed to be arranged. To top off all this craziness, the man wanted to do this as the anonymous representative of "a small group of loyal Americans". The owner of the granite company was later quoted as saying that he thought he had a real kook on his hands, so to get rid of him he quoted a price many times higher than any job he'd ever done, then shooed him off to his banker to work out payment. The man left, and the owner figured that was the last he'd see of him, but a week later news came from the bank that a $10,000 deposit had arrived for the job. Kook or not, at this point the man was a paying customer so it became business as usual for the granite company, and off to work they went.

Requiring more than just the usual stonework they were accustomed to, Elberton Granite enlisted the help of an expert from the local university for the astronomical requirements of the Guidestones, which included a sight hole for viewing the North Star, a sun-slit through the top stone that at noontime would shine on whichever day of the year it was, and some always popular solstice tracking holes bored through the giant slabs. But while these were a few of the fun features of the stones, the monument also came with some less whimsical aspects. Below is the first of the Guidestone's 10 "commandments", carved into the tablets in 8 different languages. Although some of these commandments preach the type of stuff most of us can get behind, such as Prize Truth-Beauty-Love, this first one downright scares the heck out of people.

Maintain Humanity Under 500,000,000

In Perpetual Balance With Nature

Maintain the population of Earth at a half-billion people. Here's some quick math to let you know how you'd fare under this particular rule. Siri tells me that our 2017 global population is just a tick over 7.5 billion people. To reduce the world's population to 500 million as instructed, only 1 person out of every 15 would be allowed to continue living, the other 14 would be eliminated. Of course these are just some silly words carved into a rock, but not to everybody there are, and there you have the Illuminati portion of the conspiracy. Many people believe this secret society not only controls the strings of the world's most powerful governments, but is actively pursuing ways of reducing our global population. Poisonous chemtrails, HAARP weather control, tainted fluoride in our water - if you ever need a reminder of just how sane your own life is, grab a couple beers and spend the night on YouTube looking up the terms "population control" and "new world order". Just don't blame me if life suddenly feels very boring afterward.

The flip side of this argument is that the 500 million rule is directed toward a society that has devastated itself by nuclear war, and done this paring down of humanity already. This is a fairly popular theory among those who've studied the Guidestones, as not only were they constructed during the height of the Cold War, but several other commandments seem fitting for a post-apocalyptic world as well. Ignoring the fact that I have no idea how to angle my pictures to avoid shadows, here is the English version of the Guidestone's 10 rules for society:

So if all this took place in the years 1979 and 1980, what in the past 37 years has been learned about the Guidestones and who built them? Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your preference of these things) not much. Not a single claim from the group of "loyal Americans" has been made during this time. And the mysterious Robert C. Christian, representative of the group and negotiator of the deal? Only one man in the world is confirmed to know Christian's true identity, and he's not spilling the beans. Wyatt Martin is the banker Elberton Granite originally pawned the "kook" off to, and as part of establishing the account that payments would flush through, Martin insisted on knowing Christian's real name. Christian obliged, but only under the condition the banker sign a non-disclosure agreement, something that Martin did and remained true to this day on. The two actually became friends of a sort, or pen pals, and for years corresponded through good old fashioned letters. Ever the mysterious, Martin claims that no two letters from Christian were ever mailed from the same location. Then in 2001 Christian went silent, and being that he was older than the banker, Martin speculates that this is when Christian passed away.

I made my journey to the Georgia Guidestones in the midst of a business trip to South Carolina, in which I was able to squeeze in an extra day of flying in order to make the drive over. Fortunately for me I was travelling with someone as imaginative as I am, who saw no issues with spending 5 hours cooped up in a car in order to spend 15 minutes looking at a monument. And to say it was worth such a long car ride is an understatement. The details of that ride have long since faded, but the memory of standing at the base of the Guidestones and absorbing all the secrecy, controversy, and intrigue that has surrounded them all these years? That's something that will stay with me as long as I still have wits enough to appreciate all the mysterious things our world has to offer.

Links:
Location of Georgia Guidestones on Google Maps

The Old Stone Church - A Lone Survivor's Abandoned Shell

West Boylston Massachusetts today is not the West Boylston it was 150 years ago. In the 1800s this was a developing factory town with businesses up and down the Stillwater River, but if you drive the stretch of Route 140 today that runs through this former hotbed you won't see any of those structures remaining - the factories have long since been destroyed and the houses either moved or torn down. But what you will see are two impressive and very different things, and whose histories are intertwined. One is an extremely large reservoir that helps serve the modern day city of Boston, and the other is the remains of the Old Stone Church, which stand on the banks of that reservoir.




In the 1890's construction of the Wachusett Reservoir was an inconvenience to many surrounding towns, but none more so than West Boylston. The reservoir's creation forced the closing of factories that depended on the river, devastating the community and sending many residents packing to look for work elsewhere. It wasn't until years later, when use of the automobile became commonplace and the town found itself as a handy little bedroom community to the city of Worcester, that it began attracting residents again and a new epicenter of town was born.

But through this decades long ordeal one building remained, spared the wrecking ball by its beauty to West Boylston's residents and attraction to visitors of the town. The Old Stone Church.

This was actually the second church to be built on this site. In 1832 the original was constructed for the West Boylston Baptist Society, but on May 2nd 1890 - a bad day for churches - both this and a neighboring catholic church burned to the ground. It was quickly rebuilt, but by 1902 was forced to close for good due to the reservoir's construction, an inconvenience for which the Baptist Society was awarded $22,000 by the Metropolitan Water Board. The structure was gutted and left empty, and that is how it remains over 100 years later when we took our family to see it.

Having been inducted into the National Register of Historic Places the church is open to the public, and wandering throughout its dirt floors and support beams feels like a little bit like walking through a ancient ruin. The empty windows also proved to be just the right height for a couple members of our group to hang out in.

In one of my more fanciful breaks from reality, I came here with the idea that I'd somehow be able to scale the inside wall of its magnificent bell-tower.

But I don't shoot spider webs from my wrists, and as such never made it more than a few feet off the ground. I could only imagine how great the view would be from the top.

Our visit coincided with a wedding party that made the really cool choice of having their photo shoot taken here, and although they clogged up the main entrance for much of the afternoon, the kids were able to moan and groan about family pictures just as well from the church's side entrance.

This is not the type of place most people would spend an entire day at, but if you even find yourself near central Massachusetts it's definitely worth the detour to walk around and enjoy its beauty, both inside and out.

Just head down Route 140 in West Boylston and look for the giant flag, you cannot miss it.

Links:
Location of Old Stone Church

Paddock Mines - Exploring Shaft #2

If anything can stir my imagination more than a hole in the earth, high up on a desolate mountain and disappearing into darkness and the unknown, I don't know of it. Whether it's a forgotten cave, a hundred year old mineshaft, or even a mile long abandoned tunnel if you ever find yourself in southern Pennsylvania, to walk underground in one of these places it to step out of one world and into another. And in the case of the Paddock Mineshafts, you're stepping into a world of men who dug through rock for twelve hours a day with nothing more than a pickax and grit, men who were oblivious to such modern luxuries as OSHA safety and mid-morning coffee breaks, and men who would have laughed me right off the mountain with my daily multi-vitamins and two puffs of a inhaler every morning.

Our follow-up expedition to the Paddock Mineshafts has been my most anticipated adventure in the short history of this blog. After learning there was a second and equally long tunnel in those treasured woods, we planned a group excursion with the WeRmudfun gang to go back and explore everything in one shot - both the tunnel our group found during our initial search, and this existing one they knew of that we'd been looking for but never came across.

The morning actually started on a down note, as we left the house with only two of the four people who were committed to going from our group, me and Barry. Feeling bad for the two that couldn't make it, but not bad enough to consider rescheduling, we drove the two and a half hours to our designated meeting spot, roughly a mile's distance further along an old dirt road from the first time we made this trip.

Because we were now running off GPS there would be no bushwhacking through thickets and thorns like our previous search, and it couldn't have been more than half an hour of enjoyable hiking and chatting until we reached the mine. This was the first hike on this trail for our group, and the first hike in over two years for our new friends, who were navigating the way. My only flub-up was when I struggled to make small talk and asked them if the random section of trail they we were leading us through looked familiar. You know, from their last trip here over two years ago.

We arrived at the mine and one of the first things we noticed was that unlike the previous shaft, which had quicksand disguised as a puddle and would swallow you whole at the entrance, this one's method of attack was a slow and more tortuous one. Soon after entering the mine, a foot-deep river of cold water stood throughout much of the tunnel, and there was no way to avoid walking through it. A problem for some people perhaps, but no match against the Walmart waders I'd picked up just that morning.

But similar to the previous shaft, this one's entrance is guarded by some nasty spiders that seem to be breeding an army of their own.

Once about halfway into the mine the water eases up and the shaft becomes pretty smooth sailing. It runs mostly in a straight line, but has just enough waviness to close you off from any last glimpse of daylight and give you a real sense of twisting through the mountain.

Unlike shaft #1, this one doesn't abruptly end at a wall that makes it obvious you're not going any further, and instead splits into two directions that are almost immediately caved in on both sides. Purposely or not we don't know. And although I gave it my best shot to crawl over one of the piles of rubble, there just wasn't any continuing. On a related note, I'm one of those guys who will stop to say cheese for the camera under any circumstances.

Now it was on to the second part of this adventure, the Paddock Pit, and what turned out to be my biggest surprise of the day.

When I was considering that we would be climbing down into a vertical mineshaft, I mistakenly assumed it would be a shaft with a steep decline, and that we'd just need some rope to guide the way and help steady us down. Nope. A pit means a pit, and in this case it means a hole wide enough my wife could have driven our car into it. You can imagine how silly I felt standing at the edge of this thing holding not much more than a clothesline, but I threw it down anyway because if nothing else it would give us a measurement of how deep this hole went. We heard the plastic spool smack the bottom just before we ran out of slack at the top. That was a fifty-foot stretch of rope we'd just heaved in there, and this pit had swallowed almost every last foot of it.

It was time to head home for us as we knew we wouldn't be getting into the pit on this day, but at least I knew exactly what we were challenged with now - finding a way to climb straight down into a fifty-foot hole in the earth. Off to the drawing board I would be going.

And you know what that meant ... another trip to the Paddock Mines would soon be in the works.


Links:
Searching For The Paddock Mineshaft - Part 1
WeRmudfun - Abandoned Paddock Mines Shaft 1 and 2

Ruins Of The Cornish Estate Mansion

At least once a year our family takes a trip outside our usual sphere of travel, far enough away that an overnight stay is required. It's fun to break away from our everyday lives for a weekend of exploring someplace new, and as teenagers our kids are still good enough sports not to complain about spending a night in the same hotel room as their parents. This year's getaway brought us to the state of New York, for a ferry ride up the Hudson River and a tour of the Bannerman Castle ruins on Pollepel Island.

That tour was everything we'd hoped it would be, and when it ended that Saturday afternoon our kids would have been perfectly happy returning to our hotel room for a night of Snapchat selfies and Minecraft. But they aren't the ones who paid for this trip, my wife and I are, and in my bag of tricks I had several nearby interesting places I'd scouted just for such an opportunity of having some free time. So we did what any mean parents would do in this situation, we dragged the kids on a short hike into the woods to explore the ruins of a burned down mansion.

Sometime around 1910 a wealthy merchant named Sigmund Stern and his wife built the Northgate mansion on a 650 acre plot of land in the Hudson Valley. Unfortunately, they only got a couple years use of the place before Stern's wife passed away, prompting him to sell the estate to Edward and Selina Cornish. The Cornishes lived at the property until they both died in 1938, and the mansion remained in the family until burning down in 1958. Today, what remains of this property is commonly referred to as the Cornish Estate ruins.

The popular directions to the ruins involves a four mile hike through the Hudson Highlands, but what most websites don't mention is that you can park along the side of Route 9D, and by climbing uphill through the woods reach the site within fifteen minutes. Maybe they don't mention this because it takes away from the spirit of finding the place, but come at me with that argument when you're accompanied by two teenagers who that day you've already put through a five-hour car ride, an hour of boat riding, and a two hour walking tour under some unseasonably warm June sun. Even the prospect of this fifteen minute hike led to a spirited conversation in the car, one that only ended when my wife threw up her hands and told the kids "well, you know your dad!"

Once we found the ruins everyone agreed the short hike was worthwhile though, as these were some of the grandest remains we've come across. Much of the mansion was constructed of stone, which after the fire left many walls and arches still standing for us to wander among and pose with.

Another thing this mansion had no shortage of were fireplaces. Several chimneys still stand at their full height with fireplaces jutting out at crazy angles, and I've played enough games of Jenga to know better than fool around with any of them.

Other sections were much sturdier and made for some good climbing, prompting Logan to turn the entire complex into his own personal jungle gym.

The Cornish family were also well known cattle farmers, and if you walk a little ways further up the hillside you'll come across what remains of their barn. If you're up for a bonus challenge, go into the basement of the barn and look for a crevice behind a wooden post, I hid one of my foreign coins in that wall.

We also found a few random structures we couldn't identify, such as this small platform that Barry is making himself comfortable on. On a side note, whenever we talk about going places with our family, Barry is more often than not a part of that group.

Although the Cornish Estate Ruins aren't comfortably within the range of a single day's drive, I introduce them to you not only in the hopes that a few of you find your way out to them someday, but also as a reminder. Never pass up an opportunity to see something new and unusual in life, and always be on the lookout for ways to create these opportunities for yourself.

Links:
Historic Photographs of the Cornish Estate (aka Northgate Mansion)
Location of Cornish Estate Ruins

Curious Graves - God Aimed The Tree That Crushed Him Dead

Sunday drives with our family are not your typical afternoon ride, and if you ever find yourself in our car during one of these trips your apt to see something like this as the destination on our GPS.

This day we were on the hunt for the gravestone of David Moors, buried in the town of Hancock New Hampshire and with a tombstone that has been mentioned in a graveyard oddity book I found at the library. David met his untimely death while chopping down a tree, which is unique enough, but on the grave's eulogy was a poem that described how "God aimed the tree that crushed him dead". This seemed a bit accusatory to us, or else reflected a weird sense of humor by his widow, and although we couldn't find pictures of the grave the transcript was listed in the cemetery's burial records so we knew it existed. Our plan to find this tombstone was, in terms of computer hacking, what is called a brute force attack. That is, to systematically try every combination possible until you find the right one, or in our case, read every single headstone until we located the one we were looking for.

One thing about reading every headstone in a cemetery is you're bound to find a few gems, and this day did not disappoint. First there was the wife of Hiram Whittemore, a lady I'm guessing didn't win any lifetime achievement awards in her day. She is described on her tombstone simply as someone who "Hath Done What She Could".

People weren't shy 200 years ago about informing us of how their loved ones died, either. Meet George Edward Sheldon, a man whose life was cut short the day he was "shot by a ruffian".

This is actually a pretty good life-hack to try yourself someday. Pick a cemetery - older ones work best for this - and spend an afternoon reading every single one of the headstones. You'll never be at a loss for small talk again. The flip side of this is you may find yourself at a loss for people who want to keep hanging out with you, but fortunately that's never been an issue for me. I was lucky enough to find someone who enjoys these jaunts as much as I do, and even after scouring the cemetery and not finding David's grave the first time through, my wife was eager to swap sides and give it another go.

It was on the return sweep that I spotted the grave, and with writing that has somewhat faded over time it was easy to see how we'd missed it the first time through. But the words were still plenty legible once you zero'd in on them, and they matched the transcript exactly.

David Moors

Died Sept. 15 1811

AE.29.

Here peacefully lies the once happy father

The joy of his beloved wife & daughter

But whilst in health the woodsman's ax he sped

God aimed the tree that crushed him dead

It was another successful expedition, and we did our usual high-fiving and posing for pictures before packing it in and calling it a day. In our scavenger-hunt battle for who can find the most curious headstones, I am now in the lead 3-0 against my wife Tina.

Related Links:
Curious Graves - Persecuted For Wearing The Beard
Curious Graves - Grave For A Leg

A Hermit's Chamber

Like many couples do, Tina and I like to divvy the driving up between us, especially when taking our weekend jaunts throughout New Hampshire. Not just to share the workload, but so that each of us have an opportunity to be on the lookout for cool stuff. We'll pull over for just about anything goofy or interesting, such as this three-wheeled car, this community that's very proud of an apple tree, or even this neighborly dispute that left us chuckling and wanting to know more. So when my wife squawked for me to stop the car as we rounded the bend of some back road recently I knew she'd spotted something good, and had anybody been following too closely behind us we would have soon found ourselves swapping insurances. I backed up the Jeep until seeing for myself what had gotten her so excited.

Not too far into the woods was this chamber, and my initial thought was that we were looking at an opened and abandoned crypt.

Anyone who has spent time in New Hampshire is familiar with the countless small cemeteries that line our roads and are hidden within our woods. Many are family plots with only a handful of markers, and it's not uncommon to see one that has a crypt build into the hillside. Marked by a break in the stone wall and with its half-size doorway that is what this looked like from a distance, and although I'm personally not keen on seeing a 200 year old decomposing corpse, we walked over to take a look.

As a disappointment to one of us there were no corpses inside, but that doesn't mean it was empty. What we found was evidence that someone had probably spent a lot of time in there - and possibly even lived in it - starting with this ratty old sleeping bag that barely looked warm enough for our months of July and August. The bamboo fixture on top is the base of papasan chair, which all things considered could actually have been quite cozy in here.

And these boards might even have served as a jailhouse cot for the owner of the sleeping bag.

I'm making a couple assumptions in the course of writing this. First, that this isn't the remains of some old basement and that it was in fact a crypt. Although my head leans toward the basement theory my heart is sticking with it being a crypt, for Tina's sake if nothing else. My second assumption is that someone was actually living in here and not just camping out for a night or using the place to dump some garbage. It's a possibility, but certain toiletries outside - the likes of which you'd be thankful I didn't take pictures of - make me think someone did spend a fair amount of time in here.

If that is true, then wherever this person is today I hope they're in a much better place now than they were back then.

Ruins of Highover Estate

When considering new adventures to go on I like to balance the amount of hiking needed against the amount of cool stuff we'll get to see once we arrive. The hike is often a necessity of exploration, not just because most of the good places are hidden from the public, but for the same reason a cold beer always tastes better following an afternoon of mowing the lawn. Things are more enjoyable when you have to work for them first.

The JC Phillips Nature Preserve of Beverly Massachusetts hits that sweet spot with just the right balance of hiking and exploring. It's located behind the historical Moraine Farm, which is where this adventure begins nearly 140 years ago. John Charles "JC" Phillips, a businessman from Boston, purchased 275 acres with the intent of creating both a future logging site and a working farm. Only problem was, this 275 acres was a wasteland that was as barren of vegetation as the top of my head is barren of hair. But for a problem solver such as JC this was no biggie, he simply rerouted 40 acres of drainage, planted 60,000 trees, and terra-formed the entire land into a farm that is still in operation today. JC passed away in 1885 but the land remained in the family, and in the early 1900's one of his children, William Phillips, built a mansion he dubbed Highover Estate in the woods of the property. Highover burned down in 1968, and that brings us to present day 2017 when we set out to hike this area and find the remains of the estate for ourselves.

If you drew a circle around the preserve Highover would be the bulls-eye, so in the spirit of balancing work and play we took the long way around to first enjoy the sights of bordering Wendham Lake. This is a spring fed lake that produces ice so pure it was harvested each winter and packed in straw to be shipped worldwide, a business that continued into the 1930's. With such a nice view you'd think I'd have a picture or two of the water, but twice through my photo album says this peek in the background is the best I've got.

During the hike we did get a couple good action videos, because it just wouldn't be a hike if we didn't risk breaking a tailbone now and then. I chose to risk mine by showing off my tight-roping skills on this toppled tree.

This teepee structure was curious, and I liked imagining it was a communal effort where each person to come along would add another log to it. I also liked imagining I was going to have to crawl inside and rescue Tina, but she managed to find her way out.

After some helpful directions from a trail-jogger we started coming across remnants of the burned down mansion. First it was a solitary stone pillar, then some random steps, and finally on top of Prospect Hill we reached our destination, the beginning of Highover ruins.

I've seen pictures of the original mansion and my best guess is this was the courtyard in the rear. It is also the structure that convinced me to make this hike when I first came across it online, so I was happy to find it still standing where we could get a few pictures with it.

Another spot that held up over time is this archway. I can't figure out it's purpose other than just being decorative since a brick wall stands behind it, but be sure to look for the Latin writing carved into the rounded stone at its base.

This corner where two walls meet was another head-scratcher, almost like each of them was built in different eras. Or maybe on different budgets, not unlike the sunroom we tore off our house a few years back.

Also, we've come across some pretty creepy things in our years of explorations, but this gargoyle fountain is right at the top of that list. Look close and you'll see that it's still spitting out water.

85 acres of the original Moraine Farm are owned today by the cities of Beverly and Wenham, under an arrangement that protects the land from any development. The area is open to the public, and a kiosk at the site of Highover ruins offers further history of the property and former mansion. For anyone looking to make an enjoyable hike and explore a piece of history, I highly recommend you spend an afternoon at the JC Phillips Preserve.

Just make sure you walk the long way to get to the ruins.

Links:
Where to park
Finding the Ruins