Underground NH - Exploring A Hidden Silver Mine

In the summer of 2017 I set out in search of an abandoned gold mine, said to be located somewhere in the woods of central New Hampshire. Two weeks later I found a mine in those woods, but far enough away from where I'd started to make me wonder; was this even the same mine I'd been looking for? And not that there were any shiny rocks kicking around for me to verify, but I subsequently learned that the mineshaft I'd stumbled onto below is a silver mine, not a gold mine. So was my original information wrong and are these one and the same, or is there a second mineshaft in these woods still waiting to be discovered?

Let me start at the beginning. A 1946 historical book I bought on Amazon describes how in the late 1800's a gold mine was opened in these woods, and it operated until enough people didn't get rich from it that the entire project was abandoned in frustration. The location wasn't given, but I later uncovered two separate clues that gave me enough confidence to set out on my search. One being that the mine was located a certain distance south from a railroad bed (which no longer existed, but you'd be surprised how those raised beds are still noticeable on Google Earth), and the second being that it was located a distance east from an old railroad depot. That depot no longer existed either, but I didn't see that being an issue. Finding its address should be all over the historical records of the town. At least one would think so, but I'll be darned if it didn't take me finding a postcard of it on Ebay to finally pin down its address.

But now that I had triangulated its position, it was just a matter of working out all the details so I could begin my search. Do I bring my mountain bike so I can cover more ground, or hike in case the woods were too dense for riding? Should I wear shorts to keep myself cool, or long pants to protect against thorns when bushwhacking? What type of beer should I celebrate with when I returned? Many tough decisions, but with the logistics finally worked out, on a recent Saturday morning I went for a ride.

My starting point would begin forty-five minutes from my house, where a trail led behind a town park and into the woods. Happy to have made the decision to bring my mountain bike, I started out quickly and within 15 minutes reached my suspect location. And my first disappointment. The area was just a big open marsh and there weren't any holes to be found.

Not that I was surprised, considering I'd pinned this location from an address on a postcard and satellite images of a railroad bed that no longer existed, so I did what I always do after strike one. I began fanning out my search in wider and wider circles. This mine proved to be a stubborn place to find though, and soon my circles had grown to the quarter-mile variety. Just when it looked like I might be done for the day. I stumbled onto a path that, although obviously not traveled in a long time, was definitely a dirt road at some point in the past.

I followed it for about ten minutes before finding this old picnic table in the middle of what used to be a clearing. This wasn't just some backyard table either, this was large and rustic and looks like the kind of place where miners might once have gathered, grimy and sore after a hard day's digging. Real men, not men who put SPF 40 on their scalp and take vitamin D supplements because they often feel "run down". I wouldn't belong at this table any more than my youngest belongs at the grown-up table during Thanksgiving dinner.

Thinking I must be close now, I fanned out my search into smaller circles, but for all of my optimism and determination there were no mineshafts to be found on this day. I'm convinced these woods hold a secret though, for I spotted this structure not too far off the main trail.

Which on closer inspection turned out to be a decrepit outhouse. On a related note, don't let anyone ever tell you that miners don't have a sense of humor.

So back home to the drawing board I went, and although I swore by my original research, this time I found something that pointed me to a different spot. Two things about this new location - it was just over a mile from where my original clues had led me, and this one listed it as a silver mine, not a gold mine. So either one of the articles had some explaining to do, or these were two different places entirely. I planned to find out the following weekend, which would be my next day off from work and just enough time for my legs to recover from round one.

Compared to the ordeal I'd gone through originally, my search the following week was uneventful and not nearly as treacherous, and in fact almost anticlimactic. Although it still took me a couple hours searching, at about a quarter-mile from where I'd begun the day I was rewarded with this sight.

Closer inspection revealed this wasn't a welcome sign at the entrance, and I did cross that no trespassing sign to explore the tunnel. My other reprehensible act of the day was forgetting to record the video of it in landscape mode.

Start to finish the shaft is roughly fifty feet in length, with a small puddle at the entrance and dampness throughout. I respected the property as if it were my own, and even left a small gift in the form of a foreign coin I placed into the wall, before I was on my way.

So what have I learned about this mine since the time I explored it? In 1875 a white rock was found that was thought to contain silver, and after a newspaper article fanned the flames by speculating how extensive "gold, silver, lead and coal" were in these woods, the rush was on. Several companies attempted to mine the area before a new company was formed for the job, and $1 stocks were sold to fund the purchase of equipment. At least two shafts of equal length were dug into the hillside, and although silver turned out not to be the jackpot most expected, enough mica deposits were found to supply washers to General Electric in Schenectady NY, and crushed stone and poultry grit were sold to supplement the search. But these incidental businesses were short-lived, and not even ten years later remains of the entire operation were sold at auction.

Having learned that there's a second shaft, I have to wonder how close I was to finding it on my first attempt. Maybe someday I'll venture back into these woods for another go at it, but for now I'm content with the pictures I have of shaft one. New Hampshire's mini silver-rush was not the windfall many hoped it would be, but my mission to find it closed with a much happier ending. And to complete the story, when I returned back to my house that evening, Smuttynose IPA was my beer of choice to celebrate another successful adventure.

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