On The Hunt For Abandoned Vehicles II

Life for me is one big treasure hunt, and some of my favorite things to find throughout this never-ending game are abandoned cars. Every vehicle left forgotten and rusting in the woods somewhere has a story to tell, and if cars could talk I'd sit down and have a beer with each and every one of them. Here is part two of my search for the abandoned vehicles of New England.

This first day of treasure hunting found me exploring a set of railroad tracks where I was actually in search of some graffiti, said to be very spectacular and hidden somewhere below one of the bridges. Unfortunately, the only graffiti I found was artwork by young boys just learning the human anatomy, but during the course of my exploration I came across this mostly buried car by the edge of the woods. I guessed it to have been sitting there for at least the past few decades, but remarkably when I returned to this area just a few weeks later, it was gone.

Unlike that first car which I stumbled upon purely through good karma, this next one I found after specifically marking it's location on Google Earth, then following a very weak cellphone signal to track it down. Adding to this challenge was that I went searching for it the same week a nor'easter came rolling through town. But telling myself that the harder the search the more rewarding the find, I was able to snowshoe my way out and catch a few glimpses of it beneath the snow. This car is located next to the Ellis River just north of Storyland, a place we visited often when our kids were younger. They're teenagers now and our Storyland days are long past, but you can bet my wife is counting the days to grandkids so she can go howling down that Polar Coaster once again.

Driving through the countryside one afternoon, this apocalyptic farming vehicle caught my eye just as we were passing a field. I pulled to the side of the road and pretended to read my phone until a lady disappeared back into her house from across the way, then I darted across the field as best a 48 year old with one hip can dart, and I snapped this picture.

Somewhere in eastern Massachusetts, abandoned within the no-mans land that separates a public hiking preservation and a private farm, sits this crane. Figuring it was close enough to the public side of things for us to stop and look at, Tina and I soon found ourselves taking turns in the drivers seat and snapping pictures. Only problem was, the cabin door had been rusted shut and it took quite a bit of banging for me to get it open. That attracted the attention of a farmhand who came wandering over, and he was none too happy to see me at that very moment tight-rope walking the boom. I tried explaining that because it sat right next to the trail we figured it was purposely left here for hikers to play on, but this guy was not in the mood for jokes. We got our pictures, but we also got an unexpected cardio workout, double-timing it out of there while the farmhand went yelling for his boss.

Back to my hometown of Dover, where I first spotted this truck in the woods off Tolend Road while driving an area we don't normally travel. Into my mental filing cabinet it went, until later that summer while on a bike ride I took the long way home for a closer look. I'm not very good with all the settings my camera has to offer, but given enough chances even a monkey on a typewriter is going to bang out a sentence every now and then. By this same law of randomness I was able to get all the colors just as I wanted them, for this final picture in today's edition of abandoned vehicles of New England.

Related Links:
On The Hunt For Abandoned Vehicles - Part One

The Medfield Insane Asylum

What do you do with a former insane asylum that is no longer being used to house patients?  You could fence it off to prevent people from getting near it, or you could tear it down to make room for yet one more condo association. But if you're the really cool folks of Medfield Massachusetts, you turn the entire area into a walking park and open it up to the public.

The Medfield Insane Asylum began operating in 1896 as a way to ease overcrowding among the state's existing facilities. By 1914 it had changed its name to the politically correct Medfield State Hospital, at which point its campus style grounds consisted of over 50 buildings and was home to 1,500 patients; a number would swell to over 2,300 in later years.

Today this entire area sits abandoned and boarded, and although some of the buildings have been destroyed in recent years, on the day we went I counted at least 30 of them still standing. Medfield was a community as much as a hospital, and what's left has the creepiness of a ghost town but the pleasantness of a city park.

We passed several people along the streets that day - including a family with young kids and a pair of elderly ladies - and all were doing exactly the same thing we were; getting some exercise while at the same time enjoying this glimpse into Massachusetts' past.

Anyone who remembers the cars I drove as a youth can tell you that I find beauty in the decrepit. Put me in a place like this and I'm a big old kid in a 900 acre playground, trying to see it all in one afternoon. I probably made Tina take a dozen pictures standing by this clocktower just to make sure I’d have a least one or two that wouldn’t end up in my recycling bin.

A few of the buildings were residential houses where I believe management kept themselves separate from the population, but mostly the staff lived in the upper floors and attics of the same brick buildings patients were housed in.

For a variety of reasons - least of all the hazardous materials released by the deterioration of the buildings - the town doesn’t want people going inside any of them. In addition to boarding up all the windows, security guards regularly patrol the grounds and signs everywhere warn of all the bad stuff you’ll be inhaling should you enter. I'm also convinced they have the buildings alarmed. Why I think that, I'll never tell.

Outdoor activities were a part of life for many patients of Medfield Hospital. They farmed the hundreds of acres surrounding the hospital, providing enough food not only for the hospital but excess to ship to surrounding towns. This was important not only for the hospital to help sustain itself, but for patients to keep busy while at the same time learning to lead productive lives. It wasn't all work for them, though - playtime did exist, at least according to a fenced-in yard and basketball court toward the back of the complex.

It took me the better part of a full beer to figure out how to write these next few sentences. I didn't want to finish this post by just putting up more pictures of boarded up buildings, or by stating a bunch of random facts I'd looked up about the hospital, but I couldn't translate that into figuring out how I did want to finish it. Finally I tried looking at things from a different perspective. The day we explored here I spent most of my time running around trying to get the perfect picture, and the rest of it wondering what the buildings looked like on the inside. But did I ever stop to think about the people who actually lived here, who considered this place home? I'm sure I didn't. At best I probably offered up a few stinks to have been them type comments before moving on.

So I forced myself to think about what this place must have meant to the people housed here, especially during those early years. I'm a healthy and free individual who is able to live the life I choose. Sometimes what I choose takes me in crazy directions - such as this past weekend when I drove 80 miles in search of some obscure cave on some even more obscure mountain - but that's the beauty of being free. I can do whatever makes me happy, even if it is something that leaves my wife muttering and scratching her head. With the limited health care and rehabilitation knowledge of their time, this was a choice residents of the Medfield Hospital did not have. For some of them, even if they only wanted to go outside for some fresh air, they had to wait for someone to come along and give them permission.

Rehabilitation methods vastly improved during the years Medfield State Hospital was in operation, and in direct relation to that came more patients being re-introduced into society and less need for them to be permanently housed. The population continued dropping, and by 2003, down to less than 200 patients, the hospital closed for good.

Although a public park (and occasional movie set) for now, attempts to turn this site into a massive housing complex have come up in the past, and will come up again. One day, nothing will remain of this place thousands of patients once called home and over 800 of them died, in many instances simply because they were born in a less fortunate era than those of us today.

Links of Interest:
Visit the Medfield State Hospital

New Hampshire's Five-Town Rock

The Four-Corners Monument in southwest America marks where four different states meet at one spot, and is a popular tourist destination. That's great and all, but if we're talking strictly a numbers game then we have a spot here in New Hampshire that's got it beat by 25%. It is our Five-Town Rock, and it marks the spot where Alton, Barnstead, Farmington, New Durham, and Strafford all meet at a point.

First thing to know about the Five-Town Rock is that this is not a tourist destination. You're not going to find any monuments here, there's no plaque pointing to which towns are in which direction, in fact there aren't even any trails leading to it. There is just a single rock a half-mile deep in the woods, carved with letters and dates that span back over 200 years. Finding this rock had been creeping up our to-do list for a while now, and on a recent Sunday afternoon it finally found itself at the top.

Sometimes the universe signals to us that we're going to have a good adventure, even before that adventure begins. Today was one of those days. Our parking spot turned out to be right in front of an old cemetery, and if you know my wife Tina then you know that the only thing better than an old cemetery to her, would be an old cemetery next door to a Ben & Jerry's.

There weren't any ice-cream stands next to this graveyard, but we did spot a couple of foundations, and it got us wondering whether the former inhabitants of one were now the current inhabitants of the other.

Once we got moving we realized that, for several reasons, winter is the best time to make this hike. Three reasons, to be exact. That's the number of streams we had to cross during the next half hour, which was made easy by the fact that each of them was frozen over.

Upon reviewing my pictures though, "easy" might have been too strong of a word for it - I've seen people crossing the Grand Canyon glasswalk with more confidence than Tina showed crossing this layer of ice.

But even with these challenges, and even though there were no trails to speak of, it was still a relaxing and enjoyable hike.

The rock was said to lie at the intersection of two stone walls. We encountered several along the way, but most wandered off in the wrong direction so we resisted the temptation to follow them and stayed the course.

Eventually we found a wall that didn't disappear sideways into the woods, and right where it cornered with a second one we spotted the rock. Footprints showed we were't the first people to make this journey since last snowfall, and to highlight another reason why this trip is best done in the winter, those helpful folks did a great job of rubbing snow into the the rock and making the carvings legible. In addition to the dates we found several initials which we thought might refer to which town that part was facing, but none seemed to match up or make any sense.

So rather than put too much thought into deciphering it, I just stood on the rock and made bad jokes about how tired I was from visiting five different towns in a matter of seconds. Tina laughed, but I'm pretty sure it was of the 'at me' variety, not the 'with me'.

If you're anything like our daughter Madison, by this point you might be shaking your head and wondering, did I just read an entire story about a rock? You did, kind of ... but no, you really didn't. What you read was a story about two people spending an afternoon in the woods, getting some exercise, escaping the hustle of everyday life, finding a piece of history, and having a few laughs along the way.

It was just disguised as a story about a rock.

Other rocks we like:
Boise Rock
Madison Boulder
Frog Rock