The Carved Stones of Newbury Massachusetts

Visiting the carved stones of Newbury is the type of adventure you go on when, after over and over failing to take serious your doctor's orders, you eventually end up with discharge papers that have the words no hiking written smack across the middle of them.

The Newbury Stones are roadside markers that take us back to the early 1700s, when without the aid of travelling gadgets such as Waze or Google Maps, people relied on rudimentary things such as stone markers to guide them from town to town. Ten stones still exist from the original Newbury collection, which are famous for being some of the most elaborate stone markers in all of New England.

Many of the stones had become lost over the centuries, only to be discovered in recent years either face down on the ground or tucked away on private property. Four of them were crated and shipped to the Smithsonian Museum of American History, one is in a private collection and has been replaced by a replica, but remarkably, five are back standing in the same spots they were placed nearly three hundred years ago, roadside in Newbury where anyone can drive right up and see them.


Located on a small patch of land within the intersection of Middle Road and Elm Street, is the 33 marker.

Look closely at the stone and you'll see a variety of things. On the left is the number 5 above the letter N, indicating that the center of Newbury was five miles in that direction. The right side contained the number 33 and letter B, which meant that Boston was 33 miles thataway. And below all this is the date the stone was carved, 1708.

Exactly one mile north is the only replica of the collection, the 34 marker. This was recreated from a partial piece that is now in the hands of a private collector.  Arrows point you either toward Newbury or Boston, and it also contains the date of the original stone, 1709.

By the 35 marker, travelers were close enough to Newbury it didn't seem necessary to mention it, so this stone came with only a 35 and a B, letting travelers know they had now progressed 35 miles from Boston.

In addition to being informative, each of the stones came with its own unique designs, which on this one consisted of two circles containing pie slices in each corner as well as a wavy pattern that runs along the bottom. With these clues, historians were able to piece together the identities of the various stonecarvers by matching them against similar designs carved into gravestones of nearby cemeteries.

As you arrive at the 36 stone you might just think you've run yourself in a circle, because at a glance this one appears to be the number 30. But don't be fooled, even though it looks like a cartoon bomb with a fuse sticking off it, this is a number 6. And although there's no date on the 36 stone, the triangle design did get fancier with some added loops and lines below.

The remaining mile marker is the 37 stone, which is also the least obvious to spot from the road.

Although partially sunken into the earth, the B and the 37 - plus a pinwheel on each corner - are still visible. The other side of the stone contains a mile marker for the nearby town of Ipswich, but because I short-cut my research and didn't know this at the time, I can only show you a picture of its front.

There is one more stone in the Newbury collection, and although it's not a mile marker this is the most elaborate of them all. It is called the Father Stone, featuring a two-dimensional figure dressed in 17th century garb, and was created as an entrance marker to the mansion of the family who commissioned many of the Newbury Stones, the Dummer family. That last sentence does not contain a typo. The Dummer family were prominent members of early New England society, and among their many accomplishments, their bequeathed estate led to the foundation of the Governor Dummer Academy, referred to now as just the Governor's Academy.

There is pleasure to be had in an afternoon ride, even more so when you can turn that ride into an afternoon scavenger hunt. There is also pleasure to be had in experiencing history, especially when it's history that took place close to your home. And there is pleasure to be had in the faces of passersby, as they watch from their car while you pose with a rock on the side of the road.

* To find the location of each of these stones, go to our Adventure Map and zoom in on the town of Newbury, in eastern Massachusetts. 

See also:
- The Mother Stone, now in the Smithsonian Museum of American History.
- To learn more about the history of the Newbury Stones, visit www.stonestructures.org

Abandoned Mines of NH - Mud Mine

There are treasures hidden within our mountains, places you're never going to learn about from some tourist map you pick up at one of our welcome centers. To find the kind of wonders I'm speaking of, you must dig deep - spending lots of time in both books and in woods. This was the case with the Mud Mine of western New Hampshire, which came to me through a 1914 research paper on geological locations within the United States.

Opened in 1883 and later purchased by General Electric - a company involved in a surprisingly large number of our state's mines - within two years the Mud Mine was producing a whopping 90% of all the sheet mica shipping out of New England. These were some real glory years for the mine, but they we also short-lived. In the late 1880s, cheap mica imports from both Canada and India drastically reduced the demand for domestic product, and by the early 1900s workers were reduced to scavenging through the dump piles for previously discarded sheets. Soon after, a massive cave-in buried over 1,000 feet of tunnel, and by the time of this 1914 report the Mud Mine had been closed for several years.

I located this mine in the summer of 2017, and having been such a large operation I found plenty of mining remnants before locating what's left of the mine itself. One of the first cool finds was the piece of equipment below. Somewhere in my archives is a video of me excitedly pointing out the mining rail engine I had just found, and it wasn't until after filming that I took a closer look and realized it was actually a very old compressor on wheels. For now anyways, I'm going to leave that video in my bloopers bin.

Mother Nature was not a fan of the Mud Mine. Not only did she destroy the mine by collapsing it, she punctuated the fun by dropping a couple trees down right through the middle of the worker's cabin, slicing it in half.

It was past this debris and through a long cut in the rocks that a small opening peeked up from the bottom of the cliff face, which turned out to be an entrance to what I believe is the only remaining tunnel at this site.

I got a little dirty crawling through, but once inside it opened plenty large enough for me to stand upright in.

As I started walking, it also became evident why they called this place the "mud" mine.

There was only the one tunnel to explore, with no turnoffs or decisions to make. Just keep walking until you have nowhere left to go. Before leaving I placed an old french coin at the end of the tunnel, my own little marker to see if anyone would come along after me and find it. Between a rusted out Jeep and an old couch frame I'd found outside, it seemed at least a few locals visited this place every now and then.

A year later I returned to the Mud Mine with friends, both to show them the location and to more thoroughly explore it myself.

Inside the tunnel I found my coin right where I'd left it the previous year. Maybe nobody had been in here since that time, or maybe they had been but just hadn't seen it. I grabbed a few more coins - foreign coins are super cheap on Ebay, $20 bought me enough for a year's worth of exploring - and placed them in what I felt were the most obvious locations. My hope is that someone will find them someday, and that they'll know about this blog post and write to tell me. It's a long shot, but it has happened to me before.

The Mud Mine was a nice surprise, in that everything I had read described the place as inaccessible following the collapse. Maybe a hundred years ago that was even the case. But there is a natural slope within the tunnel that almost seems to "pour" the mud deeper into the mine, causing it to pile up in the back. I could imagine that over time this erosion has allowed the small opening I found to peek through. Four stories of tunnels made up the original mine, and although three of them are buried and lost forever, it was a great success - and a great day out with friends - to find and be able to explore this topmost tunnel.

Photo by John Egolf