Pig Lane's Abandoned Community

We love a good hike, we love local history, and we love coming across random artifacts in the woods. Wrapped up in 365 acres of conservation land that was once home to several residences and a pair of mills - one grist and one shingle - Pig Lane of Strafford has each of these things and more. And in this era of each person walking around with their own personal six-foot safety zone, Pig Lane is far enough off most people's radar to make for a perfect afternoon in the woods.

A couple of questions might come to mind when you read the above paragraph. Where the heck did the name Pig Lane come from, and what the heck is a shingle mill? According to the History of Strafford County New Hampshire and Representative Citizens (1914), Pig Lane is a name that seems to have just always been there, and its origin has been lost to time. As for what a shingle mill is, Google had a much easier time with that question. Up until the 19th century when wooden roofs were a standard thing for most houses, there were mills designed for the sole purpose of making these wedge shaped shingles.

Our hike began at the main trailhead where Range Road and New Road meet, a lot just big enough for five or six cars if you park them creatively. A kiosk and map show the variety of trails and where most of the remnants are, but as we learned over the course of two separate hikes here, there's more out in these woods than what is shown on the map.

Probably the only mistake you can make is to take your first right at the four way intersection you'll encounter just minutes into the hike. It will bring you to the power lines and who knows where beyond this, but I can tell you from experience it won't be Pig Lane. After backtracking I eventually led our group to the Beaver Pond Loop, which after a marsh splits onto Foss Mill Trail, a beautiful river walk that winds along the Isinglass.

You might spot the remains of a foundation on the opposite side of the water, which is the former site of the Grey/Foss/Swaine Mill. Don't be tempted to try crossing for a closer look though, there's a much easier, and dryer, way to get there if you finish Foss Mill Trail and loop over the bridge.

This is where Pig Lane bisects the conservation property and where you'll start finding all the goodies shown at the kiosk. After seeing the mill - just a 220 foot walk down Mill Access Trail - our next detour was to the Foss Family Cemetery where we counted 13 fieldstone markers, none of which were engraved. Someone has figured out who is buried here though, for one stone was marked as a Civil War soldier, and another as a soldier from the Revolutionary War.

Perhaps the same person or group who marked these veteran's graves has also done a wonderful job piecing together other parts of Pig Lane's history. The next foundation we saw was the Swaine's house, where a sign shows you not only what that house looked like but tells the story of a flood that forced the family's evacuation out a second story window. Seems like there wouldn't be much left of the structure after that much water, but subsequent research told us the house actually survived this devastating flood and was lived in for many years afterward. Today, this is all that is left of it.

On the west side of Pig Lane you'll find what is labeled as a 1700's mill, and I'm still not clear on whether this one was the grist mill or the shingle mill. But I do know what it looked like. Stairs lead you down to the water, where along the way you'll find this sign showing the old mill and where to look for its remains.

Back on Pig Lane we continued north past a handful of foundations - which if you're a geocacher you'll want to pay close attention to - before finding a second cemetery which was not listed on the map. And unlike the earlier one that told us where the people were buried but not who they were, this cemetery told us who the people were but not where they were buried, as several of the engraved headstones have toppled from their original location.

One more off-the-map treasure our friend spotted was this vehicle deeper into the woods, and you can guess what we spent the next ten minutes doing. I though it looked like an old hot-rod from the sixties, but the heavy duty frame suggested it's probably the remains of a work vehicle.

Our final tally came to 4.6 miles and there were still some trails we didn't get to. But the ones we did were well groomed, had beautiful scenery, no crowds, and even held a few surprises. And unlike our more rigorous trails up north this system has no real climbing to speak of, making it an easy and unique afternoon in the woods that should appeal to explorers of all levels.

Links:

Connect with life in the 1700s in Strafford The Isinglass Conservation Reserve Trails reveal early settler history  - Foster's Daily Democrat

History of Strafford County, New Hampshire and Representative Citizens - John Scales

The Acworth Chambers

Located on a hilltop in Acworth are many small enclosures and stone rows that have excited the curiosity of people for the last century. William Goodwin’s 1947 book History of Great Ireland in New England compared the site in Acworth to similar sites in Europe and hypothesized that the chambers and stone rows were built by Irish monks settling the northeast centuries before the arrival of Columbus.

- Acworth Chambers, New England Antiquities Research Association

The Acworth Chambers have been on my radar for many years, but I never had enough clues on their whereabouts to take a shot at finding them. Anywhere from three to four stone chambers - beehive huts similar to those in Newton, Danville, and of course Mystery Hill in Salem - were said to exist in this western New Hampshire town. Several sources confirmed the chambers were on Kennedy Hill, but with only that to go on finding them meant I was facing an all out police-sweep over a patch of woods Google Earth estimated to be at least 1,000 acres, and there were just too many caves and mineshafts I had better intel on than to spend a weekend tackling those odds. That changed a few years ago when I was given a solid lead to where they were. Not exact coordinates, but a few landmark references that would bring me to a certain location, from which point if I were to keep walking uphill the structures would be a can't miss. It still took a while for this expedition to find its way to the top of my to-do list, but finally this spring my wife and I made the cross-state drive to try and search them out.

I'm pretty good at sniffing out the existence of unusual places such as this, but my skill level takes a significant dropoff when it comes to figuring out the best way to reach them. I'm a direct-line kind of hiker - meaning I'll walk through a swamp if my GPS tells me that's the quickest route - and so being a tour guide is probably nowhere in my future. Nor have I gotten the knack for taking those few extra minutes to figure out the smartest route to drive someplace. Had I done so on this day I would have realized the class VI road we were headed toward was closed to motorized vehicles, and that we could have parked on the opposite side of Kennedy Hill and saved over two miles of walking.

But if I was one of those people who thinks everything happens for a reason, I'd say we were meant to walk this road in order to find some of the more impressive stone walls we've come across. I'm not that type of deterministic person, but we did spend the first part of our day admiring all the treasures these woods were loaded with.

We also found a unique one that I'm still scratching my head over. We've walked many miles of stone walls in our travels, but I've never come across one that had a colorful rock like this as part of it. Unlike Red in Shawshank Redemption though, I found no tin can full of money underneath.

Eventually we hit the first of the landmarks we'd been told to watch for, and after taking a series of turns we were in the vicinity of where the chambers were said to be. My wife and I are way too competitive to look for these things together, so she picked her side of the woods and I picked my side and the chase was on. I won round one when from a distance I spotted this completely intact chamber.

Acworth Chamber

I mention that this first chamber was fully intact because everything we'd researched prior to this had referred to these as the Acworth Chambers, but this was the only complete one we found. My wife located a pile of rocks that resembled a cairn you'd find on a mountain trail, and although I wasn't initially impressed she pointed out the flat stones similar to those on the intact chamber's walls and a nearby slab that may have been part of this one's roof. She was quite certain this had once been another chamber that was destroyed or collapsed in on itself, in later research described it as exactly that in The Ruins of Great Ireland in New England, by William Goodwin.

Collapsed Chamber

Structure number three was also a tricky one. Although obviously something man-made, my first thought was that this was a firepit built in recent years, probably by some locals who thought this an interesting place to hang out. We went back and forth on whether it was the dismantled remains of a third chamber, but in the end we're just weekend warriors and not serious researchers and we left with more questions than answers. Soon after we reached out to James Gage of Stone Structures of Northeastern United States, a local expert I've gone to several times when I've gotten myself in over my head. He was familiar with the site and explained that this third structure was a ceremonial Native American enclosure, saying the following:

"Enclosures are well documented within Native American cultures across the U.S. They come in a variety of shapes, size, and building materials. Enclosures defined a sacred space in which a ceremonial or ritual took place. In many cases they defined a ceremonial space in which a person interacted with one or (more) spirits. They were used by medicine people as well (as) ordinary members of tribes. In the American West enclosures are associated with vision quest rituals. The northeast tribes did not have a strong vision quest tradition and therefore the enclosures were likely used for other ceremonies."

- James Gage, 2020

Native American Ceremonial Enclosure

Gage allowed me to share this information as part of his mission to educate the public about historical locations such as this one, and to encourage their preservation. I also appreciated his insight as to who built them in the first place, because you could put two stone structures next to each other and I wouldn't be able to identify which one was built by Native Americans for ceremonial purposes, and which one was built by local youths to sit around a fire telling ghost stories - perhaps every bit a ceremonial purpose in its own right. The structures we found that day are believed to be built by the former group, and having stood on this hilltop for possibly hundreds of years already, with the proper respect and preservation they'll hopefully be standing here for hundreds of more to come.

Other Cool Chambers:

Stone Chambers of Littleton

Newton's Stone Chamber

Danville's Beehive Hut

The Bumpus Mine - Oxford County, Maine

I speculate that the majority of mineshafts throughout New England are largely forgotten places. Maybe not entirely gone from the public's memory - fresh debris piles are evidence that rockhounders still stop by to pick through the scraps for discarded treasure, and fresh beer cans are evidence that locals still stop by for a drink now and again - but try finding information on the Internet about the majority of these mines, and more than likely Google is just gonna shrug its shoulders at you. It's seldom I come across anything modern - and by modern I mean written within my lifetime - so you can imagine my surprise when I not only found a variety of articles about the Bumpus Mine, but learned it even had its own Wikipedia page.

The beginnings of the Bumpus Mine go back to the 1920s, and it is one for the storybooks. While plowing a field in Albany Maine one day a farmer unearthed an unusual chunk of rock, and after news of the find reached Harland Bumpus - a man who understood the significance of this rock - he quickly secured the mineral rights to the property and spent the next several years mining the land. An open trench nearly 300 feet long and 60 feet wide was excavated over the lifetime of Bumpus Mine, with 39,000 tons of rock being removed from the spot where I took this picture.

What came out of this trench in those early days of mining was nothing short of record setting. One of the world's largest beryl crystals was unearthed here in 1928, a monstrous specimen that measured over 18 feet in length and was estimated to weigh 36,000 pounds. In later years the property was sold to the United Feldspar and Minerals Corporation, but believing he still owned mineral rights to the land, Bumpus brought legal action against United Feldspar which forced the closure of the mine for five years.

Eventually an agreement was reached, and in 1945 mining resumed at the site. It still consisted of just the open trench, or quarry, but that changed in 1968 when a tunnel was drilled into the northeastern end by a man named Frank Perham, as a more efficient way to extract feldspar from the rock. It was to find this tunnel that I made the 6-hour round trip drive one snowy, January morning.

Snowdrifts and dangling icicle-swords made entering the tunnel a bit of a trick, but as treacherous as it was from the outside, it was that beautiful and more so from within.

Inside, Bumpus splits into two separate directions. To the right is more of a chamber than a tunnel, an offshoot that measures just 40' in length. The main tunnel to the left checks in at twice that length, 80' from the mine's entrance to the back wall. Again, not an overly long tunnel, but its stubbiness is made up for by its width and height. My best attempt at measuring the ceiling with a tape measure that didn't want to stand up straight was 13'.

In 2005 Dr. Lawrence Stifler and Mary McFadden purchased Bumpus with a dream of conserving the entire property and making it look like an actual working mine, one which the public could tour. Additionally, they planned to open a mineralogy museum focused on the history of mining in the Oxford County community. Although perhaps not as quickly as they'd hoped for, on December 12, 2019 they realized this dream with the opening of a 15,000 sf museum in Bethel Maine, named the Maine Mineral Museum. Their timing was unfortunate, however, for as with most small businesses COVID-19 has temporarily forced their closure. But this virus won't last forever, and I look forward to the world being back to normal again, when a trip to Bethel Maine and the mineral museum will move to the top of my to-do list.

Links:

https://mainemineralmuseum.org/plan-your-visit/ - Official website of the Maine Mineral Museum:

https://www.maine.gov/dacf/mgs/explore/minerals/guide/chapter2.htm - Giant crystals of Bumpus