Archaeology

Last year I got bored with my blog and deleted it.

I’ve decided to revive parts of it—under a new name. Some of it will have to do with life in the 1940's and 50's--ancient history, but I'll post some new stuff occasionally.  

 This one is for practice—to see if I remember how to do it.

 Archaeology

Fall 1947. Connecticut Route 63, ran north from Litchfield past Grandma’s farm toward Massachusetts. She called it ‘The Turnpike Road’, although there had not been a toll collector in living memory. Parallel to it, a quarter mile to the west, lay ‘The Post Road’.

The Post Road had long been abandoned as a public way but was still used by the local farmers for access to their fields and woodlots. That fall my grandmother and I often walked along it, looking for asters or collecting the gaudiest of the fallen leaves.

We sometimes went as far as the gate which Mr. Brooks had placed across the road, not from any need to stop through traffic (there was none) but simply to affirm his absolute legal right to do so. It was Mr. Brooks’ grandfather who, in 1858, had written a memoir of his boyhood in which he recalled his neighbors:

‘Mr. John Wadhams, Sen., [Grandma’s great-grandfather] was possessed of an uncommonly firm and robust constitution, and up to the time of my first acquaintance with him in ‘South End’ [1798] had always been a hardworking, laborious man. Mr. Wadhams and his sons were for many years among the largest, most enterprising and prosperous Farmers in the town. The rocks they removed, the acres they subdued, and the sheaves they garnered, bore ample witness to their energy and industry.

All those sons had owned farms along the Post Road.

By the fall of 1947, the forest had reclaimed the acres they had so laboriously subdued. The only evidence of their hard work was the road itself and the rocks they had removed to make walls—inexplicable boundaries in the dark wilderness of mountain laurel, maples and hemlock.

Here and there we found pleasant openings in the forest. Our favorite objective was ‘Aunt Angeline’s’. 

She had been the surviving wife of one of grandma’s great uncles, still alive when Grandma was a child in the 1870’s. By 1947 her ‘house’ was only a few foundation stones and a shallow cellar filled with sixty years of fallen leaves.

Nearby, was a deep well, lined with freestone masonry. In Aunt Angeline’s day, I was told; there had been a sweep, by which Grandma and her brothers dipped water for the old woman.

Two massive blocks of granite, dragged from the foundation, capped the well. There was a small space between the blocks. While Grandma rested on the stone steps of the house (perhaps explaining, once again, her exact relationship to Aunt Angeline) I dropped pebbles into the well. I would release one… and wait...  and wait...  and wait...  until it splashed with a remote, invisible ‘paloop!’

Cold air seeped up through the crack. When I spoke into the well, there were spooky echoes, perhaps the voices of three Wadhams brothers and their cousin, killed on the same day at the Battle of Cold Harbor.