Stone Records in a Rewilding Landscape

In 1813, William Bassett of Ashfield bought 121 acres of farmland in the neighboring town of Hawley from Ezra Combs. Bassett expanded the existing home for his bride Polly Trow to 31-by-40-feet, which befitted one of the town’s most successful farming families. Located inside Kenneth Dubuque Memorial State Forest, it’s now overrun with wildflowers and is one of the most impressive cellar holes in the town. Photos by Erik Hoffner.

In the late 1990s, when my wife and I moved to New England from the sparse desert and jagged peaks of the Southwest, it took some time to adjust to the dense, green landscape of northern hardwood forest. During rambles through our new western Massachusetts home, I was struck by the history suggested by the stone structures we found, sometimes in the most unexpected places. Once a landscape dominated by vast sheep pastures and punctuated by the sound and smoke of industry, in many places New England’s forests have regrown but remain riddled with artifacts from the past: stone walls meandering through the woods, cellar holes now home to wildflowers and ferns, and mill sites where natural resources were converted to material riches.

These cultural remnants were not crafted by ancient Anasazi hands, but rather by folks whose tenure here ended rather recently. By the mid-1800s, these lands were emptying out and rewilding as European settlers moved west to find larger and greener pastures. But their footprint remains, and books such as Tom Wessels’s Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England can help a person decode this history.

During spring 2021, as wildflowers burst skyward and shadbush bloomed, I packed a camera and visited some favorite sites in a three-town radius from my home, to create my own stone record of this land.

The Bassetts’ well is close to the old foundation and still gathers water.

At the end of a short walk across our seven acres of hardwoods in Ashfield, this massive and uniquely curved stone bridge on a neighbor’s land originally connected outlying farms to the town center. Built in 1880 for the county road that is now part of the Ashfield Trails network, it hosts hikers, dog walkers, skiers, and snowmobilers. The impressive structure is also visited by mink and otter as they hunt along the stream it crosses.

Red trillium grows in a former stream-side mill in Ashfield operated by Alvan Clark and his sons from the mid-1800s onward. Located just below Chapel Falls, this mill ground lenses for refracting telescopes, which were among the largest of their time.

Astride Chapel Brook, the remains of the Clarks’ mill are adorned by a misshapen birch. While testing their handiwork, the family made astronomical discoveries such as double stars and celestial objects closer to Earth that bear their name, including craters on the moon and Mars.

In 1790, Captain Simeon Crittenden built a sawmill in Plainfield on the south end of what is now Hallockville Pond, on a stream that drains from Plainfield Pond. For 2,000 silver dollars, he sold it to Joel Rice, who operated the mill until 1826 and in turn sold it to Leavitt Hallock. Hallock built a bigger mill downstream that formed his eponymous pond, a very shallow but picturesque water body that now hosts beavers and some small patches of “wapato,” or wild duck potato, also known as arrowhead.

The Clarks’ nearby home is now a classic cellar hole bedecked with flowers, similar to the Bassetts’ in Hawley; some of their metalworks are still found on site.