Our tiny town has one of the more charming Memorial Day
services. Picture small children singing “My Country 'Tis of Thee,” a member of
the historical society reading The Gettysburg Address, and the whole
assembly joining in a walking parade between the three town Veterans’ memorials
where a former marine plays Taps on his harmonica.
Last year we missed the service, so we decided to go on a Memorial Day adventure instead. Jim, a member of the local historical society, invited folks to join him on a hike to
lay flags on the graves of two Revolutionary War veterans. The hike started
right at the top of our hill, a half-mile from our house, so it seemed like an
opportunity we couldn’t pass up.
We met Jim and Clare, another member of the historical
society, and headed down the trail. As we walked, we noticed that the trail was
often bordered by old stone walls. This had been a great mystery to me when we
first moved here and discovered a stone wall in the woods at the back of our
property. Why would someone build a stone wall in the forest? Then it dawned on me
that this had not been forest when they built the wall. This whole area had
been cleared and used to graze animals. In a couple of hundred years, the
forest had reclaimed the fields.
As we followed Jim off the trail, he pointed out cellar holes and the foundations of old barns. A little farther in and we stumbled upon the small graveyard,
surrounded by its own little wall. The gravestones were hunks of granite
hand-carved with the names of Enoch Kilton and his wife Ethear. Jim had carried
in clippers and a rake and we set to work clearing the space of old leaves and
placed a small flag in a special holder labeled Revolutionary War Veteran.
Claire told us that at the time of the revolution this whole
area had been cleared. The farmer/ militiamen here in western Massachusetts had felt the vibrations of the battles in Lexington, picked up their
muskets and started marching toward it. She also told us the story of Enoch’s
wife who came into this country with her husband and
10 children. She was severely disabled, so they had to build a special basket for her to ride in on a horse.
Once here, she was bedridden for nearly 50 years. Yet she lived well into her
eighties.
In 1936, Charles Morse, author of several histories of our town, hiked back into this area to talk to the last occupant of
Kelton Hill, a hermit named Amos Alexander. Alexander told him what he knew about the Keltons:
“During the revolution, both Enoch and his son James served with their
neighbors in campaigns against the British. One night the first Kelton home
burned to the ground. Mrs. Kelton was hastily carried out from her bed and
given temporary shelter. The neighbors went to work immediately gathering
materials, and before the ashes cooled, a new house began to rise on the same
site.” The area grew into a thriving community for a brief time, dying out when
the last Kelton died in 1910. Alexander had, himself, found the cemetery,
replaced the stones which had been broken by falling trees and cut in the names
with a hammer and a chisel.
We had originally planned to stop our walk at the first
cemetery, which would had made for a 2-mile hike, but we decided to stick with Jim and try to find the second cemetery, a few miles
farther into the woods. We had only packed a single water bottle, but Jim
didn’t have a water bottle at all. He was wearing crocs and carrying clippers
and a rake. Surely, we could keep up with him.
So we walked back to the rocky trail which headed steeply
downhill, then just as steeply uphill. We forded some streams, swatted some
bugs, and encouraged young walkers not to give up. As we trudged uphill, deep
into the forest now, the air was suddenly filled with the loveliest scent. Lily
of the valley grew along the path. As we stopped to smell the flowers, we
realized these were not wildflowers. Someone had planted this lily of the
valley many years before. Right behind the flowers, there was a cellar hole,
the outline of a homeplace that someone had built.
We had to leave the trail completely to find the second
cemetery, and after a few wrong turns, we finally found the larger cemetery
with slate stones for several pioneer families. We planted the flags and Jim cut back some of
the saplings trying to invade the cemetery.
On the way back, Jim asked
if we wanted to go off the beaten path a bit and see a mysterious stone
chamber. Apparently, a British man had come to town asking about this
particular chamber, which was built into a hillside. It was invisible from one
angle, ferns growing over the top, but as we came around, we saw an opening to
a narrow stone room that cut deeply into the hillside, high enough for a person
to stand, but only a few feet wide. It could have been a root cellar, but it
was not situated anywhere near the foundation of the homestead.
After some
research when I got home, I found that quite a few people are interested in
these old stone structures in New England. They theorize that they were built by
a group of Druids who came to America from Spain before Columbus and that the chambers
were built at a certain angle with the sun to line up perfectly with the summer
solstice. Mysterious, indeed. In Charles
Morse’s history of the town, he visited the same spot and was told that it was
one of the oldest underground vegetable storage shelters in New England. Not our own personal Stonehenge, but still pretty cool.
After many hours, we stumbled out of the forest, exhausted,
bug-bitten, and thirsty, but in awe of the history and mysteries hidden
half-buried beneath the trees, right in our own backyard. Perhaps we have lived up in some small way to historian Charles Morse's hopes in exploring this same deserted village.
"Perhaps
once more the voices of children will ring out as they explore the fields and
the woods. Surely they will find the stone walls and think of the people who
built them.”
