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Search for the Soapstone Quarry, Part II

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Dane:
Some of you may recall my first failed attempt to locate two long-abandoned soapstone quarries, the Goodrich and the Smith Quarries, in the vicinity of Cambridgeport and Grafton, Vermont. This was toward the end of last summer, and on this just-past Easter Sunday, I again found the time to try and find these elusive places of forgotten commerce in the tangled, hardwood covered slopes of Bare Mountain.
 
Grafton, noteworthy today only for a very fine type of cheese called Grafton Cheddar, was quickly falling into ruin in the 1970s, was purchased by the Windham Foundation and rehabilitated to it’s current appearance as a perfect Currier and Ives town of sturdy frame houses and tidy yards surrounded by picket fences. Hard times have apparently come here as in most of the United States, and those beautiful houses seem to be mostly for sale now. A few famous visitors have come through here, but except for the Cheddar production and one famous Budweiser commercial filmed here in the 1980s, the town slumbers beyond the range of most tourists.

Vermont is a peculiar place. One of the least populous states in New England as well as the entire United States, Vermont today has less people living in it than the mid-19th century, when whole towns suddenly became ghosts as farmers burned down their houses and barns, collected the treasured hand-wrought nails, and headed toward the richer soil of Ohio and other parts west. A very rural state that only gained universal electrical service after the Second World War, I find the place wonderfully remote and strange. Once you leave I-91, the only major highway that traverses the state and into Canada, you find yourself in the kind of New England that you will never find promoted by the Chamber of Commerce.

Although the fastest route to reach Grafton is from Bellows Falls, then west through Saxton’s River, I prefer to take a more indirect route, getting off at Exit 4 at the village of Putney, passing the haunted Putney Inn , and then via a back road through Westminster Parish, into Saxtons River, and finally, Route 121 into the desolate post village of Cambridgeport. You skirt the shallow Saxtons River as Route 121 winds through the hills, a river named after, perhaps, a surveyor of that name who may or may not have drowned or ever fallen in the river in the late 18the century. One will notice that the old farmhouse chimneys are often made from stacked cinderblocks, a building practice that strikes me as not particularly safe, but in the ten years since I used to come through here every day on my work commute, the houses are still all standing. More seem empty now though, and the guy who used to sell rusty old woodstoves by the side of the road doesn’t seem to display his wares anymore, perhaps dead, perhaps gone, perhaps something else.

Posted here are three Google Earth screenshots. The first is an overview of the area, the second is Cambridgeport itself, and the third is Bare Mountain. Somewhere under those thick hardwood forests are the quarries.

 



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Dane:
The early 20th century horror writer Lovecraft , who lived in a cottage in Brattleboro for one summer, featured parts of Southern Vermont in one of his best Cuthulu Mythos stores, “The Whisperer in Darkness,” a story set in the small towns in this area, including of course the odd and interesting town of Brattleboro. Probably the most famous, if barely remembered resident of Brattleboro was Rudyard Kipling, the great English poet and novelist who wrote, believe it or not, The Jungle Book right here in Vermont. As I walk the streets of the town, I can’t help but imagine a him in my mind’s eye in jodhpurs, a pith helmet, and a red and black checked hunting coat walking the same sidewalks of long ago. Up until a year or two ago, Brattleboro was a bastion of public nudity, an activity banned finally by the town aldermen (and that can be a good or bad thing, depending on who happens to be naked in public), and is home of a great outdoor clothing store, a decent bbq shack, some good bookstores and art galleries, a peculiar and cozy little riverside marina, and of course the Brattleboro Retreat, an institution that would once have been called an insane asylum that features a majestic bell tower built partially with inmate / patient labor, and purportedly haunted by one of the unlucky souls who fell screaming to his death off a rickety scaffolding.

I don’t know if Lovecraft ever visited the Retreat, but thanks to his visit to this area, Whisperer perhaps may be the only piece of fiction in American letters that mentions my own town of Greenfield, Massachusetts.

Here are the opening paragraphs from another Lovecraft tale, “The Dunwich Horror.” True, the squalid, fictional settlement of Dunwich is set in a different part of New England, but the feeling it evokes matches how I feel driving though this part of Vermont.

“When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country.

“The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation.

“Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.
 
“Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs.”

It was a cold morning when my friend Trevor and I arrived in the village, and although it promised to be a partially sunny day with no rain, I was thankful for the wool coat and cap I was wearing. After Trevor and I took some photos of the ruined mill, we drove the 100 yards and visited the old CIC building I worked in as a technical products copywriter. As I had expected, I had that slightly empty, wistful feeling I always get when I visit a place from my past. Maybe you too have had that same feeling when you visited your childhood home, for instance, your old college, or some other location once important to you; these old places from our past feel diminished somehow to me, as much as in size as in the shadows of memory that move and play in the shadows and sunlight by a well loved old tree, or the doorway you once went in and out of, or the parking lot your friends and you used to say goodbye in at the end of each day.



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Dane:
Approximately 7 miles up Route 121 and we were in the outskirts of Grafton, in what was once called Mechanicsville, a name on old maps that few remember today. Grafton suddenly appears, with its perfectly preserved Currier and Ives sturdy frame houses and tidy yards. Most of the town was purchased by the Windham Foundation in the early 1960s and saved the place from eventual abandonment. Perhaps that is why the town has a slightly unreal feel to it to me, a kind of Stepford in the remote hills of Vermont.

But first, we decided to visit an allegedly haunted school house. It was not hard to find, a sturdy brick cube just a few hundred feet off Route 121 along Fisher Hill Road, an improved dirt road, meaning it is tarred. Over the years, the old schoolhouse, called a normal school, has been converted to a private residence, but still retains the character of the original building. According to my little ghost guide to Vermont, you can sometimes see the old blackboards appear on the walls, and at times a ghostly shadow holding a ruler appears at the windows. Now, while I didn’t sense anything there that day, I saw a ghost at least three times on my old morning drive into Saxtons River, a female form who used to walk out of a field and up to the shoulder of the road that leads from Westminster into town. She would disappear as I approached to about 50 yards, and although I always meant to ask the owners of the house by that field if anyone had seen her or other revenants, I never got around to it. The few other times I have seen or been near ghosts, it was never at night, maybe not universal, but consistent to my own personal experiences.

After walking across what was obviously the playground and seeing if I could hear or sense the spirits of the long-dead children at play, off we went and into Grafton.



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Dane:
Naturally, it is going to be quite in a rural village on Easter Sunday, but it is always like this in Grafton. We decided to visit the central graveyard, which has plots dating back to the mid 1800s. There must be older graveyards or even burying grounds in town, and probably they will be worth visiting at a later time.

We drove over the 1860s-vintage covered bridge, and then up we went on the improved dirt road called Kidder Hill Road. Very steep at times and still slippery with frost and ice on this morning, clearly, visitors are rare and not very welcome, and there is no parking anywhere along this narrow road, so as with my last visit, I pulled off at a logging road about ¼ mile from where the road becomes a narrow trail plunging into the hardwoods and abounded old farm fields of Bare Mountain. About ½ mile past the covered bridge, you come across a sign that proclaims this is the Hayden W. Brown State forest, a primitive forest with zero amenities (and even those little trail maps in the wooden boxes by the trail head) that I’d like to explore and even camp in one day. It is named after Brown, the crazed old woman who lived in the last stone house you pass at the end of the road and an unofficial poet laureate of the state of Vermont. The house is still in the possession of the family, judging from the mail box, and is a lovely old stone structure, but just a bit reminds me of the witches hut in Hansel and Gretel. The old woman, perhaps crazy, perhaps just peculiar, had a shotgun at the ready, and would shoot at you if you came anywhere near here in the old days. I got that story from the director of the local history museum, whose dad was one of those fortunately-moving targets of her 00 buckshot-punctuated wrath


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Dane:
After pausing by the old wishing well across the road from the stone witch house, and vaguely wondering how deep it is and if anyone ever leaned too far over the edge, we proceeded into the woods along the old wagon road. It amazes me how tough those teamsters and teams must have been, as the road, which gradually and sometimes suddenly winds down and around the mountain slopes, while not a difficult hike, is also not particularly easy. We passed an abandoned beaver pond at one point, a lovely spot that last summer was alive with dragonflies and other creatures. On this Easter Sunday, it was quite and cold, the sun reflecting off the sluggish ripples of the pond. A while later, we found what I am sure is the right fork, with signs warning that the road is closed temporarily due to logging. This being a weekend, we just carried on, and saw the ugly if necessary results of commercial logging, strictly hardwood, and mostly I think hickory, though there is a lot of elm in this area.

We did spot one wild turkey, but no deer or other animals. There were very fresh moose tracks, and I would have loved to see one of those gigantic animals, but perhaps they didn’t want to see us.

I am sure we were very close. Next time, I am going to bring a topo map and compass, as well as perhaps winter trail maps, as the old wagon roads are now snowmobile paths. We did come across a few hints of old quarrying activity, but the quarries are still unwilling to give themselves up.


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