Even though I've worked here almost a decade, I still come across things in the woods I have never seen before. This week Sean, Rebecca, and I were cutting our way into a privet thicket and I found myself facing this ruin. (European or common privet [Ligustrum vulgare] is an invasive species—often found around old house sites—that we are trying to control.)
Crow's Nest is full of old stone walls and a few structure ruins. For a good discussion of stone walls running through woods, see Tom Wessel's Reading the Forested Landscape (Countryman Press, 1997). These walls were built when the land was cleared, and the woods have grown up around them after the land was abandoned (p. 41). Walls with lots of small stone surrounded cultivated fields; Frank Hartung who farms here today adds a few tractor loads to the ones around our field edges every year. Cultivated soil's physical dynamics are such that larger particles—stones, if present—are forced to the surface each year.
Historical walls with only large stone probably enclosed pasture, which would not yield as many small stones. And these walls can likely be dated to the mid-19th century since wood was used earlier and barbed wire later (pp. 44-48). The walls could have been used to keep animals out as well as they could keep them in. In fact, one way to consider the history of our relationship with nature is that originally settlers fenced nature out of their domestic areas, whereas today our natural areas are such a remnant that society wants to fence them in, literally or symbolically, to protect them. William M. Klein, Jr. traces this history in Gardens of Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley (Temple University Press, 1995). Of course, it is also true that we are a part of nature, and that nature is part of even our most altered landscapes...
But back to that ruin. A local historian who grew up on a portion of what is now Crow's Nest, Robert Earl Houck, has filled in many details about farms that are no longer there, and the lifestlyes of the people who lived here during his years on the farm, 1919-1972 (he later moved to Lancaster County). His family pictures have been invaluable in our building restorations, and his description of farming, logging, and property ownership helps us understand what's present today. The cluster of homes I call the village of Trythall was once known as "Houcktown."
I had previously found two house ruins where he described them in the woods north of Northside, and near the old railroad right-of-way the stone huts that were used to blow up scrap metal (more about that another time), abandoned overgrown lanes, and the cobblestone quarry pits his grandfather had dug. But I had never seen this particular foundation, which according to his maps could have been part of "Trythall Farm" or what other diagrams refer to as the Mose Graddis cabin or "slave cabins."
I am always amazed at the deep history of this place, how much was here that is now nearly invisible. It provokes thoughts about how what we do today will appear in centuries ahead.
