History whispered from the woods, calling me to find it. A mere rock this time, set in place to forever mark the border between two agreed-upon places, as settlers tended to do. This one, they say, was set here in 1741, a year after being settled and eight years before Hampstead would be incorporated. The…
“Water does not act like a perfect mirror. Light objects will appear a little darker and duller in their reflected images and dark objects will appear a touch lighter… A reflection [also] shows you the view from the point on the water’s surface that you are looking at, not the perspective from where you are…
On February 22, 1698 a group of Abenaki warriors raided Andover, Massachusetts and killed five people and two more (Haynes and Ladd) in Haverhill. Raids like this were somewhat common in the Merrimack River Valley at that time, as it was the frontier and friction between settlers encroaching on the lands of Native Americans who…
On February 22, 1698, Jonathan Haynes and Samuel Ladd were returning home from a day collecting cut hay when they were surrounded by a party of Abenaki warriors. Hopelessly outnumbered, they asked for quarter but none would be given for the older men. Both would be killed that day, and one each of their sons…
Yesterday I dove deep into the Cape Cod section of John Seller’s Mapp of New England. Today I’m looking at another fascinating section – the border between “civilization” and the “wilderness’. I’ve written before about place names like World’s End Pond in Salem, New Hampshire. Nothing hammers that home like seeing a map from 1675…
I was waiting in a Starbucks drive-thru this morning and looking at the house behind it. Before there was a Starbucks in this spot there was a Mobile station. Before that? Probably the yard of the house I was looking at. Before that? Probably farmland for a family that owned a larger plot of land…
