roadtrip – Obscure Vermont

October 5, 2021March 23, 2022

Shunpiking to Lewis, Vermont. Population: 0

For years, I’ve been interested in Vermont’s unique political divisions; gores, grants, and ‘disorganized’ towns – just some of the things I’ve discovered thanks to being a map nerd! I found it fascinating that there were delineated areas on the map that had little, to nothing in them.

On a firey September day that felt more like July, me and my friend set out on an ODDysey towards Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, the state’s wildest and poorest corner where some of these enigmatic areas are clustered. I’ve always loved the kingdom. From my dad pulling me out of school as a kid to go fly fishing on the legendary Willoughby River in Orleans, to hustling up at Northern Vermont University in Lyndonville when I was older, I have fond memories of the NEK, and always kinda associate it with The Monkees – because whenever I used to head up that way with my mom, we’d always listen to them on CD in her car, so I totally had them in my head on the ride up.

I wanted to see one place in particular; Lewis, one of Vermont’s five “disorganized towns” (a phrase that has always amused me) – which refers to towns with populations so low, or sometimes never luring any people at all, that their charters were revoked.

It felt fitting that we were heading up to the deserted realm north of Island Pond, a rough and tumble railroad village in the town of Brighton that’s the hub of that piece of the NEK, so much so that most wayfinding signs point you to Island Pond instead of Brighton.

Island Pond has always had a sort of an eccentric reputation, and I think a lot of that has to do with the temperament of how isolated the place is. Seclusion can be a lightning rod for weirdos, outlaws, religious cults, and the preternatural.

One of my favorite Island Pond tales of intrigue involves a carpenter renovating an old farmhouse outside the village in the 1980s. Across the road was an old farmer’s pasture that had long been overgrown and disused, so imagine how startled the carpenter was when he happened to glance out the window and see a young girl herding a flock of sheep in a field that was formerly empty seconds ago. When he confusingly went to investigate, the sheep and the girl had vanished. So he got back to work, until a few minutes later when he looked out the window and saw the girl and the sheep again, only this time, the girl was waving at him. He apparently quit the job on the spot!

UFO sightings nearby at an amazing abandoned radar base, and quite a few “Bigfoot” (or some variation of a wild and wily creature) sightings have also been handed down and proclaimed through all the big woods that edge town. Who knows what other morbid or macabre things that are still skeletons in Island Ponders’ closets… (and you’re a local, feel free to send me an email and tell me!)

Island Pond got its name from the 600-acre pond with a 22-acre island in the middle of it, which lead the Abenaki to name the area Menanbawk, which literally means Island Pond. Whites decided to keep the name but use the English translation.

The pond of Island Pond has probably existed since the last glaciers grinded on through the area, but the village of Island Pond got its start in the 1850s, when the Grand Trunk Railway, the first international railway that linked Montreal to the port of Portland, Maine, laid their tracks through the kingdom, which was very much a sort of last frontier in Vermont at that time. What would become Island Pond village just happened to be the halfway point, which made it a big deal – a total of 13 tracks once merged downtown. The railroad turned into memory by the 1950s, and the town depends on outdoor tourism nowadays – it’s pretty much the snowmobile capital of Vermont – but architectural elements of its former rowdy railroad days are everywhere. Island Pond is a strangely beautiful and unique part of the state that’s very much worth a trek up towards.

Stopping at a gas station at the water’s edge to grab some suspicious sandwiches, we were on our way!

You Can’t Get There From Here

The hard-to-reach and very pretty southern Vermont town of Sandgate might have the ‘Vermontiest’ town hall sign yet and I dig it.

As that vintage Vermont vernacular goes, you can’t get there from here – and because of Vermont’s rural and inconvenient geography, that’s often somewhat the case, so we’re not really pulling your leg or anything.

Usually, it’s a now stereotypical expression of Vermont identity that means you actually can get there from here, but the “there” is usually remote, and it requires a very long-winded, confusing route, no doubt complicated because of the very mountains that give our state its name, and whether the road is plowed or not in the winter. And that’s further complicated by mountainous parts of the state that are dead zones for GPSs and cellular service.

Taken in Stockbridge, VT, near a mountainous and mysterious area called “Notown”.

Lewis, Vermont

Lewis, Vermont has a population of zero. Charted early in 1762, it was heavily timbered, rough, and mountainous. It never attracted a single settler, so no roads, villages, or post office was ever established. The northern half of town is made up of mountains all in the 2,000-foot range, and all but one are unnamed. The southern half of town levels out into mostly semi-swamp known as Yellow Bogs, and they’re filled with mangy-looking forests that stretch out as far as you can see, which kinda backs up the ugly name.

Though Lewis is void of permanently inhabiting humans – loggers, hunters, and sugaring operations have all taken advantage of its space. At one point, most of the land within Lewis was owned by the Champion International paper company, until they sold off their 132,000 acres – most of which the state of Vermont eagerly acquired with the intention of preserving. As a result, most of the flora and fauna in Lewis is pretty young. But! Lewis – and the Northeast Kingdom – is at the southern edge of the largest biome on earth: the boreal forest! Named for Boreas, the Greek god of the Northwind, the boreal forest encircles the entire northern hemisphere in a band that stretches across Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia – the boreal forest accounts for nearly one-third of all earth’s forests! Pretty cool, right?

Lewis is also considered one of the “holy grails” of the 251 club, a cool local social club that challenges interested participants to visit all 251 of Vermont’s towns, cities, unincorporated areas, and gores. Some folks make it more fun by customizing their adventure – like making points to visit every library, post office, state park, or another Vermont icon – the general store. There’s even a film dedicated to it! It’s one of my Vermonty ‘bucket list’ items, along with eventually being able to make my own maple syrup. I even became introduced to this great Instagram account recently, where the Instagrammer plans on taking a photo in all 251 burgs. It’s also inspiring me to stop being such a procrastinator.

Lewis is hard to find. There are no state routes, ‘welcome to’ signs, green VTrans wayfinding signs, or any indications that the place actually exists. Using an atlas as a guide, we headed northeast of Island Pond and took a few class D logging roads, which are the only roads in Lewis, up into the area marked by that indicating yellow dotted line that showed we were, in fact, in a town.

According to the map, we should have been able to get there via Lewis Pond Road, but when we turned off where the unsigned road should have been, we were met with what was just a 4 wheeler trail, and a gate, and a gravel dune that would have wrecked my friend’s car. I guess you really can’t get there from here. So we had to do a little scouting for another access point, which we found further east down Route 105 and was little more than a passable but thin forest service road.

The rough road marred with gravel banks took us deep into thick wilderness occasionally punctured by a few awesome ramshackle hunting camps that had been standing for multiple generations (which I regret not taking some photos of!) – skirted around Lewis Pond, and eventually brought us up the slopes of Gore Mountain – one of the few topographical place names in Lewis – to a cleared section of mountainside where we enjoyed a terrific view of the NEK and out towards the hazy blue bumps of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and we had the area all to ourselves.

We found an accommodating boulder to sit on, enjoyed some gas station sandwiches, and just enjoyed the silence and the view and a world that was big and full of autumn. I remember the foliage that day being just ridiculous. I had no idea the views up in Lewis were gonna be so fantastic! It was definitely an evening I’ll remember.

The other named feature in Lewis is to-the-point named Lewis Pond, which is only 7 feet deep, undeveloped, apparently has some good fishing, and as beautiful as it is silent. We spent a while just lounging around the shoreline as the water lapped calmly at the cedars.

I’m not sure why the fact that the wobbly diamond-shaped town only has two toponyms is a bit surreal, but psychologically, it is. It feels like everything else within the 39 square miles that’s considered Lewis is a sort of an uncanny terra nullius, and speaks to our control freak side of human nature to label and categorize things, to prove that something exists, to achieve just a bit more of a grip on this world.

I’m fascinated with human psychology, and how a lot of the time (but not every time), things we consider as ‘odd’ are because we make them odd, because they don’t jive with our architected ideals and social rules. The only thing truly odd to me is the fact that we blindly subscribe to so many of these rigidly particular doctrines without questioning them.

But, I’m wicked into this stuff, and I guess I’d be both out of a blog and identity if I go too deep down that rabbit hole.

Lewis Pond Road, a bit north of Lewis Pond. At one point, all of Lewis was logged, so the forests are pretty young.

A sunken island in the middle of Lewis Pond

The huge landscape of the Northeast Kingdom and New Hampshire’s White Mountains as seen from Gore Mountain.

Panorama of Lewis/Lewis Pond, the NEK, and New Hampshire’s White Mountains from Gore Mountain

Today, the Nulhegan Basin Division of the Silvio O Conte Wildlife Refuge – whose goal is to try and protect the waterways that feed the Connecticut River – occupies a huge chunk of Lewis, and is named after the Nulhegan River, which basically translates to “deadfall trap” – a savvy snare that’s usually a log that’s used to capture small game by falling on it – and is a connecting title to the Nulhegan Abenaki People who were the first inhabitants of this domain.

Though the Nulhegan Basin was formed by a pool of magma solidifying here 300 million years ago and subsequently eroding away – which developed the current scenery, it’s apparently one of the coldest places in all of the northeast, with an average of 100 inches of snowfall a year and around 100 frost-free days.

There are other ‘disorganized’ towns in Vermont, but Lewis is one the most exotic to check out because of its rawness. Because people like speaking in superlatives – my personal pick for ‘most’ captivating of them would be the next-door-neighbor ghost towns of Glastenbury and Somerset down in Bennington County if anyone was wondering.

The other three out of five disorganized Vermont towns (Averill: pop. 24, and Ferdinand: pop. 32, and of course, Lewis) are all up in remote Essex County and all border with Lewis, basically making a huge chunk of the northeastern corner of the state pretty capacious, and making them eligible for a mention in this blog post. And standing shoulder to shoulder with those three towns are three of Vermont’s other geographical curiosities, two out of our three gores (the third being Buel’s Gore which forms Chittenden County’s dagger-like southern tip and consists of the dramatic Appalachian Gap), and the state’s only grant! All this chaos by simply drawing lines on a map.

And speaking off – just “down the road” from Lewis exists another state geopolitical oddity that I just had to quickly jaunt towards before heading back home; Warren Gore.

Gores and Grants

What’s a gore? It sounds gruesome, but it’s not, even though my spellcheck is really fighting me on my use of the word.

Scottish immigrant James Whitelaw would become Vermont’s official surveyor in 1787, replacing the often error-proned Ira Allen and becoming considered as one of the best map makers and surveyors in New England. But in Ira’s defense – inaugural survey work is hard.

Survey Crews would embark into unmapped wilderness to do just that. Using a 66-foot chain and wooden posts, they’d attempt to delineate new town boundaries, and then camp out for the night.

But there were still pieces left over; awkwardly sized areas never charted to any town, or given to early land grantees as disappointing compensation for basically getting screwed out of land they were promised.

In a land where possession is about 3/4th of the law; the end result became known as gores, and Vermont once had 60 of them! Currently, we’re down to just three – the rest were eventually absorbed into their neighboring towns to make the map a little less confusing, which makes gores some of the rarest creatures in the green mountain state, and pretty much non-existent elsewhere in the country apart from northern New England, which I think sorta lends them their air of charm.

Gores are often triangular, but sometimes not, as in the case of Averys Gore, which is more trapezoidal, and Warren Gore, which is rectangular. It’s their triangular shape, though, that gave these parcels their curious name. Gore is an old English term that referred to the shape of a spearhead, which is what early cartographers thought they resembled.

Warren Gore is tandem with the Mad River Valley town of Warren. Warren was trying to get a charter in 1780, but couldn’t because it lacked the total amount of decided acreage needed to create a town – which the Vermont legislature said had to be 23,000 acres. So the grantees scrambled to find the remaining 6,595 acres of land, which they did, just completely disconnected, all the way up in the Northeast Kingdom. Technically, they had what they needed, and in 1789, Warren was charted in two pieces (also known as a “flying grant”) – the smaller part becoming Warren Gore. But the two places never had anything to do with each other.

While Warren lured settlement and skiing, Warren Gore, sometimes called “Warren’s Gore”, went the static route of most gores, and attracted only 10 people by 2000, and lost 6 of them by 2010.

The desolate State Route 114 runs pretty much through the center of the gore, and is mostly bookended by deep woods and the pretty shoreline of Norton Pond. Apparently, old guidebooks used to call it “the roller-coaster road” due to miles of continuous sharp rises and dips that made you sorta feel like you were riding a roller coaster. Well, I was absolutely down with that experience, but I guess I didn’t notice anything that was too different from a bunch of other roads in Vermont, so maybe the road had been leveled down over the decades.

I took a tour through the gore and turned around in tiny Norton, an old lumber town of around 169 people that has reverted back to forests and small hill farms. Norton is a 45th parallel town ( the latitudinal line that’s half the distance between the equator and the north pole), and until pretty recently, had one of the last remaining “line houses” in Vermont – or a building built right on the American/Canadian border which is now absolutely illegal to do, in part of northern Vermont being uncooperative during prohibition. The most famous one is undoubtedly The Haskell Library and Opera House in the unusual village of Derby Line, where the stage is in Quebec and the seats are in Vermont. In Norton’s case, it was a general store that was split in two by the border, until it was demolished in 2021 and is now a grassy lot.

Pretty sure Vermont is the only state that does these brilliant sideways town line signs.

Inbetween Warren Gore and Lewis is Avery’s Gore – Vermont’s largest gore – a large trapezoidal wedge of land void of people or infrastructure. The only way in is on aptly named Gore Road, which is just a really nice logging road that dead-ends in the middle of the gore, near one of the only points of interest, an undeveloped pond a bit ironically named Unknown Pond.

West of Warren Gore is tiny Warner’s Grant, Vermont’s only grant, which is exotically considered to be the most inaccessible land tract in Vermont, and its existence is because of the sad plea of a troubled post-revolutionary war widow.

Hester Warner was the widow of revolutionary war hero Seth Warner (who Vermont state route 30 is named for). Warner was cousins with Vermont’s patron saint; Ethan Allen. With The Green Mountain Boys, Warner would lead the capture of the British fort at New York’s Crown Point while Allen was commandeering Fort Ticonderoga in May of 1775.

The Continental Congress was pretty impressed with that scheming lot and declared them an official militia. Warner was so well venerated that he was voted captain over Ethan Allen! But the war would eventually wreck him, and he’d retire and retreat to Connecticut in 1780, dying there a few years later at 41. His poor widow, Hester, literally and in idiom, was now burdened with the problem of having 3 children to raise but barely having the means to do so. So she despairingly reached out to the legislature. Her husband did so much for the revolution, surely they would give her some assistance.

They did wind up coming through for her, just slowly, and ironically, not in a way that would actually help the widow Warner.

Their compensation came in the form of 2,000 acres in the Northeast Kingdom of practically inaccessible highlands that was coarsely timbered, which they named Warner’s Grant.

Beyond that, history seems to have lost track of Hester Warner. Records do show that she never lived on the land. It seems that like the widow Warner, nobody else wanted to give living there a shot either. Warner’s Grant remains today as it was then, empty – apart from some logging activity.

I’d like to someday get up into Avery’s Gore and Warner’s Grant, but last time I was up that way, it was getting late. Too late to drive into the deep woods on logging traces – so those two are still on my list.

All of the places I’ve mentioned in this post are managed by a special state department – The Unified Towns & Gores of Essex County, Vermont, headquartered in the town of Brighton somewhere down a gated dirt driveway that leads off into some pines that looks more like the nondescript entrance to a sandpit than a government office.

Beers Atlas of Caledonia and Essex Counties – 1859. Shown here is Warner’s Grant, Warren Gore, Avery’s Gore, and Lewis.

Overlanding

There’s a fun hobby that’s abundant here in Vermont that always gets you near enough to some of the state’s best off-the-beaten-path places that most aren’t hip to. It’s called Overlanding, or, off-roading, and it can bring you to cool places like Lewis.

It’s something that I’ve dabbled with a few times with my brother over the years, starting out when we were late teens/early 20-year-olds when we started taking the family’s ’78 Toyota Landcruiser along gnarly mountain trails in the hills between Milton and Westford. For some reason, I couldn’t think about my trip to Lewis without thinking about this, so I decided to shoehorn it in this blog post.

The truck taking a muddy thrashing in the above photo was a more recent project of my brother’s – a 2 door, early ’95 project Toyota that was probably more work than it was worth. It was completely cut in half and welded back together, and all the parts came from Craigslist. It amounted to about a year of road trips, work, and headaches. But it paid off!

We rumbled in the cold and took it up bumpy logging roads and 4 wheeler trails in Vermont’s rugged north country; towns like gritty Johnson and the unassumingly vast spaces of mountainous Waterville and Belvidere – both far-flung villages that look like they’re still in the 1800s and are probably a picker’s jackpot. I still have flashes of us stopping at Tallman’s Store and rumbling down potholed route 109 and seeing the formidable wind molested haunch of Belvidere Mountain thick with snow and ridgeline alpenglow that blazed luminously.

Up in the mountains, we bumped and jarred around defunct mines, active sugarbushes, past 200-year-old cellar holes and slipped and slided up steep slopes, through stream beds, and passed cool hidden waterfalls and dead quarries – many of these areas used to be gores! It was a real thrill (and in the winter, was an activity specifically called ‘snow bashing’). If I had a metal detector, I’d probably bring that along too!

Sometimes you’d meet other off-roaders, pull over and chat about trail conditions, or get the details on the other’s ride. Other times you saw scuffed rocks or trees and knew some poor fella had to of done a real number on their vehicle. If you can make it happen, it’s a fun time, taking you places most folks don’t get to see.

It’s also a continuous mental and problem-solving situation, with the journey itself infused with self-reliance being the primary goal – so using your wits is recommend. Some of these trails aren’t easy to navigate. Another fun activity I used to do is to find some “dead roads”, a Vermont phenomenon where roads that were built in the 1700s and the 1800s have long been abandoned, but are still legal right-of-ways. Using old maps and tracking some of them down was pretty neat!

But honestly, the best part of it all? Overlanding and oddity hunting means spending time outside.

Here’s a Youtube video of some guys having some fun! I know this made me wanna get out for an adventure!

Since 2012, I’ve been seeking out venerable examples of Vermont weirdness, whether that be traveling around the state or taking to my internet connection and digging up forsaken places, oddities, esoterica, and unique natural features. And along the way, I’ve been sharing it with you on my website, Obscure Vermont. This is what keeps my spirit inspired.

I never expected Obscure Vermont to get as much appreciation and fanfare as it’s getting, and I’m truly grateful and humbled. Especially in recent years, where I’ve gained the opportunity to interact with and befriend more oddity lovers and outside the box thinkers around Vermont and New England. As Obscure Vermont has grown, I’ve been growing with it, and the developing attention is keeping me earnest and pushing me harder to be more introspective and going further into seeking out the strange.

I spend countless hours researching, writing, and traveling to keep this blog going. Obscure Vermont is funded almost entirely by generous donations. Expenses range from hosting fees to keep the blog live, investing in research materials, travel expenses and the required planning, and updating/maintaining vital tools such as my camera and my computer. I really pride and push myself to try to put out the best of what I’m able to create, and I gauge it by only posting stuff that I personally would want to see on the glow of my computer screen.

I want to continuously diversify how I write and the odd things I write about. Your patronage would greatly help me continue bringing you cool and unusual content and keep me doing what I love!

December 18, 2020December 20, 2020

The Drowned Forest

I recently had a lot of fun voyaging around the tiny angle that is New Hampshire’s 18 miles of seacoast! I haven’t been down towards the Granite State’s coast since I was 10 years old, so the nostalgia was stimulating and the sunburn was painful!

A few friends were tandem on this seacoast excursion, and one of the few goals I had for this trip was doing a bit of oddity hunting – and I was pleased with the few curios that I had eagerly put on my list. Beyond that, we just had a blast shunpiking around random coastal towns in both New Hampshire and Maine.

The environment is a bit exotic to me, in a sense that serpentine salt marshes and beaches on a waterbody you can’t see the other side of aren’t found up in Vermont (but we do have lighthouses!). This part of New England also has redolent history and mystery that have been fermenting far longer than Vermont has existed! I was definitely imbued with some unabashed excitement the whole time.

After all these years I’d never forgotten just how great of a drive New Hampshire State Route 1A was.

Before we checked into our hotel in Portsmouth, I suggested we took the requisite tour up Route 1A (known as Ocean Boulevard for most of New Hampshire’s seaboard) and the shore with the windows down and the breezy salt air coming in (and our music blasting out).

Starting in the brashy and tawdry beach burb of Hampton Beach and its famed 3-mile titular stretch of sand that are both long-established New England summer destinations, we then ventured northwards around a few rocky points with squinty views of the faraway rocks that are the Isle of Shoals – a group of forlornly not-quite-barren islands split between Maine and New Hampshire that are famed for their isolation, and grim and mysterious folklore – the spectrums of which include murder, shipwreck, ghosts, and a treasure – all suitable footnotes of any northern New England ocean island. I’d like to take a ferry ride out there next time I’m in the area.

We then passed through scenic Rye, with numerous state beaches, tidal wetlands, and ostentatious money enclaves that line Ocean Boulevard, and then ended up in Portsmouth.

*iPhone photo. The rad shield for New Hampshire State Route 1A – the numbers represented within the silhouette of the “Old Man of The Mountain” – which was formerly a naturally anthropomorphic rock outcropping above Franconia Notch said to look like its name implies, which has since crumbled ironically due to its old age, and is now kind of an awkward state marketing icon. I had fun explaining this to one of my friends who is from the Midwest.

Portsmouth, New Hampshire is a rad little city. As its name implies, it started out as a colonial shipbuilding hub and morphed into a rowdy naval port town where the Piscataqua River junctions with the Atlantic around the island town of New Castle.

The Pisaquata River also has a pretty great Google review!

The name was minted by the local Abenaki people and might mean something close to; “a river with a strong current”, which I’d say is pretty dead-on, but the details are a bit hard to parse, and because of that, there is a lot of speculative lore behind its name! It’s also the third fastest-flowing navigable river in the world. Though the city has long declined from being an employed port, the oldest naval shipyard in the new world is still active here on an island in the Piscataqua – which once launched some of the most important American warships and the first nuclear submarines. Now the shipyard is kinda moribund, but still functioning.

And speaking of submarines – there’s one in a hole right off the Route 1 Bypass! It had me and my friend exclaim: “Hold up… that’s a motherfuckin’ submarine!” when we passed it.

It’s the new home of the USS Albacore! Lauded as “the forerunner of the future” in its heyday, this vessel was built by the skillful laborers at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in 1953 and was intended to essentially be a paramount experiment of both its physical design and technological wizardry – one that the Navy was really depending on. Its teardrop-shaped body became the standard design for all subsequent submarines – and proved that submarines could actually sustain themselves and function while being submerged!

It became the world’s fastest submarine in 1966 when it set an underwater speed record of 40 miles per hour, and, it was used to innovate sonar equipment!

Now, it’s a neat roadside oddity and museum that we didn’t expect to see. Though it was closed when we pulled up as dusk hummed in, it was worth getting a few mediocre iPhone shots of!

One of the most memorable features of the navy’s island lair – and the region itself – is a notorious abandoned naval prison designed as a dismal gothic nightmare – intentionally, I’m sure.

I guess it’s an unwritten cultural rule that if a prison is built on an island, it’s gonna eventually be known as “the rock”.

Like Alcatraz, the intimidating Portsmouth Naval dungeon also shares the same tag, even though it’s technically across the state line in Kittery, Maine – and when in operation, was one of the nation’s most feared military lockups that could hold a surprising 86,000 inmates. The guards, too, had something to fear, because according to folklore, if they let a prisoner escape, they would be finishing out the rest of the escapee’s sentence. And you’ll have something to fear if you decide to try and explore it, because you’ll most likely wind up being locked up (though probably at another facility). I have no doubt that there are other gristly tales of this “the rock” – and most likely, those are forever classified.

I’m a bit bummed that I didn’t get a shot of it while in Portsmouth, but it wasn’t until afterward that I discovered that there was actually a pretty good vantage point from a bridge that leads into New Castle. Oh well, I’ll have to get my shot next time I’m in town!

Nowadays, Portsmouth is a hip tourist town with loads of charm that front squiggly roads and brick sidewalks – part of that charm comes in the form of loads of colonial architecture that was the result of the burb being one of the most successful port cities in early America. It also comes from the fact that after the city was being gradually consumed by a multi-decade period of decline, a whole bunch of Portsmouthians found their civic pride in the 1950s, when the “urban renewal” contagion was spreading around America – which meant a proposal to bulldoze half of the city’s historic neighborhoods so they could put modern stuff in its place. Thanks to locals loathing that idea – the city has a fantastic array of impressively preserved old buildings from the city’s various stages of life that couldn’t be more archetypal New England, and lacks the antiseptic, banal, and cheap architecture that plague so many other American city centers today.

It also gives Portsmouth a wicked creepy vibe after dark when things get shadowy behind old houses, arboreal-tunneled streets, and replica historic gaslights. You definitely start to wonder what sort of fiendish monstrosities lurk in the black voids and eerie stillness that slides over the city from ocean mists.

And speaking of creepy things at night – this is a good time to transition into my first oddity excursion…

Grave With A Glow?

Back at the hotel room, I was doing some research a few hundred years deep into local cemetery records, trying to track down a particular corpse. Well – actually – her gravestone. You see, Portsmouthians have a mystery among them – an inexplicable phenomenon that might be solely unique to their city. As far as I know, anyways.

According to the vague legend – there’s a light coming from within Portsmouth’s sprawling south street cemetery at night – the result of 5 old rotyards eventually colliding into one over the centuries that Portsmouth has existed.

This is a radiance that might be preternatural, for it’s said to come from a tombstone.

Yup, I was trying to find a grave that glows, which was a bit of a task. There wasn’t a lot of chitter-chatter about this curious claim. I first discovered a brief snippet of it within Curious New England: The Unconventional Traveler’s Guide to Eccentric Destinations by Joseph A. Citro and Diane E. Foulds and was finally able to dig up a bit more sustenance on a blog entry I found, that now seems to have vanished.

What I found so intriguing about the claim is that the reason for the luminosity seems to be a mystery. There are no specter stories and it can’t be blamed on floating orbs or a reflective surface that mirrors nearby shine. I guess it’s an intrinsic feature.

The grave’s occupant, too, seems to be a rather unremarkable person, in a sense that she doesn’t seem to have any disquieting history to support her grave’s peculiar behavior. The usual plot twists to New England cemetery supernatural shenanigans don’t apply here. She wasn’t accused of being a witch, and she wasn’t done some sort of great injustice that made her utter a posthumous curse (though making her headstone glow for eternity seems like a pretty silly way to achieve retribution if you had that sort of power).

Though some morphed local lore takes a stab at answers and proposes that the stone glows because; it’s the grave of a murderer, a murder victim, or even that the gravestone itself has uranium (!) or a luminescent particle in its mix. Uranium in a gravestone is still amusingly easier to believe than this story is.

It just does its thing, apparently, and it has been for some time.

That’s another interesting detail – I haven’t been able to find any information on exactly when this marvel started to happen, or how long it’s been doing its thing for, or even any accounts of people who’ve seen it. Even a few locals I mustered up the courage to ask about it had no idea what I was talking about. It’s just been acting in that fashion for a while it would seem…

The naysayers who are aware of this tale scapegoat sources like the light of the moon, streetlights along Sagamore Avenue and South Street, the traffic light at the intersection of Miller, Sagamore, and South, or reflections from the sizable pond within the cemetery grounds, that for some reason, leap a considerable distance and hit just the one headstone. But if this is all to be believed, then even skeptics have to concede that it can’t be the moon, for the stone is said to glow perpetually, even on moonless nights.

With such a mysterious sensation allegedly happening within a few minutes of our hotel, how could I miss out on witnessing it for myself?!

One of my friends decided to humor me and come along, while the other one raised an unimpressed eyebrow at me and opted to stay at the hotel.

My skepticism was as thick as the summer humidity outside that night and I felt a little guilty, so to appease my friend for joining me on my midnight legend-chase that would most likely have no payoff, I told him we could get some night shots of the city afterward, which he was pleased to agree to.

Navigating Portsmouth’s gridless grid, the old-fashioned wood frame houses ominously glowing with jaundiced light from the streetlamps soon ended and the vast graveyard thick with indifferent shadows extended beside us behind its low delineating stone wall. It was really dark in there.

Despite how nearsighted I know I am, a greenish/white glow within an otherwise dark cemetery should have been easy to spot – but as far as first impressions went, we didn’t see anything except for the waning rectangular shapes of rows of headstones coupling with panoramic umbrae that seemed to be extra nebulous for some reason. It was actually pretty creepy.

From within the cemetery, we could discern the distance-weakened streetlights and an occasional flash of passing headlights, but there was nothing I could see that I’d mistake for an unceasingly glowing gravestone. It was a good thing that I did the research beforehand, too, because finding a grave in that cemetery at night would have been an unlikely task. Unless it glowed.

“What’s the name on the grave?” my friend asked as we walked around in the dark.

“Burns”

“Wait… seriously?”

“Yup, we’re gonna see if Mrs. Burns, burns”.

“Oh god, Chad…”

Our experience in the cemetery can be summarized succinctly; there were no glowing tombstones. Or tombstones doing anything that could be considered eccentric. We then drifted over to the Portsmouth waterfront, reveled in glorious summer weather as the water bells tolled distantly, and called it a night.

We did return the next day en route to another oddity I’m going to get into below, so I could get some documentation shots of the headstones for this blog post.

There, in broad daylight, were a set of 3 tombstones with the surname Burns on them joined at their base – 2 of them bonded by older looking stones and a third and unevenly distanced one on a newer concrete foundation. They were more or less unremarkable and dimmed by age and weather. In the middle was the anomaly – the grave of Eunice Burns, who died in 1884. The epitaph “mother we miss thee” engraved below her lifespan was actually kind of sad and made me wonder how she turned into a local folkloric figure.

We also had a brief wander around the cemetery – a sprawling yard of little grave capped hills and a long pond, and observed a fantastic array of weathered old headstones and their memento mori and stories – dating all the way back to the 1600s, when Portsmouth was spelled as “Portsmuth”.

“So, it didn’t glow last night?” asked my other friend facetiously as I was putting my camera gear back in my bag.

“Nope. But who knows, it might be glowing right now and we just can’t tell because it’s sunny out”.

These are just a few shots of some headstones that I found to be interesting as I was leaving!

The Drowned Forest & The Transatlantic Telegraph Cable

More often than not, some of the most interesting things come to me completely by accident.

This is one such case, while traveling the fantastic New Hampshire State Route 1A through the town of Rye years ago.

My obsessive observational habits mean that I try to take in everything around me at once when I travel. Studying the landscape and reading every sign I see.

As we came across a small marshy area along Route 1A, I noticed a standard New Hampshire state historical marker standing a ways back from the road in the yellowed tall grasses. I’m a huge fan of those state historic/points of interest markers installed on roadsides and usually try to glance at them if I see them.

But this wasn’t the typical sign denoting a battle or historical event. Instead, it had two words that seemed to jump out at me; “Sunken Forest“.

I wasn’t expecting that, and almost immediately, my mind began to percolate.

After all, the term “sunken forest” does provide a lot for the imagination – conjuring up eerie images of giant pines and cedars submerged in a viscous, murky world of diffused light, their branches sullenly and slowly swaying with the mercy of the tides, fish encircling places where only birds could once perch and ship keels making their way over their crowns.

Did something like that exist in New Hampshire?!

Well, sort of.

After doing some internet research, I soon discovered that the reality was a little less phantasmagoric, but still pretty awe-inspiring!

Rye’s sunken forest is the extant remains of a living forest of Hemlocks, Cedars, and Pines – reduced to a range of slimy tree stumps and contorted roots in thick peat mud, many of them barely noticeable and almost always obscured by high tides most of the year.

The traces of former forests and other things that the oceans have adopted into their secretive world can be found along the northeastern coast from Massachusetts as far up as Nova Scotia – and sometimes, a particularly low low tide can reveal these things, or give them back.

This fossilized forest is from a time when the New England coastline extended approximately 75 miles outward, thousands of years ago! When the giant ice sheets that covered North America began to melt, sea levels increased and changed the coastal signature of the area, and eventually, the once-great softwood forest found itself unable to adapt to its new environment; underneath the ocean.

New Hampshire’s inundated forest is one of the easiest to view of all the still-surviving ones, which makes it all the more unique and tantalizing to track down.

But, “easiest” still means little here. The visibility entirely depends on the tides, which means actually seeing them is a rarity. And if the conditions are more ideal, the arrangement of nudged sediments, stones, and mud might also work for or against your efforts.

This oddity is bisected into 2 parts, which are either collectively known as “The Sunken Forest”, or isn’t. The one I tracked down, is the more frequently surfaced depending on the season and the tides, and is known to some as “The Drowned Forest” – which is mostly submerged in a rocky cove near the storied Odiorne Point. I like how graphic and violent sounding that name is, so I usually just go with that one. It also makes more sense logically to me, because the whole reason this oddity exists was because it was literally drowned.

Spring and summer are the best times to detect it, because in the latter part of the year, the low tides are only at night. Also, luck and persistence will help a lot too. Seriously. This was my third attempt at trying to see this – and not being from an area that has ocean frontage, this was also a required opportunity to teach myself about the tides.

The more of a chore-to-view is called “The Sunken Forest”, and is southwards down at the northern end of broad Jenness Beach – which mostly Houdinis itself except for once every few decades if conditions are just right. But, the Jenness Beach portion is also the best-preserved – with the stumps actually looking more like stumps, as opposed to up at Odiorne where centuries of ocean movement have grounded down the stumps almost level with the earth.

But when they are exposed, they have been carbon-dated to around 3,600-4,000 years old – and using dendrochronology, some of the tree stumps were shown to reach around 100 years old before they met their fate!

Finding this patch of remarkable flora was the main persuasion for me going to the New Hampshire shore – and it also was the thing that managed to twist my arm towards a beach. Not that I don’t like pretty places, but I’ve never been much of a beach person, mostly because I don’t really dig crowds or heatstroke.

By the time we arrived at Odiorne Point to meet low tide, though, it was already on the cusp of 100 degrees, and that heat just sucked the life outta me.

But I couldn’t contain my excitement as I made my way out into a rocky cove that wreaked of the fragrances that come with low tide. This was a special kind of ocean controlled oddity, sort of like when old shipwrecks will surface every now and then off, or on, New England beaches, so being able to actually behold it for myself was pretty rewarding – even more so knowing that within an hour or so, it would all be submerged again.

Scores of parents and even more kids were roving around the stony banks bracketed by seagrass stands and splashing around in the tide pools – most of them having no idea that they were in proximity to 2 very cool curiosities. But me – I was roaming around with my camera and prattling about seaweed-covered mounds that I was trying to differentiate from either being the oddity I was looking for, or just a regular sodden lump.

Some of the stumps and exposed contorted roots were almost inconspicuous in muddy sediments and other remains were found but sort of veiled below ankle-deep water with surface sun glimmer in the shifting tide pools.

Odiorne Point unassumingly has quite the history – many of the ruins that mark the point’s fluctuating timeline can still be detected – scattered through the state park that now occupies the land around the point.

The Abenaki and the Penacook gathered here for the copious resources like muscles and clams found in the tide pools, and It became the first spot in New Hampshire that seafaring Anglos set foot on a few centuries ago.

While century-old gravel pitting operations obliterated any traces of those original settlements (besides the oldest known cemetery in the state!), the brawny vestiges of a vital World War 2 coastal defense fort still exist within the park’s woods, as well as a conspicuously curious watchtower that can be seen 83 feet above the shingled homes of a small neighborhood off Route 1A that once was a satellite of the fort and was used for intelligence.

It’s the lone extant survivor of New Hampshire’s original 14 coastal World War 2 watchtowers, and is, for the most part, closed to the public. The tower is named after a neighboring natural landmark – Pulpit Rock – a jutting flat-ish topped rock formation that thrusts into a bouldery range of shoreline.

We had originally wanted to go check out the old gun mounts and batteries (and investigate rumors of secret tunnels), but by the time we were done with the Drowned Forest, I guess the heat had gotten to us and our enthusiasm, and we opted for the air conditioner in the car instead. I’ll be sure to put them on my itinerary the next time I’m in the area. Just look at these photos!

This turned out to be a conjoined oddity – the second item on my agenda happened to have been coincidentally laid down right through the Drowned Forest, and was much more obvious to detect!

You’re looking at the rusted umbilical of one of the first transatlantic telegraph cables – the first one to be installed on United States soil!

Landing of the Direct United States Cable at Rye Beach, right through The Drowned Forest – circa 1889. Notice how much more girth those stumps had then! | Via Atlantic-Cable.com

The 19th century was the sparking point for a wondrous period of advancement and invention for America. Communication – being one of the seminals of the human existence – was naturally pulled into the gravity of the changing methodology.

The telegraph could cut delivery of information from weeks to a matter of hours, or even minutes, by transferring a pattern of electrical signals called Morse Code between 2 receiving stations via a special wire, which would then have to be deciphered.

American businessman Cyrus West Field knew absolutely nothing about telegraph cables, but he had a lot of faith in their prospect, bellwethered that the telegraph was going to grow in importance, and wanted to capitalize on it in a way that nobody else was doing.

By the 1850s, underwater telegraph cables were beginning to run in small dimensions, like from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia, and across the English Channel.

Field utilized this information and thought bigger, literally. He wanted to establish a telegraph cable across the Atlantic – linking North America and Europe.

The idea also became a good way of international flexing, and the governments of America and The United Kingdom jumped on the bandwagon and helped fund the endeavor.

Because the cable was too large/heavy to load on a single ship, 2 appointed ships would sail from opposite ends of the ocean; Southern Ireland and Newfoundland, Canada, and meet in the middle to splice the cables together.

But, so many calamities bedeviled the journey that both governments and investors began to feel like fools after 3 failed attempts in 8 years.

Eventually, though, the first transatlantic cable finally happened in 1866, and it was a moving affair – with both governments lauding it as a paramount shift in human accomplishment. But, it took upwards of 2 minutes to send a single character because of the length, and then the cable was debased early on because of the voltage sent down it was too high. But, eventually, they got the kinks worked out, which pushed the project’s legitimacy card.

But – any messages destined for America still had to be sent down from the boonies of Newfoundland, which was often a slow or clumsy process. So, the Direct United States Cable Company was formed in 1873 by the Siemens Brothers, which routed another underwater telegraph cable down from Nova Scotia to Rye Beach, New Hampshire on July 15, 1874.

Because this was the first such cable to terminate on American soil – it was a big deal, and a huge crowd gathered at the beach the day of its installation – and garnished up some pretty dramatic Victorian newspaper illustrations in Harper’s Weekly with symbolistic ethereal light beams parting dark clouds onto the spot where the cable met the beach.

An official cable house was built that winter, which closed in 1921 when the cable’s usage significantly slowed down after its zenith during WW1 when it was kept busy practically 24 hours a day.

The cable house still cooly exists and is nowadays a nicely preserved private residence. It’s also why “Cable Road” has its curious name – something I wondered about when I read its name on Rye’s signature white and black street signs when I was a kid.

I tell everyone who feels like lending their ears that New England really is a special and strange place, maybe a few shades more so than the rest of this country’s iconic regions because of the comprehensive spectrum of spectacles that make themselves at home here, and these treasures are just a small representation of this. I was talking to a friend that lives in New Hampshire about The Drowned forest in particular, and he was delighted that something like that existed in his own backyard, and for years, wasn’t aware of it.

As I grow older, those are the types of discoveries that really fire me up more and more. Adventuring can really open up your mind. You don’t always need to go poke around a behemoth of an over-Instagrammed ruin to have a “real adventure”. The magic is kinda what you make of it.

The rusted remains of Rye’s transatlantic telegraph cable can still be spotted at low tide!

Here are a few links:

There’s a pretty fascinating documentary on the design and installation of the first transatlantic telegraph cable that I’ll link you below for your pleasure!

ALSO – if this kind of thing strikes your fancy – then definitely make sure to check out the website atlantic-cable.com – which was an integral part in my research on this curiosity!

The blog “Cow Hampshire” also has a good and more succinct blog post on it.

And – there’s another neat article on Hackaday

The Rye, New Hampshire Historical Society has some neat photos of the Drowned Forest from the 1800s.

Are you from New Hampshire or a fellow Vermonter? I’m looking for weird, wild, or hilarious stories, wonderous and odd places, incredible people, and especially abandoned locales! So if there’s something you’d like to share with me, I’d love to hear from you!

I’d also really love to grow this blog and present unique, meaningful, and extraordinary content that’s a departure from the same regurgitated stuff you find everywhere else online, and your help would be hugely appreciated!

Feel free to drop me a line at chad.abramovich@gmail.com

Also – if you appreciate me and this blog, perhaps consider making a donation at my PayPal below? The pandemic has hit my finances and my mental health pretty hard, so any amount is humbly appreciated. I’m also on Venmo if that works better.

I want to continuously diversify how I write and the odd things I write about. Your patronage would greatly help me continue bringing you cool and unusual content and keep me doing what I love!

September 26, 2016March 31, 2020

Hogback Mountain and A 100 Mile View

Queen Connie

Vermont’s roads are pretty regulated, so there isn’t much here in terms of weird or kitschy personalized properties that people like to put into the broad category of roadside Americana – which includes a perpetually growing compilation of the same genre (nonstandardized) but vary widely in sentiment and imagery.

But, that doesn’t mean obscurities can’t be found along Vermont’s byways. Take the tiny farm town of Leicester, whose most famous denizen can be seen lumbering over the small oval-shaped lawn of Pioneer Auto Sales, right along the side of Route 7 either before or after you approach the tiny village center – which is pretty much an intersection with a few houses and a newly reopened gas station that now has a growler filling station.

“Queen Connie”, which it’s sometimes referred as when it’s not called “that big gorilla holding the VW bug”, is a huge 20-ft. tall, 16 ton, concrete ape, holding up a progressively rotting Volkswagon Beetle in one of her upraised arms, while the other arm is stretched out, palm upward, acting as a place where someone could grab an uncomfortable seat and a gimmicky photo opportunity.

But how did something like Queen Connie end up in aesthetic conscious Vermont? And what’s the story behind it? Actually, the answer is pretty straight forward – according to what I was told anyways. The owner of the car dealership had commissioned local artist T.J. Neil to do some concrete work around his pool at home. He was impressed with Neil’s work, and casually suggested another project; to do something cool to spruce up his business. Neil surprised him by suggesting a hyperbolized gorilla – his only reason was because he wanted to see it holding up a car. In 1987, Queen Connie was constructed using steel reinforced concrete, and she’s been observing activity on Route 7 with a disgruntled facial expression ever since, and for Vermonters who are into the weird, might be one of their first forays into oddity hunting.

Though I’m glad Vermont isn’t carelessly overdeveloped like other states, emblems like this are a pejorative thing to build here in the present tense, so it makes it all the more enjoyable.

dsc_0785_pe — Your blogger and local weird worker, posing for a photo.

Up The Molly Stark Trail

I was heading down to explore parts of southern Vermont with a friend. My summer turned into a lot of stress and setbacks, and I felt like my life was becoming as standard as my white apartment walls. My prescription was a long drive, and the lure of autumn’s sway just makes road trips better. Passing through my favorite town of Wallingford always cures a frown on my face, and as we got farther south and the trees began to turn gold in the hills around Mount Tabor and Dorset, I enthusiastically recalled a defunct marble quarry I hiked to last summer.

Route 7 turns into a limited access highway through most of Bennington County, until it reverts back to full access in Bennington and brings you right into its historic downtown district, the center of town being where it intersects with state route 9. I took a quick jaunt up the hill to the Old Bennington neighborhood to take a few photos of one of my favorite buildings in Vermont, The Walloomsac Inn, then ventured up route 9 eastwards into the mountains.

dsc_0399_pe — The Walloomsac Inn, my favorite haunt in Bennington.

Route 9, also known as The Molly Stark Trail or The Molly Stark Byway as the state issued scenic byway signs tell you – is one of my favorite drives in Vermont, and the same sentiment could probably be said for quite a few other people. It’s an extraordinary road to gawk at through the windshield of your car, and even better when you’re stopping to get out and look around. The mountain road twists and turns through the innards of the national forest and gains elevation and grade pretty much as soon as you get beyond Bennington’s limits as it starts to climb the first of many hills and parallels the boulder filled Walloomsac River. To be honest, lots of things on this road vie for your attention.

A sense of awe and anticipation builds in me when I see a trademark brown and white national forest sign, telling drivers that there are various access spaces to Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest for the next 15 miles or so. That includes the massive Glastenbury wilderness, one of Vermont’s largest undeveloped areas, but more known for the titular defunct town and about 2 centuries worth of weirdness that culminated on its many slopes and took off like a contagion shotgun blast into paranormal sensationalism. But it”s hard not to be fascinated by the large expanse of wilderness. The huge area holds ghost towns, a slew of trails and forest roads, man-made feats of engineering, and plenty of mysteries. Just ask the Geocaching community.

We passed through forested Woodford, the highest town in elevation in Vermont at around 2,215 feet, then descended into Wilmington. Which is where I unintentionally found some local curio. A green 1915 iron truss bridge first caught my eye, because it was obviously abandoned, as indicated by all the trees growing through it. The underwhelming replacement was a simple concrete and steel span that bridged the river inches away. As I was gazing at the bridge, I noticed a strange white sign across the bridge that was put up on a small weedy embankment that welcomed me to “Medburyville”, and gave me a precise census of 31 people and 26 pets who I guess lived somewhere nearby in the rural area.

I was at a loss here. The area around the sign was pretty much an undeveloped light wilderness area, and I knew that we had already crossed the Woodford/Wilmington town line. I’m a pundit on Vermont geography and had never heard of Medburyville before, so I was pretty curious. What was/is Medburyville? A local parody or some kind of irony? A name of an obscure back road Wilmington neighborhood?

My camera was acting up, so looks like Google street view will have to suffice for an image of the sign.

I was curious if there was a mystery or story here, so I sent an email to the Wilmington Historical Society. In their reply, Julie Moore explained that Medburyville was a village in Wilmington, but was erased when the Harriman Reservoir was constructed for the purpose of flood control. There was a mill, several houses and a railroad line that ran through the area at one point.

Today there is only a small aluminum sign that raises more questions than answers. Just a few feet from what was/is the Medburyville area is a narrow arm of the aforementioned reservoir, which is experiencing pretty low water levels lately so it was more sandbars than water when I drove by. Local lore has it that when the reservoir is low, a slimy church steeple from the former village is exposed, but I didn’t see anything that day that looked out of place in a reservoir.

Another obscure footnote is that there once was a placename along the reservoir that had the post office address of “Surge Tank” – a name of a temporary settlement that sheltered the men who built the Harriman Reservoir dam that had it’s own recognized post office. The post office also moved around between Readsboro and Whittingham – depending on wherever construction was happening. I still see Surge Tank sometimes on obscure place name lists. Like Medburyville, Surge Tank is long gone, and without a sign to commemorate it.

Back on the road, the forests occasionally break up a little and you got a positioning glimpse that you were right in the middle of the green mountain chain. Unlike some parts of Vermont where a high elevation isn’t surrounded by other mountains and instead reduces off into valleys, the mountains around Wilmington and Marlboro stretched as far as the vistas, with various 440 million-year eroded summits slanting into other rounded domes. A few “runaway truck ramps” with large yellow signs and rhythmic blinking lights were a reminder that the undulating byway had the potential to be more dangerous than scenic for other drivers, and judging by the scars and pit marks in one of them, it had been used recently.

The “100-Mile View”

But it was the so-called “100-mile view” in Marlboro that was the most impressive. I’m not sure if that name is superlative or not, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter because the view is awesome. From a large wooden deck with coin functioning viewing apparatuses for the tourist crowd, you can see what’s left of southern Vermont before it transitions into the Berkshire Hills, and the bumps of southern New Hampshire, including Mount Monadnock.

One of the ramshackle old lodging cabins from a deceased ski resort, which I was about to hike to, sits on the edge of a drop off below the overlook, and might be one of the most photographed site among the sights. I took a walk down, and there was a laminated sign taped to the twisting floorboards telling people like myself to keep out – it’s not actively maintained (as evident by the peeling paint) and can be dangerous if the building decides to tumble down the hill. But I was able to get a shot through a dusty old window along the side and gaze curiously at a few items of older furniture left inside.

I live in Vermont’s largest city, and dig the scene there, but sometimes my hometown is just too oversaturated with people for my taste. I really ache for having access to land like I did when I was younger, where I could go 4 wheeling and hiking and just let out the things storming in my mind. So my predilection was that I could sit on that porch all day or night and gaze off into the distance in my own reverie, listening to Gregory Alan Isakov albums.

dsc_0413_pe — It seems like I was racing storms all day as I traveled around the state yesterday. They finally caught up with me at the top of the Molly Stark Trail, one of Vermont’s most scenic byways. Someone once told me how the few street signs (mostly stop signs) in Greenland’s research bases and camp cities are completely coated with stickers. It’s a way to get the story of its visitors or inhabitants. Where you’re from, what you like, what you stand for, etc. I thought that was pretty cool, and remembered that when I saw the guardrail that hemmed in the road atop Hogback Mountain. Though that’s not quite the case in Vermont, I’ve seen a few guardrails covered in visitor mementos, many just confessing fannish love for various companies or organizations, alongside sharpied graffiti, names and dates. Appalachian Gap on state route 17 has a similar theme.

The cluster of tourist buildings that sort of delineate the maximum height of land between Bennington and Brattleboro were all once a part of Hogback Mountain, a defunct ski area cut out of the slopes of Mount Olga which has mostly been recovered by nature.

Hiking Around Hogback Mountain

Hogback was one of the longest lasting family owned traditional ski resorts in the state, and arguably is one of the best lost ski areas in Vermont to explore, though you’d probably guess either of these things while driving by the few diminutive red buildings sitting in tangled underbrush along a slight rise above the wide shoulder of route 9. You’d probably never guess the property was even a ski hill unless you were able to catch the white lettering affixed to the former first aid building that reads “Hog ark Ski Area”, which in all honestly would be a memorable name for a functioning ski hill.

I decided to walk down from the overlook and have a look around at the property. Good thing I wore jeans – the land was wild with tangled undergrowth, and most likely, ticks. Having been bitten by one a month ago, I didn’t want to go through that debacle again. A few old buildings, the rusted bones of an old lift line and a squint-to-make-out overgrown ski trail could still be traced.

Vermont is the land of skiing (and snowboarding) and our pioneering ski hills ranged from extremely plain rope tow affairs to more detailed mom and pop establishments.

If you’re a New Englander, I’d say we’re pretty lucky to have a great site like the New England Lost Ski Area Project. Between that and the book Lost Ski Areas of Southern Vermont by Jeremy K. Davis, I got a startling impression of how many ski areas we once had just in the lower part of Vermont, and how many of them have been, well, lost.

Hogback Mountain itself seemed to be something special. The ski area warranted a pretty long chapter in Davis’s book and a long entry on NELSAP – considering other areas had merely a few sentences. It has a lot of history, so much I had to condense it a bit for the sake of keeping people reading this blog post.

The truth seemed to be that Hogback was envisioned by a community of people who loved skiing, and the consequences were real. Hogback opened for the 1946-47 ski season on prime real estate owned by Harold White, and was operated by the Hogback Mountain Ski Lift Company out of Brattleboro, as well as several of the families who owned the various businesses along route 9, like the White’s who owned the gift shop, the rental shop, the Marlboro Inn and other rental properties. The Douglass’s who were involved with the ski shop, and the Hamelton’s who were involved with the skyline restaurant.

It featured a Constam T-Bar which could move 900 skiers an hour and was the highest capacity lift in the country at the time. Old brochures and trail maps promote the ski hill’s location in Vermont’s “snow belt”, a high annual snowfall area of the Green Mountains which at the time, received an average of 120 inches. The Vermont winters of today are a bit more disparate.

Hogback’s highest elevation was about 2,400 feet (the base area being at around 1,900), which helped preserve the natural snowfall much better than lower area ski hills, which made it so beloved. I observed some older trail maps, and discovered that Hogback had a unique layout. You’d begin your day along route 9 where a hotel, gift shop and Skyline Restaurant were, and ride a rope tow to the practice slope, but intermediate or expert level skiers would have to transport over to a different face of the mountain to access the main T-Bar and more advanced trails.

hogbacktm1 — A trail map from the 1970s -Hogback Mountain had 12 trails to ride on. To give you an idea of the weird layout and a wayfinding point: number 21 is the first aid building, and below it is Route 9. The first aid building is abandoned and still visible from the road today. That is also where the practice slopes/beginners area was. The more advanced trails were over on another side of the mountain, where numbers 3, 4 and 6 are.

Over the years, the laid back ski hill caught enough popularity from a top notch ski school, excellent snowfall and a gorgeous mountain where skiers would admire spruce trees crusted in snow. In the 50s, it started to expand, and would continue that momentum through the 70s. More trails were cut down the slopes and made easier accessible by a Pomalift and the addition of 4 more Doppelmayr T-bars. There was also a Quonset Hut brought to the property that served as a ski-in snack hut.

Seriously, this place was a big deal. A lot of the history or accounts I read about the mountain was that plenty of southern Vermont kids learned to ski here. It also helped develop a local interest in ski races and became home to the Southern Vermont Racing Team. If a nearby community, like Brattleboro, had an outing club, they probably went to Hogback. The mountain developed a pretty enthusiastically devoted fanbase. The ski school changed instructors a few times over the decades, each new presence contributing to it in their own way.

But towards the 1980s, snowfall began to change to a lack of snowfall. Between not enough natural snow to ski on, rising costs of operation and increasing competition from bigger resorts that were becoming more common on the scene in Vermont mountains, the small mom and pop ski hill eventually couldn’t compete. Hogback’s story is similar to most of Vermont’s lost ski areas. Not being able to compete or stay consistent, most of them became fading ghosts.

Abandoned ski hills are interesting real estate. What do you do with them? Some have subsumed away in the caprices of nature and others re-opened or became private operations. In Hogback’s case, the Vermont Land Trust and a group of adamant people worked pretty tirelessly over the years to secure the funds to purchase and secure the land to save it from becoming a condominium development with a marketed quintessential nature-esque type of name. The purchased acreage was then transferred over to the town of Marlboro, and the cool Hogback Mountain Conservation Area was the result. It’s now glorious protected land, with an abandoned ski hill in the middle that Vermonters can enjoy.

Some of the old ski trails are still maintained and pruned, so hikers, snowshoers and cross-country skiers can still enjoy them. Though, for me anyways, I found that finding those trails was a bit of a challenge.

To my delight and surprise combination, if you bushwhack through some waist-high tangle weeds and growth, you can still find some of the old ski trails, which were still hikable! Well, it’s subjective I guess, but I thought it was achievable. Using the linear rusted cables of the former chairlift as wayfinding points, I decided a short early autumn hike was a good idea. The trail oddly cleared out the farther up I climbed, until both the trail and the lift sort of ended in a blissful and fragrant silence. I was a little bummed I didn’t find an old chairlift or more paraphernalia. If I had gone up farther, I would have eventually stumbled upon the Mount Olga fire tower, which I’m told had splendid far reaching views. You can get there far easier than scrambling up Hogback Mountain, by hiking over via Molly Stark State Park.

My list of places to visit in Vermont alone is so long, it’s hard to cross stuff off of. I’ll get up there one day.

There were still old ski poles left behind in the first aid building

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To all of my fans and supporters, I am truly grateful and humbled by all of the support and donations through out the years that have kept Obscure Vermont up and running.

As you all know I spend countless hours researching, writing, and traveling to produce and sustain this blog. Obscure Vermont is funded entirely on generous donations that you the wonderful viewers and supporters have made. Expenses range from internet fees to host the blog, to investing in research materials, to traveling expenses. Also, donations help keep me current with my photography gear, computer, and computer software so that I can deliver the best quality possible. Seriously, even the small cost equivalent to a gas station cup of coffee would help greatly! Especially now, as my camera is in need of repairs and I can’t afford the bill, which is distressing me greatly.

If you value, appreciate, and enjoy reading about my adventures please consider making a donation to my new Gofundme account or Paypal. Any donation would not only be greatly appreciated and help keep this blog going, it would also keep me doing what I love. Thank you!

Gofundme: https://www.gofundme.com/b5jp97d4