A closer look at Fort Stark, New Castle, NH

Jeannine and I took a short weekend trip up to Ogunquit, Maine this past weekend after her appearance at the Boston Authors Club event where she received an honor for her book "Borrowed Names". We stayed in Ogunquit, but during the three days we were there, we wandered around the area. One of the places we wandered to was the Fort Stark historic site in New Castle, a place I blogged about on this April 3.

We had gone there in March of this year, but because it was so early in the season, the site's parking lot wasn't open, and we only got a glimpse of some of the outside. This time, we were able to park and walk around the whole place -- well, except for some areas which were fenced off or boarded up. It was still pretty cool, though.

As we walked around, I kept trying to match up what we were seeing to my memories of our original visit there about twenty-seven year ago… and I discovered to my chagrin that nothing there really jibed with my somewhat vague memories of that first visit. It is altogether possible that twenty-seven years ago, the site looked much different. Perhaps it was not as well-tended as it is today. I should do some research on that.

In fact, I should do some research on Fort Stark, because one of the questions I had when we were looking at the now-empty gun emplacements was "What kinds of guns were there, and how did they shoot out to sea?" I was curious about this because there did not appear to be any firing slots through the thick walls of the emplacements, and those walls were high enough that unless the guns were REALLY tall (which doesn't make much sense), they would have had to have had their barrels elevated at a very steep angle to clear the tops of the walls.

You might see in the following photos what I mean. There were two of these large gun emplacements.

In one of them, growing near where one of the large shore guns must have been installed years ago, Jeannine spotted some red flowers, part of the abundant wild plants growing in many places around the fort.

She identified them as Columbine -- here's a closer-up shot of some of them.

This is a view looking south, I believe, from the area atop the wall around one of the gun emplacements. (Please excuse the imperfect stitching of the photos which make up this panoramic view -- I'll try to tweak it later to make it better.)

And these are a few views from the lower levels.

I'm not sure what this little shed in this next photo was for, nor why that huge concrete cylinder is lying tilted on the rocks like that. This was near the end of our visit -- that's Jeannine on the right beginning our walk around the Fort on the rocky beach on its eastern side.

I was glad that we had the opportunity to see more of the fort than we had on our previous visit, but I would like to learn more about it and go back armed with that knowledge, so that what I saw there would mean more to me. -- PL

P.S. Click on this link for a satellite view of Fort Stark via Google Maps -- it shows pretty clearly the two large gun emplacements.

Fort Stark on Google Maps

Ruins on a river

It's finally, really spring here in western Massachusetts, and I am very happy to be back on my bicycle. One of my favorite rides -- which I took this week, for the first time since freezing temperatures and snow forced me to put my bicycles away last year -- is a street and then a dirt path, both of which run along or within sight of the Mill River in Northampton, ending near Smith College's Paradise Pond. It's a winding, tree-shaded path, slightly bumpy in spots but almost always pleasant to ride on. I encounter walkers, parents pushing baby carriages, runners, and occasionally (though not too often) other bicyclists. Occasionally, some bicycling friends and I have taken hand saws with us to cut up trees which have fallen in windstorms and blocked the path. In the fall there is one stretch of the path which has these small trees, or bushes perhaps, with leaves that turn exquisite shades of pink.

There are also some ruins along the way -- nothing terribly dramatic, but they catch my eye every time. On this ride, I stopped to take a few photos. Unfortunately, I did not have my camera with the great zoom lens on it, nor did I clamber down a few slopes to get a better vantage point for photographing one spot… so these are not the best photos.

(I should point out here that this Mill River (probably one of dozens if not hundreds in this part of the country so-named) is the same Mill River featured in Elizabeth Sharpe's wonderful book "In the Shadow of the Dam", which recounts the terrifying story of the collapse of the Williamsburg  reservoir dam and the horrific flood that caused. Ever since I read that book a few years ago, I wonder if the ruined things I see along this stretch of the river have anything to do with that incident.)

This first ruin is a little hard to see through the trees -- and I suspect that in a month or two, when the trees are dressed in their green finery, it will be almost impossible to see. This is now visible from Riverside Drive, which (per its name) follows the river for a ways. I stopped to take a few photos when I spied these ramparts across the river, high up on the far bank. I do not know what they are, or perhaps more to the point, what they were.

On my side of the river, almost directly across from the ruins on the other side, was this partial stone wall.

Could these have been two sides of one dam spanning the river, perhaps providing power to a long-vanished mill? Possibly.


About a mile further, the path begins, and not too far down that path is this:

Two slightly boxy, three-sided concrete structures, the far one with a large chunk taken out of it and bearing two sizable cracks, sit on either side of the river. Between them runs a curved concrete ledge, battered and cracked and eroded, and barely visible under the water for the most part. You can see the exposed portion of it on the left, to the right of the tree in the foreground.

And over to the right in this panoramic image, there is an odd little doorway in the bank of the river. I have always wondered about this thing -- it seems, in its construction, almost primitive.

As I stood on the river's edge, taking these photographs, I looked down into the water and gravel near my feet and saw chunks of brick, some with broken corners smoothed -- I assume by years of erosive action from the river water.

Could these possibly be from the homes and mill buildings washed away by the flood on the Mill River in 1874? Or are they from some more recent bout of destruction, probably more limited in scope?

 I don't know. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable in the history of brick making could tell at a glance.

About thirty feet to the left of the concrete structure on the left in the above photo, just off the dirt path and almost buried in last fall's leaves, there are these:

To my eye, they appear to be robust concrete and steel mounting plates… but for what? What was secured here? Did it have something to do with those aging concrete structures on the river's edges? I suppose I could ask the Northampton DPW, or perhaps someone at Smith College… and probably someday I will. But for now, it if more fun to speculate.


Moving down the path another tenth of a mile or so, I spied these on the far bank of the river:

I would guess that this tumbled pile of cut stone blocks is not the remains of a building which fell on this spot, through action of the river or inaction and neglect by its builders, but rather were pushed here, down the bank from the dirt road above, to get them out of the way. Not too far away from this location, on that side of the river, is the site of the former Northampton State Hospital, an institution for the mentally ill. Did these blocks of stone come from there? Why were they disposed in this way? Again, I don't know. -- PL

Ruins in New Hampshire and Maine

A few weeks ago, Jeannine and I took a small vacation (three nights) after she did a presentation for a group of teachers in Danvers, Massachusetts. We drove from there up to Portsmouth, New Hampshire for our first night, and the next day I told her that I wanted to try to find a local ruin site, similar to Odiorne State Park in that it had abandoned shore battery emplacements from World War II. I could not remember what it was called, or where, exactly, it was -- all I could remember was that it was near the southern outskirts of Portsmouth, and the street where'd we'd parked, probably about twenty-seven years ago when we'd visited the site for the first and only time, had something either floral or fruity in its name.

I did a little web searching in the hotel before breakfast, and quickly found it -- Fort Stark, at the end of Wild Rose Lane in New Castle, New Hampshire. After checking out of the hotel, we headed there, and found it easily (thanks to the car's GPS, that is!)… but it didn't look much like I'd remembered it. That first time, as I recalled, we'd parked on the side of the road, and had to make our way through some thick bushes before we came to the site of the abandoned fort, where rusted circular steel rails -- the mounts for the long-gone shore artillery -- basked in the bright sun and salty air.

I think I may have misremembered this, because when we got to the site this time, there was a parking lot (unfortunately closed, with lots of dire-looking "NO PARKING!" signs around the area in front of it) and a large, open area between the parking lot and the fort, which sits near the edge of the ocean. Because I did not want to risk having our car get towed (which would have put a significant damper on our enjoyment of our little vacation), we only stayed for about ten minutes, and never got out of sight of the car. But I did manage to get a few interesting shots as we walked on the shore for a bit, on what I am pretty sure was the north end of the fort.

There was a large, curved concrete wall at the edge of the ocean, with large chunks missing from it's edges, very likely from the erosive power of the sea and the effects of many a New Hampshire winter. The wall was surmounted by a large mound of earth, from which grew a profusion of scraggly, slightly-stunted trees, grass, and tall weeds. And in the middle of the mound atop the wall, there was some kind of squarish concrete structure -- what looked from our vantage point like the entrance to a bunker. I took several photos and later stitched them together into this small panorama.

And here are two more shots of the wall, one a close-up of the wall showing the damage to its underside, where the waves hit it…

… and the other a medium shot from the other end of the wall (that's Jeannine strolling across the beach rocks in the distance -- I think she's trying to soak up as much of the March sun as possible).

The Fort Stark site was not open for visitors when we went there this time, but I hope to get back later in the year to give it a more thorough look, and take more photographs.

We got back in the car and proceeded to meander to our second destination, the White Barn Inn in Kennebunkport, Maine. Neither of us had ever been to Kennbunkport before, even though we have spent a lot of time in southern Maine over the years. We had reservations to stay in one of the Inn's small cottages, and this one overlooked the Kennebunk River. 

Walking to the end of the short, dead-end street on which the cottage stood, I noticed that tide was out, and some old rotted piers, long-collapsed, had been exposed. 

This is something I have seen in various places, mostly near the ocean, and I have often wondered why these large hunks of wood are just left to rot, possibly interfering with boat traffic, snarling anchor lines and so forth, instead of being pulled out and perhaps recycled. Do people think it's just not worth it? Or do they calculate that, for tourists, the sight adds some kind of visual flavor to the shoreline when the tide is out? I am inclined to think it is the latter, because they do offer -- especially to the ruin fancier -- an intriguing, if literally and figuratively murky, glimpse of history.

Later, during our second day, while Jeannine was hard at work writing in the cottage, I took a stroll to the center of Kennebunkport to see what kinds of interesting shops and such might be found there… and saw another group of abandoned, rotting piers, again exposed by the low tide.

I wonder if anyone is still alive who remembers what these once represented? Or maybe these things are not as old as they seem, and there are many locals who know what they are (or were). Perhaps next time, I will ask. -- PL

Concrete reindeer

During the months of January and February, when we were still getting regular sizable snowfalls, Jeannine and I would go out and do a little cross-country skiing in the woods near our house. She was more adept at it, having used her skis like this for many winters, whereas I had not gone out on skis for at least ten years. 

So when she wanted to try a different route than we usually travelled, one which went down a long and pretty steep slope, I decided to put on my boots with their slip-on ice cleats, and walk along with her (at least until she started down the hill, where I would have to watch as she receded into the distance). It was a nice day, all snow considering, and the walk by myself through the woods was pleasant and quiet.

The route we took was one I'd been on many times in previous years, back when I would go dirt bike riding with my friends. It was what they call in these parts an "unimproved road" -- meaning that in certain areas it was mildly rutted and passable by just about any car, but in other sections you would need a gnarly off-road vehicle, a dirt bike, or something with feet to safely make it through. It was a nice five or six mile loop around a small mountain to the north of our house, and Jeannine only skied on the first mile or so.

So maybe if I had been on my skis, and trying to keep up with her, I might not have noticed this odd little artifact off to one side of the path, behind a single strand of barbed wire:

I am not completely sure what it is meant to be, but it sort of looks like a very stylized reindeer, rendered in concrete, between three and four feet tall. It is cracked in places, and the paint on it is faded and peeling. It looks as if it was created in a mold -- if not, quite a bit of care was taken to radius the edges for a smooth, rounded look. A large capital "M" protrudes from one side (there may be one on the other side too -- I did not look when I took the photo), chunks of the letter broken away, revealing in one spot a metal reinforcing bar (or "rebar" in the vernacular of the construction trade).

Near this artifact, there is supposedly a hunter's cabin or something of that ilk, back in the woods. I have never seen it, and have no idea who owns and/or frequents it. But I wonder if whoever has the hunter's cabin brought this strange thing into the woods for some reason. Perhaps the letter "M" is an initial for the owner of the cabin… or maybe it has nothing to do with that person -- maybe instead this reindeer was built as signage for a long-dead business, and someone found it in the trash and hauled it back here.

I have no idea.

But in its decrepit, decaying state, this odd little beast fits my definition of a ruin. -- PL

"A Study in Decay", the term paper

I guess you could call this the first real formal expression of my fascination with ruins.

This term paper was done for an art history class when I was an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA in the early 1970's. It was in that class that I was first exposed to the concept of "constructed ruins", and I found that idea extremely intriguing -- so much so that I used it as the basis for this paper (which, if memory serves, garnered me an "A"… probably the only one I got in that class).

I don't really remember doing the research, or writing the paper, but I do recall doing the drawings. I don't know what inspired me to render the entire text part of the paper in hand lettering (something I've never been that good at), but it did go well, I think, with the illustrations. The entire thing was created on plate-finish Bristol board illustration paper, and I used some kind of dipping pen -- possibly with a crow quill, though it could have been a larger nib -- to draw the ruins and do the lettering.

It was the only time in my life that I endeavored to do a term paper this way, and that's probably because doing that much hand lettering and trying to keep it neat, even and legible was an enormous pain in the neck (literally).


Here's the entire paper, with cover page and bibliography. You'll note the graphic on the cover page is the one I am using for the heading of this blog. I'm not really sure where the phrase "a study in decay" came from -- I may have made it up myself -- but I suspect I may have run across it in my research for the paper.



(Note: Because pages 4 and 5 are a two-page spread, I am using a smaller image of both pages together to show how they were meant to be seen, and then two separate images for both pages for easier reading.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of all the ruins mentioned in the paper, I think my favorite was the house in the "Désert de Retz" park in France, made to appear like the base of a huge, shattered classic column. There is something bizarrely whimsical about the notion of a house built to look like that. -- PL

Odiorne

New Hampshire's Odiorne State Park lies on the seacoast not more than a mile or two south, I think, from the center of Portsmouth, NH. It is also known as Fort Dearborn, and once hosted large artillery pieces installed during World War II to help protect the US from the threat of an invasion from across the Atlantic, one which never came. The guns and ordnance have long since been removed, and when I first encountered this place with my wife when we lived for two years in Dover, NH, I was impressed -- first, with the beauty of the ocean which lay just a few hundred feet from the parking lot off Route 1A…

… and then a short time later -- as we walked around the grounds of the park -- by the massive concrete bunkers which once housed the weapons and ammunition and personnel intended for coastal defense.

My brother Bruce poses with the largest of the bunkers at Odiorne. 

Trees grew on top of these bunkers -- some fairly large, others small and wrapped in tangled vines and tall weeds. Paths wandered through the woods, allowing for quiet walks among the various concrete structures. The vegetation seemed, for the most part, to have been left to grow unchecked, though I know from visits in later years that some effort is regularly made to keep it from getting too unruly. 

Another view of that large bunker, from a day when I rode a Segway through the park -- big fun!

The walking paths follow the ocean for some distance, then dip back into the woods. It's intriguing to think that servicemen posted here during the tense days of war may have walked the same paths, taking a break from staring out to sea through binoculars, waiting for the enemy ships that never appeared.

I've visited this place at least a dozen times, and I know I will go there again. Ruins by the ocean -- I mean, what more can you ask for? One of my favorite memories is of gathering small shells from one of the rocky beaches there, shells which all had convenient holes in them.

I later strung hundreds of these shells together on monofilament, and my wife and I hung these shell garlands on the tree during what was, I think, our second Christmas together, in 1983. We still have them, though they have not decorated our Christmas tree in recent years. Maybe for Christmas of 2011, they will festoon the tree once more. -- PL

Weeds

Many times, when I think of ruins, I think of summer. Warm summer days, with the smell of plants, the sounds of insects, the feel of sweat on my forehead and arms. Is that goldenrod I smell? Queen Anne's lace? Or some other tall, wild weed, growing like the inexorable force of nature that it is? The smell of weeds is, I think, distinctly different from the smell of grass lawns and flower gardens. It has a feral apsect.

Weeds and ruins go together. They share one key quality -- they are, for the most part, unwanted. And so the weeds grow in the ruins, wild and untrammeled. Left untouched long enough, they become a blanket which covers and hides the ruins from our eyes. Think of the jungles of Central America, where centuries of unchecked plant growth have turned the ruins of ancient pyramids into green hills. 

There is nothing quite like that around here, but, if humans disappeared and nature were left to its own devices, there would be. Probably most of the structures we have built would collapse, unlike the sturdy stone pyramids of the Aztecs and Maya, and the green hills would be more like gentle green mounds.

But I don't expect to see that in my lifetime. In any event, I am happy to experience a small fraction of it, when I come across the old foundation of a house, out in the woods, or in a field… and I smell the weeds, warmed by the summer sun. -- PL 

A ruin in our backyard

I have realized that there is a ruin less than a few hundred feet from where I type this in our house.

It's not fabulous and extensive, and doesn't hold much if any historic importance. But it is a ruin, just the same.

Before we built this house in which I sit and write, we lived in an old house which occupied a spot just down the hill. It was the house which was here when we bought the property. It had charm, as an old colonial-style structure often will, but that was about it as far as its appeal went. Bad insulation, inefficient plumbing, a dark and gloomy kitchen, and various design oddities and structural quirks made it clear to us that this was not a house in which we could live for long and be comfortable.

During the three or four years we lived there, we had almost completely rebuilt the large barn which stood next to it, mostly for my use as an art studio and a place to store and service my motorcycles, and have the wood shop that I had always dreamed of. During that process, we saw what could be done with new construction, and started thinking that we would either do something similar with the house, or tear it down and build from scratch.

We chose the latter option, and ended up clearing a house-sized area on the heavily-wooded knoll behind the old house. When the new house was completed and we moved in, that old house was subsequently torn down -- albeit torn down CAREFULLY, as there were original beams and such which were valuable enough for the company that did the demolition to keep and reuse as the framework for a new house on another lot in another town.

Within months, there was virtually no sign that a house had stood there… except for one thing.

While we lived in that house, we thought it would be nice to expand the tiny preexisting patio area off of the kitchen. We had a nice, two-tiered stone wall built around two sides of it, as well as a circular stone planter for a small tree in the middle. And when the house was taken down, we saw no reason to destroy the patio -- in fact, we thought it might turn out to be a nice place to sit in the sun and enjoy the various plantings, even though we had the new house up on the hill.

Well, that was the idea, and we did spend some time on the old patio, but it quickly became apparent that we wouldn't be using it very often. So it has sat there, for almost twenty years, with very little in the way of upkeep. The plantings are overgrown, the bench weathered and rusting, and tall weeds grow between the slate paving stones, which are slowly being covered with lichens. Occasionally, in the summer, I run the mower over the patio to keep the tallest of the weeds down.

It is, in essence, a ruin.

And while not as elaborate as some ruins, this one affects me in similar fashion -- perhaps even more so in some ways, because when I go down there and sit on the old bench, I contemplate the passing of time, and even of a way of life for us which is no longer. Most of the time we spent out there, when the old house still stood, was with our daughter when she was little. We had her small wading pool there, and played with her dolls and other toys either on that patio or nearby, on the lawn or in the shade of the lilac bushes. I remember my mother chasing our little daughter around there, grandmother laughing and granddaughter shrieking happily.

Now my mother doesn't run, but moves slowly with a walker… and my daughter is about to turn twenty-two and lives three thousand miles away, on the other side of the country.

There is more than a slight hint of melancholy here. -- PL

Why do I love ruins?

There is something compelling about ruins -- not just the famous ones known around the world and studied endlessly, but the small, almost insignificant ones -- the ones you see on a daily walk along a river path, for example. What is that crumbling concrete abutment? Why is it here, in this spot? Was it once part of a dam, part of a factory long ago washed away in a flood?

There are answers to these questions, perhaps... but perhaps not. Maybe these bits and pieces of lives once lived will always hold a certain amount of mystery. Some of them hold virtually no importance to current times and the lives of people in the present... but at one point, they DID mean something.

This blog will be dedicated to an exploration of the fascination with ruins… or perhaps I should say, MY fascination with ruins. I don't intend to make a study of the attitudes of others.

There are ruins everywhere. As I said in a comment to one of my wife's writer/blogger friends:

"When we really stop and look around with an eye for picking out ruins, it seems they are all around us, in one form or another. In our area of the rural Northeast, there are hundreds, probably thousands of old stone walls, some out in the middle of heavily wooded forests… and they were once boundary markers, dividing different fields of farms now long vanished.

It's also not uncommon around here to see ruins on rivers -- old mills mostly washed away, leaving behind bits of themselves -- crumbling stone walls, dams and spillways, the occasional stairs to nowhere.

When Jeannine and I lived in New Hampshire, we would occasionally drive back to the Northampton/Amherst area to visit friends and family, and I often wondered about the more modern "ruins" we would see along the back roads -- the abandoned businesses, shuttered and weed-grown, the paving in their empty parking lots split by the relentless growth of grass and saplings. I would imagine the people who once worked in these places, or who owned them, or who patronized them, for whom these now-empty shells were once a vibrant and perhaps necessary part of life. These types of ruminations provoke a certain delicious melancholy.

One of my favorite ruins in this area was the concrete dinosaur, a Tyrannosaurus or Allosaurus, I think, which stood on the edge of Route 5, in the shadow of Interstate 91, heading south from Northampton. It was a promotional sculpture for a place called "Nash's Dinoland", a roadside attraction my parents took my dino-loving young self to at least once. For years that thing stood there, bits and pieces of it falling away as the winters ravaged it, the paint flaking furiously under the baking sun and pelting rain. Then it was gone."

That was the beginning of an exchange which proved to be the impetus for the creation of this blog. I would like to thank Amy Greenfield for her help in pushing me down this path. -- PL

(Note: The "A Study in Decay" header graphic is something I drew and it comes from a paper I wrote in an art history class while I was an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA in the early 1970's. I hand-lettered the entire paper and created several illustrations of ruins for it. I'll probably post all or part of it on this blog. -- PL)