One group I belong to, and peruse, is "Forgotten NH" on farcebuk
NEMO.. you might enjoy this post. I believe it's west of you. From the comments it appears to be in Sheldrick State Forest.
The Sheldrick Forest Preserve is a forest located in West Wilton, New Hampshire and owned by The Nature Conservancy. The 227-acre (0.92 km2) property is host to a large diversity of old growth trees and a number of plants. The preserve's three miles of trails are available to the public.
Anyway, One of the posts that caught my eye was this one LINK<<
The hardship they must have endured back 136 years ago.....
One-hundred and thirty-six years ago this morning, at 6:00 a.m. on July 10, 1885, Oscar Stanley and two carpenters were putting the finishing touches on the Stanley’s new home. Situated at the base of Cherry Mountain, Stanley, his wife Ellen, and three daughters lost their previous home six weeks earlier to fire, barely escaping with their lives.
Ellen and the girls were staying at Ellen’s mother’s house a half mile north of Stanley’s, while the men stayed on site in the barn during construction those six weeks. That morning, while waiting at the house for Oscar to bring them to their new home, the girls and their mother felt a tremendous rumbling. A few minutes later someone came by and said “something terrible has happened at Stanley’s.” Ellen ran to the farm, not knowing what to expect. The farm her husband and his father had spent 40 years homesteading was gone, covered in 30’ of mud, debris and trees. The new house and barn were destroyed. A landslide, starting at the peak of Owlshead, a summit of Cherry Mt., had consumed it all.
Ellen found her husband and the two carpenters safe. Oscar had heard the rumbling, and looking outside saw a tumbling forty foot wall of boulders, dirt and logs rapidly descending from the steep slope behind the house. Oscar yelled to run, and the three men were able to narrowly escape its path. Unfortunately, Don Walker, the Stanley’s young farmhand, was unable to get out of the barn in time and was buried in its wreckage. He managed to get the dirt from his mouth to holler for help. He was pulled out, a mass of cuts and bruises, bleeding internally, with one leg crushed. After 4 days his leg was amputated, and he died a few hours later.
Within hours of its happening, people started arriving to see “The Great Slide.” For the rest of the summer season they thronged to the site in large numbers, arriving daily, by foot, wagon, coach or train. Someone put up a small eating place, and Oscar Stanley sold a partial interest in the farm to a Gen. F. P. Brown from Whitefield who put up another restaurant. Hotels did a brisk business. Preachers claimed their sermons were sparsely attended due to the call of the slide. The town of Carroll sought reparations for the damage to its roads from all the traffic.
The Coos County Democrat’s local columns were filled with accounts of that summer. Whitefield Whittlings - “The proprietor of the new restaurant of Cherry Mt, Slide, Gen. F. P. Brown, had a good run Sunday, and all hands was kept busy, about 3000 visitors.” 7/29/1885
”Messrs. Brown and Stanley have placed a toll gate across the road leading from the slide station, and all persons coming over the railroad have to pay 10 cents or else take to the woods and swamps and make a road for themselves if they wish to see the slide.” 8/5/1885.
Also from Whitefield Whittlings - “There were 27 carloads of living humanity passed through here to visit the Slide, last Sunday from the P. and O. and Northern R.R.” 8/19/1885.
Home gone, at summer’s end the Stanley’s would move into town, eventually living in what is today the Carlisle Place. The timelines of their lives were from then on described as “before and after the slide.” The three daughters, Della, (19) Grace, (9) and Mora (5) would grow up to marry local men, all three living into their 80’s and 90’s.
Today the scar of the slide is almost gone, healed by time, reclaimed by the forest. A marker erected by the State of NH at the trailhead to Owlshead on Rt 115, briefly describes what transpired all those years ago.
I know right where Sheldrick SF is. I've hunted in that area. There are several old apple orchards around there that the owners allowed hunting on. Most all of them were turned over to the state when the orchard owners got too old and weary to manage them properly. They turned the properties over to the state because they didn't want the land sold for developments. The transfer deeds state that the properties are to remain "forever wild". I got that directly from one of the former owners before he passed on. He and his wife were allowed to live out their days on the property, after it had become a state forest. Once they passed, their house, the old livestock barns and other sheds were demolished. The "trails" cited in the site write ups are actually old roads used by the orchardists to maintain the orchards using their tractors, recently, and probably horse drawn equipment back in the day. Most of these properties in that area were passed down through generations of families until there was no one left to carry them on.
ReplyDeleteOne of the properties has a nice beaver pond that I keep meaning to get to to fish for native brookies. Haven't got there yet and maybe never will. The bugs in late spring/early summer in that area are frightful. On that same piece of land there's a hilltop where you can look to a row of hilltops stretching its way to the North that will take your breath away. Remains of ice age terminal moraines, as are most hills in S. NH.
Nemo
Not sure where the confusion is, Irish, but Cherry Mountain is nowhere near Wilton, New Hampshire, in Hillsborough County. That landslide occurred in Jefferson, in Coos County, north of the Presidential Range. "Above the Notch" is how the folks up there speak of it. The other end of the state.
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