Reading rural landscapes: a field guide to New England's past

WilliamFaulkner once said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."Nowhere can you see the truth behind his comment more plainly than in rural NewEngland, especially Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and western Massachusetts.

Everywhere we go in rural New England, the past surrounds us. In the woods andfields and along country roads, the traces are everywhere if we know what tolook for and how to interpret what we see. A patch of neglected daylilies marksa long-abandoned homestead. A grown-over cellar hole with nearby stumps andremnants of stone wall and orchard shows us where a farm has been reclaimed byforest. And a piece of a stone dam and wooden sluice mark the site of along-gone mill. Although slumping back into the landscape, these features speakto us if we can hear them and they can guide us to ancestral homesteads andfamous sites.