The Fiske Center Blog

Weblog for the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

One Little Tractor

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After seeing our photos of the Sarah Boston foundation, you might find yourself asking, “How did all those stones get into the foundation?”. Was it gradual? Did the above ground house slowly slump into the cellar? Well, yes: for about 100 years the house sat on the side of Keith Hill shifting with the coming and going of the seasons, tipping in the wind, heaving with the frost, providing shelter to scads of squirrels, rabbits, mice, birds and even the occasional hunter (in fact, we often find evidence of these former inhabitants just like we find evidence of Sarah Boston and her family). But the majority of the damage was the work of one little tractor, back in the 1930s. After the Hurricane of 1938, the landowners bulldozed the foundation into itself as part of cleanup efforts around what was then, an apple orchard. For the most part, the stones we’ve been carefully lifting from the cellar for years tumbled into their recent configuration in what amounts to an instant!
Last week our good friend Linda Casey at the Grafton Historical Society was kind enough to show us some old photos, taken as promo shots for the Catarpillar Company, of the landscaping of Keith Hill after the big storm. They seem triumphant, even celebratory. The idea that one man and one small machine could move rocks so large is actually still impressive today, I guess. But I bet he didn’t have to painstakingly measure, map and otherwise record the position of every last one of those rocks. Did he? Perhaps more impressive is the dedicated efforts of our field crews over the years, making hundreds of maps to record meter by square meter of rock fall, so that now we can not only understand exactly how those walls fell, but maybe even what they looked like before they did. Thanks guys, for moving that mountain one pebble at a time!

One little tractor, so many rocks (photo courtesy of the Grafton Historical Society).

by Heather Law Pezzarossi

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