Winter Views

By Ruth Melville

My second favorite part of winter is that the absence of foliage lets you see things you can’t see in greener, leafier parts of the year. Previously hidden places and connections become newly visible, sometimes in unexpected ways. Looking out from the top of our hill we can see houses on the other side of Route 272 that in the summer we don’t even know are there.

With the winter dieback, and the lack of snow, more surprises are revealed closer to hand. Lately we’ve been clearing away some dead foliage and unlovely barberry from a corner of our property that we normally don’t pay much attention to: the land is overgrown, and there are no paths through the woods. But as the broken branches and vegetation got carted away or burned, all sorts of objects were revealed: old scythes, oil drums, bottles and jugs, a rusted-out stove with nice porcelain handles, even a muffler. Clearly, previous owners of the property had used this corner as a dump. There are also partially cut stones, some with holes drilled into them, others with bits of iron wedges still stuck in the rock.

But as the patch of wasteland became clearer, we found something more impressive. Set into the ground are stone foundations, about 10 feet tall and several feet thick—much larger than we had realized—and big slabs of stone. To me, it looked like the side of a moat or a castle wall (and I’m not even a fan of “Game of Thrones”).

Not sure exactly what we’d found, we turned to the Internet. My husband did a Google image search on the word “millrace,” the canal in which water flows to a mill wheel. Within seconds he had up on his screen the spitting image of our stonework: the millrace for an iron furnace in Pennsylvania built in 1809.

Was there once a mill on this property? Crissey’s “History of Norfolk” confirmed that there was indeed a sawmill here, built by Edmund Brown. Brown owned a farm on this land, and Crissey writes that “he did quite an extensive business in the manufacture of lumber, for himself and his neighbors.” He “cleared and made productive land of the rocky, primeval forest.” Later, about 1876, the mill “was enlarged, rebuilt and a circular saw put in.” At the time the “History of Norfolk” was written, in 1900, the mill was still there, but it was not in full operation.

We haven’t yet found any evidence of the wheel or its supports, which were presumably made of wood. But we also haven’t found a saw or metal fittings, so we hope there is further evidence of Brown’s mill to be discovered.

My first favorite part of winter is blankets of pristine snow. But in the absence of snow, the quieter surprises of life in the Norfolk woods offer a pleasure of their own.