Building A Bridge

PART ONE: STOCKBRIDGE, VERMONT

Rocks had fallen during spring torrents, and there was nothing to do but repair the fieldstone cellar wall with cement and remove the stones. The house is small and indistinct, directly across from the Stockbridge Post Office. Records indicate it was built shortly before the Civil War, and when I purchased the house, the seller mentioned that it once belonged to a Union soldier who had died in the war. Investigating town property ledgers, I found that during the war the house was owned by two gentlemen, neither of whom served in the Union Army.

I began lugging the rocks to my land on the banks of Tweed River, a half-mile distant, to arrange into a streamside fireplace. As I lifted them into the back of my Durango, I considered their history. They had not seen light of day in over one hundred and fifty years. I pondered the last hands to have handled them. It took weeks to dig a cellar hole and construct rock walls, an art form handed down generation to generation, before the advent of concrete. The walls were perfectly straight; the corners precise ninety-degree angles. That it took one hundred and fifty years to finally weaken them is testament to the craftsmanship.

As I dumped the first load streamside, I imagined mid-19th century Stockbridge. Like many Vermont villages, it was a farming community larger in population than today. Young men were sons of farmers and farm laborers, raised in Stoney Brook’s cool breezes and high open fields of South Hill, others sons of Gaysville shopkeepers and merchants. They were lithe, strong young bodies, rural sons of earth and water, seed and plow. They included Perry Pierce, John Scobie and Chester Larnard; they included Alanson Packard, John Burnham, and Oscar Paine, most in their twenties and prime of life.

The social aspect of rural living dominated their young lives. Gatherings of any sort, the farmers market, a barn raising, were eagerly anticipated. Even today, stories flow from the 1930s and 40s of a more isolated life, the eagerness to gather at great distance with great effort, particularly during winter. When President Lincoln’s call to arms came, it is unsurprising that young, restless souls volunteered in waves across the silent, cold land, the scent of excitement irresistible to those raised in rural solitude.

I had cleared a spot along the stream of brush and two trees, one of which I paid to have cut down, the other I had not, having accepted a beaver’s assistance. The forest is quiet; more accurately it is consistent in its natural sound. A small run of rapids provides a soothing, muttering companion. Leaves are yellowing, mostly beech and maple obscuring an occasional apple tree, the time when leaves fall here and there, now and then, despite absence of wind. It is their time.

I aligned rocks, selecting larger ones to begin the base. Ten-thousand-year-old glacial detritus, they are primarily a collection of granite and mud rock, a catch-all phrase for mongrel stone formed in millennia past by intense pressure and heat. These rocks attained their present form by being chipped from bedrock by glaciers, then ground, worn, pulverized and finally abandoned in the glacial retreat. Ten thousand years of sprouting vegetation, grown to forests, had covered these rocks, lying undisturbed until Anglo-Saxon settlers began filtering into central Vermont three hundred years ago. Then, with persistent industry, these rocks were pulled, hauled and gathered, then placed on boundaries, accumulating into stonewalls. These walls are ubiquitous, indicating far-flung, former farmland. Lichen-covered and crumbling, these forest walls are a direct link to our rural past, as are the walls in my little house, whose stones I lugged, carefully fitting and nudging into place.

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On South Hill Road, over the hill that falls to the far bank of my stream, lie fallen-in cellar holes of a lost town, their stone fences running through the woods, and a lonely graveyard. From gravestone dates can be discerned the 50- or 60-year lifespan of a mid-19th century village. In that graveyard lies Erastus Worthen, whose stone declares, “Co. B 2nd Vt Wounded Battle of Wilderness.” The date of his death is obstructed by the repaired crack in his stone. In neighboring Pittsfield’s cemetery lies Darius Rannay, “Co. A 16th Vt.” In Stockbridge’s Maplewood Cemetery, on the far side of the common, lies William A. Walker, “Co. A 16th Reg Vt Vols.”

With altruistic as well as naïve understanding of what lay ahead, Stockbridgers joined men from adjacent towns to form Company A of the 16th Regiment of the Volunteer Militia of the State of Vermont. Under Colonel Wheelock Veazey they mustered in Bethel, then traveled to Bennington where they joined fellow companies of the 16th Vermont. On October 23, 1862, full of excitement, anticipation, and perhaps overconfidence, raw recruits boarded railroad cars that delivered them to the Grand Army of the Republic, where their first orders were to proceed toward a small town in rural Pennsylvania.

NEXT WEEK, PART TWO: GETTYSBURG