Rob Sirois writes:
Last spring on my way to the NEARA Meeting I thought I had seen
something next to the road in Ossipee, New Hampshire. It was on Route 16
a few hundred feet north of a furniture store well known in that area. I
had an opportunity on Friday to take the hour long drive to do a short
investigation. Two structures could be seen atop a small knoll next to
the road. One was a boulder with a pile built onto it and the other a
split boulder filled with rocks. Both showed some damage from the past
widening of Route16.
On top of the knoll, not far from the two
structures is a small family cemetery which has signs of still being
looked after.
I looked about for more and found another boulder with
some rocks on top of it. Deeper into the woods were what could have been
mounds or just rock dumps. Some had brick tossed onto them, others look
as if kids had dug into them to build “forts”; nearby were some small
well shaped rock piles.
On the way back to the truck I crossed a small
swamp and made my way to a rock wall that I knew lead back to the road.
Just on the other side of that wall was a lozenge shaped mound about
four or five feet high, twenty feet long and ten or so feet wide. It was
hard to get a good picture of it because of the thick growth of young
trees. It had something of ring of larger stones approximately the size
of breadboxes along the outside and in-filled with smaller stones.
Roughly oriented from north to south; the southern end was the highest
point in spite of a hollow depression in it. The mound had taken some
abuse from some recent logging activity and judging from the remnants of
a parlor stove and other debris; it was used as a dump.
A few miles up
the road is the Indian Mound Golf Course. The mound itself is an
unassuming hill near the 13th fairway. It once contained a body with
concentric burials radiating out from it. Also in this area was a Native
American Fort at what is now called Bear Camp. I’m sure that there’s
more to be found in the Ossipee Valley Area.
2 comments :
My family has a summer home not far from where Rob found these fascinating stone features beside Rt. 16, and I had seen and photographed several of them seven years ago. But I didn't wander far from the highway, and missed seeing what Rob found. Route 16 was an Indian trail hundreds of years ago, so one would expect to find stonework scattered along it.
I’m from ossipee and can provide proof of what all the rock piles mean!! Email me kassyandds@icloud.com
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