Rt 16 Ossipee NH

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.