Norman

Pomfret, VT, Odds and Ends

Over the years, I've taken many hikes to sites in Vermont with the late Ernie Clifford, who was my main contact in that beautiful and fascinating state.  Rochester was my main focus, but Ernie also showed me many sites in Pomfret, the town of his youth.  

One warm July day in 2006, he took me to a site he had recently shown to a group from NEARA. As we walked along an old country path, we came upon a break or gateway in the wall, and leaning against an end part of the wall was a small standing or manitou stone, which Ernie had not noticed before.  

End view of wall in previous image

Because I feel that small standing stones often mark Indian constructions, whether they be walls or stone mounds, I stopped to study the gateway area between the walls  more carefully.  In the middle I saw a small quartz stone poking through the leaf debris, and then I began to uncover more stones, which turned out to be a circle, or perhaps an oblong, about a meter across.  Many of the stones in the circle were quartz.

Because of this discovery, and the fact that a standing stone was found leaning against the end portion of he wall, I concluded that the wall was probably Indian.  In a recent article by Ernie in the NEARA Journal, he concluded that single width stone walls in Pomfret, VT, that he studied were Indian, and this example would fit that category.

View of the end portion of the other wall

Given the fact that the wall is fairly straight, I've often wondered if this wall could have been built by Indians during the period when Vermont was beginning to be settled by Europeans in the latter half of the eighteenth century.