Month: May 2015

Interesting article here on The Magna Carta – it’s 8 century anniversary this year, its impact and suggestions of what it means.  I think it is interesting and intrinsic about The Magna Carta that, while the article does not mention it, ideas are like viruses – once you catch an idea, it doesn’t go away and it propagates.  Originally published in the Wall Street Journal by Daniel Hannan

Magna Carta: eight centuries of liberty
http://on.wsj.com/1d3IyFk

Mr. Hannan is a British member of the European Parliament for the Conservative Party, a columnist for the Washington Examiner and the author of “Inventing Freedom: How the English-speaking Peoples Made the Modern World.”

Invasive plants were coming back after being cleared by John Bakewell of Carlisle Arboriculture.  So I decided to take over my dad’s scythe with the brush blade to clear stuff on the other side of the silt barriers (since it would be hard to get a tractor mower over there).

Part of the deal John worked out with the Kimball’s was that I would keep clear the invasive plants on the land behind the barn – in exchange for keeping all the junk plants under control and taking the white pines on the property line down.  We are going to put some new trees (5 or so I believe) after everything is done.

I like using the scythe but I am not up to the standard of these guys.

BEFORE picture

MIDWAY through mowing

AFTER

Today, Sunday, we went over to the building site with brooms and a bucket for splashing water around – to try and make the rock Gneiss a bit more camera friendly.  Along the driveway we achieved great success – everywhere else – not so much.  The good pictures below.

I also broke out the scrub brush to start prepping boats for the 2015 summer season.  Unfortunately, I discovered that Dad’s hi-performance single shell has started to delaminate along the joint between the deck and hull – in several places.  One split was over 2 feet long.  Interest was low in rowing in it, now the rot may be enough to consider it as a total write off.

My mom’s shell is a Maas Aero (if i recall correctly), made in Richmond California, across the bay from San Francisco  🙂   It is a really sweet boat – very handy, stable but still fast and efficient.  Just a lot of fun.  That boat is in great shape still.

So good stuff – more to do – but a good start in advance of Memorial Day!

I was reading the excellent Carlisle:  Its History and Heritage by Ruth Chamberlin Wilkins and came across the founding of the mill on my property on Bedford Road, Carlisle.  I have excerpted it below by hand.

Product Details (Amazon.com) 

• Unknown Binding: 481 pages
• Publisher: Carlisle Historical Society; 1st edition (1976)
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0006CO8UA

Page 28

“Robert Blood had a sawmill in 1660 on Ministerial Brook, on land now owned by Richard B. Bates, 341 Bedford Road.  [the mill site now owned by me – Nicholas Fohl –  with the main Bates property belonging to the Kimball family who continue to operate the Bates – now Kimball’s Ice Cream stand].  John Green, who bought the property in 1736, continued to operate a mill there, as did still later generations of the Green family.  In the late 1800’s, Mr Benjamin F. Blaisdell ran a saw and hoop mill there.  He died in 1901, but the mill was operated as late as January 31^st, 1903.  At that time, the mill, then operated by Edgar I. Blaisdell, was burned by a fire which started from a small stove during the lunch hour, when the men were away.  Probably not many remember the mill when it was in operation.  However, there are those now who remember skating on the then widely flooded meadows back of the mill, an area which at that time extended to East Street.”

She lists several mills throughout town on Spencer Brook, Concord Street, Great Brook, Lowell Street, East Street and Page Brook (on Brook and Maple streets).  I had never seen prior to reading this passage that Page’s Brook at my location also had the name of Ministerial Brook – interesting.

On the operation of mills

Page 220

“One of the earliest mills in town was the one located on the Great Brook on Lowell Street at the foot of the hill beyond the Farnham Smith residence (now Great Brook State Park) which had been the site of the fulling mill in the area for the finishing of homespun cloth.  Following that, its use was continued for other purposes.  In 1840, Henry Hoar had a Wheelwright and Paint Shop there, and after his death in 1842, William Green continued it for the same use.

The next owner, Mr. Elmon B. Rose, remodeled the shop for a hoop mill where he made birch hoops, nail kegs and similar products.  This shop burned in the fall of 1883.  In January of 1884, the following news item told of its being rebuilt: ‘A new hoop factory has been erected by Mr. Elmon Rose near the site of the one recently burned.  The next day after the fire, and while the old ruins were yet smouldering and smoking, the batters were placed in position for the new building, which has been gradually progressing day by day, and in less than a month after the fire, a building of about the same dimensions as the one burned, was completed and the accustomed vocation was being pursued.”

The following quotation about the hoop mills is taken from written recollections of the late James Harry Wilkins, who remembered the mills as a you boy, and particularly that of his uncle, Elmon B. Rose.  ‘In the Eighties and Nineties (1880s, 1890’s) there were four hoop mills in town.  One was on Lowell Street, owned and operated by Elmon Rose and situated at the foot of the hill near the residence of Farnham Smith [at No. 886].  Another on Lowell Street was near the home of Clinton Lahm [at No. 639]  One on Concord Street near Miss Macone’s new house [at No. 896]   and a fourth was on the property of Richard Bates, Bedford Road [at No. 341] , then owned by Benjamin Blaisdell, Sr.

“As the operation of the mills was much the same, the Rose mill on Lowell Road will be used to show how the hoops were made.  A crew of six or eight men were employed.  A part of the crew worked in the woods, cutting the birch poles and getting them to the mill, where three or four men, including the sawyer, work at the mill.  The six or eight horses that were needed to carry on the business of getting the poles from the wood and hauling the hoops to market were stabled in the large barn on the Farnham Smith property, a barn which was built by Mr. Rose.  Previous to acquiring this property, Mr. Rose had lived in a house formerly on the William Palmer place next door, [now the David F. Kitrosser place at 788 Lowell Street] and had used the barn which was then there.

“The poles were unloaded in the mill yard as near as possible to the outside saw that was used to cut the poles into proper lengths before going into the mill.  Inside they would be knotted and made ready for the hoop saw which was a concave saw about the size of an ordinary saucer.  The saw was concaved to allow the sawyer to get around irregularities in the poles.  Extra long hoops required two men, the sawyer and his assistant who stood at the opposite end of the saw bench to pull it through.  When the hoops came off the saw bench they were placed in a rack for bundling, and were made ready for market.

“The product of the Carlisle hoop industry was used largely by the meat packing plants in Somerville, and by the orange growers in Florida, but the use of wire and other forms of metal sounded the death knell of an industry that had meant much to the town down through the years.”

The following advertisement shows that the hoops from the Rose mill were also used for shoe boxes.  On February 22, 1889, an advertisement in the publication called “The Shoe and Leather Reporter” said, “E.B. Rose & Son, of Carlisle, Mass., manufacture strapping hoops for shoe boxes.  When nine feet and over in length, these straps cost at the rate of $1 for each 1,000 feet”

Mr. Rose’s hoop mill, after being abandoned for some years, collapsed in the fall of 1835, and eventually all traces of it were removed.”

My thinking about the prep of the birch and “would be knotted”?  I think what would happen is that the birch would be taken down out in the woods and the branches roughly trimmed on the site.  That would allow for a fairly easy transport and handling for the “outside saw” which trimmed for length.  Once inside, they would more carefully trim the branch stubs off the main trunk?  Interesting stuff and the only explanation of how a hoop mill operated that I have been able to find.

I did a bit of digging for my prior post and when I Google searched for William Koford, I stumbled on the DigitalCommonwealth website.  It is wonderful and pretty well organized considering it appears to be structured via an automated process.

Here is a search of photographs of Carlisle MA on the site.  Below, are a number of photos I found that I had not seen before AND were Koford House at the corner of South Street and West Street Carlisle related.

the origin of these photos is the Wilkins Notebooks.

The Wilkins Notebooks – from DigitalCommonwealth  (also to be found from the Gleason Library site)

Picture caption for above: In the year ending March 1-1867, the town of Carlisle paid C.E. Adams $14.39 for grinding grain

Edited 5/25 for spelling errors, added some update data on photos above, and the photo below of the Cider Mill

Cider mill with fan window on Ricker farm.  Title from volume, page 2.
Picture caption: Erected by Humphrey Prescott.

 

 

I mentioned in this post here  that my parent’s had found some old photos that Alice Koford had taken and given them in the late 1960’s when they purchased the property on South Street in Carlisle.  The photos were taken post WWII but before the property was sold in the estate sale (as I recall, Alice’s mother passed away in 1941 without a will and the siblings were unable to work out the details for over 20 years – so the judge moved the estate into an estate sale.  Ben Benfield outbid Alice by some $15,000 for the full 150 acres and the house.  He broke up the property and sold the house and 5 acres to Alice, 5 acres to my parent’s and the remainder went into various conservation restrictions.  Some was sold to the newly formed Conservation Foundation (between our property and the Concord town line and Spencer Brook) and across Westford road up the hill along West Street – a conservation restriction)

Anyway – yesterday (Saturday) I took a camera tried to replicate the pictures as of present day.  That turned out to be a bit of a challenge for two reasons – first, that the apparent aspect ratio and lens field of view that Alice used was a bit different than what I have today.  I got pretty close though.  Secondly – traffic on a Saturday here is now significantly different than back then – standing in the middle of the street takes a bit more situational awareness and agility than I suspect that Alice needed to use during the first shots!  (for my brothers, this should be obvious, since we used to play up and around the street and the traffic in the ’70’s was pretty meagre compared today – and that had to be 20+ years after the original photos were taken.

So – first up – the original picture of the barn at the top of our present driveway.  Note a couple of things

1. The large elm tree on the left of the original picture was still alive when the property was purchased.  My mom says that all the elms on the property (4 large ones) all became stricken with Dutch Elm disease shortly there after and died.  The future stump of the elm became the left hand corner of our present drive way (give or take) – I recall it making left turns out of the driveway onto South Street to be a bit of a hassle.
2. Some rocks in the stone wall are recognizable from both pictures
3. It is unclear if the telephone pole in the photos is the same pole or not?  I am pretty sure it is NOT because the square relief cut on the earlier photo appears to be missing on the current pole.  So it is difficult to figure out the distances from the edge of the road on that side.  I seem to recall as a teen, that South Street was lower vs the grass than either photos show – because mowing around the pole was a bit tricky due to height differences.  Not sure how much that was or accurate that memory is
4. the corner of the main stone wall currently is a 12’x12′ approximate square arrangement of stones.  It is difficult to say if that is present or not?
5. The barn was gone when my parents bought the property.  My mom had the driveway guys fill in the cellar hole and foundation of the barn so we little kids would not fall into it.
6. on the right hand side of the older picture is a hen house type structure (long and narrow and parallel to the present driveway.  My Mom recalls it containing a large stack of Wellesey College Alumni magazines along with other trash.  Everyone at the time thought that was very odd.
7. New Picture stuff – the big tan rock?  that was buried and in the town ‘taking’ along the road and was a regular obstacle to snow plows and cars hitting it and breaking things – the town got sick of it sticking up so they pulled it out.  My dad convinced them to just move it onto our property since it was neat.
8. New Picture – Additional.  This shows the backside of the area around the telephone pole because the squared stone work is not very visible in my current photo.

The old Koford House, previous prior to that, the old Davis House.  Read more from the Wilkins Books online at the Gleason Public Library website for descriptions of this house that dates back to 1689 and other old houses in Carlisle, MA

A few things to note between old and new.

1. Alice Koford told me that she planted a number of the trees along South Street and at the corner when she was a kid to block noise from the chickens that were on the old Hutchinsons/Larson’s property (next to our parent’s property)
2. Simon Davis Jr.  built the house originally. John Davis lived there and practiced medicine.  Samuel Davis lived there for some time.  It appears that the Hutchinson’s owned it briefly (based on map).  This was sold to William Farrar (son of Steven Farrar and Lucy Davis) and the Hutchinson’s had the house next door (Spencer Brook Farm).  The deeds and documentation are a bit vague.  Ultimately, it was sold in 188o’s to William C Koford.