The decade of the 1790s when this apple tree made its start was significant for this region in Maine. In a detailed history of the settlement of Weld (Early Settlers of Weld), E. J. Foster wrote of this area as a basin that is “formed by the surrounding mountains” and that was “little known except to hunters until the year 1782 when Dummer [Sewall] and his brother Henry Sewall set out from Bath, Maine, in March [when they could travel on the crust of winter snow] to survey the country from the Kennebec river to the Connecticut. In their exploration [the Sewalls and the party traveling with them] crossed this valley [and]—pronounced the land to be good quality and worthy of cultivation. They discovered a pond about six miles long, near which they found several traps; and on a tree was cut the name ‘Thos. Webb.’ This name they therefore gave to the pond, and also the river, which was its outlet into the Androscoggin.”
Webb Lake is about five kilometers from where I was excavating the aforementioned cellar hole, which is seventy-five meters from the remains of the old apple tree.
The eighty-five-square-kilometer area by this “pond,” after being surveyed, was later called “No. 5” or “the settlement.” In 1816 it was incorporated as the 214th town of the state of Maine and named Weld, which now has a store, post office, and most recently (2010) a coffee bar with Internet access. As a teenager, I used to go to the square dances at the Weld town hall, where Rod Linnell was the caller every Friday night in the summer when I worked peeling potatoes and washing dishes at the boys’ camp, Camp Kawanhee, at the edge of Webb Lake (i.e., “pond”). The village of Weld is an easy jog down the steep hill from the remains of the old apple tree and my home camp and clearing.
Nathaniel Kittredge, the first acknowledged settler of the Weld area, arrived in the spring of 1799 to “fell trees, and burn and clear a few acres,” and to erect a log house. The following year he brought his family, and in that same year Caleb Holt, the second settler, came and followed the same pattern. Walking in on the snow crust, he arrived in March and “planted the first [apple] orchard in town, and made the first cider in the fall of 1829.” These historic dates, as I will show later, are relevant to the history of the old apple tree, and ultimately that of the homestead where it grew.
Cutting the wood from the tree and counting the growth rings had revealed the tree’s time in the human historical context. The ecological context of where it had grown up was clear from a glance: the two dead stubs a meter from the ground, the remains of two huge laterally spreading limbs. This was proof positive that the tree started to grow on cleared land! But now comes the kicker: how could there have been cleared land up here on this steep hill over two centuries ago, presumably a decade before the first settler, Nathaniel Kittredge, arrived and “burned and cleared a few acres”? Ten years is well within a margin of error concerning the tree’s origins, except that the hill where the apple tree grew would not have been settled until much later than 1799, when Kittredge arrived.
The European pioneers who came after this, to seek better land after the good, more accessible ground had been taken, built their cabins and grew their crops in the bottomland along the Androscoggin River valley, and along tributary streams, and then they came to the shores of lakes. They needed land where the soil was rich and deep and where they had access to drinking water, fish for fertilizer and food, and waterways for travel. The tops of these steep, thickly forested hills with their glacially scarred ledges and repositories of glacial till of jumbled rocks required backbreaking labor of men and oxen to clear before cattle could graze and crops could be planted. There was no water on this hill where the apple tree had grown, unless the settlers dug a very deep well. The huge stone walls near it are but one reminder of the hard work of site preparation required to live up here. Some individual rocks in the impressive stone wall weigh tens to hundreds of kilograms, and perhaps tons.
Asa Adams was likely the original settler of this hill farm; there is no record of anyone having lived here before. His daughter Flora was born on the property in 1858, after the Adamses had occupied it since around 1830. So the old apple tree should have been a mature tree of forty years then. Flora married James Kendall York, who came from a nearby farm; she stayed on the farm where she was born and together the couple had nine children (seven surviving). The hill then became known as York rather than Adams Hill.
When I purchased most of the property in 1977, it was uninhabited and had been left idle for nearly a half-century, although some of the Adams and York families had continued to come up in the summers until at least 1929 to pasture their cattle. Around 1930 the house and two barns of the then-York/Adams farm burned. The fields then started to be reclaimed by forest, and twenty-five years later Phil Potter, my Maine woods mentor, brought me here when I was a teenager. We hunted grouse and deer in the abandoned overgrowing fields and apple orchards that Flora and James Kendall York had planted to raise the Ben Davis variety of apples. These were “good keepers” that could be packed into barrels with straw and carted down the hill by horse and wagon to the railroad station by the town of Wilton. From there they were transported to Boston and put on a sailing ship to England. Generations of the York family have told and still tell how old Kendall was proud of his apples and would graft up to five different varieties onto one tree.
The birth date of around 1790 that I determined for the old apple tree by the old York homestead was, as I have mentioned, extremely puzzling, because this was about a half-century before the estimated time their orchard was planted, and because the tree’s hefty trunk with two thick branches reaching laterally was proof that there was cleared ground here over two centuries ago. But how could there have been cleared land forty years before 1830, when the first settlers—who would have settled the rocky hills last—reputedly came up to the Weld area?
The question nagged, and then I took note of another peculiarity of this tree: it was adjacent to a large pile of rocks right where two stone walls intersected. The remnants of the farm’s orchard trees, on the other hand, were all at least forty years younger and grew on what had been ground cleared of rocks, and not one next to a stone wall. Only this tree grew precisely where four large stone walls converged, next to a space that was left on one side of the crossed walls where a team of oxen would have been able to pull their sledge through. The spot where the tree grew therefore looked as though it marked a central and likely well-traveled place in a clearing. But where might the seed or seedling of this grand tree have come from?
Various artifacts that became exposed after digging in the soil near the homestead of the Adams/York family
The new settlers came inland from the coast. They spread out into the nearby hills and made their homes there. Vincent York, who wrote a historical account of this area titled The Sandy River and Its Valley, quotes historian William Allen’s formula in his History of Norridgewock: Comprising Memorials of the Aboriginal Inhabitants (1846) of how the local settlers made their homes there: “[First] year, cut down trees on five or six acres, and burn ground over in preparation for planting; second year, after planting is done, build log home, cut more trees, move family in before the harvest; third year, build small barn, increase stock; fourth year, raise English hay, rye, wheat, and corn and begin living more comfortably; fifth year, clear more land, increase flocks and herds; sixth year, start pulling stumps, and preparing land for the plough; seventh year, build self framed house if you can.” He further noted, “A man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon the thick trees.”
The pioneers who planted apple trees soon after they settled near Webb Lake a few kilometers below the Adams site had come up along the Androscoggin River from the Atlantic coast, and they would have cleared land in an upward and outward direction. They routinely used fire as well as axes to make their fields and farms. There were likely forest fires; there is charcoal under the superficial layers of soil in many places on York Hill, a hint of how the clearing was created. I doubt that Johnny Appleseed came up here, though. But bear
s were plentiful, and they would have raided apple trees then, as they routinely do now. They would have spread apple seeds in their scat and would have been inadvertent apple tree planters.
Bears, wolves, and ravens were probably so ubiquitous then that few people would have bothered to mention them, although one bear encounter is recorded in Foster’s early historical account: Abel Fisk, while coming to the settlement in the autumn of 1808, “got lost in the bog at Alder brook” (a fifteen-minute walk downhill from the farm site and my camp), where he also “lost” one of the two horses pulling his wagon. A few days later Benjamin Houghton (for whom Houghton Ledges, a ridge nearby, is now named) “encountered a white-faced bear feeding on the flesh of the horse.” There are still bears here and they routinely drop apple seeds.
If the old tree originated from one of those bear-planted seeds on burned land, then, when the lower valleys became settled and Asa Adams and other people came up into the hills with their oxen in the 1830s, they could have found a mature apple tree. They would have been surprised and delighted to see it as a “sign” of home, a good omen, and therefore an inspiration to plant their orchard nearby. Then, when they were starting to clear the land, using “cattle” (oxen) to drag countless tons of rocks on their sledge, they may have gravitated toward that tree. It offered shade in the summer and fruit in September. Is that why the now-massive stone walls radiate from that spot in four directions?
The tree may have told me as much as it could, and despite the questions about the history of this homestead, I thought no more about it because there seemed to be no way to get answers. But then, by a strange coincidence, it reemerged into consideration.
On a tip from Anne Agan, who has deep connections to the York clan, I talked in 2011 with (the now-deceased) Dr. Albert Sawyer, then a ninety-year-old grandson of James Kendall York and Flora (Adams) York. Sawyer, a retired chemistry professor from the University of New Hampshire, was living in Durham, New Hampshire. He remembered being on York Hill as a child. His hobby was genealogical research of the York family, and he had traced the clan back to various royal personages in Europe, including Charlemagne.
The long and complex genealogy, as such, didn’t greatly surprise or interest me. It was remote. But then I was invited (and went) to the annual York Family Reunion in nearby Wilton, Maine, where the old gentleman showed me some dreamy, grainy photographs of York Hill dating back a century. They had been taken by his mother, Helen York. Now I was excited.
Helen, one of the seven surviving children of James Kendall York and Flora Ella (Adams), was born on York Hill and for a while (1916–17) taught in the nearby one-room schoolhouse at the foot of it. At the time there was, close to the schoolhouse, a small community of workers at a small sawmill, Hildreth’s Mill. It had been set up to make lumber of the tall pines harvested upstream along Alder Brook. The stone foundation of a dam built to use the water to generate power to run the saws still remains. The lake created by the dam is gone, but the brook is back.
Helen had owned one of the first Kodak box cameras (issued circa 1910), and one of her several pictures, labeled “Kendall York Home in the Plantation with Mount Blue in the Background,” shows three persons herding at least twenty cattle and a white horse on a bald overgrazed hill in front of a farmstead. I would hardly have recognized the site as York Hill, were it not for the unmistakable shape of Mount Blue in the background. The artifacts and the stone foundations where I have dug previously pinpointed the locations of the buildings, so I knew almost the precise spot from where the picture was taken. Another picture from about 1911–15 shows Helen’s parents standing stiffly with the clearly recognizable profile of the Gleason Mountain–Kinney’s Head Hill in the background, in front of the then-new apple orchard. But the third picture yielded a total surprise to me, one that nobody else would likely have been in a position to care about, or appreciate. This picture is of Helen herself, and it was simply and inauspiciously labeled by Albert Sawyer: “Helen York: Reading on a Rock Wall at Home.” For me it was not about Helen as such, or the book she was reading, the long white dress she was wearing, or her attractive face and hair. It was all about the tree behind her, and what she was sitting on.
The tree in the picture was an apple tree, and given the date of the picture, it was an unusually large one. But mostly what caught my eye were its two thick and low lateral branches. They looked familiar—they seemed exactly placed to match the distinctive form of that huge apple tree I had known while it was still barely hanging on. Could this be the same tree? But I was indulging in wishful thinking; there was no way I could prove my conjecture. Instead, I tried to visualize the century-old scene when the picture was taken.
I “see” a Fourth of July when the York clan, as they had every year in those years, met for their traditional picnic on “The Ledges”—an overlook a few hundred meters above the house site that afforded a grand view down to Webb Lake and Tumbledown and Jackson mountains. Helen had dressed up in her “Sunday best” in anticipation of this event, and she and her four sisters had bantered with her mother, Flora, as they cooked the Sunday meal. The day before they had done the washing, which they hung on a long line (that is seen faintly in the background in Helen’s other photograph of the farm itself). After the cooking, and after the women had dressed up, the sun was coming up over the ridgeline of Gleason Mountain and shining on their two apple orchards and the pasture and two hay fields. It was a morning for celebrating, and Helen admired the farm buildings—the house with attached shed and two barns next to it—and saw her father, Kendall, and two of her brothers in front of the house with the cattle and the white horse that pulled their carriage when they traveled down to the village of Weld by the lake. Mount Blue showed tall and clear to the north that day. Helen got out her camera and took pictures, and her mother suggested that she take one of her daughter as well. Helen was hesitant; she didn’t like to be photographed standing stiffly and staring straight into the camera. She had a better idea. She, the schoolteacher, would hold a book, and she would sit on the stone wall in the shade of their big apple tree and show her mother how to hold and click the shutter of this new wonder, the camera.
With these fanciful ruminations in my mind, the “Rock Wall” Helen York was sitting on suddenly emerged as a possible key to deciphering the past. I needed to know which stone wall she was sitting on. While creating a map of the farm years earlier, I had made an inventory of the three kilometers of rock walls. There was only one chance in about two thousand that I could pick the one-meter section of stone wall she was sitting on. Without knowing which side of the wall she was sitting on, it would be doubly difficult to find that spot by random chance.
The photo showed nothing in focus by way of background and behind the tree, and so it gave no clue to the photographer’s position. I guessed, though, that the picture might have been taken away from the sun and toward the buildings. If so, I might be able to identify the spot where she sat, if I could recognize the rocks. Rocks are routinely removed or fall from stone walls, but the lower rocks could hardly have shifted, and each one has its own individual shape and relation one to another. It was a reality that at that same time concerned me, because I was rebuilding the foundations of the old Adams/York homestead.
With a print of the picture of Helen “Reading on a Rock Wall at Home” in my hand, I stood where I imagined her photographer had stood facing Helen and the old apple tree. I knelt down, pretending to hold an imaginary camera, and noticed where the surfaces of two rocks fit together at an angle of about forty-five degrees. There was an oval opening in the center of that cleft. I then looked down at the century-old photograph. Helen York had, a century earlier, sat next to that cleft!
I set my chain saw as a stand-in for her onto the stone wall in front of the old tree remnants, positioned myself so I was facing where the old homestead once stood, and snapped a picture. Later, when I set the two photographs side by side, I was stunned—the same distinctly shaped and angled arrangement of r
ocks below Helen’s right hand was repeated in my photograph. Then other rocks around them fell into the same matching pattern (except that the topmost layer of the stone wall was now missing). The spot where she had sat was fifty paces (seventy-five meters) from the farmstead barn. From the shadow of a sharp corner of one rock onto the rock below, I could also deduce that the photograph was taken late in the morning.
I had proof that the picture of Helen York was also a photograph of that now-dead old apple tree. I had found a connection between the tree, its past, and my present life on the Hill, my home. The past clicked up against the present with a resounding whomp to make the link in the long chain that reached back to the first settlers of this area, to those who made American history. I realized that home is where there are both knowledge of the past and hopes and plans for the future. Home is therefore always something in the making through shared experiences that linger in the imagination.
The capacity to have memories and emotions is not unique to us. We have that ability in common with every bird and probably every mammal. What differs are their specific sensations, to which we are not privy, and their expressions of them that are sometimes difficult to interpret. Birds express emotions by vocalizations. I had seen possible memory and emotion in a blue-headed vireo that nested the last May in a balsam fir tree thirty meters from my cabin and sang extraordinarily the previous November before starting its migration. It likely had found a place that appealed and was fixing it in its memory, and yearning brought it back come spring when one (or it) nested there. The loon that kept visiting the lake a kilometer or so down the road came to know it and its occupants. Its memories of home returned it from out in the Atlantic Ocean when the days were getting longer again, and they would help it return to specifically this place. And just so, when I look across the field to that old apple tree stump that will soon be no longer, I know that the memory of it will be with me still, and attached to it will be the history of this Hill, this homestead. It will stay, as a deep and private thing.
The Homing Instinct Page 23