Call this part one of: “The Rock House.”
I’ll start with stuff I had found and copied years ago that now has been digitized within the last year. I walked up there a few days ago, without a camera, with that cultural landscape thought in my head. The newest components are ATV tracks and those little plastic bags one associates with crack cocaine, Blue Moon White Ale bottles with orange slices in them, and a hemlock brush screen across the entrance of “Leather Man’s Cave.”
I think the first time I was ever there was 1970 or so, when we used to camp in one of the many other “caves” up there, known collectively as the Leather Man Caves. My school vacations were spent camping in “Chimney Cave.” Identifying the names of each cave (with help at one point from Carol Hanny – see http://www.skyweb.net/~channy/index.html and http://www.skyweb.net/~channy/leatherman.html in particular), led to the puzzle of what to call the big rock that isn’t a rock shelter or a cave – and isn’t the Rock House pictured below – which is actually the entrance to but not the cave known as Chimney Cave. The excerpt below was very interesting – and gets more interesting the more you look at – or the more I look at it, through the lens of Turtle Vision:
The Rock House
From
The Town and City of Waterbury, Connecticut
By Sarah Johnson Prichard
Vol. 1 by Sarah J. Prichard and others; v. 2 and 3 ed. by J. Anderson, with the assistance of Anna L. Ward.Published 1896 The Price and Lee company
I’ll start with stuff I had found and copied years ago that now has been digitized within the last year. I walked up there a few days ago, without a camera, with that cultural landscape thought in my head. The newest components are ATV tracks and those little plastic bags one associates with crack cocaine, Blue Moon White Ale bottles with orange slices in them, and a hemlock brush screen across the entrance of “Leather Man’s Cave.”
I think the first time I was ever there was 1970 or so, when we used to camp in one of the many other “caves” up there, known collectively as the Leather Man Caves. My school vacations were spent camping in “Chimney Cave.” Identifying the names of each cave (with help at one point from Carol Hanny – see http://www.skyweb.net/~channy/index.html and http://www.skyweb.net/~channy/leatherman.html in particular), led to the puzzle of what to call the big rock that isn’t a rock shelter or a cave – and isn’t the Rock House pictured below – which is actually the entrance to but not the cave known as Chimney Cave. The excerpt below was very interesting – and gets more interesting the more you look at – or the more I look at it, through the lens of Turtle Vision:
The Rock House
From
The Town and City of Waterbury, Connecticut
By Sarah Johnson Prichard
Vol. 1 by Sarah J. Prichard and others; v. 2 and 3 ed. by J. Anderson, with the assistance of Anna L. Ward.Published 1896 The Price and Lee company
But in the same history, you'll find:
Walking the Mattatuck Trail, this description fits in with Leather Man Caves - or the Old Hunting Caves. The Leather Man was camping in old rockshelter sites, each about a days walk from each other.
And I think that "Mantoe" is most likely a form of the word "Manitou."
So I'll take some pix of what I designate as "Rock House,” possibly a shortened form of "Manitou's House Rocks."
No comments:
Post a Comment