Thursday, June 13, 2013

Veteran's Memorial Park

This is possibly a little piece of a boulder row on a stretch of a bedrock outcrop in a park on Nova Scotia Hill Road in Watertown CT. It stops abruptly right here, drilled, blasted and bulldozed away to to install a restroom facility, sometime after the early 1970's when my high school biology class collected "specimens" in the then undeveloped park. 
A Brief Early History of Watertown:
"More than 210 years ago the area that is now Watertown belonged to the local Paugasuck Indians. But in 1684, Thomas Judd and 35 other proprietors bought the land from the Indians and Town history began. Around 1700, Obadiah Richards settled in the area of Upper Middlebury Road, and John Scott on Nova Scotia Hill Road. By 1710 they both had left for safer places..." 
Safer places? Well, there's many a tale about people with the last name Scott, a confusion of Johns and Jonathans and even a Joseph Scott, almost all of them captured, tortured and killed by Indians at least once or twice. And there's a Rock Pile or Stone Mound discovered by a couple friends and former classmates of mine associated with the story: http://www.flickr.com/photos/53003768@N06/8402283121/in/photostream/

"In 1710, a party of Indians, or French and Indians, made a visit to Simsbury and Waterbury. In the south part of what is now Plymouth, they killed a man named Holt. (He may have been a transient person, or a hunter from another town.) The place is called Mount Holt, from the circumstance of the massacre. It is a spur of Mount Toby. About the same time, some Indians came down from Canada, on their customary errand, and ascended a hill, or mountain, on the west side of the river, opposite Mount Taylor, to reconnoitre. They saw Jonathan Scott seated under a large oak tree, in Hancock's Meadow, eating his dinner, with his two sons, aged fourteen and eleven, at a little distance. The Indians approached stealthily, keeping in a line with the tree and Mr. Scott. In this way they reached him unperceived and made him prisoner. The boys took to their heels; but the father, in order to save his own life, which he was given to understand would be taken if he refused, recalled his sons. Thus the three were captured. The Indians then retraced their steps rapidly with their prizes, having taken the precaution to cut off Scott's right thumb, in order to cripple him if he should make resistance...After the peace, Jonathan Scott, with his eldest son, Jonathan, returned to Waterbury. The younger son, John, became accustomed to savage life, preferred it, and never returned. This preference, under similar circumstances, is not a solitary instance. White people who have been a long time with the Indians, particularly if their acquaintance began in childhood, very generally become attached to them and their mode of living. It is far easier to make a savage out of, than into, a civilized man.*"
* See Hutehinson's History of Massachusetts, II, p. 128, note.
This version of the story is from: http://books.google.com/books?output=text&id=cUMOAAAAIAAJ&jtp=105

The Park has lots of interesting stone rows like the boulder row. In a few minutes of wandering I came across a zig zag row and some linear rows (more of which I've found  in various places there before - always with no camera, always in summer when the undergrowth was thick), but I did find a "cobbles on boulder pile" in a swampy spot in between the athletic fields and paved walking paths that are all only "slightly less than swampy." How the stone rows might be explained as field clearing in such a wet place eludes me. Guys with clipboards always seem to show up when I'm there, yesterday looking at standing water on and around the gravel fill on the edge of a basketball court just below the rest rooms by the blast damaged outcrop (that I was hoping was connected more to the water table than to the restroom as the source of the problem).
So here's the "cobbles on boulder:"
I thought a couple might be "testudinate:"
The best example of what I think might be a carapace stone with a notch for a now missing head stone:





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