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By Root 451 0

wave was grass covered and with a big willow tree near the crest. I guessed the tree must have been dooryard shade at some point in the past, but of course now there was no longer a door nor a yard, though there was a foundation hole lined with rocks and choked with raspberry bushes. The spot offered a lovely prospect, the roll of the meadow, the bend of the tree, the rise and fall of the hills to the west—all of this gave the entire scene a feeling of rhythm and sway. Farther back from the road, to what I assumed would have been the view from the rear of the old house, poplar trees had filled in the meadow and hay fields, and below it to the left—the north—the land sloped toward Cold Brook, which gurgled now as it must have then, cold and clear over smooth stones.

One hundred years ago—even fifty years ago—the land around the homestead would have been open for a half mile or more in every direction before it hit a line of trees, and a person standing in the yard on a summer day like the ones I was experiencing each morning would have seen nearly a dozen other small houses and farms in the intervale and among the cleared hills. Stone walls would have threaded the open land with sheep grazing the grass-and-rock hillsides. It might as well have been the Cotswolds except for the occasional wolf or moose that wandered down from the north. Back further in time, two hundred years ago, there would have been yet another landscape—dark and unbroken forest except for those places of natural streamside meadows or small patches that had been opened to the light by the earliest settlers, who had come up from the towns around Boston, either directly or by way of Portland or the towns of New Hampshire’s Merrimac River valley.

Joseph Adams was one of those early settlers. In 1823, he bought a hundred acres from Mary Batchelder, the widow of Josiah Batchelder of nearby Fryeburg and Boston. Batchelder had received a grant of 28,822 acres from the Massachusetts General Court, for the price of seventeen cents an acre. Batchelder’s grant stretched from the New Hampshire border nearly to Kezar Lake. Massachusetts then was still selling its frontier lands to ease its debts, piled up from the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Joseph’s purchase, which required a mortgage from Mrs. Batchelder, included not only the homestead knoll but my hillside across from the pond. If Joseph followed the pattern of other settlers, he would have cleared the land by first setting fire to it, then pulling the stumps with oxen and chains and lugging the piglet-sized stones that came up out of the ground to piles in his fields, or forming them into the walls that bordered them. The work would have been ferociously hard, and Joseph likely added game to his diet of mutton and beans, corn and root vegetables. There would have been an abundance of bear, deer and even woodland caribou in the vast forest of the north country. He undoubtedly planted apple trees so he would eventually have had cider, and, also no doubt, some of that cider would have been encouraged to ferment so Joseph could enjoy a pleasant buzz as the snow piled high outside his windowsills and he rested his tired bones in front of a blazing fire. Surely some of the gnarled old trees I have encountered in my walks among the hills sprouted from seeds produced by Joseph’s trees and carried into the woods in the stomachs of deer and birds.

By 1830, Joseph was married to Mary Robinson. According to census records, there were seven people in his household: Joseph and Mary, and at least four of the others were their children. The identity of the seventh is not clear; perhaps it was a relative who was taken in, or maybe another child. Andrew Jackson was president in 1830, and the tremors that soon would cleave the nation were already being felt. The debate over a state’s right to nullify federal law emerged in the Senate that year, and Maine had been admitted to the Union as a free state eight years earlier under a compromise that allowed slavery in Missouri. President Jackson was busy then removing the