Exploring Forgotten Places in New England
This can be filed under the art of getting lost
First… what is a forgotten place?
To me, this barn above is forgotten but I’m sure that the owner knows it’s here but obviously has seen better days. The building is covered by brush and trees. The double doors in front are blocked from use but I believe there was access on the side of the barn. How many years till nature reclaims this building? Will it be lost to memory in the future?
I consider anyplace that I find and It’s not plainly evident as to what it was or who created it, is a forgotten place. What I find most interesting about “forgotten places” is that they are rarely on maps and you discover them quite often by accident when you are looking for something else. They leave you wondering about who or what was there. To me, the who, where, and why are usually brain teasers and to this day I will think back to the places I have found in past travels.
First Forgotten Place – West Hill Covered Bridge
You are probably wondering if Jeff has gone off his rocker? Yes, I have written an article about the Hill West/West Hill Covered Bridge before this and It’s clear that the Hill West covered bridge has not been forgotten. As long as we find them and write about them, are they truly forgotten? The GPS location is 44.86763077265757, -72.64800515989933.
When I first found the West Hill covered bridge it might have qualified as a forgotten place. It was blocked from traffic from both ends and it was clear only the teens who tagged it with paint and snowmobilers were the only ones who visited.
To be honest, I’m not talking about the covered bridge itself, I’m talking about the hidden building next to it. Many years ago (2008) Lisa and I found the Hill West covered bridge (as detailed in my linked article) and in exploring both ends of the bridge and underneath it, we found another building nearby.
This is one of my favorite forgotten things to find, an old building. Sometimes they will have historical markers that tell us who built it and when. most times you will only the building’s foundation and no markers to tell you a story about the place.
Has this ever happened to you? Let me know in the comments.
Second Forgotten Place – Beede Falls
This day, we were in New Hampshire looking for Beede Falls which doubles as a swimming hole in summer for the locals, and the fall colors in… well, fall. To find it you will go to Center Sandwich New Hampshire and take the Sandwich Notch road. On the right after leaving Diamond Ledge Rd and jumping on Sandwich Notch Rd, you may find a small parking lot on the right,
but before that…
During our explorations to find it, we came across a rock wall and stone foundation. But what was more amazing was surrounding the foundation was a garden gone wild. Flowers of all descriptions were bringing in bees and butterflies.
All that was left of the home was the foundation and a rock wall near the road. What really caught our attention was the wild garden that was flourishing in the owner’s absence. At some point in the past, this was obviously the home of somebody who loved to spend time tending their garden.
While Lisa was consulting the map book looking for Beede Falls, (it is not easy to find) I got out to take a closer look at the garden. I could almost feel the presence of the gardener still here. The gardens that were once neatly tended had gone natural. Both wild and cultivated flowers had reclaimed the yard so I couldn’t tell where the yard ended and the garden started. What really caught my eye were the number of monarch butterflies and what I thought was the buzzing of bees. traveling from bloom to bloom.
Then I thought, those were REALLY loud bees when in reality, I was hearing the wingbeats of hummingbirds. This was the first time I had ever seen a hummingbird in person but not the last.
Where is Beede Falls?
Now we have to leave the forgotten garden full of butterflies and hummingbirds and travel up the road a bit further. The parking lot is just on the right with room for several cars. It was September and it hadn’t rained for a week or so and the waterfall that would normally cascade down the face of the rock was a mere trickle. We explored for a little while and I looked for signs of early New England fall color. But this was only September… Click here for a map.
From the parking lot to the waterfall is only 2/10s of a mile and a gentle walk. The surrounding trees are mostly Evergreens so the fall colors will be light but in early September we had the place to ourselves.
So, this piece is light on directions and more about the lucky happenstances that can happen when we are out looking for fall colors. I tell people day in and day out, to not be in such a hurry. Stop and get out of the car because you never know what you will find. I hope you enjoyed these little “lucky” forgotten places
Old Iron Tracks in Ossipee New Hampshire
Another forgotten place might be any of the forgotten railroad tracks that you can find throughout the country. They lead off into a nearby town or Just go off into the distance and fade into the brush. If we go down the tracks what will we see? Where will they go? What will we find?
Forgotten things like this raise so many questions
This one you can find in Ossipee New Hampshire and its actually visible from Route 16 and would have been a connector from Boston and New York in the mid-1800s to the early 1900s. Back when people would take the train from the larger cities to come up to the mountains to get away from the heat of the summer.
What is neat is looking down from Google Earth and you can follow the path of the train tracks as they travel down from Ossipee to Tamworth and points South.
Jeff Foliage Folger
Autumn is a state of mind more than a time of year – Jeff Foliage
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I’m with you, Jeff. I love to discover and photograph abandoned or long forgotten places, buildings, etc. Especially old outbuildings or houses (which I refer to as “ghost houses”). It makes the imagination run wild with what life must have been like there back when it was inhabited. Thanks for sharing this!
I think this sort of thing resonates with most of my readers and I try to show folks what can happen if you get out of the car to explore. Or even get out of the car, go into the general store and talk to the people there. Most times the people there are happy to tell visitors about the little known places that make their town special…
I’m with you, Jeff. I love to discover and photograph abandoned or long forgotten places, buildings, etc. Especially old outbuildings or houses (which I refer to as “ghost houses”). It makes the imagination run wild with what life must have been like there back when it was inhabited. Thanks for sharing this!
I think this sort of thing resonates with most of my readers and I try to show folks what can happen if you get out of the car to explore. Or even get out of the car, go into the general store and talk to the people there. Most times the people there are happy to tell visitors about the little known places that make their town special…
I see what you are talking about in Forgotten Places. To take a picture of what was and now what is makes one think about what it was in its grandeur. The charm and often the mystery of such places in the photo leave my mind wondering in thoughts of the unknown. My husband has followed you for the past few years and now I am too as we just booked airline tickets from Texas to see the beautiful fall foliage you show in your photography and write about. Your videos bring this to life making us want to go and see the beauty of New England. We read Yankee Magazine which too is full of travel ideas in New England. We plan to arrive for two weeks on October 13, 2021. Hopefully ,To just missing the Columbus Day crowds. First to Woodstock, Stowe and Burlington, then across Hwy 112 , the Kancamagus Hwy to Conway. Acadia and Bar Harbor next, down the coast of Maine to Rockport area. Finally to Newport Rhode Island, Narragansett and Mystic before heading back to Dallas, TX. Your photographs, writings and videos certainly will be helpful as we travel celebrating our 55 years of marriage with this trip. We hope the dates we picked will be a good time for foliage viewing and photography. Thank you, for all the time and travels you have done to give us a great amount of information for our trips as well as reading at home.
Well, the dates seem logical to me at this point. We had in 2020 a first in a long time “early” fall color show. Could it happen again? I don’t know but your choices are sound for most years I’ve seen. The only possible slow-down in the colors maybe along the shorelines where the colors arrive last. Sometimes the colors don’t show till November but you will see color during the last week or two of Oct. Remember the fall colors don’t go from 0-60 in 2.4 seconds… They go from green to Peak in 1-2 weeks in any spot you stand.
So where ever you stand if it’s not perfect (*Note, it rarely is) then get back in the car and try someplace else. In 2020 and around 25 October I expected to find really good color in Connecticut, but we got nothing, so we drove up into Massachusetts and still found better color up there rather than in CT… And this started out as an “Early fall color year” but even though it started early it didn’t continue that way… Talk about confusing…
I see what you are talking about in Forgotten Places. To take a picture of what was and now what is makes one think about what it was in its grandeur. The charm and often the mystery of such places in the photo leave my mind wondering in thoughts of the unknown. My husband has followed you for the past few years and now I am too as we just booked airline tickets from Texas to see the beautiful fall foliage you show in your photography and write about. Your videos bring this to life making us want to go and see the beauty of New England. We read Yankee Magazine which too is full of travel ideas in New England. We plan to arrive for two weeks on October 13, 2021. Hopefully ,To just missing the Columbus Day crowds. First to Woodstock, Stowe and Burlington, then across Hwy 112 , the Kancamagus Hwy to Conway. Acadia and Bar Harbor next, down the coast of Maine to Rockport area. Finally to Newport Rhode Island, Narragansett and Mystic before heading back to Dallas, TX. Your photographs, writings and videos certainly will be helpful as we travel celebrating our 55 years of marriage with this trip. We hope the dates we picked will be a good time for foliage viewing and photography. Thank you, for all the time and travels you have done to give us a great amount of information for our trips as well as reading at home.
Well, the dates seem logical to me at this point. We had in 2020 a first in a long time “early” fall color show. Could it happen again? I don’t know but your choices are sound for most years I’ve seen. The only possible slow-down in the colors maybe along the shorelines where the colors arrive last. Sometimes the colors don’t show till November but you will see color during the last week or two of Oct. Remember the fall colors don’t go from 0-60 in 2.4 seconds… They go from green to Peak in 1-2 weeks in any spot you stand.
So where ever you stand if it’s not perfect (*Note, it rarely is) then get back in the car and try someplace else. In 2020 and around 25 October I expected to find really good color in Connecticut, but we got nothing, so we drove up into Massachusetts and still found better color up there rather than in CT… And this started out as an “Early fall color year” but even though it started early it didn’t continue that way… Talk about confusing…