Building with Stone [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONThe Stones RemainMy dog and I walked the long slopes upcreek from our log house, savoring the last sunlight of first April after a bitter winter and uncertain spring. This is ledge-rock country, limestone-ribbed with scatterings of thin sandstone at certain heights on the slopes; glade country, with a skin of soil over the gray mass of stone, gnarled post oak clumping the hillsides, and thickets devouring the soil along the wet-weather streams.We found the toppled chimney of a settler's cabin. Its drystone ledge sandstone fallen in over the space the house had occupied. No trace of hewn log or beam, of board or nail, and only the barest outline of foundation cornerstones, moss-grown and sunken. IVIost significant, no dump of old cans or broken glass. This cabin fell at a time when nothing was thrown away.A half acre of benchland soil above the creek branch had once been cleared where 18-inch-diameter cedars now towered. No fenceit would have been split rails, long decayed or burned in a woods fire. Up from the fallen stones led the faint trace of a steep wagon road, with stones stacked out of it. No rubber tires could negotiate this hill; it wound up to a limestone ledge and followed around a side draw to climb eventually to Join the old stagecoach road above, itself unused for a hundred years. He would have walked mostly, this pioneer, maybe ridden; in most places the track was far too narrow for any wheels.Seldom is a pioneer homestead so completely erased. We poked around and found a long double row of stones against the hillcaved-in root cellar or smokehouse lower level, both structures vital in the new country. Below the house, in the side draw, wet now with thaw, we found the spring, the precious trickle that made life among the parched glades in the dry rattle of summer possible. The side stream, the branch itself, goes dry before July, even at my house a half mile below. This spring must be, or must have been, year-round.And there are the few stacked stones, heavy in moss, that outline the springhouse. The spring was rocked up to form a pool just within the foundation, but the soil around it has caved in and moved back into the hill. Now only these few stones remain, with the faint song of the trickling water. A path dents the rise to the cabin site, and another across the side draw. That way still lies the little old house that served as a stage stop far up the ridge. Springs are and were few in this country; dimly in my mind those forgotten settlers move up the path, laden with wooden buckets in an ongoing task we could not live with today.?a