Local history set in stone
New book unearths facts, stories about the rocks that surround us
When you travel around New England now and again, it is safe to say you will see plenty of rocks and rocky places.
Your travels might take you to New Hampshire to see the high granite peaks of the White Mountains, or maybe you will just stop in at one of Rhode Island’s natural spots like Lincoln Woods and take in all the boulders strewn about.
But just looking at New England’s rocks may not be enough for some. They might want to know more about the noteworthy rocks they see and even consider how they ended up in the places where they can be found.
That is the idea behind a book written by Michael J. Vieira and J. North Conway entitled “New England Rocks: Historic Geological Wonders.”
The 188-page soft-cover book was just released by Acadia Publishing and The History Press, and could be a useful and fun summer travel guide for those looking explore the region’s silent but unmistakably significant geologic and historic stone markers.
The region’s stone history, of course, begins long before the arrival of European colonists, and even prior to the use of New England’s forests and high country by its native peoples.
The landscape found when people moved in had been shaped by geologic molten formation, the effects of weather and slow work by factors such as the movement of glaciers during the age of ice.
In the book’s preface, Vieira observes that: “Rocks may not be living things but they are a part of our lives.” The book shares “the tales, histories and, to a small part, the geology of notable rock formations,” he offers. “Across New England, we see giants and animals, faces and furniture– we sometimes face our fears and fear our fates,” he writes.
The book goes on to detail historically significant sites, mystery shrouded landscapes and well-known mountain ridgelines while touring Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Rhode Island and Connecticut.
Vieira and Conway start their rocky tales with a description of the history of noted rocks and ledge outcroppings in Swansea, Massachusetts, linked to events of the King Philip’s War of 1675 and 1676.
Swansea was originally home to the Wampanoag and a base for King Philip’s band before the Native leader, also known as Metacom, sought to take back New England lands ceded to the colonists in the years after the Pilgrims in Plymouth.
The opening chapter of New England Rocks talks about Abram’s Rock, an outcropping behind town hall on Main Street and still visible today as key meeting place of the Native Americans and their leaders.
Also in town, off Route 44, is Anawan Rock, a formation made of small rounded stones bound together, another important site in King Philip’s War. It was here, the authors relate, after Metacom had already been killed, that Colonial militia man Benjamin Church captured Anawan, one of Metcom’s war chiefs, as he camped in the area.
In addition to the stories of a number of other unique Massachusetts rocks and locations, the authors also provide a look at the history of Plymouth Rock and the validity of the commonly held belief that Pilgrims arriving on the Mayflower used it to find their way to shore.
The Plymouth Rock essay includes details on how the original boulder was split in two by an effort to move it closer to the town center and also the reductions in its remaining mass resulting from tourists chipping away mementoes in the years before it was permanently protected.
New Hampshire’s chapter in the book includes a look at the once wondrous and naturally carved face in Franconia Notch known as the Old Man of the Mountain, and other less character-based treasures such as the Madison Boulder.
The Old Man of Mountain was a series of ledges up the cliff face that could be seen as a stone face from a specific viewing point. It had been drawing attention from the early days of New England history but sadly disappeared one night in 2003, when nature reclaimed it in a collapse of the ledges.
Vieira and Conway also relate the manner in which the Madison Boulder came to rest on a ledge shoulder in the forest off Route 113 in the Madison Boulder Natural Area of the New Hampshire State Parks system.
The boulder is a glacial erratic, meaning that it is a piece of hard granite that was picked by the movement of glaciers in the area thousands of years ago, rolled and smoothed, and dropped its resting place – wherever that might be – when the glacier melted or receded.
A number of glacial erratics with a history of movement similar to the 5,000-ton Madison Boulder are highlighted in New England Rocks. The authors selected the most noteworthy examples it seems, but readers actually don’t have to go all the way to New Hampshire or Maine to find one.
Although not listed in the chapter on Rhode Island with the state’s historic rock places – the stone ledges known as King Philip’s Chair in Bristol where Metacom is said to have held court, or Slate Rock in Providence, where Roger Williams is thought to have stepped ashore – Cobble Rock in Woonsocket was once a glacial erratic with New England fame.
The glacially deposited boulder sat perched nervously on an outcropping of ledge at the top of Rhodes Avenue at the Woonsocket and North Smithfield line until one night in the 1970s, a bolt of lightning or some other force set it arocking, and it rolled off its perch into the gully where it can still be found today.
“New England Rocks” does relate the speculation on the origins of the stone tower in downtown Newport that some believe to have been created by lost Vikings and also the tale of the Narragansett Rune Stone found on the shores of Narragansett Bay. But another worthy addition, something the authors might consider for a future work, is the geologic history of the state rock – Cumberlandite.
This unique rock, an iron ore with magnetic properties, is believed to have been created by a long ago volcanic outflow at Iron Mine Hill off Elder Ballou Road in Cumberland near the Woonsocket line.
Cumberlandite, found only in Rhode Island, is the State Rock and as noted by Alonzo W. Quinn in his “Bedrock Geology of Rhode Island” report for the State of Rhode Island Development Commission, half of hill where it was found was quarried away for its use as a rough ore and for fill in construction.
But even today, according to the report, the state rock serves as an example of how the glacial ice sheets moved through Rhode Island. The source of Cumberlandite serves as the top point of an elongated triangle that runs all way south through the state and Narragansett Bay to the terminal moraine left as by the glaciers at Block Island.
Nowhere outside the triangle of that route is Cumberlandite naturally found, according to Quinn’s report. Just as Vieira and Conway relate in their book, old rocks, even those found locally, do have a story to tell.
Michael J. Vieira is a retired associate vice president of academic affairs at Bristol Community College in Fall River, Massachusetts. He earned a PhD from Capella University and a Bachelor of Arts and Masters degree from Bridgewater State College. J. North Conway is the author of 13 books, including a quartet of books about New York City during the Gilded Age and has also written the book, “The Cape Cod Canal: Breaking Through the Bared and Bended Arm,” among his other works.