Cobble Rock: It’s still there
WOONSOCKET — After recently mentioning Cobble Rock and its past standing as a significant glacial erratic while writing about Michael J. Vieira and J. North Conway’s new book titled “New England Rocks, Historic Geological Wonders,” I quickly learned Woonsocket’s geologic highlight has not lost its fame entirely.
A reader, in fact, sent me a note explaining he had gone off in search of Cobble Rock in the woods between Rhodes Avenue and Mendon Road nearby the Fairmount section of Woonsocket, and had not been able to find it.
‘Was Cobble Rock still at the place where it toppled from its balancing perch back in the 1970s?’ was the question I surmised, and while responding that I did not believe the large granite boulder had moved, I did spend a nice spring afternoon taking a walk to the top of Fairmount to find out for myself.
I had last traipsed over to Cobble Rock back in February 2013, with photographer Ernest Brown, and our local guide, former Obeline Drive, North Smithfield, resident Paul Durand, then living in Woonsocket, and I was curious to see if anything had changed from what we found back then.
The rock is believed to have been deposited to its former balancing act by a melting glacier of the last ice age that left transported rocks all over the area as it receded.
The rock’s fame had drawn many people to Woonsocket to see it, picnic near it, and even mark their names while climbing on it. Old postcards that were once sold at Woonsocket’s post office can still be found showing Cobble Rock in its glory days in the early 1900s when such activities as a healthful walk to a natural wonder was a desired use of leisure time and the blessing of a good weather day.
Durand’s family had been frequent visitors to Cobble Rock site over the years and he told how his sister, Simone, and mother, Lillian, had posed for photos at the massive balancing glacial erratic with their arms outstretched, seemingly ready to topple it over. He also related that there had been attempts made to displace the rock, but all to no avail.
Then, in September of 1977, Durand recalled the big storm that passed through the area, one also listed in other published accounts on Cobble Rock, and voiced his family’s belief it some how caused the rock to finally tumble from its precarious perch.
Durand’s late father, Adrien Duran, a longtime employee of the nearby Saint Antoine residence for the elderly, had heard his dog barking about something in the night and went out to Cobble Rock the next day and found that Cobble Rock, an estimated 200-ton granite boulder, had indeed fallen over and was upside down in a gully nearby its old perch on the ledge ridge line running through the area.
Was it a bolt of lighting from the storm, as his father believed, that knocked down Cobble Rock, or as others have speculated, simply the strong wind of the storm or a crumbling of the stone that had for so long held it in place?
To find the answer to the questioned posed by our reader, I set out to find the Cobble Rock on a dirt road that now runs into the old walking path crossing the high Fairmount Woods from nearby Mendon Road in North Smithfield. The old path, deeply etched between trees along the route, is likely the Native American trail talked about in many of the past stories on Cobble Rock, or Coblin Rock as it had once been described. The area running through a Woonsocket conservation land district also has connections to a whetstone manufacturing operation of the 1700s that left quarry pits marking the place where the best sharpening-stone ledge could be mined.
The trail also has an outlet on Rhodes Avenue near the city’s water storage tank and runs west downhill into the city’s Fairmount neighborhood. I walked for less than 30 minutes in my search for Cobble Rock, likely due to my crossing of an once-cleared field near the site than has now become overgrown with brush, and found the rock just where it had been located on my last visit.
The trees surrounding the new Cobble Rock location just off the ledge may have grown up a bit in four years but once you are nearby the old glacial erratic, it is hard to miss.
I took a few photos and even filmed a video clip of the spot, but the position of the sunlight coming through the trees suggested that I not linger too long and even to put off an attempt to “boulder” up the long-ago smoothed surface of the rock.
Before I left, however, I did stop to listen to the area around me and found it filled only with natural things. The wind rushing up the hill and stirring the trees, the calls of song birds, and even the hum of insects added just the right backdrop for the silent rock sitting nearby – steeped in its own songs of history.