By far, one of the most impressive, unusual and intriguing features has to be a large, crescent-shaped cairn on the upper slopes of the site.  Some refer to it as the “boat,” but since there is no large body of water nearby, I prefer the term crescent, as in crescent moon, or perhaps an Indian bow.  Measuring 37 feet long by 9.5 feet wide and 3.5 feet high, it has a bowed, crescent shape when viewed along its axis, with the convex side facing east (Fig. 3).  When I first saw it, it reminded me of a crescent-shaped structure I had seen at Parker Woodland in Rhode Island, which also faced east (Fig. 4).

Fig 3

Fig 4

         This feature, however, had a tapered backside and did not have any other distinguishing features.  At the northeast end of the cairn in Rochester, and separate from the rest of the construction, is what I and others refer to as a Manitou stone, which in this case is a thin slab of stone with a rounded top (Fig. 5).  Manitou stones either can be in the shape of an early American gravestone, with head and shoulders, or they can have a simple arched or triangular-shaped top; in any event, all examples are quite thin.  Similarly shaped stones have been found alongside large cairns at other sites, such as at Parker Woodland in Rhode Island (Fig. 6), and also at least three other cairns at the Smith site, one of which is fairly small but with a Manitou stone leaning against it (Fig. 7).  We do not know the significance of these stones, but they seem to emphasize the importance of the stone mound or cairn against which they are placed.   

Fig 5

Fig 6

            It is one thing to claim that an unusual looking stone feature is American Indian, simply because of its size, shape, construction, and how it relates to other stone structures nearby, and another to prove it.  There is no direct way to date stone cairns to the accuracy that we need, but there are ways to use evidence to formulate sound arguments.  For example, we know more about the Smith farm historically than we do about most sites with cairns.  Before Smith bought the 250-acre property in 1847, it had been previously owned by at least five different individuals, beginning with a Peletiah Morgan in 1780, the original proprietor.  With no access to it during the early years of its ownership, the property passed from owner to owner with its value fixed not much above $50.  In 1812 it sold for $62.  A year later, the property was bought by Alexander Norton for $184, triple the amount of the year before.  What happened?  I believe the sharp increase in value can be explained by the construction of a cart path from Brandon Gap Road to the property sometime in 1812, and perhaps the clearing of some land.  This cart path shows on early 20th century maps of the area as a dotted line that ascends the ridge to the farm site.  There was no other road to the farm, and it remained isolated from others in the area.  Not until the 1930s, when the Civilian Conservation Corps cut a road through the forest did the old farmstead come into closer contact with contemporary society, but by that time the farm had long been abandoned.  After Norton purchased the land in 1813, it was sold three more times until Chester Smith assumed ownership in 1847.  In the book Rochester, Vermont, Its History, published in 1975, the unnamed authors wrote that only four acres had been cleared when Smith purchased the land.  

         Letters that Chester wrote to his fiancée, Sarah, between 1848 and 1850, describe some of the activities in those early years at the farm.  In one letter, from February 1848, he describes felling 300 trees that were then hauled to a mill on Brandon Gap Road to be sawn into planks for the construction of a house and barn, and clearing 30 acres for mowing.  Remember that only four acres had been cleared when Smith moved to the property in 1847.  Add to this the 30 acres in 1848 and we still have a total of 34 acres cleared, much less than the 50+ acres on which the cairns are found.  This evidence implies that some of the cairns, at least, must have been pre-existing before the land was first sold in 1780.  Add to this information derived from the Smith daybooks from the 1840s to the 1880s, in which there is absolutely no mention of constructing stonework of any kind, and we have a pretty clear picture that neither Smith nor any of the previous owners of the property constructed the stonework.

          Not much attention has been paid to the planning and construction of a large cairn, such as ones found at the Rochester site.  Several years ago I chose a large one at the Smith site to determine how many stones comprised it.  The cairn measured something like 21.5 feet long, 8’ high on the downhill side and 12’ wide (Fig. 8).

Fig 8

       I measured the sizes of different stones in the façade, and gave this figure to a friend of mine in Wisconsin, Herman Bender.  Based on figures I provided, he estimated that there were something like 10,000 stones of various sizes in the cairn, which altogether weighed 80 tons.  Photos of the cairn and the stones, plus the figures from Herman, were sent to Nick Aiken, a professional dyker or wall builder from Scotland, in October 2003.  Here is what he wrote about constructing a cairn of this size:  “The stones must have been brought to the site.  There are too many in each cairn to be found in the immediate area…If I were building such a structure I would spend the winter hauling stone over the frozen ground, on a sledge.  It would take some time to get 80 tons of rock to the site…April is ‘mud season’ in Vermont…I believe it is usually May before the ground is stable and it is easy to move around without getting stuck in the mud…The big rocks at the foot of the cairn must have needed two men to shift them.  It would not be impossible for one man to do the job but he would have been ruined in a short time…I can shift about 5 tons of stone in an easy day.  I think I could build number 13 in about three weeks but the hauling of rock might take all winter.  One man hauling to the site would take a soul-destroying amount of time.  The rock may have been hauled to the site as it was required, large rocks first then the smaller stuff.  I would move rock from near the top of the slope down to a chosen spot, thus reducing the need to haul uphill.”

      Besides the work involved in building a large cairn, we also need to look at the kind of stones used in its construction.  With respect to the crescent cairn, in the very front center of the cairn, and placed on top, are two large slabs of quartz (Fig. 9).  An enlarged view shows that each slab is about 5”-6” thick and cleaves horizontally (Fig. 10). 

Fig 9

Fig 10

        About 150 feet to the southwest is a large quartz vein or seam (Fig. 11), at the downhill end of which a spring emerges.  The physical characteristics of the quartz, with thick, horizontal bedding planes, are identical to the slabs on the cairn (Fig. 12), and the latter undoubtedly came from this location.  The fact that a spring emerges from one end of he quartz vein makes this particular site powerful and sacred, for springs were considered portals to the underworld by the Indians, where animal spirits emerged and went.  This sacred water also imparted to the quartz extra potency, and we can imagine that the quartz from this location was chosen for this reason.