"riverman" wrote in message ...

...When I left in the late 70s, the entire Bradford/North
Bradford/Bradford Center region had only about 600 residents, and falling,
and the woods (my regular haunts) had many many overgrown foundations and
reclaimed homesteads. You'd know you were in one when you were walking in
the woods and you stumbled onto an apple tree grove, found rhubarb and
raspberries growing in patches, and a little poking around inevitably
turned up an old collapsed foundation, a well (don't fall in), and some
rusted farm machinery tangled in the grasses. Often, 50+ year old trees
were growing from the foundation, and there was little or no trace of the
access road left. A little sleuthing would show how the current woods road
or skidder trail network used to be a main road across the region, and how
old anonymous sections of stone wall that were deep in the forest were
once roadside features, made by people long ago whose memories had faded
along with the landscape they created. More than once, I'd find an old
cemetary the did not appear on any maps, and was barely recognizable.

I used to wonder what those folks would think if they saw the region
today. What was, to them, a small dirt access road out back became the
main paved highway through town. The old town center, with its church,
lumberyard, store and even railway station is now a lost ruin deep in the
woods, miles from any road or trail, with only 4-legged visitors.

Back in those same late 70s and into the early 80s I knew a number of people
who were involved in the nascent (and apparently stillborn) "back to the
earth" movement. They rented or, in a few cases, bought old farm houses
here in southeast Wisconsin and to one degree or another tried to make at
least a part of their living off the land. Virtually all of them had a
woodlot on or adjacent to their property, and I used to spend a lot of time
exploring in them. I found many of the same kinds of tantalizing clues to
former land use practices you described above and, more often than not, was
left wondering what they might mean. Imagine my delight to find a book
that was all about finding and interpreting those clues. I hadn't thought
about "Reading the Landscape of America" by May Theilgaard Watts, for some
time. Googling it just now, I guessed that it would be long out of print
and difficult to find. Not so. Looks like it was reissued in 1999. Good
thing. Good book:

http://home.att.net/~naturebooks/rtla1.html

Wolfgang