William Marvel [10/04/2004]

By William Marvel

The other day I found a shard from an old crock sticking out of the ground near my crab apple tree. I picked it up and instinctively placed it with an assortment of artifacts that my father collected on a shelf in the back shed. There it will probably lie for years among snaffle bits, harness rings, forged nails, and other earthenware fragments. Such relics emerge with considerable frequency from the sites of buildings and buried dumps all around this property. The stone walls yield portions of treadle sewing machines, step plates and axles from rotted carriages, the remains of high-button shoes, and rusted kitchen implements with ancient patent dates.The land where I live has known a relatively transient proprietorship. Two hundred years ago this entire hill belonged to the Davis brothers, who came up here from Strafford County and farmed it for a couple of generations. All of that clan eventually departed for greener pastures, leaving behind their name and a scattering of graves near the hilltop. William Knapp, a Massachusetts farmer, moved into the house that occupied this spot. His only son took over when he died, but there was only one grandson, who went to Dartmouth and never came back. Around the beginning of the Civil War the Knapps sold out to Dimon Kennard and moved away, except for one who still lies on the hill.The Kennards had to scrape to sustain themselves. The hill farms of South Conway yielded a meager living in those early days of mechanized agriculture. Town tax records and Civil War enlistment papers tend to corroborate that poverty: the slightest recruiting bounty prompted South Conway men to enlist in far greater proportions than their counterparts from more affluent households. They also suffered from remarkably short stature that might have been at least partly due to poor nutrition. South Conways recruits stood, on average, more than four inches shorter than their ethnically similar comrades from Conways more prosperous floodplain farms.Dimon Kennards only child, Frank, was the shortest of them all, measuring a shade over five feet, four inches by the age of nineteen. Frank enlisted in the Union army to provide some cash for the family coffers, but he returned home eight months later, weakened by the "camp jaundice" that afflicted several of his companions. By the end of the war his parents had filled two more graves in the cemetery, and Frank moved to Boston for a factory job. The house on Davis Hill grew so dilapidated that a succession of neighboring farmers bought the place each fall just to work the fields, selling the entire farm the next year with the crops standing.The Jacksons came here about 1880, building a new house on a foundation of quarried granite. They stayed nearly half a century, gradually abandoning the farming life, while their children migrated to Center Conway and Fryeburg. The widowed Mary Jackson sold out to a man who dismantled her house in 1928 and built a new one nearby. No one ever lived in the "new" house until we moved in, in 1954, and soon afterward I watched trucks dump fill over the Jacksons granite foundation until it disappeared.My family has lived on the hill for more than 80 years, and this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of our removal to this house. We have now inhabited this site longer than any other family. During my residence here most evidence of previous occupants has faded away: the sprawling pastures have long since grown back to forest; the earlier houses have vanished without a visible trace; not a descendent or a photograph remains on Davis Hill to testify to its earlier existence. The only hints of those hardy denizens are the stone walls, the remnants that rise from the soil, and the crumbling epitaphs up in the graveyard.The creeping years of youth quickly accelerate into fleeting generations. The most acquisitive and egotistical of us strive to leave something behind to celebrate our sojourn under this sun, but a couple of centuries of rain and snow will erode the most elaborate monuments. Modern pollution disintegrates even the Acropolis; only ideas can survive, and even they require attention. A few brief decades hence, other passersby will kick up the more durable paraphernalia of our eraa piece of styrofoam, some smashed plastic, or a scrap of mylarand they will wonder what manner of people filled our forgotten society. William Marvel lives among the ruins on Davis Hill, in South Conway.