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We live on Brickyard Road in Woodstock, which is one of the older roads in town. The oldest house on the road and one of the few from the 18th century is the Lyon farmhouse, built by wealthy Woodstock business man Ebenezer Lyon around 1740. He owned grist mills and also opened the first brickyard in town, so this was the road from his house to the brickyard, hence the name. For many years it was The Lyons Tavern, a popular watering hole and proof that our sleepy road was once a busy thoroughfare linking agricultural Woodstock with the manufacturing towns of Southbridge and Sturbridge Mass. The tavern offered rooms as well, and many guests complained of thumps, bangs, and ghostly footsteps. The house thus became known as one of Connecticut's earliest haunted houses. Like most of the town, we have an abundance of stone on our property, and the length of our road frontage is lined with a tumbledown stone wall that I guess dates from the 18th century when intrepid settlers tried to make a go farming the land here. Centuries of neglect and gravity have brought the wall to ruin, so I have been slowly rebuilding it, using the stone that is still piled there or buried just beneath the leaves. |
I have finished about 150 linear feet of the 600 feet or so that comprises the entire wall. I'm amazed just how much stone there is under the debris. The nice thing about the old wall stone is that it has weathered edges so when reconstituted, the wall has a "been there forever" look. I try to put the best lichen-encrusted stones facing outward and on top, so they can seed the other stones (in my experience, it takes five years before noticeable lichens start to appear on freshly built walls made with excavated rock). |
completed sections looking north (left) and south (right) |