In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

f o r e w o r d Wayne Franklin QR A few hundred years is not long as human history is measured—let alone earth history—but, as Kent Ryden suggests in this thoughtful collection of essays on nature and culture in New England, it offers sufficient ground for raising a rich crop of insights. I first read his meditations while sitting in an old farmhouse in the midst of the complex landscapes he explores. He opened my eyes to things I had learned while occupying the house without quite realizing it. The first is how many layers even the simplest fact can have. This house, the wood plaque on its façade proclaims, was built in 1762. The most recent local history states that it was erected by a Scots-Irish doctor and his wife, then in their forties. On arriving from County Antrim as a youth, John Dunsmoor probably lived with kin nearby in the old Massachusetts town of Lancaster, where he learned his trade, then moved to Lunenburg some years prior to Ruth Fisher. She hailed from the Connecticut Valley town of Hatfield, but also apparently had immigrated from Ireland. How they met isn’t known, but with their marriage in Lunenburg in 1747, this town became their permanent home. After fifteen years of married life in some undetermined house elsewhere in town, where Ruth gave birth to their six children, they at last managed to erect this place on Northfield Road. Having moved in, they stayed until their deaths in the closing years of the eighteenth century. They are buried side by side in the town’s North Cemetery, which can be reached by a lane leading through a small hemlock wood just across the street from their house. As the couple’s final home, the place draws regular visitors from across the United States who claim descent from them. Since I regard myself as merely the latest in a sequence of people who have nested here, I happily give visitors a tour of house and grounds, filling in what I know from books and oral tales. It’s a big structure now, the sort that has become a New England icon. And the dwelling itself is dwarfed by the enormous nineteenth-century apple barn that, attached by a wing, hovers over its rear. Everybody in this rootless society has this image somewhere in their unconscious. We are a country mostly descended from modest outcasts, whatever our points of origin, but when we dream of our past we do not often seek out the marrow of that truth. Because the Dunsmoors’ house probably began as a simple pair of rooms, upstairs and down, and then experienced several expansions over the decades, its appearance today hardly gives my dreaming visitors an accurate picture of how modestly their ancestors actually lived. Probably during the couple’s later years here, the house was first doubled across the front, then had a back range of rooms added. Sometime in the 1870s, after the property had become the summer place of a grain merchant from the nearby city of Fitchburg, that large barn was built. At the same time, an old house frame from somewhere else was moved in and converted into the wing linking the two structures. A final three-story square structure that filled in a niche between wing and barn was the last addition, except for a relatively recent screen porch. The grain merchant and his daughter, whose own family lived here from 1911 on, tore out many original features and put in modern amenities, raised the height of the third floor to accommodate a dance chamber, and replaced the old central chimney stack with a pair of smaller flues, one of them to accommodate a central heating plant. The ultimate result was a house that has more than a dozen rooms, integrally linked to a clapboarded barn of truly massive proportions, all of it painted white and each of the sixty some windows adorned with a pair of dark green shutters. Like many older houses, this one sits smack on the road, and its location as the visitors drive up tends to magnify its size. All of the Dunsmoors’ descendants, eager to claim their rightful place in the nation’s first scenes, comment on the mass of the resulting composition . They clearly like the idea that the family tree is rooted in such ground and, like the ancient sugar maples along the road...

Share