An undisturbed snowplow ridge told the story: It had been months since a four-wheeled vehicle had driven the aboriginal trail that became a Colonial path, then a well-used thoroughfare from Williamsburg to Conway until discontinued around 1950. Because the mud season hadn’t yet arrived, I decided to give it a shot, convinced I’d stay atop […]

On the road again, me and an old codger, he a spry octogenarian. We were following e-mail leads from Conway readers commenting on last week’s column about my visit to Conway’s first cellar hole, that of Cyrus Rice, circa 1763, now hidden in a manicured 350-acre wood lot. The tips led me to Shirkshire, to […]

What I remember most about the late Ellsworth Barnard was the day I met him and wife Mary at their forested cabin in Shelburne’s Patten District, five miles up the hill from my Greenfield Meadows home. It was back in the late 1990s, probably 1998, which would have made him 90 or 91. I had […]