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The School House
The historic organization that I
am with, was offered the use of a school house that was built in the
early 18th century. Several members visited the site to consider
the offer. While we were there, I brought out my dowsing rod.
I am familiar with the history of the site and knew that there was a log
meeting house on the site prior to the building of the school.
They had added a stone addition to the log meeting and thereby provided
for the separation of the sexes. After the log structure burned
down, a new stone structure was built in 1812, on another nearby site,
that is still in use. The school, the current meeting house, and
the current carriage house are on the National Register of Historic
Places. I was urged to scan the lot adjacent to the school house.
Log structures seem to have two rectangles that are one within the
other by about eight inches. The stone structures are also two
rectangle with a separation of about 20 inches. At first I found
the "stone structure" rectangles. Adjoining were the log structure
outlines. I was then asked: "Where is the path?". I
then found two lines at about 30 inches apart running toward the school
house, but they stopped on the way. At this point, I found a line
perpendicular to the end of the "walkway". Scanning at the end of the
walkway, I found the perpendicular line continued to a corner and then
formed an open rectangle with the open side toward the street.
Leading from this open side of the rectangle ("carriage house") are two
lines that go out to the street that was once a dirt "Meetinghouse"
road. These lines are a nominal 11 feet apart. This was
getting complex. We measured the outlines of the "stone and log
meeting houses" and I reported the results to the other members present.
They are now getting familiar with my many findings. "Okay, why isn't there a path
to the school?" I was asked. I went to the other end of the
"carriage house" outline and there are two lines about 30 inches and they
go to the steps leading to the door on the schoolhouse.
We again scanned the outlines of the original meetinghouses in 2010.
We then scheduled an archaeology project at selected sites where marker
stones would be placed along the outline of these old Meetinghouses. While setting the
stones we performed archaeology were the stones were to be set.
We found no artifacts that we could link to the two early structures.
We noted that the doorways were offset to the right. This finding
could be related the placement of benches where one bench faced the
others. We also scanned the outline of the Carriage House, and
installed marking stones around the base. The limit of the
overhang is not detectable. |