NATURE SHRUGS US OFF PRETTY EASILY:

Seeking the lost villages: Abandoned mill towns dot White Mountains (CHELSEA CONABOY, July 30. 2006, Concord Monitor)

A bout a half-mile off the Tripoli Road in Woodstock, a rusty axle straddles a stone foundation next to Eastman Brook. In the late 1800s, it held a water wheel that powered an adjacent sawmill.

The people in the village of Thornton Gore used it to cut and plane boards to build homes, barns and schoolhouses. The wheel has decayed and crumbled into the brush below, just as the houses it helped build have fallen in on themselves and disappeared, leaving only cellar holes.

There are dozens of villages like Thornton Gore in the White Mountain National Forest, abandoned by settlers in favor of homesteads in the West, life in New Hampshire's growing cities or a steady wage in factories to the south. The forest has reclaimed hundreds more neglected sawmills and the sites of countless logging camps, pushing birch tress and frost heaves up through once sturdy and seemingly permanent structures.

"This was something in its day,"said antique book dealer and history buff Rick Russard, pointing to the channel through which the brook was diverted, called the millrace. "Somebody built it. Then they walked away from it. And then they died, and it fell apart. And nobody cares."

Aside from hobby historians like Russard, the Forest Service staff and a handful of others, most people know little about the long-abandoned villages. In some places, that's intentional, to avoid vandalism. But mostly, the Forest Service staff is overloaded by the number of places to be documented and marked, while new remains are constantly being discovered.

"There's so much of it that we have a real backlog," said forest archeologist Karl Roenke.

All you have to do is walk through the woods here to realize how silly is the environmentalists' insistence that Man has changed the planet in any significant way.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 2, 2006 10:08 AM