York Town News
A walk to remember
By Virginia L. Woodwell
Slabs that once supported a chimney in an overgrown cellar hole are all that remain of The Mount, a Junkins family home now deep in the woods south of Mt. Agamenticus. In its prime, The Mount commanded sweeping views to the south. Ron Nowell, in the foreground, led 11 people there on Saturday, Aug. 19, on a walk sponsored by York's Historic District Commission.
Photo by Virginia L. Woodwell
The first walk, held on July 29, explored abandoned cellar holes and other evidence of human habitation along a wooded trail just to the east of Mt. Agamenticus.
Last Saturday's walk did the same thing for the region southwest of Mt. Agamenticus, starting at a spot a little more than three miles distant from the mountain and moving toward it.
Participants met at 1 p.m. at Kingsbury Lane, just off Route 91, and proceeded north along a broad woods trail that had once been a road. Now deeply gullied in spots, it ran uphill for most of the one-and-one-half miles covered by the walk (the trail ends, ultimately, on the mountain), crossed two bridged streams and passed, in that section of it, three cellar holes, an open well and two small, private, cemeteries.
Participants learned that the cellar holes were the last remnants of homes belonging to families named Knight, Gowen and Junkins, and the Knight and Junkins names in the cemeteries, on such markers as bore inscriptions, documented some of that history.
Before the homes, however, the first stop on the walk was at a stone bridge at the western end of Boulter Pond. Scarcely visible now save as rocks forming a dam of sorts, Nowell said that it was actually six or seven feet broad and six feet high - tall enough to walk through at low water - but that extensive beaver activity to the west was contributing to the high water concealing it.
He called the bridge "a feat of engineering," and speculated that it had been built at about the time of the Revolutionary War or somewhat later.
Along the way, the Knight house cellar hole stood to the left on a rise, distinguished now by slabs of rock at its center forming a cave-like root-cellar. On the top slabs, bricks testified to the fact that a chimney had once stood there.
Nowell said that there was evidence of a barn's foundation nearby, and Alan Junkins, one of the walkers and a founder of the Junkins Family Association who has labored on Junkins family history, said that, when the land was still cleared before the forest grew back, residents could look out across the landscape from this house and see the York River below.
Junkins also reported that some current York residents have lilacs cultivated from lilacs still in evidence at the Knight house.
Not far away from the house was its stone-lined, hand-dug well. Nowell noted that it was positioned so as to get drainage from both the barn and a wetlands nearby, and so probably contributed to frequent deaths by "black water," or typhus.
The first cemetery visited on the walk was situated on a dogleg off the trail, out on a promontory above an encircling beaver-created wetland that Nowell said is properly called Knight's Marsh. A stone wall marching right down into the marsh and out its other side indicated that the marsh was relatively new, as did the many standing dead trees there, killed by its water.
Junkins reported that he and a cousin, Roland Junkins, used to tend these and other Junkins cemeteries around town assiduously, Roland dragging a lawn mower up the long trail to do so, and, once, even some cement to reset a stone.
"Every Junkins cemetery overlooks water," he said, though he said he did not know why.
"Silvester Junkins/December 21, 1846/Aet 27yrs 10 mo" reads one stone at that first cemetery, and another near it: "May E/daughter of Silvester and Sarah E. Junkins/Died/Jan 24, 1847/Aged/5 years."
The walk passed a declivity in the ground on the right marking the site of a house belonging to Gowens (pronounced to rhyme with "go" rather than "cow"), forebears of Angevine Gowen, who flourished in York at the beginning of the 20th century and distinguished himself as surveyor, photographer, engineer, writer and historian. (Angevine Gowen, however, it was noted, was born and lived at Cider Hill.)
The leisurely pace of the walk, made even slower by the climb and the day's heat and humidity, allowed for many conversational excursions.
In one, Nowell noted that one Captain James Gowen had been among the York contingent who accompanied William Pepperell on the Louisburg military campaign against the French on Cape Breton Island in 1745. The Gowens were originally from Kittery, he said. Also among that contingent, from York and this area, he added, were Samuel Junkins and Lemuel Junkins, and one John Linscott, who lost a leg there.
In another conversation, George Chapman, Jr., a Linscott descendent and York native with an interest in local history who, at 82, has roamed and hunted (as he still hunts) in those woods for years - reported that he'd once found there a primitive gravestone for a child, made of fieldstone and inscribed with the date 1704.
The final stop on the walk was the cellar hole of a house once known as "The Mount," a Junkins home, and its nearby cemetery.
The home was so called, Nowell said, because, before the forest regrew from sheep-farming days when all the surrounding lands were cleared of trees, its high spot delivered a sweeping view that extended all the way to Great Bay, Portsmouth, N.H., and the mouth of the Piscataqua River.
Some of the view was still visible, he said, when he himself first came up as a boy, and when one could still drive a truck up the road.
The view can no longer be seen, he added, "unless you climb a tree," and the road is clearly now impassible save to ATVs - and they, it was noted, now need permission to drive on the land from the Kittery and York Water Districts, who own the properties.
At The Mount, Nowell also reported that, for some reason not known, the site also boasted some exceptionally good soils for gardening and an orchard. Some small clearing from that effort remained visible there.
The cemetery there documents, among others, the deaths of Daniel Junkins, who died at age 75 on November 11, 1848, and his wife, who died at age 71, less than a year later, on August 13.
Alan Junkins reported that all the Junkins hereabouts (and many now much further afield, too) were descended from one Robert Junkins, who was among the Scots captured in the battle of Dunbar in 1650 and sent to this country as an indentured servant. He settled in York and died in 1699, Junkins said, dividing his property between two sons, one of whom inherited the big tract of Agamenticus land where the walkers stood and had been walking.
A bonus on the walk were Nowell's observations about nature. He listed orchids that grow in the region, noted in passing a giant beaver hut in Knight's Marsh and stopped to point out nests of great blue heron high in the marsh's dead pines. The shagbark hickory in evidence, he also said, were growing there at their most inland limits, and they produce nuts that are "90 percent shell." He remembered his grandmother, he said, spreading them out on newspapers on an attic floor to dry, then spending hours cracking them.
For more about the Historic District Commission, visit www.yorkmaine.org.
