Stuff you have found on your property??

[GonHuntin]

I've owned my property since 1998 or so and I had never seen this until November.

I found signs of an old homestead not long after buying the place, including another hand dug well that still has water in it and the remains of a root cellar on the banks of the creek. This well is across the creek from the other stuff and I stumbled across it while looking for a hog my wife had shot at......not sure why it filled in, maybe when the creek flooded?? I wish this stuff could talk so I'd know more about the people who settled the land......I know the abstract would give info as to who owned it, but it really wouldn't tell the stories of the struggle to make a living on the place.

There is a very old cemetery just across the fence on a neighboring property, all but one of the headstones are just rocks, with one "modern" headstone from 1911. I found the cemetery not long after buying my place (had the hunting rights leased on the neighbors property)......the neighbor had no idea it was there!

Anyway, have you found anything interesting on your place??

 

[j-bird]

In the 20 years I have lived on my place I have found 2 things that I didn't know where there.

The first was found/ran-in-to in a pasture. After some additional investigation and digging it was a large steel wheel from back when the tractor wheels didn't have rubber on them (pre-war). There wasn't much left of it and the guy who did most of the work wanted it.....it was pretty worthless to me so since he put the work into it I left him have it.

The second thing was a stone fence post. I posted pics of it on various forums trying to get some info. I am pretty certain it's lime stone.... I think it was used back in the day as a corner post. It's heavy. My loader will pick up nearly a ton....and it struggles with this monster. Some day I will re-purpose it to hold a sign or the like with our family name or address or the like on it. I have seen some others in the general area so at some point they where pretty common in my little corner of the world. Most appear to have supported some sort of metal framed gate. The top part is roughly 8" square and is cut and a radius shape on the top.....the lower section is left rough. It's roughly 8 feet long. All I know is that nobody is walking off with it....and if they do....I ain't stopping them!


My Wife's family has been working our property and other farms in the area since the second world war so they have found and seen a lot of things, prior to my involvement. Between working the fields or running the woods looking for game for the table....if it was out there it was more than likely found before I got there!

One of the stranger things on my place that you wouldn't know by looking at it is the corduroy road. I didn't know about it until I came home from work one day and the road was blocked by my wife's grandfathers truck. I asked what was going on. He explained that the county was grading the gravel on the road and the blade had caught one of the road bed logs and rolled it up and made a mess of things. I went and looked and sure enough you could see the other logs (or what was left of them). The area has a high water table and to better distribute the weight of the road, back in the day they laid these timbers and then put the gravel on top. He knew all about it.....I had no clue. Apparently those on that crew had no clue either! Having been in that area since the 40's he sure had a lot of that area's history in his head. He had done passed when we found the stone fence post so I couldn't ask him about that.

Funny thing about having family in the area for that length of time.....I'm not known by my own name. I'm "Gil's granddaughter's husband, that lives up at the old Robert's place". "Gil", short of Gilfred, was his name and "the Roberts place" was at least 30 years ago. But, being the "new guy" in the neighborhood.....I mean come on what's 20 years....I just go with it.

 

[Chainsaw]

That is a really strange phenomena; Our places won't be called ours until after we are gone. Once we are gone they will be referred to so and so's place and we will be the so and so's.

 

[THE LLC]

Old wells like that scare the heck out of me.

 

[mattpatt]

One time when I was a very young boy probably around 6 or 7so. I remember setting down at the kitchen table and all of a sudden it got very bright outside. I remember asking Momma why the sun was coming out again so quick as it had just went down. This lasted for around 30 seconds or so then it got dark again. We never really figured out what happened but we guess that it was a meteor.


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[KDdid]

Old wells like that scare the heck out of me.

I used to hunt a lease in So. Ohio’s hill country, and we found a stone well with two deer skeletons in the bottom. We dragged a couple of logs across the opening, but since that’s been 9 years ago, I’m guessing that the trap has been reset.



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[GonHuntin]

Old wells like that scare the heck out of me.

Me too!

The well in the photo above is only 3'-4' deep and is in a very "out of the way" part of the property, so I'm not too worried about it.

I covered the first well I found with a piece of steel so nobody would fall into it, it's probably 20' deep to the water line. I should probably take a few T-posts and some wire up and fence it off.

 

[Jeff H]

After 16 years of owning my place I found an old typewriter while hinge cutting. It's central to the property and nowhere close to any field,road, power line or anything else. I'd love to know how it got there. Tornado is the only thing that would make sense. A bit of a head scratcher.

 

[GonHuntin]

Jeff that is a strange one!!

 

[catscratch]

Not really something "found" as we've known about this site forever but it's cool nonetheless.

The best I can figure is that the smaller stone buildings are older than the larger stone structures. They are in more disrepair and definitely a different style of stone work. All of this is in the same area the size of a large yard. It overviews a small spring feed creek that seldom goes dry.

The larger stone structures probably date back to the 1890's-1910's. I've found no records of them but in that timeframe Russian and German artisans built a bunch of stone arch bridges in the area using the exact same type of stone with the same workmanship. I "think" this was one of their homesteads.

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[THE LLC]

Some cool stuff.

 

[farmhunter]

We have an old Foundation in the woods- my Grandmother called the woods the Sugarbush. We have letters from her grandmother to her mother in the 1870s also calling it the same, Seems to be there was a Maple Syrup making shed there. There are pieces of an old cast iron stove there. Its an Old Woods - some of those really old Maples still stand - but not many. The woods was last logged in the 1930s.

We have some old wells too - one is filled in like the one shown previous, another is 20 ft deep. The House has been long gone - I think for 80 years now. The house and the out buildings are on the local county map from 1854.

 

[IkemanTx]

I re-found a clay tile French drain system laid in the bottoms of two small fields on what was originally my great grandparents place. I was walking the creek below it and came across the end of a broken clay pipe sticking out of the bank with what looked like a low flowing fire hydrant’s worth of water coming out of it. Apparently, it was laid in the 30’s. Only one of the outlets still works, so I’m waiting for a decent rain (followed by a dry spell) to go out there and search for the others to release them. Hopefully the original locations are visible from some water seeping?

Also, we knew this well was there, but the brush was so grown up around it you couldn’t even see it. 3 hours with chainsaws revealed it. I am going to mortar the outside and replace the top deck. Curiously, this wood (Not including the stand with chain and pully) may be the original top from the 30’s or 40’s. My great grandfather used Osage Orange lumber for the construction. To my great Grandmother’s knowledge, no one ever replaced the wooden top.

The pressure tank beside it was added, with a small pump, in the mid 80’s, but stopped being used after my parents divorced shortly after.

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[Tap]

I've owned my property since 1998 or so and I had never seen this until November.

I found signs of an old homestead not long after buying the place, including another hand dug well that still has water in it and the remains of a root cellar on the banks of the creek. This well is across the creek from the other stuff and I stumbled across it while looking for a hog my wife had shot at......not sure why it filled in, maybe when the creek flooded?? I wish this stuff could talk so I'd know more about the people who settled the land......I know the abstract would give info as to who owned it, but it really wouldn't tell the stories of the struggle to make a living on the place.

Anyway, have you found anything interesting on your place??

I never found much on my place, but that well reminds me of something I saw several years ago when I used to work for a mover.
We had a delivery at an early 1800s home that had an addition added. When they excavated for the addition, they unearthed a well similar to the one in your pic except it still produced water. They incorporated that well into the foyer. It was just inside the front door, covered with plate glass, and had lights down in it and water could be seen and heard trickling into the pool at the bottom. The floor surrounding it was wide plank pine reclaimed from an old church. And in-laid into the pine were compass points...N,E,S,&W. It was the coolest thing that I've ever seen in a house. That was before the days of carrying cell phone cameras. Sure wish I had a photo of it.

And my buddy found a human skull on his place. It was from someone who had some sort of mental breakdown. He wandered into the woods, naked, in February and froze to death.

 

[Chipdasqrrl]

Found this little home built by what I believe was a muskrat on a small pond. No idea where he found the fence thing but it’s pretty cool. If I were to put some building materials by it such as 2x4’s or chicken wire I wonder if it would use it.


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[mattpatt]

One day I came upon an old tree with an indention in the ground right beside it. There was also a very old block and tackle pully hanging from a limb right above the indention. Thinking this was strange I started digging. At ten feet I found some old horizontal logs. I dig another 10 feet and found some more. This time there was a little bit of gold chain found with them. I dug some more and about every ten feet I would find more horizontally buried logs. At out 80 feet I found a stone slab with strange markings on it saying something about buried treasure below. I kept digging and all of a sudden the hole started filling with water! I never did figure out what was down there. Maybe one day....


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[IkemanTx]

One day I came upon an old tree with an indention in the ground right beside it. There was also a very old block and tackle pully hanging from a limb right above the indention. Thinking this was strange I started digging. At ten feet I found some old horizontal logs. I dig another 10 feet and found some more. This time there was a little bit of gold chain found with them. I dug some more and about every ten feet I would find more horizontally buried logs. At out 80 feet I found a stone slab with strange markings on it saying something about buried treasure below. I kept digging and all of a sudden the hole started filling with water! I never did figure out what was down there. Maybe one day....


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Hahahahaha


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[Kabic]

D

One day I came upon an old tree with an indention in the ground right beside it. There was also a very old block and tackle pully hanging from a limb right above the indention. Thinking this was strange I started digging. At ten feet I found some old horizontal logs. I dig another 10 feet and found some more. This time there was a little bit of gold chain found with them. I dug some more and about every ten feet I would find more horizontally buried logs. At out 80 feet I found a stone slab with strange markings on it saying something about buried treasure below. I kept digging and all of a sudden the hole started filling with water! I never did figure out what was down there. Maybe one day....


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Did you name it the "The Money Pit"?

 

[j-bird]

I was out yesterday looking for sheds and saw this and thought it was pretty cool. Not really the same as some of the other posts here, but I thought it was interesting to see. The vine growing up the tree not growing as fast as the tree is what causes this. These trees are just saplings and the additional daylight from logging caused the rapid growth of both.

 

[Tap]

I was out yesterday looking for sheds and saw this and thought it was pretty cool. Not really the same as some of the other posts here, but I thought it was interesting to see. The vine growing up the tree not growing as fast as the tree is what causes this. These trees are just saplings and the additional daylight from logging caused the rapid growth of both.
View attachment 11051

Is that Oriental Bittersweet vine? If so, I'd hack and squirt it.

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