It was a beautiful day to be in the woods. Because my back screams at me if I walk very far, I get out there by 4-wheeler (named Trigger) and then hike some. February has never allowed me to do this before.
You could make track soup from all the paw and hoof prints, some old, some new. There were walkers and bounders and amblers and straight-liners: deer, fox, coyote, rabbit, fisher, grouse, mouse, and one rather big-footed ‘galumpher’ that I can’t identify. Below (right) are deer tracks between the tracks of two coyotes on one of our woods roads. On the left are the tracks of a Ruffed Grouse.
Lately we’ve been drawn to Mrs. Wheelock’s piece. She and her husband, Otis, lived on the western-most part of the land we now own. They settled there in the late 1850s and began having children. By the time he enlisted in the Union Army on December 22nd, 1863, they had two boys and three girls. Fifty-three days later, Otis lay dead in a Washington, DC soldiers’ hospital.
Susan Wheelock would spend the next 47 years eking out an existence on that rocky and steep land that is currently ours. Her youngest son, Cyrus, lived with her and worked ‘out’ on a nearby farm to support them both. The other son moved west and eventually died of “Not wanting to live.”
Part of the land was quarried for marble, and maybe that also generated some income. It could not have been an easy life. The 1910 census notes that Susan Wheelock was blind. She died a year later.
By the mid-1920s, Cyrus had moved up over the hill to the house that once stood about 100′ from the log house that Bob and I live in. He was in his sixties, and he was a hired man for Oliver and Abigail Carey who farmed the 90 acres we bought in 1976,
Both Susan and Cyrus are buried in Pierrepont Hill Cemetery.
Wizened Wizard 