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In rural New England, we grew up with the opportunity for archeological exploration in our backyard. Not only had the mountains and forests served as home to the Abenaki Indians before the Europeans colonists arrived, but several centuries of colonial homesteads lay forgotten and hidden in the forests of Vermont and New Hampshire.

The most prized and marketable artifacts that could be found by expeditionary children searching the woods were old glass bottles, everything metal or wood had long since rusted or rotted away to dust. The curious shapes and colors were a source of great curiosity as we tried to imagine what had originally been held in each bottle we found. The translucent blue glass bottles were our favorites since such glass is rarely seen today, but other colors could be found as well. Sometimes, the manufacturer’s name was cast on the bottom and rarely the original contents of the bottle were similarly identified. Most often the bottles were originally used for some medicinal potion that today we would most likely call snake oil. These bottles, usually a hundred or more years old, could be cleaned up and sold for anywhere from ten cents to several dollars depending upon the bottle at yard sales. That was a veritable fortune to an eight year old in the early 1970’s.

Our family often went hiking through the mountains and we children would range off the path searching for the sites of old ruins. The buildings were completely gone, the wood beams and clapboards long since moldered away to rich loam by the plentiful moisture of the New England forest. There were several tricks to finding the sites of old homesteads, however. The most obvious of course was the presence of a cellar hole. A cellar hole was simple a sunken area whose sides were, or had once been, lined with rough field stones. The holes were originally dug by hand and rocks were set into the dirt walls to hold them up, usually without mortar of any sort. It was in and around the cellar holes were most of the old glass treasures were to be found.

The other trick was to look for ancient twisted apple trees in the middle of the forest. Nearly every New England homesteader planted apple trees around their house back in those days. The thick twisted trunks stand today as silent sentries, marking what was once an open yard around someone’s home. These homesteads have all been reclaimed by the forest, with tall pine, maple, beach, and oak trees proclaiming nature’s mastery over man’s folly.

We imagined battles fought between the colonists and the natives that reduced the old houses to ash, or ancient plagues that left them empty to fall and be reclaimed by the forest. We searched for arrow heads and never found any, but we collected our glass treasures and etched even more valuable memories of our childhood into minds, as we scrambled through the abandoned ruins hidden in the hills and mountains.