The Greenwalt Quarry

Notable sites in the Greenwalt area

In the 19th Century, most of the US population lived in rural areas, and most of them were engaged in farming. However, it was always a difficult life and farming alone rarely made anyone comfortably wealthy. For that reason, farmers were always looking for other ways to supplement their income. It might have been doing handyman-type work, carpentry, helping out on neighboring farms, or pretty much anything that someone would pay them for. They also might look around and try to utilize whatever resources they had available to them. This is a both a story about such a situation, and about how it took a few strokes of luck to uncover it.

In the course of my research over the past decade, I've come to appreciate how fluid it is and how often one investigation flows naturally into the next. In no small part, this is because in an area like MCH the lives of the residents are so interconnected that it's almost impossible (and in my mind, undesirable) to separate them and try to fully understand anything cordoned off and in a vacuum. The chain of events that lead to this particular story began a few posts ago, with the Italian community at Roseville. In trying to understand that tale better I ended up with the story of the first trip along the B&O line, and how they stopped to admire the new bridge over White Clay Creek and its stonework.

This in turn led Newark-based historical researcher Jim Jones to take a trip to the bridge himself, just to see what the area was like today. While there, his keen eye detected what appeared to him to be an old quarry, just a couple hundred feet southwest of the bridge. There was a sheer rockface wall that looked very much like it had been quarried. The questions then became...Who created this, when, and for what reason? With the close proximity of the railroad, my first thought was that it might have been a B&O operation, perhaps quarrying stone for use as ballast along the tracks. That would have dated it back as far as the 1880's.

Fair Field on Polly Drummond's Hill

North side of the Fair Field barn

Although farms in the 18th and 19th Centuries were awash in all kinds of structures, both large and small, the two most important were the dwelling house and the barn, just not always in that order. In fact, it was not unusual for a family settling on a new piece of ground to first build a small log home while they worked on the larger, permanent barn, then only several years later replace their home with a larger, more permanent stone or frame house. For while the family could make due with a smaller home for a while, they still needed a place for their livestock and equipment, without which they'd be looking at some very hard times.

As the 19th Century gave way to the 20th and the landscape of MCH changed, many of these farms ceased operating. Some were abandoned, leaving all the buildings to fall into ruins. On a lucky few, both the house and the barn were saved, either because some farming was still done or the families worked to save the barn. But because they are large and require a lot of upkeep, most times the barn was left to fall into disrepair or be torn down, even if its accompanying farmhouse was still in use. On most MCH properties where a historic home still stands, either the barn is completely gone or at best, a few walls stand in testament to its existence.

There are very few instances, however, where circumstances allowed for a barn to survive where the house did not (I should mention that the house and barn were usually built very near each other, no more than a quick walk apart). In one such instance, an old fieldstone barn is now in the hands of  a non-profit organization that, while having nothing to do with history, is nonetheless working to upkeep and continue to utilize the historic structure. The group is the Drummond Hill Pool, and the beautiful barn is the last remnant of the estate once known as Fair Field.