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Date: 7/20/2021
CHESTER – Chester Foundation President David Pierce and Director of Parks and Trails Elizabeth S. Massa recently completed a two-year quest to find and document the boundary stones in the town of Chester.
They took on the task as boundary stone walkers in response to a letter sent to the town from the U.S. Census Bureau in January 2018. They also inspired architect Jeffrey Scott Penn to do the survey for Huntington.
The letter states that the voluntary Boundary and Annexation Survey (BAS) is an important opportunity to ensure the correct boundary and legal name of the town. The letter also said the bureau is consolidating reporting with individual states, and that towns should work with the state to ensure that any changes are reported.
Pierce said boundary stone walkers used to be an elected position, which he first remembered hearing about in Worthington years ago. “It seems to have fallen out of favor, they probably don’t think it’s necessary and didn’t prioritize it. Chester hadn’t done it in years,” Pierce said, adding that the documentation in the town was sparse, so he and Massa had to start from scratch.
“Every town is supposed to have boundary stone walkers,” Massa said.
Pierce, who is also president of the Friends of the Hilltown Stone Arches, said he knew where a couple of them were from an old town map that showed a lot of the stone posts in 1893. He said a lot of them had water troughs next to them, and most of them, according to that map, were alongside roads.
Over the past two years, Pierce and Massa found 17 stone markers in Chester that were shown on the old maps. “We didn’t find them all,” Massa said. She said some may have been moved by snow plows and damaged, others may have been stolen or vandalized. She said she read in a book about a stone marker in Montgomery that had been thrown off the cliff of Tekoa mountain.
“It’s virtually impossible to find them all. I know there’s one in Russell on Pine Hill that is half chopped off. The Chester Huntington one on Old State Highway is broken into three pieces but it’s still there,” Massa said, adding that they returned to Bromley Road three different times to search for a marker which they never found.
She said 50 percent were relatively easy to find, as long as you know where the town lines are.
“You have to go before the leaves come out. It’s almost impossible to find them once the leaves come out, as 50 percent of them are in the woods, and you have to hike in a couple of miles and use your GPS to find them,” Massa added.
Once found, Pierce would take a chisel and put his initials as appointed town boundary stone walker and the year on the stone. The first ones had D.P. 2019, then D.P. 2020 as the project entered the second year. He said he consulted with the Chester Granite Company, run by Alan Williams, who let him borrow a hammer and chisel and showed him the technique. “It was kind of tough, not easy to do. A lot of them were rocks, a lot were full. I didn’t do those – I didn’t want to obliterate something else,” he said.
Along the way they were joined by Penn, who accompanied them on the search for several stones, such as the stone on Goss Hill Road on the border shared with Huntington, which Massa said was the hardest one to find.
“(The stone) had fallen down, and was laying on its side on Walnut Hill,” she said, adding that she, Pierce and Penn walked for two hours in 20-degree weather to find it lying on its side covered in moss. That stone was subsequently marked on both the Huntington and Chester maps. She said they put the stone upright.
“The really cool one is at the top of LIttleville Dam. It was in the tar in the road and scraped out,” Pierce said, adding that it had probably been knocked over by a plow. Pierce said he’s going to be looking for money to repair some of the stones. Other boundary stones were found in rock walls.
Both the Chester and Huntington boundary stone reports have been filed with the towns. The report in Chester has a full-size blueprint copy of the maps with photos of the stones inserted on it. The location and photos of the stones in Chester were also posted by Massa on the free Gaia wayfaring app, which is available to the public.
“I took a fresh look at the bounds. After map research (USGS and others), I identified physical bounds are present at the corners, and ultimately, I located all of them except one (which may be present but I could not reach). Many of these are ancient (over 200 years old) but some date from subsequent border changes (1855) or Army Corps period work for the reservoirs. There are secondary bounds along most major roads, and I identified several of those,” Penn said, adding that he produced a report for the town to assist in future reconnaissance.
Massa also created a Facebook page, Hilltown Stone Posts, which now has 500 followers. A founding member and active leader of the Western Mass. Hilltown Hikers, she posts photos of boundary stones the group finds whenever they are out hiking. “I found Russell, Tolland, Sheffield and Salisbury, CT.
“Once we did all of Chester, we got into it, and so did members of the Western Mass Hilltown Hikers,” she said, adding that stones are now being posted all of the time on the page by other people.
“History tends to get forgotten. If you start to bring it back, other people pay attention,” Massa said.