View From the Square, Aug., 2007

    The history of our village goes back nearly 300 years. Well, actually it goes back much farther than that if you consider the first human inhabitants, the Native Americans. Native Americans may have been in our area for thousands of years; an archeological site on Hendrick’s Island near Center Bridge revealed 5,000-year-old artifacts.

Locals have reported finding arrowheads in fields along the south branch of the Paunacussing. I have never found such rewards. I often think of our first inhabitants killing deer—for no stipend. Today, goodly hunks of our Solebury tax dollars go to gunning down our suburban rats. Still, many cars beat the snipers to the task.

Carversville is quite lush in late August. Not lush with inebriants, but with vegetation. The Triassic cliffs of Fleecydale Road look primeval and jungle-like. Butterfly bushes crowd the road; late blooming flowers hug the cliffs and American grape and poison ivy cling to trees and rocks like feathers on a boa.

Wildlife is rampant, too. Road pizza, in the form of garter and northern water snakes, mark our summertime roads. A simple way of telling the difference between the two species is that the former is sometimes green or black with vertical markings while the latter is sometimes reddish or black with a criss-cross pattern. Dick Lloyd, who lives with wife Sharon on the Paunacussing, took a photograph of a northern water snake attempting to swallow a fish. The fish proved too formidable for the jaws of the snake and the snake went away hungry. The fish went away dead. Once, in August of 1999, while on a jog on Fleecydale Road, I saw the biggest water snake I cared to see. I would estimate it was six-feet long. I’m sure one of the subsequent floods have performed a forced relocation the serpent.

Other wildlife appear in the village, not including the occasional rodent. A fox lives along the creek past Mike Brummel’s house on a Fleecydale Road. I have seen it scurry away while walking my dog near that spot. The creek is also home to wild trout (near the iron bridge at Old Carversville Road) and to some interesting birds like the kingfisher and the great blue heron. There are deer, too. Go figure. The deer paths go straight up the cliffs at some places. Maybe the sharpshooters should station themselves there.

Speaking of the cliffs and their history, they go back a bit farther than even our Native American ancestors. The geology of our cliffs goes back several hundred million years to a time when the continents were one. It’s inconceivable to think that our area was not that far from Africa but it was. Geologically, the area is part of a phenomenon called the Newark Basin. Red cliffs and brittle rock represent shoreline deposits of a great lake that spanned the area from North Jersey to west of us. The rock is red because it was hematite, or iron-rich rock. In other words, it’s rust. This shale is known as Brunswick Shale. But if you look at the cliff next to Fleecydale Cottage on Fleecydale Road, Ron and Eleanor Gross’s house near Short Road, the sheer wall is gray interlaced with bands of minerals, including iron. The layers in the rock represent volcanism. The rock is trap rock, which gets its name from Swedish for “trappa”, meaning stair or step, according to the US Geological Survey. When volcanoes ceased spewing lava across the plains of the basin, the sediments of the subsequent lake covered the trap rock. Today, trap rock is mined as a source of road beds and construction material. My driveway consists of crushed trap rock. Some Brunswick Shale was mined for building construction. We call these structures brownstones.

Our cliffs are faults, probably a result of aborted rifts 160 million years ago, when the North American Plate separated from African Plate in the late Jurassic period. It was after the rifts formed that the sediments began to build up. Those sediments comprise our Fleecydale valley today. Of course, about 100,000 years ago the melting glaciers of the Ice Age scoured our area. But that’s a story for another day.

So, the next time you look at the Fleecydale cliffs, imagine how far below the water you might have been, how close to Africa you once were, and how hot the lava below your feet was. Imagine those deer paths you see were probably here 5,000 years ago when Native Americans did the culling of the herd.

 Our history is so ephemeral, a mere blip on the timeline of the area. I’d be curious to see what are area would look like 160 million years from now.
View From the Square, April, 2006

Often, my view from the square comes from the perspective of a doting dog owner. That is, I’m being towed in the direction my canine companion, Rosie, chooses to drag me. During my morning half-conscious wanderings with her, we meander from our Carversville Road home past a litany of local roads: Stovers Mill Road, Wismer Road, Aquetong Road, Fleecydale Road, and so on. She makes her rounds, admiring road pizza, carrion and squirrels and I reach an acceptable human state thanks to my third cup of French Roast from the General.

Countless times have I walked these roads—from Sawmill to Stovers Mill, from Fretz Mill to McNeal—and thought about the derivation of the street names. Who was Fretz? Who was Carver? Who was Short and who was Street? What’s a “fleecy”? Where was the saw mill? Has anyone seen the toll gate?

It took me just 12 years to seek the answers; a knucklehead could have figured out half of them immediately.

A five-minute phone call to resident historian Ned Harrington allayed a decade’s worth of pondering. Ned, a veritable font of our area’s rich history, spared me the sin of my ignorance. Instead, he gave me a primer in past demography that resulted in the naming of our streets.Let’s start with Street Road. First, let me tell you that I assumed--in my twisted kind of way--that Street Road was named for someone named “Street”. Who would name a road Avenue Lane, or Road Place, or Boulevard Drive, let alone Street Road? Well, the 18th-century planners that laid out the boundaries of Solebury and Buckingham townships did just that. “It’s a street or a road”, replied Ned. “It’s both, that’s how it got its name.”   So much for my warped theories.

Next, I fell into Ned’s trap by asking about Short Road. Ned spared me deserved indignities by alerting me to the fact it’s “a short road”. So much for a farmer or mill owner named Short. Speaking of mill owners, Stovers Mill Road is named for Issac Stover, one of an ample supply of Stovers (he was also an owner of the Inn). Fretz Mill Road was named for…you guessed it, a man named Fretz who owned the mill on Fleecydale Road. Fretz’ mill spun wool—fleece. That’s how Fleecydale Road acquired its name.

Along Fleecydale Road there were other mills. Among them were a tannery, a granary, a saw mill, and a sash and blind factory. In pre-canal and pre-automobile days goods were carted by horse to New Hope for market. Merchandise was placed in “suggin” bags—probably burlap sacks—and shipped via the aptly-named Suggin Road. Today, that road is known as Sugan Road. Presently, Sugan Road “dead ends” west of Saw Mill Road but it used to continue all the way to the Paunacussing Creek. Today, remnants of the lost section of the road—two sturdy rock fences marking its terminus at the creek--can be seen at the Paunacussing Creek near Fretz Mill Road.

Now, let me steer us back to Tollgate Road. There is no toll gate and there never was one. A “modern crackpot” thought Tollgate Road sounded better than its original name, Kepler Road, according to Ned, who still refers to it by the latter. Other street names are more intuitive: Wismer Road was named for the Wismer family (coincidently ancestors of Ned’s); McNeal Road is so-called because a farmer named McNeal lived on the road: Carversville Road is named for Thomas Carver, for whom the village is named; Saw Mill Road was home to a saw mill, the remains of which are hidden from sight today.

Lastly, one of the busiest streets in Solebury Township starts or ends in Carversville, depending on one’s perception. That street is Aquetong Road. The eight-mile path goes from the village to the Delaware River to the former village of Akwetong. Indigenous people referred to their domain as a place of many springs.

It was logic that named most of our roads—named for people, places, or things. The exception to that theory is, of course, is Tollgate Road. Today’s newer road names bear little sense, especially with names like Hearth Way, Furnace Way, Bellows Way, or Fox Chase Lane, Fawn Place, or Buckskin Drive. There’s even a Miladies Lane, which should not be confused with Milords Lane. I kid you not.

I’m happy with our street names—logical or not—and I’d gladly pay a toll to keep them that way.

For further reading on the subject of the village’s mills, read Gary Granzow’s excellent pamphlet Five Mills on the Paunacussing. Contact the Historic Carversville Society at info@carversville.com for a copy.

Paul Savage, April 2006

View from the Square, June 2005

You have to love Carversville. It dates back to the early 1700’s. It has two historic bridges, each significant. The town square holds a secret (a buried water pump, so now the secret’s out). A lot of old houses remain, most are well maintained, and many hail from the 18th century. There’s a tunnel, too; it connects the two branches of the Paunacussing at Carversville and Wismer Roads.

There’s the odd flood now and again. The flood of 1999 wreaked havoc. Seven inches of rain fell. Boats rescued people. It was wet, very wet, Noah’s Ark kind of wet. The Paunacussing couldn’t handle the work load; water bottlenecked at the tunnel, debris created a dam at its opening, and wham, just like that, the Village was under water.

The symbol of our Village is a composite of the buildings vital to Carversville. Each is an icon, each holding an import piece of the Village DNA. In the logo, those buildings—the Inn, the Store, etc.—sit atop the 1844 Fleecydale stone bridge. That bridge is a metaphor for us. It’s a connection, a span, a crossing to the past.

It’s a simple bridge, just three arches. The bridge melts into the adjacent hill, which is probably 200 million years old, prehistoric for sure. It’s constructed from field and river stones, ubiquitous as the bridge itself. Little mortar was used; just technique passed down from the Romans, who mastered the craft

It spans the creek at about a 30-degree angle. Most bridges attack their voids at right angles. It’s wide enough for one car to cross comfortably. SUVs and the like barely squeeze by; the bridge was built for horses and carts. Some capstones from one side have been dispatched to the creek, probably by a truck. The bridge does not like trucks.

Bridges are celebrated around the world. The Brooklyn Bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Pont Neuf in Paris, and Tower Bridge in London all strike awe, as they did when they were erected. We celebrate our bridges too. But we do not hold the keys to maintain them. Those keys are held in Harrisburg, or some satellite office of Penn Dot, hidden from view, elusive to the grasp.

Our bridge—the symbol on our logo—is in danger. It’s splayed; meaning that one side of the bridge is not parallel to its companion. There a hole in the deck, protected by orange traffic barrels, offering a view to the creek below. Stones below the arches protrude like canine teeth, stalactites point to the graffiti beneath, and the piers are just one or two bad floods from giving way to collapse—if the sides don’t fall first.

Our tunnel—perhaps 100 feet of it—is hardly noticed. It starts just a little to the west of the McDonald’s property on Carversville Road. It goes east under Wismer Road, then under Noel Barrett and Anne Carney’s "front lawn" where it reopens by the old yellow post office, now owned by Dan Stern. Like the Fleecydale Bridge, it has seen better days, or it’s long in the tooth, as Ned Harrington might surmise.

So Penn Dot, which is responsible for our tunnel, decided to help our failing channel last week: they injected enough concrete at base of the tunnel to keep it from collapsing. Unfortunately, it’s narrower now. That means less water can pass through it. That spells flood. Penn Dot’s intentions were hardly malicious; if something’s broke, fix it. But if this tunnel were an artery, adding a goodly hunk of concrete is tantamount to clogging the vessel, not expanding it. It needs a stent, not more plaque.

It’s easy to make jokes about Penn Dot. Hopefully, our bridge won’t collapse when their over-the-weight-limit10-ton dump truck drives over it. This is the Keystone State. Keystones hold bridges together. Our keystone is fading fast.

Paul Savage, June, 2005

View from the Square, April 2005

It must be spring.

The detritus from the winter storms lingers on the pavement like poppy seeds on a bagel. The temperature rises above bone chilling enough for intrepid noon-time epicureans to lunch al fresco in the secret garden, the first of the fair-weather song birds serenade them from the trees. The hue of the field behind the General Store changes from tan to green, chlorophyll forsakes dormancy yet another time. The icy edges of the Paunacussing have given way to the mossy stones and pebbles of the stream bed, revealing an oyster shell or shard of red clay pipe, refuse from another era.

The pelotons (packs of bicylicsts) have returned, the lycra-clad cyclists waddling from their high-priced carbon fiber and metal rigs for refueling at the General’s counter, each shoe making its signature click-click, each brightly colored jersey catching the eye, some might say assaulting it. Sometimes the pelotons roll through the Village without stopping, heading for biking Nirvana of Fleecydale Road, the trailing sound of their voices, gears and chains distorted by the Doppler Effect. Other riders, pursuing pain, eyeball Wismer Road like Hillary ogled Everest, making the ascent on the steepest hill in town for pleasure, some might say twisted euphoria. It must be Saturday.

Not far behind the manually powered two-wheelers come the Harley-Davidsons, and other less-pedigreed motorcycles. They carry their signature noises, too, though not quite as subtle, competing for decibels with the choir at the Christian Church. It must be Sunday.

Poking from the thawed flower beds in The Secret Garden are bulbs’ shoots, like moray eels in a coral reef. Awaiting their arrival are half a dozen women (with an occasional male in tow) to spend a morning battling weeds, their weapons trowels, rakes and clippers, and coaxing botanical allies from their winter’s absence. It must be Monday.

The odd car, usually bearing Jersey tags, seeks the first Villager for directions to Rice’s, its driver hardly recognizing the spectacled pony-tailed man as he dispatches them toward Mechanicsville Road. It must be Tuesday.
 

Canine Carversvillians come in different shapes, sizes, colors, demeanors. Some are tethered, others lead, a few follow. They’re Winston, Cosmo, Quinn, Quincy, Fannie, Lucy, Louie, the two Jakes (no relation), Rosie, among others. Their quest is to follow their noses, leave a few calling cards, perhaps take a dip in the creek or share a bagel. It must be Wednesday.
 

No village is complete without a watering hole. And neither is ours. This night, locals flock to the oak bar at the Inn, for dry Chardonnay, cold yeast beverages and single-malted libations, among other concoctions. Some might even eat. It must be Thursday.
 

Hugh appeased his smoker stationed in a woodsy nook of the General parking lot, stoking it like a collier on a steamer. The pork occupant of the cooker received an ample slathering of homemade barbecue sauce, and about ten hours of the chef’s attention. Today, merely an hour past lunchtime, his signature B-B-Q is sold out, sating many a customer. It must be Friday.

The Square seems awake again, more bustling, teeming with cars, some parked, some blowing past stop signs. But it’s always busy, even at night, save Mondays, when the Inn’s closed. We just get to see it, hear it smell it, dodge it. And savor it.

It must be spring.

Paul Savage, 2005