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The 1683 Thomas Estabrook Farmstead and stone circles
Visible behind the minute men on the previous page is Thomas Estabrook's cellar hole, which is also shown below. Thomas, who has given his name to these woods, settled here sometime after 1660, probably by the time he married in 1683 Sarah Temple from the nearby Spencer Brook Valley. It must have been wild country then. Concord had become the frontier once more-- just 8 years before, most communities to the west had been burned by native people during King Philip's War.

The Estabrook cellar is for many people the destination of their walk. Some don't even notice it, though, so quietly does the cellar hide behind the stone walls that border the old Estabrook road.

Estabrook 1683 Cellar This old cellar is the "center" of their woods experience, the place they have come to believe is the most isolated in the woods from the urban world.
Estabrook 1683 cellars Henry Thoreau's best walking companion, the young poet Ellery Channing, immortalized this forgotten spot with his poem, "The Lonely Road," written when Channing lived on nearby Punkatasset Hill. (This picture by Jan Buerger.)

  See also the photo album: A Walk on the Estabrook Road.

Just south of the Estabrook cellar,
one can find the mysterious stone circles . . .
Stone Circles small The 33 Stone circles. A few rods south of the Estabrook cellar hole are the stone circles. There are about 33 of them, arranged in rows, too large in diameter to be campfires, with their stones generally set vertically. (For scale, Jan Buerger's blue fanny pack is visible in the top picture.) No one has come up with an authoritative explanation of what these are, or has found another example in New England's woods. (People have opined: primitive sites for limestone burning? Guards to protect fruit trees from cattle? An encampment?)


For more terrific history, look at --

The original minuteman route down the old Estabrook road : click

More "ancient yankee ruins": cellars, quarries & mills: click

Other National Register sites near Bateman's Pond:
the Paul Adams farmstead (with manure piles!)
and the 250 year old corn hills: click