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The Other Cellar Sites
In addition to the seventeenth-century Estabrook cellar, there are seven eighteenth-century cellars in Estabrook: Paul Adams-Rebecca Estabrook's; Kibbe's; the Yellow Birch Cellar; the Black Birch Cellar; Boaz Brown's (17th century?). Pictured elsewhere is minute man Zacheus (later Isaiah) Greene's 1765 house, surviving as the Bartlett farm in Carlisle. Unpictured are the unattributed cellar at Ken Harte's and the lost cellar of Oliver Barron (1744). And at least one corbelled stone chamber (see below). See also, on this site, The Estabrook Woods Experience and the Old Cellar Holes, by J. Walter Brain.
  
 Adams-Estabrook Place small  Kibbe well  Bl. Birch cellar thumb

 P. Adams-Rebecca Estabrook Nat'l H.R.-eligible
farmstead (see below).

 One of the wells of
Samuel Kibbe (b. 1725-d. 1796)

  Little-known
Black Birch Cellar & well
 Yellow Birch Cell. link  Stone chamber link  Boaz Brown cellar
 Long-lost
Yellow Birch Cellar

 Corbeled stone chamber
with capstone. Two others may exist as ruins.

 One of the dual cellars
at Boaz Brown's (17th century?)
John Thoreau Mill John Thoreau's mill. Henry's father had many careers--the last was as a maker of pencils. At one point during Henry's youth, his father operated a sawmill on one of Estabrook's tiny brooks to cut up the cedars of Estabrook's pastures. The millpond and the foundation of the mill are still there on Saw Mill Brook. (The site probably had been in use for centuries). Years later, the son would write: "Was that a large shad bush where Father's [pencil] mill used to be? There is quite a waterfall beyond, where the old dam was" (April 21, 1852). 

 
Old reservoir Hidden in the woods are other small scale waterworks and impoundments, testimony to how precious the water was--not to be wasted. Sometimes they would tip a portion of one watershed into another, for the use of a mill--miniature versions of what happened in Maine, when huge rivers were tipped. Click here for a larger version of this photo, which show the outflow from what was probably a storage pond for runoff, upstream of the Thoreau mill.

 

Lime quarries and kiln.

Further up the old road are the lime kiln and limestone quarries, which were first in use 1685. Limestone was precious to the colonists. One reason was that it was used to plaster the walls to keep the wind out and the chimneys to keep their houses from burning down around them. There are seven working pits, like small slits in the metamorphic rock, from which the locals laboriously chipped the marbleized stone.

 Limestone quarries
 In the quarry  Walking through the quarries lets one touch the farmers' labors.

 

The old lime kiln is visible 50' east of the Estabrook road, near the fork of the Esker Trail. Many mistake the kiln for an old cellar. The limestone was hauled here from the quarries, heated, and turned into plaster. It is said that plaster from here went into the old Angier Meeting House in what is now Waverley. Many decades later in the late 1800s, botanists would visit the area to find plants that liked a sweet soil.

Limestone kiln thumb

Click.
 

For more terrific history, look at --

The original minuteman route down the old Estabrook road : click

The 1683 Estabrook cellar & stone circles: click

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