Boxborough Esker

The Boxborough Esker: A Featured Site in Manitou
A Field Report by Daniel V. Boudillion

Site Visit: December 16, 2001

The Boxborough Esker is prominently featured in the book Manitou by James Mavor and Byron Dix. They consider it a significant Native American site in the Hopewellian tradition. To quote the authors:

“We believe that the shaman-preachers of Nashoba used the praying villages to maintain the Indian communication links, the sacred landscape and the stone and earthen structures in the midst of encroaching white colonists. We believe that central to their world was the Boxborough esker.”

I thought it would be interesting to visit the esker and report how it appeared to me. It is not my intent to prove or disprove anything with this article, but simply to report what I saw and provide some photos for those who have not yet visited the site.

The esker is a natural geological formation nearly a mile and three quarters long from tip to tail, and more than sixty feet tall. Geologists consider it to have been created by a glacier 15,000 years ago. In any event, it rises out of the Beaver Brook watercourse, a long, high, serpentine shape. It lies just south of Route 2 between Beaver Brook and Route 495, paralleling them on a northeast-southwest axis.

Map of Esker

The esker is approximately sixty-five feet high and ten to fifteen feet wide at the top. I walked the length of its spine and it resembled a railroad bed raised sixty feet high with extremely steep sides. It was certainly an awe-inspiring place of nature and well worth visiting for its own sake.

View West from Top of Esker

The northern end of the esker lies in Littleton. This section has unfortunately been completely removed through past gravel operations. The section that is featured in Manitou is owned by The Nature Conservancy, which maintains a well marked trail on the property. Public access is on Swanson Road at the dead end. A yellow sign marks the trail head on a chain link fence next to the highway. There is a four tenths of a mile walk between two chain link fences to actually get to the esker. On my first visit I walked in from the north through the strip of woods between 495 and the swamp.

The area discussed in Manitou is at the northern end of Muddy Pond. As I approached Muddy Pond along the spine of the esker, I noticed several features from the book: a ramp going down on the east side, a stone row paralleling the path along the esker’s spine, and further along, a gap in the row through which a second ramp descends.

Gap In Row & Platform / Leveled Area

I have previously seen similar gaps like this where two ends of a stone row don’t meet up correctly, leaving a passage between them. The most recent example I’ve seen of this was close to an Indian corn grinding stone in Acton. The area beyond the gap is a long level area that Mavor & Dix call a platform and believe to be man-made.

The second ramp proceeded across the leveled area and then down the side of the esker. All told, there are four such earthen ramps giving access to the top of the esker as well as a newer ramp of modern construction. Of the four older ones, there was nothing I could see that specifically implied native construction to me. Rather, they seemed consistent with Colonial-style cart ways. Whomever created them, they are still in remarkably excellent condition. I found them to be quite serviceable: both well defined and level, and without ruts. All the ramps I saw were seven to eight feet wide.

Earthen Ramp

The two ramps at Muddy Pond are placed in one of the few areas where farmers - before Route 495 was built - could access the esker across dry land from their fields on Hill Road in Boxborough. In fact, a rutted old cart way runs down from Hill Road to the base of the northern ramp. I am told by George Krusen that this was used by the farmers as a means of accessing the esker in order to cross Beaver Brook further upstream at a place called Brown's Bridge.

The other two ramps are on the west side of the esker: one further south, the other at the middle portion. These both lead to the water’s edge of Beaver Brook. In both cases, these are one of the few places where the brook bends close enough to touch the esker, thus making them suitable as landings for boats or canoes. In fact, the southern ramp appears to have once been a well used campsite.

Campsite

At the bottom of the ramp at Muddy Pond, I looked for the three earthen circles. These I did indeed find, although they were difficult to photograph. They are more clearly visible to the eye than the camera, with one more obvious than the other two. They are approximately twenty-two feet across, constructed of a circular ditch, the earth of which has been piled up in the center, making a low mound. Each has an entranceway about three feet wide where the ditch was not dug. These present a very unusual sight and are well worth the visit. The only similar thing I’ve seen was the low circular mound on top of the larger earthwork and standing stones at the Druid Hill site in Lowell. (This was excavated by the University of Lowell and pronounced a folly. It has since been made into an athletic field.)

Earthen Circle

A fourth earthen circle is noted in the book. I located this by the water at the end of the ramp located in the middle portion of the esker. This was much less distinct and it is a testimonial to Mavor and Dix’s sharp eyes that they discovered this at all.

Mavor & Dix also note three prayer seats, or coves, on the flat at the esker’s base at Muddy Pond. The southern prayer cove is an earthen construction made of a shallow u-shaped ditch. It is similar in construction style to the earth circles. The one to the north is adjacent to a stone row and ramp and is the best of the three. This is a small stone cove set in a low earthen mound. It is at the base of the esker, facing the esker. The third one is next to a stone row that runs up the side of the esker. It is similar in construction to the north one, but in poorer condition. It also faces the esker.

Prayer Seat

The row that runs up the side of the esker is pictured in Manitou with the Summer Solstice sun setting behind it. I was unable to confirm the alignment due to visiting in winter, but their photo is quite convincing.

Summer Solstice Row

Following this row back from the esker there is a six foot break, which picks up again and heads easterly uphill to Route 495. Past the break, Mavor & Dix note two north-facing embrasures next to each other in the wall. These appeared as only slight indentations to me, and their structure was such that the back side of the wall formed a slight south facing embrasure as well. Neither would have caught my eye had I not been looking for them with the book in hand. However, just a few feet further in the row, and adjacent to the embrasures, was a construction of three white stones. The large white stone has a flattened top, the egg shaped white stone resting on it. Leaning up against it is a small white Manitou stone on the south side. The north-facing embrasures face an old camp site and are near a modern deer stand.

Embrasure with White stones At Upper Right in Row

A note about the stone rows. Mavor & Dix mention seeing both white quartz in the rows as well as burnt stone. I can confirm this – it is certainly an oddity that sticks out, and white quartz is unusual in the area. I also noticed quite a bit of reddish stone in the rows. Also, the esker is not particularly rocky, with little field stone of any sizes or variety. After viewing the stone rows in the Muddy Brook area, I began to wonder where the stone came from. The esker did not seem to my glance to have been able to provide it in that quantity. I also noticed that where a row crossed the esker’s spine at the southern end of the pond, that some of the stone was in large broken chunks and had large boreholes drilled in it. Similar size bore holes may be seen inside in the back of the chamber on the Littleton/Harvard line in Littleton.

According to Mavor & Dix, old bottles and pails can be votive offerings in more recent native American culture. And as noted in the book, there are some old pails located at the juncture of the stone rows at the base of the esker near the bottom of the ramps. I also located several Manitou stones in and around this part of the esker, as well as a sapling whose trunk had been shaped to have a u-shaped bend to it. Shaping of young trees in this manner is considered by Mavor & Dix to be a native activity and part of marking sacred sites. There was also a dug-out area on the flat that was not mentioned in the book and looks relatively recent.

Pails

Also noted in Manitou are two scallops taken out of the side of the esker to the left of the Summer Solstice row. A tree has partially fallen on them, but even so, they did not seem particularly significant to me. I would not have noticed them had I not been looking for them from the book. However, I should mention that of the four ramps I saw and investigated, at the end of each of them there was a scallop in the esker. (Three of the four also terminate with earthen circles.)

At the southern end of the esker where Beaver Brook crosses is a second area mapped and featured in Manitou. This area consists of a ditch, row, and two scallops in the embankment. To get to it from the esker, you need to cross the brook by way of a beaver dam. I crossed in winter, but I do not think it would be easy or always possible in summer. The ditch, row, and scallops are exactly as described in the book. The brow of the ditch was also used as a camp site some time in the past. There is also a shallow ditch that runs parallel with the stone row at the base of the esker side of the brook.

Ditch & Row

In conclusion, by using the maps provided in the book, I was able to locate all the features that Mavor & Dix reported. However, the Muddy Pond site is subtle. Had I not been looking for the features reported in the book, I doubt that I would have given it a second glance, and might have attributed what I did see to Colonial and post-Colonial activity. The earthen rings are very impressive, but it certainly would be easy to miss them in a casual walkthrough. The most obvious enigmatic construction was the row and ditch at the beaver dam. I found the esker itself to be an inspiring place of nature in and of itself.

View of Esker from Muddy Pond Site

The purpose of this article is simply to report what I saw when visiting a featured site in a groundbreaking book, not to prove or disprove any theories about the site. If anyone would like to comment or correspond, my email address is dvb@boudillion.com.

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