On this past sunless and moody Sunday I launched into the Contoocook River in Greenfield, NH and paddled downriver beneath the covered bridge (at left) connecting Hancock and Greenfield.
Near where the river widened out into the approximately 420 acre Powder Mill Pond I passed this idyllic abode perched on a boulder...
Upon entering the pond I used my
map to find Moose Brook and the nearby Elmwood Junction, a once busy rail crossroads of the Boston and Maine Railroad system. Entering the cove leading to Moose Brook an eagle noted my progress and served as a good omen for the day...
Fall foliage was better than I expected, despite the lack of sunshine...
I went ashore where the rails of the abandoned Monadnock Railroad (connecting Worcester, MA to Hillsborough, NH) long ago crossed Moose Brook...
This spot was just south of Elmwood Junction and if I'd stood here a hundred years ago, and looked to the north, I'd have seen a transportation hotspot such as the one depicted in this
link.
Howard Mansfield in his book
The Same Axe, Twice: Restoration and Renewal in a Throwaway Age describes the place as follows: "Elmwood Junction had a considerable constellation of buildings: a station with platforms, a station agent's house, coal sheds, water tank and pump house, ice house, oil shed, tool shed, high-level freight platform, two water standpipes, scale house and scales, and a section house. There were sidings leading to these: a sunken track into the coal shed, a coal loading and unloading track, wharf track, passing track, short and long curving wye tracks, an x-shaped diamond crossing regulated by a ball signal, and tracks leading compass-like from Hancock, New Hampshire to Nashua, Hillsborough, Peterborough, Keene, Boston, and Worcester...on the large x-shaped crossing, trains reversed direction, doing what was known as the "Elmwood Shuffle".
Aside from this sign...
...which may have once corresponded to numbered place-markers, very little of Elmwood Junction remains...most everything was removed and the rest bulldozed into oblivion. The line coming west from Nashua does remain, and in the late 1940s was connected via this curved-section of track to the line going north to Hillsborough...
...thus ending the need for the "Elmwood Shuffle".
The rails are on the light side for today's heavier railcars and haven't seen a train in years.
After walking through phantom buildings and stepping about phantom tracks, I returned to my vessel and paddled to the dam at the pond's north end...
Turning about I hoped to see Mt. Monadnock to the southwest, but the low clouds hung tough and kept the mountain shrouded from view.
Once back at the boat launch I decided to continue heading upriver on the Contoocook and explored it in a mostly southerly direction to the truss bridge at Cavender Rd (closed to vehicles)...
In one of the more remote sections between the pond and Cavender, numerous scent mounds lined the river's west bank...perhaps the sign of river otters.
This hornet's nest was nicely decorated for the season...
Powder Mill Pond and the Contoocook above it offer fine paddling with shorelines undeveloped for the most part...absolutely perfect for an early October Sunday morning.
There was little trash of consequence encountered while paddling on the Contoocook River and Powder Mill Pond.
However, traipsing about Elmwood Junction garnered a fair amount of recyclables...
...none of it historic in nature.
