Setting Sun Through Snow-Laden Branches(Random Pointless Photos)

Artsy cell-phone shot taken on a trail out back of Big Maple Lake.



Same place, same time: dog in blue boots.

Crown-Tipped Coral

Found this interesting fungus while walking my dogs in the woods north of Big Maple Lake on a wet day.


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It looks a bit like Crown-Tipped Coral, but I'm not sure those really are "crowns" on top of each stalk. It might be Yellow-Tipped Coral. The first is edible, the second is poisonous.

8 9 17 16(Random Pointless Photos)

You can find this concrete marker among the trees north of Big Maple Lake.


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This spot is (supposed to be) the meeting point of Sections 8, 9, 16, and 17 (of Township 35 North, Range 7 West).



So it also marked the meeting point of the Chester and Nolte farms … both of which eventually became the Wasy farm, and all of which is now Deep River County Park.


Here are Buddy and Robbie ignoring that concrete post and its aging metal guardian.




East of this spot, in what may be the tippy-top of Section 16, or the bottom of Section 9, among the ruins of the Nolte/Wasy farm, I found this:





A tree had grown up through the concrete floor of an outbuilding, then fallen over, and in doing so pulled up a section of the floor, exposing orange terra cotta tile under the concrete.


Here's Big Maple Lake.




Here's an artistic shot of sunlight sparkling on Big Maple Lake.




Here's Robbie getting in the way of the sparkles.

Hides Behind Bulls

Another dip into the steamer trunk brought up this intriguing series of photos.

First, we have this man dressed in work clothes but sporting a fabulous fedora as he shows off a bull.


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images courtesy of Eldon Harms.

No ID on him. Another picture, however, has these notes on the back:



The Nolte brothers, as we know, were Henry and Louis. Could Fedora Guy be one of them? The steamer trunk's owner examined the picture and said, "That sure looks like Henry Nolte … but maybe you shouldn't bet money on it." He was a boy of ten the last time he saw Henry, and that was 80 years ago. (The fact that the photos are printed on Velox paper doesn't help us, since that type of paper was in use throughout Henry's lifetime and for decades after his death.)

This is the photo with the notes on the back:



In this and many other photos, Fedora Guy adopted the technique of crouching behind the animal he's showing off, so that his hat won't distract from the bovine beauty.


Let's play "Spot the Guy Behind the Cattle"!

















Well, that was fun!


Another way not to outshine the cattle was to hold the animal by a long rope or pole and stand outside the shot:



… Oops. (From what I can see of that man, he's dressed differently — overalls — so it may not be Fedora Guy, or it may be another day. He's wearing a hat, but you can barely see its shape.)


Practice makes perfect:




Give the guy a hand!



There's a few more like that, but I think we've seen enough.


One last picture! It's similar in subject matter and style, but the physical photo seems to have a different finish.



Is that even Fedora Guy? He's dressed differently from the first picture (hat included). Really, I can't see his face clearly enough to judge whether it's the same man.


One last comment: in the first photo in this post, there is a one-story building in the background that appears to sit on a cement foundation. The building is long; if it is also narrow, then it might possibly be the source of that long, narrow cement foundation that remains among the trees between Big Maple Lake and the Deep River. However, beyond the handwritten note suggesting a link between the Nolte brothers and these photos, we have no information about where these photos were shot, and I can't say I recognize any of these buildings from the 1947 property assessment report, so I have little basis to assert that this is the Nolte farm. On the other hand, if Fedora Guy is Henry Nolte, then at least 13 years of possible alterations passed between these photos and the property assessment photos.

The Milk House

In our previous installment of Stuff That Used to Be Around Big Maple Lake, I mentioned the lingering remains of what appears to have been a small terracotta-block building with electricity. Here's the building those ruins seem to resemble:


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images courtesy of Chester Wasy.

A milk house is where the full milk cans were kept cool in tanks of water until they could be shipped to the milk-bottling factory. In Henry Nolte's time, the electrical pump that drew water into the tanks was controlled by a big throw-switch on the wall. That switch always sparked when you turned it on, which scared the little neighbor kid who would tell me about it 80 years later.

That wheeled contraption out front is a milk cart, built to carry cans of milk from the barn to the milk house, and from the milk house to the truck that would carry them away to their rendezvous with destiny.



The problem I have with connecting this building to the foundation among the trees east of Big Maple Lake (small foundation, bits of terracotta blocks, porcelain insulators and shreds of metal wire) is that, as we see from the photo, the milk house was right next to the main house, and the ruins out in the woods that seem to correspond to the main house are at some distance from the little foundation. So I must be wrong about something, and perhaps many things.

Nolte-Wasy Garage and Tool Shed

Somewhere in the woods between the Deep River and Big Maple Lake is the location of these two buildings …


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images courtesy of Chester Wasy.

… but I don't know where, exactly.

Here is the description from the 1947 property assessment report.



The garage was made of Hobart terra cotta, or so I'm told. (While I have found a concrete foundation out there surrounded by fragments of terra cotta, the foundation looks too small to hold two cars; it might be another terra cotta outbuilding which we shall get to later.) It was built within Louis Nolte's lifetime, as Henry and Louis each had their own car to park in there — a Model T and a Model A, not sure who had which.

The Former Nolte House, 1947

Here is the saddest house in Ainsworth, in happier times.


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images courtesy of Chester Wasy.

This image comes from the 1947 property assessment report prepared for the Wasy family.



I do not know how much remodeling this house went through between 1934 and 1947 — not enough to make it unrecognizable to a former neighbor of the Nolte brothers!

As you may remember, this house stood on the west bank of the Deep River, on the north side of Ainsworth Road, east of Big Maple Lake. Mr. Wasy has told me that the property assessment report included a map showing the layout of this farm (houses and outbuildings), which he will send me when he is able; I am hoping that map will help me make sense of the ruins in the woods. I already have photos of the outbuildings and will get around to posting those eventually.

The Wasys lived here for two years before moving to the former Chester house.

Wildflowers of Ainsworth: Least Hop Clover

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The blossoms are so little and the plant so low-growing that I've overlooked it all this time, though it's abundant. This photo is from the Big Maple Lake area, but Least Hop Clover grows all along Ainsworth Road and in my own lawn.

Ruins of Ainsworth: The House in the Woods

The northern part of Deep River County Park has a long trail winding through its woods, with Big Maple Lake on one side and Deep River on the other.

If it's April and you enter the trail northwest of the lake, you will see daffodils blooming amid the rougher vegetation on the edge of the woods.

You follow the trail into the woods. Soon you pass between posts that once held a gate.


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You keep walking north. Fifty feet into the woods to your right — you won't notice it unless you know exactly where to look — is a rusted piece of old farming equipment, one wheel crushed by a fallen tree.



The trail comes to a fork where it has looped back on itself. You keep to the northwest fork. You see something through the trees that's tall and broad, brick-red and stone-gray, and completely leafless. You say to yourself, "What the heck — is that a chimney?"

It is.



At first you think, delightedly, that you've stumbled upon some remnant of a pioneer homestead. Closer inspection proves you wrong: it's all quite modern, from the well ...



... to the plumbing ...



... to the wiring ...



... and even to the downspout.




The years and the nocturnal revelers have not been kind to the chimney. The photo above is several years old. Here it is a few days ago.



If you walk east from the house, you come across a shallow depression running north-south through the woods. It's not deep enough to be called a ditch, but it's too straight to be natural. Follow the faint line of that depression, and you come to a gas connection.





I know nothing about the history of the house. I can't find it on any of the aerial photos. Still, it's an interesting thing to encounter deep in the woods. I love the park, its trees and wildflowers, the river, the birds and deer and other wildlife, but nothing there intrigues me quite as much as these human artifacts.

Aerial Photos: 1939 (1 of 3)

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This photo is bisected vertically, just to the left of center, by Grand Boulevard, aka State Road 51. Almost at the center of the photo you can see the triangle formed by the intersection of Grand Boulevard, Ainsworth Road and the Grand Trunk Railroad.

Ainsworth Road here appears in its old configuration: it crosses the railroad tracks and connects with Grand Boulevard south of the tracks. These days it veers north to connect with Grand just north of the tracks, never crossing them at all. When I moved out here in 1990, you could still see a line in the pavement of Ainsworth Road that pointed obliquely toward the tracks, marking the road's old path. I don't know exactly when the change was made, but I believe it was post-1973. When they resurfaced Ainsworth Road prior to excavating Big Maple Lake, they covered up the line.

On the north side of the Ainsworth Triangle, you can just make out what appears to be a building right beside the railroad tracks. I suspect that was the railroad station. Two paths have been worn from Grand Boulevard to that building, as if by people coming from the north and from the south.

As you follow Grand Boulevard south, you can clearly see the dark square of the school building, halfway between Ainsworth Road and 73rd Street.

Looking east on Ainsworth Road, you find no trace of Shiloh Ranch or the sheep farm buildings. Once you pass the tiny house and barn at 6720, there is nothing until the collection of buildings that surrounded the house at the western border of what is now Big Maple Lake park. The house still stands today, and as for the outbuildings, you can find their ruins among the trees that have filled up the fields on both sides of the road.

Continuing eastward along Ainsworth Road, you come to a collection of buildings on the north side of the road, just edging the dense vegetation that marks the Deep River.

When I first started taking my dog for walks in the forest around Big Maple Lake, I noticed great blocks of broken concrete piled along the path at the east end of the park. I thought, who would go to all the trouble of driving up this little path to dump their debris in the park? What's wrong with people? and so on. But a little more exploration showed me that the debris hadn't been imported — it was the remains of some mysterious structure that had been built and then demolished on that site. Deep among the trees, among the thickets of poison ivy and the thorns of multiflora rose, I traced the concrete foundation of a long, narrow building. Elsewhere there were remnants of electrical conduit, fencing, gates, truck bumpers, glazed bricks and, further towards the river, what seemed an archeological treasure trove of garbage that people had dumped down the high, sloping bank of the Deep River. Further investigation of the remains and the garbage dump proved it all disappointingly modern, but I was still curious about what the structures had been and who had built them. I haven't found out yet.

Anyway, there they stand, pristine in an open field, in 1939.