Folks who have visited my "Nostalgia Place" will recall my essay about the weekly visits to my grandfather's house in the Silver Lake district of Cranston, RI. Part of Silver Lake is also in Providence, and includes Neutaconkanut Hill, at the foot of which is now a park. Several months ago, I received an e-mail asking me about a former ski lift on Neutaconkanut; I didn't know such existed.

Today I was chilling out reading one of my bound volumes of St. Nicholas children's magazine, this one from April 1900, and came upon this in the section "Nature and Science for Young Folks":

Big Boulders and Little Boulders

On a Rhode Island hillside, high above a valley, is perched a boulder so balanced that it looks as if the slightest push would sent it rolling down the hill. There are houses below it. Were it to fall on them they would be crushed like egg-shells, for it is as large as a house.

Before the white man lived in the valley the Indian hunted there. He climbed the hill and give to this wonderful rock the name "Neutaconkanut." Long before the Indian found it, even long before history began, the rock stood there like a gigantic sentinel guarding the valley.

How came this immense boulder there? It is certainly not the work of man. It could not have dropped from the heavens like a shooting-star, and remained balanced there, because it would have been crushed in striking.

[article then goes on to explain about the glaciers and glacial rock left behind after the last Ice Age.]

The balanced boulder was one of these rock fragments. It, too, was torn from some northern mountain-side and borne southward by the ice. When the ice melted it was left balanced high on the brow of the hill where to-day it stands undisturbed, a monument to the long ago departed ice age.

Wow. I wonder if the rock is still there, but I think not, as I'm sure if such a wonder existed my Dad would have taken me up to see it. So I wonder what did happen to it? Did someone dislodge it when they built the ski area? Or before? Did it finally simply erode and fall on its own?

I went searching about and found nothing about the rock, but here's a web page about the former ski area.

This is a history of Silver Lake; I didn't realize it had once belonged to the town of Johnston.

Here's a close-up of an old map of Johnston which apparently is in the town hall; you can see the houses at the foot of Neutaconkanut Hill as mentioned in the St. Nicholas article.

And this web page is "Pleasant Places in Rhode Island," a wonderful article from an 1893 Providence Journal describing the western countryside of Foster and Scituate, which includes an account of traveling by stagecoach from Danielsonville, which mentions Neutaconkanut and the old King estate.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 6:30:00 PM

Comments:

I have a couple references, as well as some drawings and postcards, of big boulders on the hill. Someone forwarded a story on to me about one of the rocks being destroyed as a precaution against it tumbling on down the hill!

# posted by  Anonymous : 2:50:00 PM

 

Any information in reference to Neutaconkanut Hill is greatly appreciated.

# posted by  ellip : 10:01:00 AM

 

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nhill.org%2Fabout%2Fflora-and-fauna%2F&h=aAQGciZwF

# posted by  Anonymous : 10:35:00 PM

 

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