Historians unearth Templar mysteries — and magic

“Doing history” is much the same as detective work. We don’t like to be stymied. We ask questions and revise our understanding as new information, interpretations and patterns of behavior come to light. The best part is when we uncover mysteries in our own backyard.

Harry Wolfe has such a mystery. A series of stone walls, roughly 3 feet high and wide, sprawl across several acres in a mountainside ravine high above his family’s farm.

The Wolfes have roots deep in the soil and soul of Brush Valley. For more than 40 years, the family patriarch, Eugene, invited archaeologists from Pitt, Bucknell and Penn State to investigate the spot. They eventually registered the site with the state’s Bureau for Historic Preservation. So who laid these stones? When? Why here? Many theories ramble all over the map of human beliefs in an attempt to explain these walls.

One school of history insists that ancient Phoenicians, lost Templars or even extra-terrestrials followed the Susquehanna’s tributaries to lay out these and similar structures as temples, observatories or as inter-planetary pit stops.

Some claim that John Morton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, purchased the tract. Morton, though, died in 1777, 10 years before the region opened to uncontested settlement and 12 years before the Land Office recorded this property’s earliest warrant.

Records show that Andrew Gregg owned the land from 1789 until he sold it to his son-in-law 45 years later.

Another source states that someone either built the “Old Improvement” for fox hunting parties or to fence in thoroughbred horses. But this rocky slope is fit more for a pack horse or an ox than for chasing foxes. Besides, why would anyone lay up so many stones for such a frivolous activity?
A more recent theory asserts that settlers used the walls to drive bison to their deaths.

Historical ecologist Gordon Whitney suggests that if bison did roam central Pennsylvania, it was long before European settlement. And wouldn’t they have run in the valley lowlands, rather than up and over the mountaintops?

We need to separate the reasonable from the fanciful, the “what is” from the “what we’d like it to be.”
Speculation rarely bothers to weigh, sift, and measure the physical evidence. That involves actually digging up and systematically surveying a site to arrive at a more plausible explanation.
There appears to be no rhyme or reason to the walls’ positions, but a survey map reveals another story. The walls form several enclosures of varying size.

Members of the local Bald Eagle Archaeological Society have researched the artifacts unearthed at the site. Metal detectors found square-cut nails all over the place.

One archaeologist suggests that these nails were possibly used to make movable wooden fences that subdivided larger areas. The nails may also have fastened boards to increase the height of some walls.

A variety of potsherds — from redware to pearlware to spatterware — as well as many metal tools and buttons were found. Most of these artifacts were made between 1825 and 1860. An overgrown wagon road, one of many that crisscrossed these mountains, runs parallel to the spot. Stones still line a 7-foot-deep, hand-dug, L-shaped well. Several walls straddle the stream bed, possibly to dam the flowing water.

But it was the bones that led them, thus far, to the simplest, most sensible — yet ordinary — conclusion. Hog bones, to be specific.

Nineteenth-century farmers often let their hogs run loose in the mountains to forage for mast. Near summer’s end, neighbors may have spread a thin trail of spent grain mash — an alcoholic by-product of whiskey distillation — to lure increasingly drunken hogs into these stone corrals for fattening and butchering.

The small building foundation is the right size for quickly converting a s’Brennhaus or Pennsylvania German still house, into a butchering house. Either structure, traditionally, would have been little more than a three-sided shack.

Wagon drivers traveling the adjacent road could have delivered ground meal in exchange for filled kegs. The site’s location, just across from Brush Mountain’s western tip, would have been relatively accessible for both Penns and Brush Valley customers.

Regardless of the theory explaining their presence, even the mundane can provide us with a sense of beauty and wonder.

These walls stand as a tribute to the human capacity for physical labor and community effort. To paraphrase John Stilgoe’s title, magic, indeed, does lie outside our back door if we take the time to see, to dig and to question.

Bruce Teeple, of Aaronsburg, is a freelance writer, local historian and community columnist for the Centre Daily Times. Readers can write to him by e-mail at mongopawn44@hotmail.com.