
As this photo shows, winter has made a comeback. Not only did we get a few inches of snow about a week ago but it turned cold again and has stayed cold, so that means the ice on the wooded trails is still there. They say tomorrow it might reach 55 degrees, so maybe I’ll have some flowers to show you next time. Meanwhile, I chose to walk the Industrial Heritage Trail in Keene. Not only is it paved and regularly plowed, there are some interesting things to see along the way.

This was once a rail bed used by the Cheshire Railroad and then the Boston and Maine Railroad and there are informative signs along the way that tell you the history of the place and what went on here. I’ll leave it up to you whether to read them or not.

This bench made from bicycles was probably the strangest thing I saw on this day. It doesn’t look very comfortable.

The city maintains this segment of trail and the have planted shrubs, including lilacs. Slowly, the buds are growing bigger.

They’ve also planted hydrangeas here and there. Panicled hydrangeas I believe, but there are so many different varieties these days I can’t keep up with them. I grew up with my grandmother’s “snowball” hydrangeas and that was good enough, even though I’ve never felt a need to have them in my own yard.

What I enjoy about hydrangeas is how, when their petals hang on through winter, they sometimes look like stained glass before they fall. These weren’t quite there yet.

This trail is one of those that the railroad had to build up quite high above the surrounding landscape so they could have a nice level grade throughout the run, and down below I spotted two concrete structures that I can only imagine must have been tank supports for a huge round tank. What was in the tank I’ll never know but it seemed too far away to be of use to the railroad. With so much industry in the area it could have held just about anything.

But the land owners didn’t want anyone exploring and I can’t blame them. You have to always remember when you are on a rail trail that you’re walking through the back yards of the people who live along it. I lived very close to a working rail line so I know what it is like to have some random person just wandering around through the yard after coming down from the tracks. It’s a bit disconcerting, so all of us who walk rail trails should stay on the trail and respect the privacy of those who live along them.

I found a poplar branch covered with black jelly fungi (Exidia glandulosa). They were a bit dry and had lost some of their volume but they hadn’t shriveled down too much. When they dry out they lose about 90% of their volume and shrink down to small black flakes, and it looks like someone has smeared paint or tar on the limb that they grow on. You can see that over in the upper right, how paper thin one of them has become. When it rains, they will all swell up like black pillows. Their reaction shows that jelly fungi are mostly water.

There were lots of self-seeded wild crabapples out here and the birds had been slow about it but they were eating them. A flock of robins can strip a crabapple of every bit of fruit in no time at all, so I doubt it was robins eating them.

There are lots of old repurposed factory buildings in this section of town is what this sign is saying.

And there is one of the old factory buildings that has not been repurposed. It’s easy to tell Kingsbury Corporation by its huge smoke stack.

It has lightning rods and steel bands, and many, many cracks. It even looks like it bulges a bit.

Some of the steel bands have and are falling off, which is just a bit alarming.

Kingsbury started out over a hundred years ago making toys, but evolved into a world leader in the design and manufacture of machine tools. Now the company has gone out of business and the building is all but abandoned. I worked there as an engineer for years until the bottom fell out of the engineering market pretty much all-over New England. When all the car companies went into a slump so did many other businesses.

The windows in the engineering department have been bricked up. Mechanical engineering was a job that I truly loved and I have many fond memories of my time spent here.

I used to have to cross a bridge different from the one this sign speaks of to get into the building. Beaver Brook actually flowed under the Kingsbury building I worked in and one year when it flooded all the wood blocks in a big wood block floor floated into a pile. It was a bit of a nightmare because it meant that area couldn’t be used to assemble machines.

This bridge over the brook is much different than the original railroad trestle but it serves today’s purpose. I was out here mid-day on a week day and I met a few people out using the trail. It was just after my retirement and I found myself feeling like I had skipped out of work and was slacking off. It has been a long time since I’ve been out walking on a week day so I’m sure it will take some getting used to.

Beaver Brook was staying where it belonged and looked good and clean. This brook, along with the Ashuelot River, is responsible for the town having grown up where it did. Between them they powered a lot of industry. The first sawmill and grist mill in Keene were powered by Beaver Brook. It winds its way through the heart of the city and it’s a fine thing unless and until it floods.

Another shrub the city has planted along the trail is the highbush cranberry, which isn’t a cranberry at all. It is a native viburnum named Viburnum trilobum with fruit (drupes) that resemble cranberries in color and shape. They are also said to taste like cranberries but I’ve never tried them. They’ll grow to 15 feet tall under the right conditions and these examples were quite tall. Birds are said to love the fruit and I was happy to see that most of them had been eaten.

White poplar (Populus alba) catkins were just starting to come out of the bud. They’re gray and fuzzy much like willow catkins and when they flower, they’ll grow to 3 or 4 inches long and fall from the trees in great numbers. This tree was imported from Europe in 1748 and liked it here enough to now grow in almost every state. It won’t be too long before their fluffy seeds will be floating on the wind.

There is a beech tree out here that shows what can happen when Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) twines itself around a tree. Luckily someone cut the vines away from the beech but it will now be deformed for life.

The tree looked healthy but it’s hard to say if it will live a full life with such a twisted shape.

This shot that I took previously shows what Oriental bittersweet was doing to a young elm. Elm is one of the toughest of our native trees but no tree can withstand the steel cable like strength of bittersweet. Once it wraps around a tree trunk the tree’s only hope of survival is to grow out around it and absorb it.

The trail goes on into downtown Keene and from there south into Swanzey, Winchester, and Hinsdale if you feel like a good long walk, but since I grew up walking these railbeds I’ve walked it all at one time or another, so I turned around here. Though it isn’t as nature filled as my usual walks I do like this part of the trail, especially in winter when everything is so icy.
It’s hard to leave the only place you’ve known.
~Lois Lowry
Thanks for stopping in.
Hi Allen, a number of years ago while working to restore habitat that had been badly degraded by invasive species, I came across some plants that I quickly recognized as highbush-cranberries. I was really excited because there were at least twenty of them in a relatively small area. I took some samples home to make sure my identification was correct. I was correct that it was a highbush-cranberry, but it was the European version. The difference is that the nonnative has glands on the petiole near the base of the leave and they are wider than they are tall and the American one has glands that are taller than they are wide. Arthur Haines of the Native Plant Trust confirmed this.
Since then I have been on a mission to find native highbush-cranberries so I can propagate the seeds and set them free. The good news is that I found a source in northern Vermont and the bad news is that all the others that I’ve come across are European highbush cranberries. While collecting the seed, I noticed that if I don’t get there in the first week of October, almost all the berries are gone. On the other hand, I’ve seen the European berries hang onto the branches most if not all winter long.
A word of caution, the nonnative berries taste horrible and I have not mustered the courage to try the native berries after that distasteful experience.
One possible reason for seeing so many nonnative cranberries in the wild is that many nurseries, even those that try to deal in native species, sell the European subspecies unknowingly and they have escaped into the wild.
Thanks so much for your great blog and I hope you enjoy every minute of your retirement.
Thanks very much Gary for such an informative comment! I planted highbush cranberries off from the 70s to the 90s, and I never knew this. If I ever recommend bird attracting native shrubs to anyone again I’ll leave highbush cranberry off the list. I’ll go back and look at the leaf petioles this spring and see if these match your description of a native shrub or not.
Thanks again!
Enjoy retirement. It will take a while to accustom yourself to enjoying that morning coffee and not feeling you are cheating as everyone else goes off to work. However, you now get to enjoy the trails with fewer people. Linda B and I look forward to joining you on the trail soon. Miki
mikicc.org. selfemployedagain.wordpress.com
Thanks Miki, that’s just how I’ve felt but as you say, I’m sure it will wear off. I hope to be walking the trails looking for flowers before too long. Red maples should be blooming in a couple of weeks. I hope I can get together with you and Linda sometime in the not too distant future!
It is nice to see the swelling buds even as the recent snow lingers. Also great to see Beaver Brook looking so nice and clean. I grew up with a back yard that ended at the edge of the brook. Thankfully, it was upstream from the worst of the pollution, but I sure do remember the colorful but nasty look just south of Church Street where there apparently was a paint factory. I share your concern about the smoke stack.
As you know I grew up very near the river and it used to be the same. Somehow we came to our senses and cleaned them up. I remember the stacks of shopping carts that were pulled from the Ashuelot.
I did what was essentially this same post about this trail a few years ago thinking someone with some authority might read it and do something about that steel band, but I’ve never heard a word. I used to hear from a town selectman who was very nice but I suppose he must have been voted out quite a while ago.
It is good to see a well surfaced and well maintained trail. I would be rather alarmed by those loose steel bands too.
Yes, that trail is a breeze to walk. It comes in handy in icy weather. What bothers me most about that steel band is how teens have gotten through the fence and hang out in there. I hate to think about it ever falling on someone. I can’t believe that I’m the only one who has seen it but I’m sure the town would say it was the landowner’s responsibility.
Congratulations on your retirement! as always thanks for sharing, I loved seeing the old building
Thank you Erika! I don’t know if you are local or not but there are many other buildings out there that I didn’t show in the post, some quite old.
My favourite picture was the one you took of the white poplar catkin buds, the whole post most interesting.
Thank you. I like the shine of poplar buds. Some are very sticky, but these weren’t.
Becoming retired does take some getting used to – but in a good way. Enjoy!
Thank you. So far it has been a bit strange but I’m sure I’ll work it out!
I am ALWAYS glad I stopped in! Interesting to get a little industrial history alongside the naturalist view of things.
I’ve just moved to a house in northern Vermont this past year with several high bush cranberries in the yard but so far I haven’t seen many birds eating the berries which surprised me a little. Several other crabapples also seem to be nearly untouched and I’m wondering if the birds hold off until almost spring—the robins are just reappearing here now so…?
Thank you. Highbush cranberry fruit usually has to freeze and thaw several times before birds will touch them. This is true with many fruits; for some reason they just don’t like the fruit of many species until they have dried out, so that’s why we notice that they hold off eating fruit until spring. Also, some foods are lower in fat so they ignore them until is little else left to eat in spring.
In the end though, everything edible seems to disappear.
I should have also said, regarding crap apples; there are a few that birds just will not eat.
I’ve signed up for the History of Cheshire County Museums newsletter, inspired by this morning’s post and amazed, not in a good way, by how much I don’t know! I saw that the Museum’s website has many interesting stories, what a local treauure. The deformed beech tree photos really illustrate how beautiful, deadly bittersweet tortures over time. “Pretty is as Pretty Does”, not in this case.
The Historical Society of Cheshire County is a gold mine if you’re interested in history, Lynne. And just a fun place to visit!
Bittersweet is just doing what it is programmed to do, which is to reach the crown of the tree to get more sunlight, but the tree does suffer because of it. That’s why it should be cut away from trees if you have it on your property.