A Day of Chores & History

In between my photo outings I have chores like mowing the grass which is what I did yesterday afternoon and this morning. We did a bit of exploring after lunch today going to Russell, the place that our road is named for. Since moving to the new house I've learned that the road (Russell Turnpike) that passes in front of our home was one of the first three roads built in this area.  The other two went from other areas to Russell.

The road out front went from Lake Champlain near Westport to Russell from where there was access to the St. Lawrence river. It was called the Northwest Bay Road then and transited many sections of current road that are familiar to me on my excursions to photograph in the Adirondacks. During the War of 1812 (during which my twice great grandfather Stephen was in the Vermont militia) this road was used by the military to get from Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence and there was an armory in Russell.

GG Grandpa moved to this area after his service in the war and it is an odd feeling to realize that his first visit to the area probably involved a march past where I now live and took him over sections of road through landscapes that I now photograph. It is doubly strange because a maternal grandfather  (James) spent time in the Adirondacks as a tourist in the early 1900s and I have photographs he took of Barnum Pond, one of the places  Stephen would have passed on his military travels and one I too have photographed numerous times including this one.

The photo above is not from the route of the Northwest Bay Rd. but isn't very far afield. It was made in Wilmington which is a bit North of Lake Placid, one of the communities that was on the route. It is another image from my latest excursion. Made with a Canon 7D and 18-135mm lens, 1/10th sec. @ f/29. I did the B&W conversion in Lightroom 4 and toned it in Photoshop CS6.

Addendum: Sept. 13 - I did some web searches this morning and found a map of the Westport to Hopkinton portion of the original road. http://hsl.wikispot.org/Northwest_Bay_Road?action=Files&do=view&target=Northwest%20Bay%20Road.jpg That is the route that I usually take when I go to the mountains to photograph. Without knowing it and without intending to I have been following in Stephen's footsteps.

A Stroke of Luck

I subscribe to Ancestry.com's on-line services and I received an e-mail yesterday about updates to their site. One of the updates was a change to the user profile section so I decided to update my profile. Then, since I hadn't visited the site in several months, I ran a search on GGGrandpa Stephen, the major dead-end in my genealogical research. I do that as a matter of routine when I visit genealogy sites in the hope that someone, anyone, has posted something new that would give me another clue to where he was born and who his parents were. I got a whole list of stuff, the first being what I already knew and had posted myself and most being about other Stephen Bullards all over the country. The second was the 1850 census (been there, seen that) but the third item was an Army enlistment record. Awesome. I knew he was in the VT Militia during the War of 1812 but the enlistment record tells me when he enlisted, where, who recruited him, that he was 5' 10"" tall with blue eyes and brown hair, a fair complexion and the bit that I have been frustrated by for about two decades, where he was born, Jeffrey, NH. It was like reading the LOTTO numbers in the paper and finding that they matched the ones I played.