There's a land surveyor in New Hampshire who spends a lot of time in the woods and that's where he comes across some really fascinating stories about places and people.

And then when he gets home, he writes about them.

You should stick around because we're about to meet him.

♪ Welcome to Windows to the Wild.

I'm Willem Lange.

♪ We first met Marshall Hudson while riding on a rather unusual railway near Concord, New Hampshire.

Marshall wrote a story about the scenic railway and published it in New Hampshire Magazine.

We read it and we thought we'd like to meet this guy.

Well, we did.

And now you will too, Marshall.

You're right here.

It's nice to meet you.

It’s nice to see you again.

You're well, I hope?

Yes.

You?

Are you?

Oh, yeah.

In the pink.

Can't you tell?

Well now, today you've traded the railway for a canoe.

I have.

So what’s, what are we doing today?

We're going to perambulate the town line between Canterbury and Boscawen.

Perambulate in a canoe?

We are.

We won't go into that, but okay.

The town line between the two is the middle of the river.

Yeah.

Canterbury on that side.

Boscawen on this side.

And we're going to walk the town line.

And you're going to tell me how you decide where the middle of the river is.

I will.

I'll tell you that.

Okay.

And I presume that all the way up and down this thing, there is a story after story after story, right?

There's a couple.

We'll get into it.

We'll.

We'll tell a couple of stories as we go.

That's great.

That's fantastic.

So if we're going to get wet, we might as well get it over with.

We're not going to get wet.

Oh yeah, we’ll see.

I left my wallet in the car.

It's okay.

I'm bringing mine.

I'm confident.

♪ We’re on the Merrimack River.

It flows out of New Hampshire's White Mountains and empties into the Atlantic Ocean at Newburyport, Massachusetts.

♪ I can assure you that we won't paddle its entire 116 miles today.

Instead, we'll stick to a section of the river that runs between Boscawen and Canterbury, New Hampshire.

♪ Marshall, what are you doing, man?

You paddling at all?

I'm in float mode.

That's it.

That's the perennial Bob Owens question.

I don't think the guy behind me is doing a thing.

This is.

This is really lovely, you know that?

Here we are in the middle of all this civilization and and this is truly civilized.

Very nice.

♪ Native Americans were the first to live along the Merrimack River.

It was their highway.

Eventually, industry appeared along with riverboats that moved goods from Boston to Concord.

Henry David Thoreau was here in 1839.

He later referred to the Merrimac as an attractive highway.

♪ Marshall spends time on the river too.

He searches for old stories that are waiting to be told.

♪ I think earlier you started to ask me how I got into doing this?

Yes.

Because I'm a surveyor, I had found many of the, surveyed a lot of properties along the town lines and so I knew where a lot of the intermediate town line bounds were.

And they asked me if I would perambulate the town lines for them because they knew that I knew where a lot of the bounds were.

So they officially appointed me the town line Perambulator.

And I've done all of the town lines in Canterbury.

Now, before we go any farther, a bit about the word, perambulate.

You know the word ambulate.

Ambulatory.

Latin.

Meaning to walk.

Perambulate, to walk through.

For I mean, you know, the British.

They take their kids around and up in a pram.

That's short for a perambulator.

You know, they walk the kids in a pram.

Aye.

♪ A 17th century New Hampshire law requires municipal officials to walk their town boundary lines.

They do it every seven years to make sure markers are still in place.

Whether it really happens in every town is another story.

I declare that we're on the middle of the river.

Yeah.

On your left is Canterbury.

Yeah.

And on your right is Boscawen.

Marshall knows firsthand that it does happen here.

One of the town lines that hadn't been done was this one because there's not much to do.

It's not like you have to actually go out and find the bound.

You just have to meet the selectmen from the other town and agree that the river is still the town line and then float down the river and it's a terrible job, but somebody's got to do it.

So.

So I got that part of my appointment.

♪ Walking town lines by foot can be difficult.

After Marshall dug through local history, he discovered that drawing them could be tricky too.

Well, there used to be a bridge that went across the road right here.

And you can see the abutment over there on the Boscawen side?

Yep.

And then the island in front of us, you can see the central pier.

Oh, yeah.

Right there.

It’s coming up and out of that pile.

And if we go up a little further, you'll see the Canterbury side over there.

In the 1850s, there was a lawsuit between the two towns and the people involved here fighting over where the center of the river is.

Yeah.

Both towns agreed that the center of the river was the town line.

Yeah but they couldn't decide how you determine the center of the river.

And they concluded.

They appointed a committee.

And the committee concluded that the deepest part of the channel is the center of the river and therefore the deepest part of the channel is the town line.

Yeah.

Well, the side that lost appealed it and they went to a higher court and the higher court overturned that decision.

And they concluded that regardless of how the river meanders and regardless of where the deepest channel is, the center of the river is a split between the two banks.

So you go to the bank over there, you go to the bank over there, and you draw a straight line, splitting the difference between them.

Yeah, but that moves too, doesn't it?

Well, what they did in during that court decision is they ordered that permanent monuments be set so that when the banks moved, the permanent monuments would continue to depict where the true town line was.

Yeah, right.

And the problem is, it's pretty easy to order that if you're a court.

But when you're in a sandy river, how do you put permanent monuments in the sandy river under the water and with everything shifting?

So the only permanent monument that was ever set was on this bridge.

Yep.

And they marked the town line on the bridge and the perambulators have perambulated to that mark on the bridge for many years.

That permanent marker, as it turns out, may not have been so permanent.

Marshall combed the pier where it might have been placed.

He couldn't find it.

So the the only permanent mark is gone.

And it's kind of amazing to me that Perambulators have still managed to find it every seven years, even though I'm convinced it's gone and not there.

Marshall's work as a land surveyor takes him to places less traveled.

That's where he comes upon relics of the past, often abandoned and forgotten.

♪ Marshall's curiosity can bring them back to life.

At some point you must have thought, I gotta start retelling these stories.

I was surveying, and and when you're surveying, you're on the clock.

And so you've got to get the project done.

And so there's a limit to how much off topic stuff you can delve into.

Oh, yeah.

And I was always finding things that were interesting.

Yeah.

And so I would read a deed or I'd talk to a neighbor or talk to an abutter or talk to a landowner and they would tell me something interesting, you know, about, did you know there's something there?

Or you'd read a deed and it says, this is by the what?

And I always found that interesting and fascinating.

So it was always, well, when I got time I'm going to go back and look at that.

And so I kept a folder.

And every time I came across something that was piqued my interest that I didn't have time to deal with when I was trying to make a dollar.

Yeah.

I would take that deed or that piece of paper or a few notes that I had taken from talking with someone and stuff it in the folder.

And sometimes I'd be out in the woods and I'd see something and I'd take a picture of it and put that in the folder.

♪ And once you've got it researched and figured out and documented and and kind of proven, now you gotta do something with it.

You can't just say, yep, okay, that's the answer and put it back in the folder.

Yeah.

And so I started submitting them to New Hampshire Magazine and they started publishing them.

♪ I did one up in Orford recently where there was a big concrete square, if you will.

Yeah.

And it was too big to be a cellar hole and it was shaped all wrong to be a barn.

This was Orford?

Up in Orford.

And it was shaped all wrong to be a barn.

Yeah.

So what is it?

And it was a big concrete thing.

And it had, I think it was five, interior passages all made out of concrete and rock and interconnecting them was arched doorways.

And there was only one door to the outside.

And the thing stood probably 14 ft tall.

And we did some research to figure out what it was.

And it's an old bunker silo that you would store corn in.

Before there were round concrete silos, they have concrete bunkers.

And the concrete ones never caught on.

Farmers went with the round silos next to their barns.

♪ So I think this is just a natural, lazy section of the river.

♪ It's a beautiful beach, but there's nobody here.

♪ Why did we stop here?

The opposite side of the river.

♪ Kind of starting there.

See the big sand bank there?

Yeah.

And it continues further down.

Yeah.

♪ And there's a story and there's different versions on it.

And but the the central version, if you will, is that on the Boscawen side there was a Native American that got into the colonial village and stole what's described as the velveteen go to meet, go to meeting britches, pantaloons.

Imagine wearing velveteen britches?

Velveteen britches, pantaloons of some well-to-do resident of the town.

And he stole them and and an angry mob was chasing him to get them back.

And so they're pursuing this Native American and he came across there with a mob in hot pursuit.

He came to the river and swam, swam across the river and came to those steep sand banks.

And he had to get up to bank to get away from them.

So he scrambled and slipped and slipped.

And when he got to the top, he held the pantaloons up over his head and taunted everybody that was chasing him, because they weren't going to come and get him.

And years later they asked him, well, how did you manage to climb those banks like a squirrel?

And his reply was, much he do to get to the.

It was broken English.

Much he do to get to the top of the banks.

And so ever since then, they've been called the Much He Do Sand Banks.

Really?

Yeah.

♪ Marshall comes across stories throughout the state.

♪ Two that kept me reading were set along New Hampshire's seacoast.

♪ So there's a place, apparently one in Newcastle, something like that, where there's something called Pull and Be Damned Point.

Pull and Be Damned Point.

It's not there anymore.

They blew it off the map.

It was a ledge outcrop that stuck out into the river.

Yeah.

And on the opposite side, there was another ledge outcrop just stuck into the river.

And the Navy wanted to expand the shipyard, the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard or the Kittery Naval Shipyard.

Yeah.

They wanted to expand it.

And those were obstacles.

And so the Navy concluded the way to improve navigation so they could get bigger ships up in there was to dynamite this point that stuck out into the river.

Yeah.

This point was called Pull and Be Damned Point because if you were in a rowboat and you were going upstream.

Oh, yeah.

When you came to that point because it was squeezed, the flow picked up and you could pull with all your might and you were damned.

You weren't going anywhere.

You just pull and you were stuck right there.

And so it was Pull and Be Damned Point.

And to.

So the Navy came up with, well, we're going to dynamite it.

♪ And they needed to get like, 30 ft below the lowest tide.

Yeah.

So how do you do that?

And the solution is a lot of dynamite.

Yeah.

And so they did it in two phases.

If this is the river, it stuck out into the river.

And a big point like that.

Yeah.

And so they drilled and blasted right down the middle.

Yeah.

And they excavated as much as they could out of the middle.

Yeah.

And left this horseshoe.

♪ And then they put wooden cofferdam planks.

Yeah.

Along the shore here.

And then they drilled and planted dynamite.

♪ And then they flooded it and blew it.

♪ It worked.

But you read the newspaper clippings of the day, and there were people writing in saying, this'll never work.

It costs too much money.

Yeah.

And it had the potential to do a lot of damage, like crack the earth or throw the Earth off its orbital axis.

No question about it.

There was there was legitimate fear.

Nobody had undertaken a project like that and it all had to go in one big blast.

And and it worked and it didn't knock the Earth off its orbital axis.

It didn't crack the Earth.

Whoa.

♪ Now, there was.

Apparently, there was a hermit who lived out here too somewhere Yeah.

Goat Island in Great Bay had a hermit on it.

I’ve seen a picture of this guy.

Yeah.

He had, like, a houseboat he was living in.

He did.

On land.

On land.

Yeah.

There’s an island in the river and at one time there was a bridge that went across and and the island, when the bridge went across, they built a little tavern so that there was a stop and they dug a well.

And then the bridge went and the tavern went, but the well remained.

Yeah.

And this hermit, his name was Murdock.

He was Irish and he was on the run from the law.

He had he had gotten involved in a, like, a revolution where they were trying to overthrow the English government.

There were half a dozen.

And he came out on the losing end of that.

And so there was a wanted dead or alive on him.

And he got on a boat and sailed to America and changed his name a little bit from Murtagh to Murdock.

And and he sailed up and down the coast and on ships and freighters and stuff and sailed past that island a number of times.

And then he fell in love and got married and had a daughter and and tried to settle down and and run a bar, a tavern.

And that didn't work out for him.

And the marriage didn't work out for him.

And and so he went out on his own, kind of.

And he built a houseboat and sailed it on to go to Goat Island and use well that was there from, from the old thing and and lived there most, most of the rest of his life.

Were weaving back and forth and this current.

I see that.

You know why?

Because you're committed to the left side.

And I'm switching sides to try and keep us online?

No.

It’s that I'm so much heavier than you are Because you’re heavier than I am Yeah, well, what they call me in the Adirondacks?

Bill Heavy.

I thought it was.

They spelled it Bell, but it was Bill.

Bill Heavy.

♪ We floated past the county jail up here.

Merrimack County Jail.

♪ And when we did, there was there's trees that have grown up now, but at the time you couldn't.

There weren't a lot of trees there and you could see across the river and we're on the lower side and you can see across the river, up onto the hillside.

And there was a farm over there, a farmer building a farm.

♪ And the prisoners had nothing to do all day except look out the window and watch what was going on at this farm across the river.

♪ And they noticed several things.

One of the things they noticed is that there was never any cows or never any horses in the pastures and the fields.

He never had any animals out there.

And they noticed that they never saw him out there working the crops, growing potatoes or pumpkins or something.

So what kind of a farm was this?

In the barn, they noticed that the snow would melt off the roof before the house.

Every snowstorm.

♪ So the prisoners were thinking, what's going on here?

And that word spread to the prison guards and that word spread to the sheriff and eventually he raided the place.

Yeah.

And he found a still in the basement of the barn in a hidden room, in a secret, secret hidden room in the barn.

And the farmer was making moonshine, making booze and selling it in Boston.

Doing well by doing good.

Doing well.

Yeah.

And they convicted him.

They they raided the place and broke up the still and and and convicted him and he had to pay $1,000 fine and 30 days in jail, but he appealed it.

And he won on the appeal because the search warrant that they used gave the sheriff legal authority to search a barn in Canterbury, but the barn was just over the town line in Northfield.

And so they couldn't use the the evidence gained during that because they didn’t have a search warrant.

♪ The fun in it for me is in the research in the in the finding them.

But once you got it, you just feel the need to share it.

So.

Yeah.

That's right.

♪ That's what stories are for.

To be passed on, you know, to the succeeding generations.

So they know.

Well, they know what's right and they know what's wrong.

They know what defines them.

You know, this is who we are, this is who we were.

And that's important.

♪ Now, this is the first canoe trip I've ever taken sitting in an armchair.

It makes for a tough paddling but I have to admit, it's rather nice.

♪ As we move close to our landing spot, Marshall saves what might be the best story for last.

♪ I found a big pit.

Call it a pit.

Yeah In the ground up in Goshen.

Yeah.

And started asking questions and looking into that.

And come to find out, it was a plumbago mine.

Plumbago.

Yeah.

No, I'm not gonna ask.

And the interesting thing was this plumbago pit.

Yeah.

Was owned by Franklin Pierce.

Really?

So it was Pierce's Plumbago Pit.

Or President Pierce's Plumbago Pit.

4 P’s so far.

Yeah.

Well, plumbago is graphite used in the making of pencil lead.

Ah, yeah.

And so before he was or him his father, his family, him and his brother, before they were making money as lawyers and politicians, they had to make an income and they were making it for farming and when when it wasn't haying, planting, harvesting season, they could make a little extra money from the plumbago on their property And then they were excavating.

So plumbago was a thing.

It's a thing.

It's graphite.

It's a carbon carbon graphite thing.

And they'd mined it out and pulverize it and.

Yeah.

Ship it to a pencil manufacturers who'd mix it with clay and put it in a wooden casement and make pencils.

And President Franklin Pierce isn't exactly known for being a pencil maker.

Here's one for you.

Yeah?

Somebody else who's not known as a pencil maker.

Thoreau.

Henry David Thoreau.

Henry David Thoreau and I think Thoreau bought graphite from from.

Oh, no doubt.

Pierce.

And and he improved the, the technique so that his father began making money after a while, which is nice.

You're ahead of me on that one.

I mean, you've been there too.

Thoreau was also a surveyor.

So as land surveyor, I pick up on that.

♪ We say goodbye to you where we did last fall, when we rode the scenic railway together on a small island at the confluence of the Contoocook and Merrimack rivers.

♪ Well, we've made it one more tim We've said goodbye here before.

We have.

On Hannah Duston Island.

In front of the Hannah Duston Memorial.

Yeah.

And it's also where the Concord town line enters the river.

Right over there, separating Canterbury and Concord.

Yeah.

And our goal for the day was to perambulate the Canterbury town line down the river.

So we made it all the way to here.

We did that.

We did that.

And coincidentally, it means that we end up coming from the north to the south and ending here And the last time we worked together, we started on the Concord Scenic Rail Line and came to the north.

So instead of paddling, we were pedaling.

That's true.

Okay.

Is there an honorarium associated with what we just did?

No.

Well, no.

But thank you for accompanying me.

The pleasure was all mine.

And we must say goodbye to these people too.

Okay.

I hope to see you again on Windows to the Wild.

♪ Support for the production of windows to the wild is provided by the Alice J. Reen Charitable Trust, Bailey Charitable Foundation, and viewers like you.

Make a gift to the wild and support the Willem Lange Endowment Fund, established by a friend of New Hampshire PBS.

To learn how you can keep environmental, nature and outdoor programing possible for years to come, call our development team at (603) 868-4467.

Thank you.

♪