November's Last Hours

We just got back from yet another trip to North Carolina, where I got pretty seriously lost in the Pisgah National Forest--on the trail to the original Cold Mountain--and scaled the dizzy heights of Chimney Rock.  They don't mark the trails on the Pisgah; they just expect you to know where you're going, so it's easy to lose your way.  I was prepared to build a debris hut and stay the night, but it would have scared my wife too badly.  I don't know how it is that I've been to North Carolina four times this year.  

My favorite season is drawing to a close.  Good bye, November, these gray days of the soul.  I'll anxiously await your return next year.  It's not that I hate Christmas.  It's just that I hate all the market-driven Christmas mania that begins even before Thanksgiving.  These last lingering hours of November are good, too.  We don't need the Yuletide, and we don't need the snow.  We don't need the garish decorations or the sentimental music.  All we need is these dark hours.  I could make do with a wattle-and-daub cabin in the woods, a woods very much like this.  I feel confident that I know how to build one, and the world I'm fleeing would barely miss me.

More Rural Abandon, Greene County

This place is posted but very nearly irresistible to a ghoulish trespasser like me...  Too bad there was a junky old car parked in front of the house just opposite; I might have gone inside.

Here's the backside of the same house.  It stands at the turn-off to get to SGL #302, described below, right at the corner of Nebo Ridge Road and Walker Hill Road.  Aren't the road names great down here?

 This old farm was very tempting.  It's right at the place where you turn off of Walker Hill to pursue Smokey Row Lane into the game lands.  It's been abandoned for a long time, but there were still curtains in some windows, and it called to me.

 Here's the front of the house, as seen from the driveway.  There are no "No Trespassing" signs, and it looks like the barn is still used...which did worry me a little.  In fact, I thought I heard strange banging noises coming from in there, but there are all manner of weird noises in mining country, especially up on these windy ridges.

 I pulled into the driveway and was preparing to make for the house, when an inexplicable feeling of dread came over me.  The place just creeped me the hell out.  I turned tail, and I've been kicking myself all the way home.  I honestly think I would have gone in if there'd been a more concealed spot to park my car.  As it was, any passerby (of which I saw none) would know that somebody had parked there to snoop.

There was a handful of outbuildings, and the barn--not shown--may have horses or livestock still in it.  Somebody seems to be keeping a trailer parked near the barn, which also gave me the impression that, though the house is empty, the farm is still visited by its owner and used for various things.

Enlow Fork Revisited ~ State Game Lands #302

Upon the advice of an acquaintance, I visited Enlow Fork back in 2011 and didn't think much of the place.  It's scenic, but haunted by the sinister sounds of the Enlow Fork Mine, which is hard by.

This place belongs to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, and it's also known as PA Game Lands #302.  I believe that this is the foundation of an old farmhouse; it's too small to be a barn, and the rectangle is too oblong to be an outbuilding.  Plus, you can kind of tell what a nice place it once was from its vantage point above the valley in the first photo.

To get to this very remote location, you go almost to Ryerson Station State Park, but turn into the old mining country just on the other side of the village of Windy Ridge.  Evil-looking mineworks dominate the countryside, that should have been beautiful otherwise.

This shabby old farmhouse is near the entrance to the game lands.  It looks occupied--at least as a hunting camp.  I'm so jealous... 

The wicked racket from the coal mine adds to the spookiness when you hear pheasants calling in the brush alongside the once-public roadway that winds through the little valley.  This place is overrun with pheasants, but I couldn't get any good photos of them.  Their eerie call sounds like the brakes going out in a car--metal grinding metal.

But the redtail hawks were calling, and after walking about a mile away from the parking area, the noise from the mine becomes indistinct.  Old public bridges still span the Enlow Fork, which is a tributary to the Wheeling Creek.

Nebo Methodist Church isn't anything all that special to look at, but as I've been saying, I'm more and more interested in the history and architecture of rural churches.  Enlow made a good enough destination for a day-off trek, but I don't think I'll bother to come back for a while.  There are better places nearer to the city.

Windy Gap Presbyterian Church and Environs

Wending down these little country lanes among fields, and woods, and meadows, it's a kind of joy to come upon this little white church with its old cemetery.  In this heavily Scotch-Irish countryside, you know before looking that it's Presbyterian.

It's a pleasant spot, hushed and serene, though it shows all the tell-tale signs of a neglected place.  The lawns are mowed, but the sign is barely legible, and there's a general air of disuse.  A lot of rural churches will be completely out of business within a decade, though I find online that this congregation disaffiliated with the original Presbyterian Church in order to join a fundamentalist splinter sect that's intolerant of female clergy and gays.  Is that anything like the "Seceder Church" named in the post below?  If so, this seems to be seceder country.

There's a stateliness to many of the buildings down in Washington County.  This old house is in the town of Prosperity.

Look closely to see in this photo one of the county's 23 covered bridges.  I could see disappearing to a place like this...if not for all the seceders....

I thought I could find the Western PA Conservancy's Enlow Fork site by memory.  I was wrong.  But I did end up finding the body of water known as Enlow Fork, with Washington County on this side and Greene on the far side.  The bridge to the Conservancy site has been out for years, and I don't know any other way to get there, so I just meandered and went home via West Virginia.

Chapel Cemetery, West Finley, Washington County

Had a curious drive down through the hinterlands of Washington County again.  I was trying to find the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy's site at Enlow Fork and stumbled across this place.

You are not welcome at this little cemetery.  The gates are wired shut, so you have to look in from outside an inhospitable chain link fence.

 It's too bad.  I couldn't look to see how old the stones were, and I was intrigued by the claim that this is the site of the "First Seceder Church" in Western PA.  Sounds like a Scottish thing, fractious Presbyterians.

And yet, someone does lovingly maintain this little plot.  I really wish I could have gotten a look at these many old headstones all lain together like paving stones.  Were they collected up from various corners of the cemetery where they had fallen?

 The entrance to the cemetery was also the driveway to this old farmhouse, which is completely surrounded by chain link, too.  It looks like whoever lived here died about fifteen years ago, and their adult children--who surely live an hour away--are still putting off the task of going through all their junk.

In the meantime, the front porch has collapsed.  Just look at all the stuff crammed into that carport.  Unlike some abandoned houses, this one was not inviting, though there aren't any "No Trespassing" signs.  Strangely, a dog started to bark at me from somewhere on the premises.  Do they really keep a guard dog at this empty house to keep people from stealing the twenty milk jugs hanging on the clothesline?  Poor dog.  I'm not an animal lover, but dogs are social creatures and shouldn't be left alone in places like this.