A little history of my back yard

My yard lies right up against a park which used to be a farm. In the picture below you can see the little strip of no-man's land which runs between my yard (you can see my back yard fence) to the left and a long, narrow hill rising up at the right which serves as a buffer between my house and the park. The park people are responsible for mowing and upkeep here:


In the back corner of my back yard, looking just over the fence into the park, you can see some old irrigation piping from the farm, plowed-up rocks which were dumped in what used to be a shrubby buffer between farm fields. and some old fence posts still standing:

There's even an old bundle of barbed fencing wire:

My little town was an important junction on the underground railroad and it's said that the farm was one of the many safe stops here. Runaway slaves would hide out in the forest on the edge of the fields during the day, and find safe shelter in the barn at night until they could be transported to another safe place. We like to think that the forest they hid in during the day is where our back yard is now.

Ohio was a northern state, but runaway slaves weren't safe even in the northern states. They were hunted down by people who made money off of finding and returning them. They were only really safe when they reached Canada. Lake Erie and a boat to Canada was the goal of the runaways. Today, Lake Erie is only about a 40 minute drive away.

If you want to read an excellent children's book involving runaways and the underground railroad, then pick up Shelley Pearsall's book, Trouble Don't Last. It involves Ohio (though not my little town) and one of the routes which led to a boat and safety in Canada.

In the picture below, I'm standing in the back corner of my yard, looking toward the baseball fields in the park. In the foreground is the fence, then the remains of a horde of wild rose brambles which used to flow over my fence. For some reason they died off, but there are plenty more out there. The park left the brushy border between farm fields and it is now a brushy border between the baseball fields and the soccer fields.

If you have good eyes, you can just make out the tall lights that were erected only last week around the furthest ball fields. I'm not looking forward to their being turned on (if you click on the picture you can see them). I've posted about my feelings on artificial nighttime lighting before (you can find the posts - including this one - here):

In a spot just on the other side of my fence, in an area where the brambles died off, I found a clump of lemon balm growing. That made me happy.