Pulsegleaner
Garden Master
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2014
- Messages
- 3,551
- Reaction score
- 6,986
- Points
- 306
- Location
- Lower Hudson Valley, New York
My mom was telling me over dinner that, in the town one over from us, they had built a number of houses around the turn of the (20th) century, over what had previously been a park. What everyone forgot was, BEFORE it was a park, back in the late 17th and early 18th century, that spot was the location of the local slave cemetery (I'm in the part of New York that was settled by the Dutch VERY early, so there were slaves here for a while), and, of course, no one had bothered to dig anything up when they made the park. So the police started getting a LOT of calls from new homeowners who had begun to do some gardening and started digging up human bones!So true... been there, done that. Tree roots are psychic too, they always seem to know in advance where you want to dig.It took me 5-6 tries to plant my crab apple. I figured out it is better to first drive in a fence post 2' down to test the site, rather than to dig several failed holes which then need to be filled in.
I understand something similar happened in Washington Square in NYC in 1837, except, in that case, what disinterred everything were the vibrations from a large cannon they were firing off for the Fourth of July ceremonies. And, of course, they STILL keep finding the odd burial in NYC when they dig (along with old ships, bits of the original wooden water pipes and a lot of other stuff.)
