The hike we took the other day had a destination. The trail we were on is the park trail to town......and it crosses the road about half way to town.....from that intersection the trail goes to Eli's Creek and crosses Wentworth Brook fairly early after you cross the road. My great, great grandfather bought the property from Duck harbor to Sharks Point Beach in 1835......there it abutted the Wentworth property which was considerable I assume as the mountain was named for them. There is an island legend about a young girl Named Betty Wentworth that drowned in the brook there......she was buried in the family's yard. I am not sure of the year but it was before 1850. I guess the sadness drove the family away from the island...she was young...like 10 or so. Anyway my father always talked of finding the grave and we did 40 odd years ago......me, my father and my niece. The bride and I tried a few years back to find it again without success. I was asked last year by the oldest native islander living today if I knew where it was........I said yes....he said good...very few even know of it these days.
Sunday we trekked through the woods looking.....well that bugged me that I knew the story and had been there, I could not actually take anyone there. The brook is named after the girl...The Betty Wentworth Brook....comes down off Wentworth Mountain and emties into Deep Cove...a rather sheltered tiny cove. After searching without luck closer to Eli's Creek I went to Deep cove and sat for a spell and thought while the dogs rested and the bride beach combed. I envisioned the place as it would have been back then. It was just grass and ledge then ..no trees. Now it is all grown up in spruce.....some big and some thicket type stuff. So we left the trail and followed the brook inland. What seemed like a terrible place to settle with steep, stony sides began to look actually awesome. The brook was rather narrow but the erosion patterns were stunning......inland a few hundred feet the ravine opened up and though still steep about halfway up was a plateau on either side of the gulch....an ancient flat stream bed cut down the middle by the brook. The flat was perhaps 100 feet wide on each side. This was what I remembered so I searched the north side all the way to where the park trial crossed the brook. The bride was done but I knew we were not to far from the road so I said go ahead up the trail and wait for me at the road. I continued along the flat edge.......about two hundred feet in I came on the ancient yard with house and barn stone foundation and stone wall to keep the oxen and cows in.......and sure enough right there in the yard was the stone marker I was looking for......right on the edge of the steep bank going down to the brook where she drowned was her final resting place. A rough, natural nearly square stone perhaps 6 inches square buried upright in the ground like a small obelisk .....the top sheared away clean at a rather steep angle as I remembered.
It must have been a wonderful place to live in those days as the site was protected by the deep ravine on the north and south sides and without the trees you would have seen the ocean to the west.....small protected cove and an ox cart trail up to the homestead.....flat land that actually had dirt to dig in without the usual amount of rocks....to bad my great great grandfather's neighbors didn't survive ....would have been awesome to still have neighbors who been there as long as we have.
