The Backside of America

It’s Really Big, Sometimes Beautiful and Always Worth a Second Look

Saturday, November 23, 2024

Jalopies in the Landlocked Forest

From Dave Brigham:

I really need to keep better track of where I get leads for this blog. At some point in the last several months, I read about a place called the Landlocked Forest in Burlington, Mass. I can tell you that I saw somebody's photos on Flickr featuring junked cars in the wooded expanse, and that's what convinced me to visit.

The conservation area is located on the border with neighboring Lexington. I parked in the small lot along Turning Mill Road, not far from an old paint mine I explored several years before (see September 2, 2014, "Make Mine Paint").

Along the power line trail leading to the forest, I met a distressed ursas arctos.

Once I got in the forest, I spent approximately 98% of my time and 87% of my energy swatting away bugs of all sorts - mosquitos, flies, gnats, you name it. I had a general idea of where the rusted-out jalopies were, so I followed my instincts as I headed north through the trees. After a while, I came across some extremely rusty something-or-others.

While the Friends of the Burlington Landlocked Forest indicates on its web site that there is within the woods a stone foundation from a home dating to the 1700s, I didn't see it. And I have no idea what the rusted metal in the photos above might have been. Part of an old shed, perhaps?

I kept chugging along, heading east until I was close to Route 3. I'd seen a mama deer, thanks to a heads-up from a passing mountain biker, but not much else of interest. I turned back to the west, swatting away bugs all the while, trying to make sense of Google Maps as I wandered. I got close to a residential development at one point, so had to head a little more south. I hit a few dead ends and was starting to get a little frustrated when -- AHA!!

I don't know what kind of car that is, nor can I identify either of the other two show below.

So why are there cars strewn across the wooded landscape in the middle of a lovely hiking and biking oasis?

Until the 1950s, at least some of the forested land was privately owned. There was, I assume, at least one road here, a throughway where at some point a few cars broke down or were stolen and abandoned. In the '50s, the state extended Route 3 south through Burlington and "owners of the property within the Landlocked Forest were compensated by the State because they were now unable to access their land," according to the Friends of the Burlington Landlocked Forest web site.

In the ensuing decades, the property owners petitioned the state legislature to permit access to the land from Route 3, but each time they were denied. In the late 1980s, the Town of Burlington took the property by eminent domain and created the conservation area.