William Faulkner once said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Nowhere can you see the truth behind his comment more plainly than in rural New England, especially Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and western Massachusetts.

Everywhere we go in rural New England, the past surrounds us. In the woods and fields and along country roads, the traces are everywhere if we know what to look for and how to interpret what we see. A patch of neglected daylilies marks a long-abandoned homestead. A grown-over cellar hole with nearby stumps and remnants of stone wall and orchard shows us where a farm has been reclaimed by forest. And a piece of a stone dam and wooden sluice mark the site of a long-gone mill. Although slumping back into the landscape, these features speak to us if we can hear them and they can guide us to ancestral homesteads and famous sites.