NO ANSWERS, ONLY MORE QUESTIONS

This isn't a story about geocaching, although it appears here in my GC'ing blog. It isn't even a story about a successful hunt, if your only criterion for success is finding a specific answer or place, for we really only found more questions. This past Saturday BatikFrak10 and I met Waypoint Wayne to do what can only be called industrial archaeology along an abandoned CSX (formerly C&O) railway grade near the town of Fitzpatrick WV.

WaypointWayne (Wx2) is he of the wonderful "Phone a Friend" geocache. Scroll far down to refresh your memory of that outstanding cache. Go ahead, we'll wait here.

See. Worth the review wasn't it?

Wx2 seems to be interested in the industrial history of an area as much as seeing a place as a possibility for hiding "Tupperware in the Woods", and when we reported finding extensive concrete foundations near a cache he was watching, he contacted us (me I guess) about what those remains looked like and exactly where they were located.

WX2 was, and remains, interested in locating a site called "Spanglers Mill", both to find the industrial ruins and to find the town site itself. Spanglers Mill, the town, is listed on a 1913 USGS topo map of the Fitzpatrick/Crab Orchard area of WV. The problem is, where exactly was Spanglers Mill? No one seems to know any longer. According to the way I read (past tense) and continue to read (present tense) a C&O map that I own, Spanglers Mill (the mill itself) might be located near a certain C&O bridge. A problem arises here because that bridge is about two miles from the site that Wx2's map shows the location of Spanglers Mill Town/Mill.

We agreed to meet and do a physical hike into the area and see if we could find a definitive answer to our little puzzle. Follow along:

We're hiking along the tracks here, looking for... ? I guess we're looking for whatever we can see. Already we have found several areas of concrete foundations between the tracks and Piney Creek. I do know that what we have found is not a C&O water tower or signal bridge, those have easily identifiable patterns in their construction. These looked like a small building or two of some nature but were fairly far back from the tracks themselves.

What's this? We don;t know. Is it man made? Concrete? A foundation of some nature? We don't know are were unable to find out. It is across Piney Creek and the creek was nearly bank full, way too deep to even think about wading. Piney Creek is about 15-20 feet wide at this point--quite substantial.

One thing we did find out for certain, spring is not far away. Colts Foot, one of our earliest spring wild flowers, blooms along our path.

We're about a mile or so cross country from the town of Crab Orchard at this coal load out. A load out is the business end of a tipple where the coal is loaded into the hopper cars after cleaning and other processing at the tipple. We have been looking for the remains of what is locally described as a"dinky" track up to Crab Orchard in the early 20th century. The "dinky" brought coal down to the mainline RR for loading into hoppers and shipment to the outside world. The abandoned dirt road behind the load out might be the "dinky" track later converted into a primitive road. The road follows a water grade--always a good sign when looking for old RR grades. But again we don't know for certain. We are running out of time and will have to return another day to explore further. A "dinky" is a narrow gage railroad, usually primitive and somewhat crude.

Is this what success looks like? We don't know for sure, but across Piney Creek we can clearly see the remains of a very old road (not railroad) grade. WX2's topo shows a road descending to the town of Spanglers Mill. Have we found the road?

Here's another view of the road grade and some wonderful, and very old, stone work along the creek.




Here's what we don't know after our trip:
* If we have found the road leading to Spanglers Mill (which seems likely), then where is the town site? We saw no concrete foundations near this spot. Indeed, there's almost no place to perch a even a very small town nearby.
* How big was Spanglers Mlll (the actual mill)? Court records from a lawsuit involving the Spangler heirs mention only a small quantity of easily portable woolen milling equipment which would in turn indicate a very small operation. We have a photo which is captioned "Spanglers Blacksmith Shop". What if the caption is wrong and what we are seeing in the photo is actually Spanglers Woolen Mill?
* If the larger ruins BatikFreak10 and I found earlier where not Spanglers Mill, then what were those ruins, and why aren't they noted on my C&O map?
* Is the road grade we found actually the Spanglers Mill road?
* Did we find the "dinky" tracks?
* What about all those other foundations we found early in our hike? What were those?

One thing we do know, we had a nice day.
All photos courtesy of BatikFreak10.