I wandered through history on the Asnebumskit trail in Holden Massachusetts the other day.
This land is the ancestral territory of the Nipmuc people, who used Asnebumskit Hill as a lookout point and to mark family and tribal territories.
This land was also hiked by Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau hiked the ridge and wrote about it in an 1852 letter and his notes calling Asnebumskit Hill “one of the true temples of the earth” and it was “better than church”. The scenic overlook today is known as “Thoreau’s Seat”. The trail also hides a cellar hole of a freed slave on its lower trail and back In 1939 the summit of Asnebumskit Hill also became the site of the first FM radio broadcast in Massachusetts!
