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During the late 1960's and early-to-mid 1970's these woods were teeming with the activity of children. Wandering through these woods today, on and off the path, I have found no signs of children - and that is a shame. For me and the other neighborhood kids these woods were alive. They were where we spent most of our pre-driving years. We had bikes so we could travel around town, but we practically lived in these woods. (When I was 11 years old I regularly rode to West Annapolis to visit a friend who lived off Melvin Ave. I know this because I had an accident there on the new bike that I had just gotten for my 11th birthday during the summer of 1969.) The woods (that is what we called «Ogleton Woods») was the site of many significant firsts. First use of an axe. Fist felled tree. First kiss. First experiments with fire. First taste of beer. First fort. Ahhhhh, forts.

We all built forts. Lots of forts. All over the woods.

These are some of the forts I remember. All but the first one are forts I was involved in building.
1 - A tunnel fort next to Ogleton Rd down the hill from Old Bay Ridge Rd. That was a dangerous one as it was simply a tunnel about 10 feet long and only big enough for a 10 year old to crawl through. It could have collapsed at any time - but it didn't, thankfully. I lost my first tooth there. Never found it. Had to leave a note for the tooth fairy explaining the situation. She understood. This was my first fort-in-the-woods experience. This was some older kids' fort. They let me and the other little kids play in it. Or maybe we were just the guinea pigs testing to see if it would cave in on us instead of them. I was 5 or 6 years old at this time (first lost tooth hints at my age).

2 - A fort under the exposed roots of a tree that had fallen leaving a giant root ball upended and exposed. I remember we ate Scooter Pies there. There was no real construction involved except cutting back some roots to open up the fort space.

3 - A lean-to. For this one we cut down a whole bunch of trees about 3-4 inches in diameter. One of those was nailed horizontally to two trees about 5-6 feet up. We weren$#39;t very tall and that is as high as we could swing a hammer. We then leaned the other trees up against the cross bar. A pretty boring kind of fort, but it was an OK place to read Mad and other (nudge nudge, wink wink) magazines.

4 - Our first tree house was a pretty elaborate affair. It had a triangular base (like most of our tree houses). It was so high up that we had to use a rope ladder that we built to climb up through a trap door in the floor. We climbed up small trees next to the tree house trees and hammered while clinging to these trees. One of them was an old rotten hollow tree. Before anyone was allowed to come into this fort they were required to climb up through that hollow tree (maybe 6 feet tall) and fall down into the holly bush below. We all did it - more than once. Scratched but not really hurt. Torture was a requisite part of a boy's life at the time. You had to prove your worthiness before you could come into the fort. We used chicken wire to make «walls» so that we couldn't fall out when we slept there. A good offense being a good defense, higher up a tree we built a crow's nest so that we could see anybody coming. Not like anybody we knew would have done anything to either us or our fort. This fort was so back-in-the-woods that no one EVER found it. It was near the water between Queen Anne Circle and Dulaney Lane, behind the Gray's house.

5 - A hole fort behind the swamp near the big curve on Ogleton. This hole took a few weekends to dig out. It was probably 10 feet in diameter and about 4 feet deep in the middle. We used trees we cut down to cross the hole as roofing timbers. Adding smaller and smaller tree pieces and branches we covered the whole thing with leaves, except for a 2 foot wide door, a simple hole entryway. Unless you saw the door this fort was virtually invisible to anyone walking through the woods. However, if someone happened to walk ON it, it would have collapsed, and what a surprise they would have had.

6 - Another tree house, on York Lane. Another triangle design. This was the highest tree house I built. It was at least 10 feet off the ground. The wood was leftovers from some project that John's dad had laying around. We only had to carry it about a hundred feet from his house to the build site. We used his ladder to reach this height and build WAAAY above our normal build height. The walls were 1x 10s. We spent many nights there in our sleeping bags. We built hotdog-cooking fires underneath it then would climb up the 2 x 4s nailed to the tree to ascend to our beds. There is a house there now. I think about that fort every time I go down York Lane.

7 - Our best fort. If you walk the Ogleton Trail regularly you may have come upon a tale of another one of my forts. I posted (literally) that story during June of 2016. That fort was 100 yards from here and happened, if memory serves, about 6 months before we began work on a new one.

8 - And there were others. These were just the best, most fun, and most memorable.

One of Many. Maybe our Best.
Long, long ago, in a ditch far, far away - (or is it an old creek bed as we thought in our youth?, a friend and I built one of our best forts ever. We built forts all over the woods and this may have been our best one. We built different kinds; tree forts, dug outs, lean-tos, whatever our imagination, skills, and materials would allow. We seemed to have only one active fort at a time. We built them sequentially, as we either got bored with them or they got destroyed (more on that later). This however, was the biggest fort we ever built, was waterproof, and had a fireplace with a chimney. It was a great place to hang out when we were 12 years old.

It was the fall of 1971. I remember the smell of autumn's leaves underfoot and the chill of the crisp wind which we escaped in the comfort of our heated fort. I remember us singing Iron Man and Willie the Pimp from two albums I bought on the same day during summer vacation at «On the Corner» record store at West St and Cathedral.

We took axes, saws and hammers into the woods to make our forts. Our parents knew we were fort builders and all we heard from them was «have fun». Of course we knew to «be careful». That didn't need to be said. And if we didn't return the tools we'd be in real trouble. Again, no need for that to be said. We were responsible and experienced. We'd been building forts in these woods since we were 6 or 7. At that age we were «the little kid» hangers on that the older kids (most likely someone's brother) allowed and tolerated being underfoot.

Since we had no money we couldn't afford to buy supplies. We had to find another way. Fortunately for us, at that time there were a number of houses under construction in the neighborhood. At each building site there was a trash pile with wood scraps, leftover remnants of tar paper, and other such things. These piles would be routinely burned onsite before the piles got too big. What a waste. But that's how it was done. So, what we did was to 'liberate' this trash (to us it was treasure) and use it to build our forts - see the bottom of the page for some interesting details about house builds in Annapolis Roads - 2 x 4s of varying lengths, large pieces of plywood, tar paper, nails (well, the nails weren't in the trash, they were in large boxes. But we thought, what the heck, they'll never miss a handful of nails.) We took the supplies and dragged it through the woods to our forts. Schlepping the stuff we used through the woods was no big deal. We had the time, energy, and the desire.

We knew just how we wanted to build this one. We'd cut down two trees to make a 6-foot high X at the open end. Then, we cut down another tree, about 20-feet long, to be used as a rafter/beam from the closed end to the intersection of the X, which was just past the big pine tree at the right. We used the wood from the trash pile as a roof. Covered the wood with tar paper, then covered that with sticks and leaves. It was waterproof. We know that cuz we'd go there in the rain to hang out.

Since it was fall, it was chilly. What to do? We built a small fireplace into the dirt walls of the fort. We used bricks from a different building site, probably 25 bricks total. It took several trips back and forth to get the bricks transferred. We most likely spent the better part of an afternoon moving the bricks. Heck, if you search the ditch walls near the back here, I'm sure you'll find some bricks. To get the smoke out of the fort a chimney was necessary. We built that too. Our first attempt didn't work too well so, after several tries we got it to work. The smoke from our little «warming and marshmallow-cooking» fire went up and out the top. Cool.

and then, one Saturday afternoon in January . . .
We arrived here in the morning, lunch in hand, ready to spend the afternoon playing in the woods and reading Mad Magazine in our fort. We’d been there an hour or two. It was cold. The fire was ott enough to keep us warm. The wind was strong. The trees around us were swaying. We decided to go home because, «it's cold and one of those trees may come crashing down on us». So we left. We had spent years playing in these woods and didn’t really think that there was real danger. We were just cold and used the «trees may fall» as a way to preserve our prepubescent machismo. The next day after church we returned to our fort for what we thought would be a typical woodsy afternoon. What we found there shocked and scared us. A tree, 6-8 inch diameter, had fallen smack dab on the fort and crushed it. The X and the rafter had collapsed under the weight of the tree. It had been totally demolished. Good thing yesterday was cold or we might have stayed too late for our own good. We were lucky that day.

After that unexpected disaster and a few months later, we built a tree house about 200 yards away. There are still nails in those trees as evidence of our efforts. That was a neat fort too. We had the tree house and somebody else built a hole fort about 30 feet away. We had a long plastic tube through which we would talk to the other fort. Every fort we built was different. We learned so much playing in the woods. These two forts were destroyed by fire in an awesome battle the following summer. Maybe I will post that story at the site of those forts some time in the future.

These woods were special to a generation of kids. We loved them. We cherished them. We knew them intimately, like the back of our hands. That sounds like a cliché but it is true. We spent so much time here. It was our home away from home. There were no paths. We didn't need them. We knew the shortest path to any place in the neighborhood from any place in these woods. We used trees, fallen trees, hills, gullies, stands of laurel trees or patches of raspberry vines, and other such things as our navigation system. (If we saw raspberries we knew that we were near the edge of the woods as that is the only place they grow). And I guarantee that our bearings and the way we roamed would not have been improved if we had GPS. Guaranteed. I love these woods.

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I stumbled upon this odd sight during October 2016. It was WAAAAYY off the trail.