This is the fourth of ten in the Boxborough-Centric geocache series. A complete list of the BC series can be found here.
This is a nine-stage multi that will bring you to almost all corners of Boxborough’s Patch Hill Conservation Area, the Town’s largest contiguous tract of conservation land. You will need to plan on several hours to complete all stages. The difficulty rating applies to most of the stages. There is a lot of variety in the hides. Think outside the box.
Listed coordinates are for Stage 1. The closest parking to Stage 1 is off Hill Road at the noted Parking waypoint. A trail map for the Patch Hill Conservation Area can be viewed and downloaded from the Town's website here. While the map does not show parking at this trail head, there is in fact room for two vehicles if you park carefully.
Stage 1 is a round blue container. The highest point in the Patch Hill Area is a half mile southeast of Stage 2. A waypoint is provided to show you where it is.
Each stage contains a partial clue and coordinates and a hint for the next stage. The final stage contains a requisite clue for the tenth cache in the series, the BC#10 Boxborough Centroid GC2DDCR.
The terrain is hilly, but generally free of poison ivy and thorny bushes, so bushwhacking is not that hard. There are some very wet areas. You will see lots of evidence of land uses from generations ago. Most of the caches are near trails, so be cautious of muggles.
The few corners of the Patch Hill area that are not touched by this geocache set were taken by other caches. To visit them find:
2009 Boston Red Sox Roster Series - Dustin Pedroia (GC1ZDW7) by boston brewins
Patch hill Chirps! (GC2GJ34) by g-o-cashers
The Other Boxborough Library (GC2GJ21) also by g-o-cashers.
There are also a few mystery caches with finals in this area, but I won’t identify them.
The theme for this cache is The Boxborough Quilt. Quilts are generally made from pieces, or patches, of fabric sewn together in a pattern, thus the term “patchwork quilt”. Patch Hill seemed the appropriate place to introduce people to the Boxborough Quilt.
In fact, there are four significant quilts in Boxborough. Which one is the “official Boxborough Quilt” depends on who you ask.
1) The Boxborough afghan: the Historical Society worked with a private firm to make this up for fund raising in the mid 1990’s.
2) US Bicentennial quilt put together by the children at Blanchard Memorial School for the Bicentennial in 1976
3) The quilt made by Mabel Priest Robbins in 1917 with the signatures of each resident of the town at the time. This one is lovingly preserved in a special acid-free box at the Sargent Memorial Library.
4) The quilt put together in 1990 by six local ladies. It is bordered with gray to symbolize the stone walls in town, with an ivy motif to symbolize the ubiquitous poison ivy, Boxborough’s official town plant.J It currently hangs in the Local History Room at the Sargent Memorial library and is pictured below. Blow-ups of each block are available in the image gallery below. The initials of the quilters can be seen on the headstones in the representation of the Old North Cemetery in the block of the Herb Garden. This is the quilt referred to in all the questions to be found in the stages of this geocache.
The Boxborough-Centric series is a collection of nine individual caches, each with a clue to the tenth. All are located in Boxborough, Mass. They will take you to some of the more interesting places in the town. Several of these caches will rely on information that can be found in a book called Boxborough: Portrait of a Town, published by a group of Town residents in 1983. A special copy of this book, reserved just for this cache series, can be found in Boxborough's Sargent Memorial Library. The librarians will show you where it is. Please do not mark it up. Bring a pen and paper with which to make notes because you cannot take this copy out. Or, for a cost, you may make copies of a few pages at a time in the library if you prefer. The library’s hours can be found on its website here. You need to find ALL the first nine caches with their respective clues to find BC#10 Boxborough Centroid GC2DDCR. You do not need to find them in order.
G-o-cashers was the First-To-Find on the BC#10 Boxborough Centroid geocache (he did it the hard way, without waiting for the full series to be published). He is making the copy of Boxborough: Portrait of a Town he won for the FTF prize in that cache available to anyone who wants to borrow it for this series by placing it in his The Other Boxborough Library (GC2GJ21) geocache.