New Lot, Before and After
Here's the "lot next door" that we have purchased (April, 2001) and cleaned up, just to make things prettier & provide some protection. We've got some before and after pix, it was pretty overgrown & ugly, as you can see, but we think our on-going 'beautification project' has helped a lot. We've saved a lot of trees, hickory, red maple, poplar, holly, quite a few dogwood, 2 very small cedars and several sweet bays. There were 2 or 3 cherrys down and rotting, plus several others. I'll update the pix as more goes in, and things grow a bit.
1. Here's the view from the road, as you come into River Bluffs. Our house is thru the trees in this view. We didn't take any 'before" pix from this view, but the difference is striking, as you can see from the next groups.
We added the azaleas, and have quite a few more things to put in to replace the bird habitat and improve our privacy. Some neighbors have said they had some plants that they would divide & 'donate', and some have suggested a gazebo for picnics, but that probably won't happen.
2. Moving down the road to the right, you see a corner of the "lake", and a view of the East side from our back yard
3. Moving further around, you can see the view we used to have from our back yard, and the big difference now.
4. Looking back at this from the other direction, as if you had turned left on the road, you'd see the 'bog', a low area, with some flowing water coming in thru a culvert under the road at the bottom left of the picture. It dries to a very small trickle most of the time during the Summer, tho'. (The lake stays within a few inches of this level.) Most of the lot is 10 feet or so above the lake, which in turn is about 15 feet above the level of the Neuse River, which it empties into at the far end, about 1/4 mile away. The Neuse is about 3 miles wide here, about 7 miles downriver from New Bern. Lots of boating activity.
5. There is a gravesite here, William and Cassandra Wood, who died within a week of each other in January, 1852, 11 years before the Yankees came in off the river about a half mile from here on the way to New Bern. He was 27 yrs old, she was 58. Local legend has it that there were two graves moved to this site from another site about 2 miles away, a mother and infant, moved by the husband. We haven't reconciled facts with the legend, as there are no other markers here now. Her marker was broken years ago, we've patched it together, hope it'll hold. We put the fence and flowers in, the area had been overgrown and neglected for years.
Backyard a look at our backyard, birds, etc.
This page last updated on 02/09/2005.