The stone at the bottom of Camp Brook Road has a 4 on it in white house paint, and the 4 has been repainted at least three times because you can see two older ghosts of it underneath at slightly different angles. It sits about eighteen inches proud of the ditch line, granite, roughly a foot and a half wide at the face. It is not four miles from anything I have been able to identify. Four miles up the road puts you past the height of land and into a hayfield. Four miles down puts you in the river.
I started writing these down in March 2024 after a man at the transfer station told me to turn left at the seven. I nodded like I knew, drove past it twice, and eventually found it on the second pass: an iron post, square section, maybe three inches on a side, with a 7 cast into a flat plate bolted near the top. It leans downhill at what I measured with a phone app as eleven degrees. The plate is cast, not stamped, which means somebody had it made.
My rules are loose. It counts if it carries a number, if it stands within about ten feet of a road surface, and if it is not a state or town highway marker of the official green-and-white sort. Address numbers on mailboxes do not count. Numbers on barns do count, and I have four of those, including a hip-roof barn on the east side of the river with a black 12 that must be six feet tall.
Directions here run on these things whether or not anyone thinks about it. Last August a woman giving me directions to a hayfield said go past the twelve barn, then when you see the little white stone bear right, then it's the second driveway after that. She did not name a single road. I got there without a wrong turn.
Trouble is that the numbers do not agree with each other. The 7 post on Camp Brook and the 7 stone on the Braintree side are eleven miles apart by road and cannot belong to the same sequence. My working theory is that at least three separate numbering schemes overlap in the valley, probably logging haul distances, a defunct rural mail route, and somebody's private surveying. I have no documentation for any of that.
Current count as of last weekend: thirty-one confirmed, nine of which are painted stones, twelve iron or steel posts, four barns, and six I have not classified because they are wooden and rotting and I cannot tell what they were originally. Two of the wooden ones I found only because of snow shadow in February.
The 4 stone got repainted again sometime between the last week of June and the middle of July. Same white, slightly heavier hand on the downstroke. I have not met whoever does it and I have not asked around, partly because I suspect that asking would end the whole thing.