Mooney's Trail

Summary

Mooney’s Trail is a narrow way on a built-up gravel ridge running east from King’s Highway, just south of Sloptown Road, through cedar woods toward the fields behind a house on East Side Road. It is a settlement trail rather than a recreational one, and what makes it notable is the line of ruins along it.

The route

Described in a single site-visit account and neither mapped under this name in OpenStreetMap nor walked into this archive. The account gives no mileages, only positions relative to each other.

What the route was

A farm access way. The account describes a built-up gravel ridge supporting the trail through a cedar woods, with fields “once worked” lying fallow to the south, now overgrown with junipers, and rockpiles that record the effort of clearing them.

Points of interest

Three buildings stand in a cluster about a third of the way along:

• a frame house, judged at the time of the visit to be perhaps sixty to sixty-five years old;
• about a hundred yards further east, the remains of a large two-storey log cabin, its walls still standing but roof and upper floor collapsed, with inner plaster still adhering in places;
• about a hundred yards north-east again, a smaller log cabin apparently converted to a barn, with an eight-foot door cut into its south wall, sided with cedar shakes and chinked with the same plastered-over square wooden plates recorded elsewhere on the island.

Nearby holes may mark a log-lined well and an outhouse, and the remains of 1920s-era cars lie scattered in the woods.

The last residents

The account quotes LaDonnis Mooney, reached by telephone, who could say little: “They were Mooneys, but not related. The last residents were a brother and sister. She was blind, and used to guide herself along a strung-up clothesline to her henhouse to pick up the morning’s eggs.” The trail is said to have run to a homestead at Little Sand Bay, and a further trail may once have run south, of which no trace remains.

Access and ownership

Ownership is not established anywhere in the archive. The trail crosses ground between King’s Highway and East Side Road that is not identified in the source, the ruins stand on land whose owner is unknown, and the account is a visit narrative, not a statement of public access. Nothing here establishes a right of way, and the ruins are unstable.

Evidence and limits

A single undated local-history page is the whole of the record. The building ages are the visitor’s estimates, the identification of the well and outhouse is explicitly tentative, and the trail is not mapped. Treat every measurement here as approximate and every date as unverified.

Documented associations

No source-confirmed non-road entity is linked yet. Exact-name research leads remain in scripts/audit_road_links.py; a name collision is not treated as a road association.

Research status

The local newspaper and website corpus contains exact-name mentions in 0 file(s). Those files are research leads; the relation layer is added only when the surrounding source text establishes that the record involves this road.

Added 16 August 2026. Recent changes