April 29, 2025
Source: FB / Leslie Yochim Russo
One afternoon, I was strolling beside the lake at the boundary of my land when something caught my eye — two rusty, metal pipes sticking out the ground. Curiosity getting the best of me, I began excavating around them. They weren’t connected to anything obvious. No wires, no plumbing, no evidence of a dwelling place. Just a couple of rusty pipes, buried deep in the ground.
Initially, I wondered if it was a kind of ancient plumbing, or an abandoned tie-down for a dock. Or who knows — maybe even a lost moonshine vent! I looked all over the place for clues about any other connection between the pipes.
The holes in the sides of the pipes made it even weirder, as if something had once been bolted through them. But they couldn’t possibly connect to septic or plumbing — they sat too far from the house, gave off no smell, and had no dock nearby. Just a normal little mystery lay buried beneath a pile of leaves and dirt.
Then I Saw a Picture That Cleared It All Up
One night I was doing something on the internet, and I saw one of these old pictures. Two pipes were poking up from the ground, exactly like the ones I had seen — but in that photo, a tall flagpole was placed between them.
It hit me like a flash. The pipes I stumbled upon used to be the base of a neglected flagpole.
People used to build flagpoles with a plain hinge arrangement. The pipes functioned as a cradle and bolts would come through the holes to secure the flagpole in place. You could drop the pole to fix it or hoist a new flag — ingenious, straightforward and built to last.
The Setup Was Not Uncommon, Particularly in the Mid-1900s
These were not off-the-shelf kits with logos or instructions. Just basic steel pipes, bolts and a bit of old-school welding — a do-it-yourself project that was built to last.
And last it did. Those pipes are firmly anchored in a time whose passage has consistently evaded them for decades.
Builders put up my house in 1938, and ever since, a steady stream of discoveries has clung to it — stone walkways hidden under the lawn, old glass bottles stacked beneath the crawlspace, and now this hefty old flagpole base down by the lake.
It Makes Sense — A Flag on the Water
I can almost see it now: a huge flag flying over the treetops, something that’s big enough for boaters on the lake to see. Perhaps it was raised every weekend, a bright exertion of color over the estate. Or perhaps it had always been there, year-round, looking out over the water in silence.
How do You Know if You’ve Found One Too
Look for:
- Just two or three steel pipes close together
- Holes near the top for a bolt
- Caps or closed tops
- No visible utilities
If that’s recognizable to what you have, it’s an old flagpole base.
A Little Chunk of Solid History
I am not taking mine down. Perhaps I’ll even fix it someday. It wasn’t all old hat begging to be torn up and thrown in the trash. Some tidbits of the past are worth leaving where they are — silent reminders of a time when people constructed what they needed themselves and built it to last.
So the next time you spot something strange in your backyard, maybe take a closer look. You could very well be standing on history.
