Crum Ruins Inspire Short Film

A still from Mark Pappas’ short film, “The Ruins.”

Mark Pappas has been running through the Crum Woods all his life. In the eighties, when he was growing up, he used to ride bikes there with his friends, and explore, and just hang out. But he never saw the ruins until this year.

“I don’t know how I missed them,” he says. “The meadow and the trails back there were my go-to place as a kid.”

Pappas left the area for college and spent 15 years in Philadelphia. When he moved to Springfield with his wife a few years back, he started running in the Crum again. Growing up, he had heard stories of land near the Leiper-Smedley trail seized by eminent domain and houses torn down so the Blue Route (I-476) could be built. But now he started hearing about a grand, ruined estate back among the trees. He decided to track it down.

Pappas got hold of a trail map and saw how many trails he’d never explored. After a few days of trying different options, he stumbled upon something he’d never seen before: sloped stone walls, decorative carvings, and empty niches where statues must have been. It felt magical. “I needed to find out all that I could about this place,” Pappas says.”

He also decided to take some footage of the area, using a drone.

Pappas took a couple of cameras and spent three or four days in the Crum experimenting with angles and points of view. On one of those days, he encountered a couple who said they were involved with the Media Film Festival. They suggested Pappas make a short film with his footage and submit it. 

The resulting film, “Ruins,” is moody and alluring. Pappas shot in early spring when the trees were still bare. Wide frames show vistas of the Crum with Pappas, in black shorts and T-shirt, running through it. There’s no talking, just music (also by Pappas), with captions superimposed over the landscape.

“Ruins” dives into the history of the place. Purchased from William Penn himself by a Quaker named Thomas Powell in 1681, the land was sold in 1927 to Ward and Edith Hinkson, who named it Oak Knoll. The Hinksons added formal gardens and planted trees, turning the estate into a private arboretum. An Italian water garden boasted terraces and fountains, and greenhouses grew tens of thousands of orchids.

But when the Blue Route was planned in the 1960s, Oak Knoll was in the way. 

Pappas has been submitting his film to small festivals. The Media Film Festival has been postponed a year, because of the coronavirus pandemic, but the Minefield Film Festival in Albuquerque selected the six-minute film for a prize. 

For Pappas, the takeaway of the experience is the wonder of things that may be concealed in one’s own backyard. “Put down your phones,” he writes on the blackness of the film’s final shot, “and discover what is hiding all round you.”