We take them for granted. They have become so completely part of the local landscape that they probably don’t even register on our conscious minds as we motor along, taking care of our 21st century business. Stone walls are everywhere.
But a mere heartbeat ago in geological time, stone and rock walls served the useful purpose of marking property lines, not because wooden fences couldn’t be constructed, but because the stones were in the way of agricultural fields and pastures needed for livestock. Ever resourceful, the stones moved out of necessity were conserved as walls by the settlers.
We know the history, that the rocky soils of New England came about when the glaciers receded and melted away. Millions of tons of stone were left behind. The stone supply was endless.
Tossed stones, known as two-handers because they could be thrown one person using both hands, were piled about thigh high in meandering strips that became walls. Fields required the clearing away of stones each spring as a new unwanted crop of stones seemed to sprout up by black magic. Our forebearers called them “devil stones,” believing that Beelzebub himself was pushing them up from the bowels of the earth. In reality, their emergence was the result of heaving created by frost that gave the stones their upward mobility.
Increasingly more land was cleared as demanded by the beef-butter-bacon economy of the 19th century. So writes author and landscape geologist Robert Thorson of the University of Connecticut. Thorson has been studying, educating students and the general public about the importance of stone walls for decades. His fascination with the history, archeology, and geology of stone walls in New England puts him in a unique position as an authority on the topic.
Thorson says that by the mid-19th century, a whopping 70 percent of the New England countryside had been deforested for fuel, buildings, and farmlands. He said that if we could wander back in time, what we would find as far as the eye could see would be small farm holdings surrounded by “dump walls.” Another whopper of a statistic from Thorson’s research is that some 240,000 miles of stone walls have been erected. That’s 400 million tons, “enough to build the Great Pyramid of Giza 60 times over.”
Speaking of “dump walls,” Thorson has identified several types of stone wall construction. There are the simple dump walls, a classic mounding of stones to mid-thigh in a casual, “I’m tired of moving rocks,” manner. There are the tossed walls, basically the same as dump walls but a bit tidier. There are the neatly fitted single walls, the neatly fitted double walls and, finally, laid walls, which utilized slate and flat stones in a linear fashion.
Thorson writes in his book, Exploring Stone Walls, that the tallest stone wall feature is located in Newport, Rhode Island, along the Cliff Walk, and the oldest, built in 1607, has been found in Popham, Maine. He also noted that stone walls provided protection for the minutemen during the Revolutionary War.
Given his rock-solid (pun intended) love for stone walls, Thorson founded the Stone Wall Initiative in 2002 for the continued education and conservation of stone walls in New England.
Both Thorson and researcher Susan Allport, who wrote Sermons in Stone: The Stone Walls of New England & New York, said of the stones in their plentitude, they just kept coming.
Here’s a fun fact: The most common stone in New England is granite, but the stone walls of the area are primarily made of gneiss containing banded coarse grains of feldspar, quartz, and mica and/or schist, which is comprised of mudstone or shale with sheet-like grains of muscovite, chlorite, talc, sericite, biotite, and graphite.
Allport’s research discusses the geological history of the stony ground beneath our feet, commenting that their size ranges from massive boulders that seem to have suddenly stopped rolling towards the sea – think Witch Rock in Rochester or the massive boulder behind that home on Church Street in Mattapoisett – to tiny pebbles along the beach. These stones are known as melt-out till. Logment till is the term used for the rich soils beneath the melt-out till.
While stone walls were continuously built throughout the time of the early settlers until the Industrial Era, Allport reports that most walls were being built in the latter half of the 18th century. She says that by the time Industrial Era walls were abandoned, economic development moved away from an agrarian society to industry, the manufacturing of goods.
The need for heating fuels has had an environmental impact over the centuries that precipitated even greater deforestation than farming had. Changes in the earth’s rotation and ocean currents, as well as volcanic winters, episodes that darkened parts of the planet, all contributed to times of extreme cold weather, including years without a summer growing season.
There were approximately 500 years of weather impact on mankind and its need to survive the cold. As more and more land was cleared, widespread deforestation exposed the soils, causing them to freeze more deeply, thus creating frost heaves that lifted billions of stones to the surface.
The single most pronounced period of stone wall building came between 1775 and 1825, Allport has stated. Thorson agrees, calling it the “golden age of stone building.” After the Revolutionary War, Thorson believes property owners returned to their homes with an increased sense of pride of ownership and rebuilt many dump-style walls into more uniform features.
But what becomes of those remaining stone walls hidden hither and yon throughout our Tri-Town area, walls that haven’t been disturbed by modern day subdivisions or new home construction?
Massachusetts General Law Chapter 266 provides protection for stone walls that have been constructed along designated scenic ways, primarily in municipal easements. Walls on private property appear to have no protection, save for that provided by the property owner. They are, after all, on private property. There are walls yet to be discovered in our region, most assuredly.
Allport’s research included the use of laser mapping technology to locate wall features deep within reforested areas. The visual emergence of long forgotten walls are truly archeological finds, giving us a better understanding of how our ancestors were using the lands. Allport believes the walls hold the key to New England’s social history, including settlement patterns and farming styles, a backdrop against which human activity can be measured.
Each stone was once held by a person, a farmer, a native American, a slave. “What remains are countless individual acts etched upon the landscape – those labors, hundreds of years later, they endure,” Allport wrote.
We have always found poetry in our natural world. Robert Frost wrote of “fences making good neighbors” in his poem, “Mending Wall,” inspired by a wall dividing his property from his neighbors. Stone walls make us stop and wonder, “Who put this wall here … when was it built … what animals are using the crevices as shelter … will it remain here forever?”
“Stone walls are the most important artifacts of rural New England,” Thorson says. “They’re a visceral connection to the past. They are just as surely a remnant of a former civilization as a ruin in the Amazon rain forest.”
Stone walls are works of art and feats of engineering. They are also a thread to our collective past, like breadcrumbs leading us to a deeper appreciation for those who have gone before us.
To learn more about stone walls of New England visit stonewall.uconn.edu, roberthorson.clas.uconn.edu, or ask your library for Allport’s books on the subject.
By Marilou Newell