Walls of Stone

Since moving to New England in 1997, I have learned to pay attention to stone walls. They feature prominently in my Land Protection course. Protecting open spaces -- whether field or forest or both -- requires understanding how those spaces change, and walls are a big part of that understanding. 

I am fortunate that rangers and ecologists at Harvard Forest and the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park have been very generous in sharing the lessons of stone walls with my students and me. As a result, we notice the walls differently and I even follow a nerdy stone-wall page or two online.

This recent post on that site is as good a summary as I have seen of the importance of stone walls in New England.

There is a stone wall running through the woods somewhere near you right now, and it is standing in the middle of what used to be an open field.

New England holds something on the order of a hundred thousand miles of dry laid stone wall, and almost none of it was built to be looked at. Farmers clearing land in the 1700s and 1800s hit glacial till, which is what the ice sheet left behind: soil absolutely packed with rock. Every single spring the frost pushed a fresh crop of stones up to the surface. You had to put them somewhere. The wall was the somewhere.

Which means these walls are property lines and pasture boundaries from a landscape that no longer exists. At the peak in the mid 1800s, big stretches of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont were something like seventy to eighty percent cleared. Photographs from that period look nearly treeless. Then the Erie Canal opened, better farmland opened up out west, the mills pulled families into the cities, and the hill farms were abandoned in enormous numbers. The forest came back entirely on its own.

So when you are walking in the Litchfield Hills, or almost anywhere else in New England, and a wall comes out of nowhere and runs dead straight through hundred year old oaks, you are not looking at a wall in the woods. You are looking at woods that grew up inside somebody's pasture after they gave up and left.

Is there a stone wall on land you know well, and do you know whose field it used to be?

I can recommend two books on the topic. I have required David Foster's Thoreau's Country since I started teaching the Land Protection class mentioned above. Fortunately, it was published around the time I inherited the course. I have sometimes also required Reading the Forested Landscape by Tom Wessels in that same course. I have not met either author, but colleagues of each were early guides in my exploration of the properties mentioned above, and I learned a lot from them! 

Lagniappe

As the N.C. Wyeth painting below reminds us, every stone in every stone wall was placed by a human, mostly with no mechanized equipment. 

Barefooted Brooks Clark Building a Wall
by Newell Convers Wyeth
Originally published in "Men of Concord" in 1936
Shared in 2026 by The Thoreau Society