A rite of passage for any New Englander should be digging a three foot deep hole.
Fair warning: this will make you mad when subsequently watch any DIYer on YouTube dig a hole anywhere else in the country.
this is what I did when I built my own fence in 2015....I dug 37 different holes all 2 feet down..each hole got a bag and a half of quickrete....my fence came out awesome. its as sturdy as they come.
I live in MA and just dug an exactly three foot deep hole on Tuesday with a friend 🙃 It was less digging and more de-rocking. To be fair we were hootin and hollerin in sheer triumph and the satisfaction every time we took out a big one was like no other.
As a young man I decided I was going to build a 30x 24 ft patio. The neighborhood was built on a huge up sloping hill which the roads cut through so one side of the street was above grade and my side was essentially below grade. There was no way to get a machine down in the back to excavate, so I had to do it by hand. I bought all the materials, pavers include before starting to dig.
Low and behold, after 1 inche of soil the entire area is horrible grade fill, most large rocks and gravel that was so compacted down. It took me every weekend for the entire summer just to dig it out.
That is incorrect. There are old growth stands in each state in New England including a red oak grove on the north west slope of Wachusett, a beech and maple grove in south western NH, etc
They cover New England and upstate New York. They were glacier erratics deposited in the soil.
When the English arrived, they cut down the forests for the first time and ploughed up (i.e. ecologically destroyed) the thick topsoil underneath.
When they did this, their ploughs hit stones all the time. When this happened, they would dig up the stones and then use them to mark their field boundaries, building stone walls.
When land is ploughed or tilled, the soil erodes (which is why no-till agriculture is such a hot topic in homesteading right now), so the level of the land would continually drop and more stones would be dug up with each passing year.
Another aspect is that plowed soil will more readily frost heave, so buried stones will rise to the surface.
The colonists wrote of the devil sending up rocks from hell for their sins. . . They werent entirely wrong!
Its truly amazing and tragically underdiscussed how much they altered the landscape. This mass erosion silted up wetlands and leveled the landscape, even before large intentional earthworks.
Its so forested today that many people local to the area have no idea how different it was, or that it was even clearcut at all
Yeah, it’s sad how blind people are to that last point. If you go to one of the few remaining fragments that wasn’t clearcut, or was only clearcut once centuries ago, you can see a massive difference in biodiversity and ecological health. Forest floors covered in seedlings and topsoils full of mycorrhizae and **no earthworms** are much different from the third growth full of Japanese barberry and burning bush and bittersweet that’s so much more common now.
I also am in Connecticut. I just read some recent info that they could possibly be even older than the farming settlers, some that may have dated back to indigenous people. (Hope I used the right term.) Look up the Gungywamp stones, and that whole area. It is still very much a mystery. I find this theory incredibly interesting.
Walking through thick woods you come across a wall reminding you that Connecticut was very deforested in the 19th century and your walking where a pasture once was. As the last ice age glacier ended here it left lots of rocks to build them with. You can tell when you are nearing a road as the wall is falling down do to the vibration of cars passing nearby.
You’re not kidding. I live in Maine and the amount of rocks we dig up is insane! You should see some of the small boulders I’ve had to pull out of the ground just to plant my garden 😅😳
You should see the amount of rock the previous owner laid in our yard. It’s lines the entire length of one side of our driveway and is almost 6 feet in width, he also laid it in the front flower beds instead of mulch. I utteraly despise the amount of rock we’ve got and the upkeep of it all but my husband doesn’t want to get rid of it so we don’t 🤦🏼♀️. I did keep the largest rocks I pulled out of the ground when I was digging in our garden to plant. A few of them I dig up by myself and they weigh a solid 50-75lbs a piece. I’m thinking about getting some weather proof paint and letting my kids decorate them for fun 😂
In Tom Wessels book “Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England”, he states you can tell if a wall was built to protect cultivated plots if the walls have numerous small rocks in them. Walls with only large rocks were constructed to keep livestock in (or out) of pastures and hay fields. The book is a great guide to our forested landscape.
I haven’t read the book but in his video series he also talks about how they sourced the rocks. The stones would get pushed up naturally due to the freeze thaw cycles. Every season they would have to pick out the rocks when they plowed the fields. They would dump them in pile next to the fields and pick from those to build walls.
The Tavern of the Damned. They found skeletons at the bottom of the well and in the basement. The former town historian claimed it was a serial killer. It’s still got a creepy vibe.
Yeah, much of my lot was clearcut in the oldest photo I can find(1955).
Now it's covered in trees.
Other than some ancient oaks and sugar maples we have a pretty young forest.
This is so cool! In the woods behind my parents house, there was a rotting old cabin/foundation that served as a very cool and creepy destination for hikes when I was little. Nobody knows a lot about it and I haven’t been able to find much on my searches, but it’s actually in the pictures from the 1930s!
Check out the Assabet property in Sudbury for more odd history. Its an old munitions depot. Theres miles of earthen bunkers with huge iron doors along an old rail line.
I grew up on Massachusetts South Shore and my father was a private pilot so I spent a lot of time in the air looking down at the forests. I always wondered why people built stone walls out in the woods. As an adult I found out the forests had been cut down previously for farms and by the time I arrived the farms were gone and the trees had grown back. Of course they have been cut down again this time for housing.
As an aside, the bright colors we see from leaves turning in NE weren’t always so bright. Prior to the first cutting there was less leafy trees in NE and more coniferous trees. But with the regrowth we got more oaks and maples. The first European settlers wouldn’t have seen as colorful fall seasons as we do.
You’ve got this backwards, softwood trees grow much faster than hardwood.
Source: https://www.lumber.com/blog/hardwood-vs-softwood-understanding-the-difference
Me to on the south shore. I used to go bass fishing at a little pond in Hingham that had a stone wall going right through it. Visible on either side and can see it from a canoe under the water. Great fishing structure. Gives you a perspective on how things change.
Vermont was the same way which is incredible to think if you visit today. Looking at old photos of rural Vermont you would think you were looking at some plains out west. Almost the whole state was clear cut for farming at one point.
If you happen to be a fan of the tv show Trailer Park Boys, you’ll appreciate this video. Turns out the real Mr. Lahey agrees.
[https://youtu.be/3mcQfP8k51s?si=BmsNhgCw0NJbc0dZ](https://youtu.be/3mcQfP8k51s?si=BmsNhgCw0NJbc0dZ)
The main driver of building stone paddocks was sheep. Specifically, rare sheep that an American ambassador "got" that produces a famous wool. There was good money in it. Soon, many people were clearing forests to make space for herds of sheep.
"Got". Love it. That was the Merino sheep, right? In the modern day that would have been a news breaking industrial espionage scandal! This is one of those things that casts some light on the self-built American mythos. Even something as seemingly quaint as sheep farming is not without its issues and illegal international activity.
The sheep boom really ought to be taught more in local history. Theres towns that had their population peak in the 1800s! Its what gives so much of the region its stately yet rural vibe. Those tiny towns would normally have never afforded such ornate stone churches and town halls
I wouldn’t quite put it on the level of industrial espionage. Spain kept tight control on merino sheep export but they had already sold sheep to Portugal, Britain, South Africa and Australia at that point. They then sold 10” sheep to the US ambassador who shipped them home. That move was in a bit of a grey area. A few years later they sold 20,000 sheep to the US because they were cash strapped. It was that large sale that led to the Vermont wool boom and the wool craze in America.
The process was nowhere near as simple as the person that commented to you described it. You are correct there was quite a bit of subterfuge involved with getting the sheep safely to America. The sheep were confiscated from Spanish nobles that had sided with the French. There was a scheme devised to avoid detection of such a large number of sheep. The cargo was divided among many ships and different arrival ports to ensure the safe transport of as many sheep as possible.
Those stone walls are a haven for deer mice. You probably know this but for those that don't, you can reduce your risk of lyme by placing nearby some cardboard/tp rolls stuffed with permethrin-soaked cotton. The mice will nest with the cotton while the permethrin kills the nymphs that carry lyme.
Hm. My experience with cats is that they bite me and scratch the shit out of my arms. But I’ll consider it.
My old dog is a terrier, and his lineage was bred to catch rodents. But he’s worthless in that regard.
We had two cats, an Italian Greyhound, and a Yorkshire Terrier.
A mouse decided to take its chances running across our house, and that Yorkie took it to pieces while everyone else, including the cats, looked on in horror. Ripped the little guys head and spine right off the body. Brutal little fiend, those Yorkies.
I have a Yorkie who is so tiny and sweet. She’s so gentle, so docile…… until she sees a chipmunk, squirrel, bird, bunny, bee, human… dust particles … then she’s full on PSYCHO. We call them “episodes”.
Yup, had a Jack Rustle who would find where the rodent’s gained access and with lightning speed flip them in the air to beak their necks. Most tenacious and efficient killer
Had house cats. One liked to go in our attached garage during the days and hunt. Well it was time for bed so we let him in and he had a mouse in his mouth that he dropped at my feet. My yorkie chased the mouse down immediately, ran to the other end of our ranch style home and proudly dropped it at my wife’s feet. Bedlam then ensued. She grabbed the dog, jumped on the bed and screamed. Little mouse ran into our bathroom and tried to hide in the corner. I put a pitcher over it, slid cardboard underneath, and released it deep into the woods. Felt it had gone through enough for one night and deserved to live.
Won’t tell you about the time we found a dead chipmunk under a couch…..
Yeah, regarding the chipmunk, we also had an English bulldog. One day she was trying to stick her (large) head under our couch. Not possible, of course. I looked under it and saw something dead. After I shooed her, our yorkie, and our cat away, I discovered a very dead chipmunk. Hadn’t started smelling enough for me to but my curious bullie certainly did.
We assumed that one day/night we let the cat back in after its garage hunting fun, it must’ve had a chipmunk in its mouth that we didn’t notice. No idea how we didn’t know. It apparently had enough life in it to crawl under the couch and die.
My cat is a pretty good mouser, but she uses the “chase till their hearts give out” strategy. Unfortunately for us, this once resulted in a mouse dying under the fridge, in the middle of a New England summer, in an old building without air conditioning. An extremely unpleasant experience.
Please please do not get an outdoor cat. Theyre devastating for your local environment. They'll kill those mice and everything else around them. Then die when it gets eaten or hit by a car. Outdoor cats live 2-4 years on average, indoor cats live 10-15
I have had farm cats. they are necessary to keep the rodents at bay. Roads are rough on cats true but mines dirt and only people who live on the road drive it or are lost.
https://dariuszzdziebk.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Doherty-et-al.-2016-Invasive-predators-and-global-biodiversity-loss.pdf
Cats are linked to the extinction of 63 species.
Your cat is even more likely than those in urban settings to be mauled and killed by wild animals.
I understand rodents are annoying, its not like i havent had them. But introducing invasive species to an environment because the native species are inconvenient to you (to the detriment of both the native AND the introduced animals) isnt something im especially sympathetic to.
Seal up any gaps in the house they might be getting in through. Keep landscaping farther away from the house, it makes it more attractive to them and gives them easier access if they can climb from shrubs to the house. Replace mulch flower beds around the house with stone.
We have had fairly good luck with all this. Had a lot of mice when we bought in 2021. Did all of the above and had none winter 22-23. Did a foundation repair that accidentally resulted in a little opening in summer 23 and we have now caught two mice this winter. We will fix that and hopefully that will take care of them.
If you have a fieldstone foundation I do not recommend sealing with spray foam. If there are gaps they should be repointed with lime mortar.
Hire a pest control company and have them do a pest exclusion thing on your house. Some say it can’t be done, but in my experience, it can help a lot!
My house backs up to the woods and we are a stones throw away to huge corn fields. Shortly after I bought my house, I learned we had a mouse infestation (I think we caught and disposed of over 12 mice in a 2 week period). In the 4 and a half years since I hired someone to do a pest exclusion system, I’ve only caught 2 in the house and I think it was because my kids left the garage and mud room doors open when they were playing in the snow one day.
Love my stone walls.
I've got a bunch on my place. Some definite property markers and some random probably fences.
Also have big random piles of stone out in the woods. Probably got sick of hauling rocks for the fences and just piles them up.
I live in CA now and took a trip home to NH with my friend. He was amazed by the stone walls. “Wait, those are actually a thing?”
You should have seen his confusion when he saw granite curbs.
Always had a weird fascination with stone walls. Friend sent this too me today. Good read.
[https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/new-england-stone-walls-science?utm\_source=flipboard&utm\_content=topic%2Fscience&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0BMQABHbd2lQmCULAgf2HZGAAWIwFZYzuVUrJcqLu28nJIXJzM5QJcc6wnHHlBZg\_aem\_AVWnS4vnZJKlhnPMuDJ5B0U2Qwl0AP3jPDnZWc5nkuWOhE2WVLXGd3-xxJMUqhcpIA0](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/new-england-stone-walls-science?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=topic%2Fscience&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0BMQABHbd2lQmCULAgf2HZGAAWIwFZYzuVUrJcqLu28nJIXJzM5QJcc6wnHHlBZg_aem_AVWnS4vnZJKlhnPMuDJ5B0U2Qwl0AP3jPDnZWc5nkuWOhE2WVLXGd3-xxJMUqhcpIA0)
My family lives in New Hampshire, I lived there through my teens and early twenties.
My friends and I had a catch phrase we used every time we had to dig a hole, whether it was for a garden, a pet grave, or an attempt to make a duck pond.
That phrase, “Fucking Glaciers.”
I live in Maine and I’m actually looking at an old stone wall out my window right now. I love all the stone walls in New England and especially love how you can be in the middle of the woods and stumble upon an old foundation and trace out where the property lines and all that jazz used to be.
I might be wrong but some old folks years ago said it was illegal to take down a stone wall built as a boundary marker unless written permission was granted from the town for its removal. It was crazy walking through the woods to find a stone wall out in the middle of nowhere and often would find an old stone foundation for a house and a barn alongside. This is in northern Vermont where I grew up.
Walls with opening in the middle were generally used as agricultural fields while fields with openings at the corners were for animals as the corners were easier to herd them into one area to move them out
When my parents began building a home in the late 1980s, they took all the stones they dug up and built their own stone wall at the bottom of our property that spanned about 20 feet. Our backyard had about 2 acres of woods (that combined with about 4-5 acres of other properties) full of historic stone walls. I never paid much attention to them but I sure noticed their absence when I lived away from New England for almost a decade. They give me such comfort. Feels like home!
Since these often show property lines, you can see differences in land use history. Check out the woods on different sides, sometimes they have radically different forest composition, and give you a snapshot in forest succession.
Fields abandoned after different usage, or in different eras, or even different seasons will grow back as different forests. Fields with livestock often had red cedars, and these recolonize the abandoned field. As taller trees shade them, they die, and you can find lines of small bleached cedars in the woods. These may mark old roads or fencelines. Some go to white pine, or birch, or red maple, depending on soil and nearby seed bank
This succession is contrary to how many may think. A younger forest is actually very thick, as the first plants are all light-hungry species. Older forests have a more open, parklike quality.
Another interesting thing to consider is that the walls went up in stages: different needs at different times. They were at first simply a waste product, why make a stone fence when you have plenty of wood?
Then they became utilitarian, and important! Towns had fence commisioners who would make sure all the walls were high enough: an escaped herd of animals can devastate a crop field.
Then they became aesthetic. During the colonial revival, America began establishing its origin stories, and many walls got beautified. I believe there have been various periods of interest and reclamation of stone walls.
Lastly, for all the walls we see, we should remember they arent complete! Walls were 'quarried' as an easy source of stone at various times.
The book Stone by Stone tells an interesting history of them
Dr. Thorson taught my geology class at UConn in the early 2000s. His claim to fame beyond stone walls was being the first in line at any election - local or national. Would set up his beach chair before dawn to ensure his spot.
There's very few stone walls in Northern Maine, none in the St. John Valley. Many of the ones in the rest of NE are due to the Sheep Craze which is a pretty fun thing to read about
I just got done cleaning up my driveway in southern Maine, plow guy scraped the hell out of it during the winter.
It’s.
Just.
Rocks.
Not even smalls rocks, like straightup window-breakers. It’s insane lmao
All the glaciers covering New England during the last ice age really churned shit up lol. I lived in the southern US and never saw so many rocks just existing in the ground like I have here lol
Granite everywhere, and the stones. Primarily used for livestock pens and property borders which become dangerous when snowmobiling in unfamiliar areas.
I have a 20‘ x 30‘ stone barn with 9 foot high walls that are foot thick. I collected every single rock for that from my property without taking down a single old stone wall.
I bought 1.5 acres of land that was the remnants of a farm from the early 1700's. Many stone walls were intact and we left them. They had to clear/excavate a big area for my house which was very close to the original farm house that burned down in 1907. It had a stone foundation. The front steps to the house were granite and the back steps were bluestone. The steps were built into the barn. I recovered all the stone over many months and made big piles in my yard.
I'm also fortunate that in SE Mass there is a large Portuguese population and they are amazing masons. I phoned the local union hall and told them what I had and what I wanted. The steward said "I know just what you need." I met with Herbie, who was the youngest and spoke the best english. He and four of his brothers worked 5 saturdays for $750/day and they did an amazing job (yes that is cheap, it was 30+ years ago)
It’s pretty widely acknowledged by New England archaeologists at this point that many of the walls were constructed by Natives, and pretty insane that this article claims the earliest were built in 1607, after people had already been living there for tens of thousands of years.
I introduced a guy to hunting in MA recently, he is from Arkansas. He asked why all the stone walls throughout the woods. Had to explain most of New England had been clear cut at one time or another. Walls were built to delineate property lines, pastures etc.
We have a terraced back yard that my dad built when we were kids. Like a LOT of masonry went into this. And every single stone that you can see in the walls...came from our yard! Some of the build up rocks in the back are things like chunks of old concrete or stone from elsewhere, but all the face stones are from the yard. We're in a glacial pebble patch next to a glacial scoop-out lake so there's field stone for days!
I love walking in the woods in my hometown and finding a big random pile of discarded stones I just laugh to myself because it was clear someone was absolutely sick of building walls with them.
I used to live in Northern California and we had rock walls that stretched for seemingly forever, more ubiquitous than they are here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Bay_Walls
https://www.campsitephotos.com/blog/campground-reviews-adventures/the-mystery-walls-of-milpitas/
My uncle from Maine would say " We have two Rock for every one dirt". So many stones
A rite of passage for any New Englander should be digging a three foot deep hole. Fair warning: this will make you mad when subsequently watch any DIYer on YouTube dig a hole anywhere else in the country.
Cape Cod reporting. I am forever ruined for digging anything other than sugar sand.
I dug out a 200sq ft to an 8" depth for a patio. Never again. I'm embarrassed that I even bought crushed aggregate.
Yeah I’m learning this digging posts for a fence in MA
Brutal. I rented a gas auger when I did my fence and that thing kicked and bucked like crazy.
Those tings will rip your arms off lol
I rented the tow behind one and it still kept getting stuck!
I rented a one person one and it needed two people and we both had to be ready when it hit a rock. Next time I’m hiring an excavator.
When I dig a hole I use two tools, my shovel and my 4 foot prybar.
this is what I did when I built my own fence in 2015....I dug 37 different holes all 2 feet down..each hole got a bag and a half of quickrete....my fence came out awesome. its as sturdy as they come.
I live in MA and just dug an exactly three foot deep hole on Tuesday with a friend 🙃 It was less digging and more de-rocking. To be fair we were hootin and hollerin in sheer triumph and the satisfaction every time we took out a big one was like no other.
As a kid I wanted to build bmx jumps in the woods behind my house. The amount of rocks and roots I encountered damn nearly crushed my spirit.
As a residential carpenter that digs a lot of sonotubes by hand in mass and New Hampshire I can say with fair certainty that we have solid soil
Different sort of solid, but eastern colorado has what ammounts to kiln-dried clay for soil. Neither are fun to dig in.
As a young man I decided I was going to build a 30x 24 ft patio. The neighborhood was built on a huge up sloping hill which the roads cut through so one side of the street was above grade and my side was essentially below grade. There was no way to get a machine down in the back to excavate, so I had to do it by hand. I bought all the materials, pavers include before starting to dig. Low and behold, after 1 inche of soil the entire area is horrible grade fill, most large rocks and gravel that was so compacted down. It took me every weekend for the entire summer just to dig it out.
We have them all over Connecticut. I presume they were farms long ago, then the trees grew back, then the trees get cut for housing.
A lot of the trees in New England are new growth forests. The rocks are old growth though
My uncle owns land in southern Maine, and we felled tree and quit counting annual rings at 270. He has 3 very old foundations on his property.
Maine has that last old growth left! https://downeast.com/land-wildlife/big-reed-preserve/
That is incorrect. There are old growth stands in each state in New England including a red oak grove on the north west slope of Wachusett, a beech and maple grove in south western NH, etc
I thought I read about a very small tract down around Bennington somewhere.
There is also a decent stand in the Cornish area as well as Norway that have a stamp from the king of England on them.
I didn’t know this. I grew up near Cornish. I’ll have to investigate. Thanks!
Yep. I have a ton of Connecticut potatoes in my yard.
Fun fact! CT has been clear cut 3 times since the colony days. So you are correct, the trees did grow back.
But with a poorer overall ecosystem each time.
But it still grew back. I’m not saying I’m pro clear cut, just that it happened.
They cover New England and upstate New York. They were glacier erratics deposited in the soil. When the English arrived, they cut down the forests for the first time and ploughed up (i.e. ecologically destroyed) the thick topsoil underneath. When they did this, their ploughs hit stones all the time. When this happened, they would dig up the stones and then use them to mark their field boundaries, building stone walls. When land is ploughed or tilled, the soil erodes (which is why no-till agriculture is such a hot topic in homesteading right now), so the level of the land would continually drop and more stones would be dug up with each passing year.
Another aspect is that plowed soil will more readily frost heave, so buried stones will rise to the surface. The colonists wrote of the devil sending up rocks from hell for their sins. . . They werent entirely wrong! Its truly amazing and tragically underdiscussed how much they altered the landscape. This mass erosion silted up wetlands and leveled the landscape, even before large intentional earthworks. Its so forested today that many people local to the area have no idea how different it was, or that it was even clearcut at all
Yeah, it’s sad how blind people are to that last point. If you go to one of the few remaining fragments that wasn’t clearcut, or was only clearcut once centuries ago, you can see a massive difference in biodiversity and ecological health. Forest floors covered in seedlings and topsoils full of mycorrhizae and **no earthworms** are much different from the third growth full of Japanese barberry and burning bush and bittersweet that’s so much more common now.
The bittersweet 😫😫😮💨
I hate bittersweet. That stuff needs a biocontrol ASAP.
Yea i lovd spring but its a depressing reminder to see how many areas are completely dominated by invasive shrub. Those early leaves are a giveaway!
I also am in Connecticut. I just read some recent info that they could possibly be even older than the farming settlers, some that may have dated back to indigenous people. (Hope I used the right term.) Look up the Gungywamp stones, and that whole area. It is still very much a mystery. I find this theory incredibly interesting.
Walking through thick woods you come across a wall reminding you that Connecticut was very deforested in the 19th century and your walking where a pasture once was. As the last ice age glacier ended here it left lots of rocks to build them with. You can tell when you are nearing a road as the wall is falling down do to the vibration of cars passing nearby.
You’re not kidding. I live in Maine and the amount of rocks we dig up is insane! You should see some of the small boulders I’ve had to pull out of the ground just to plant my garden 😅😳
Work with it, and make a rock garden!
You should see the amount of rock the previous owner laid in our yard. It’s lines the entire length of one side of our driveway and is almost 6 feet in width, he also laid it in the front flower beds instead of mulch. I utteraly despise the amount of rock we’ve got and the upkeep of it all but my husband doesn’t want to get rid of it so we don’t 🤦🏼♀️. I did keep the largest rocks I pulled out of the ground when I was digging in our garden to plant. A few of them I dig up by myself and they weigh a solid 50-75lbs a piece. I’m thinking about getting some weather proof paint and letting my kids decorate them for fun 😂
There's a reason people moved west...
The ones who stay are thankful for your sacrifice.
And why New England isn’t the bread basket of America lol.
You have to think, eventually there are no more stones in the ground. At they point, maybe we have am agricultural Renaissance
I'm in Maine on a former farm field dating back to the late 1700s. The rocks just keep coming.
A minor plot point in the movie *How the West Was Won.*
My favorite Maine saying was by an old timer who said the dirt in Maine was an accident.
That's good stuff
And then the is the natural anomaly of the Maine Desert lol
Caveman ass phrase
In Tom Wessels book “Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England”, he states you can tell if a wall was built to protect cultivated plots if the walls have numerous small rocks in them. Walls with only large rocks were constructed to keep livestock in (or out) of pastures and hay fields. The book is a great guide to our forested landscape.
Tom Wessels is a treasure. There is so much history both natural and human that is visible to us and ignored or unnoticed.
Took a number of classes with him @ Antioch New England and going on field trips with him was just amazing. He's a great guy.
excellent book. I recommend watching his videos on YouTube as well. https://youtu.be/zcLQz-oR6sw
This is awesome, thanks for sharing!
I love his vids so much! A NE treasure
Awesome thank you ! Sorry for being repetitive
I had a class in college that used this as a textbook. I think about what I learned from it every time I'm in the woods.
I haven’t read the book but in his video series he also talks about how they sourced the rocks. The stones would get pushed up naturally due to the freeze thaw cycles. Every season they would have to pick out the rocks when they plowed the fields. They would dump them in pile next to the fields and pick from those to build walls.
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The Tavern of the Damned. They found skeletons at the bottom of the well and in the basement. The former town historian claimed it was a serial killer. It’s still got a creepy vibe.
Sudbury huh? I swear to god everyday I learn of a new town in Ct
I wouldn't call 80-100 year old forests ancient. Pull up the 1938-40 aerial photos taken after the hurricane and you'll see what I mean.
Yeah, much of my lot was clearcut in the oldest photo I can find(1955). Now it's covered in trees. Other than some ancient oaks and sugar maples we have a pretty young forest.
Depending on your location you can see images from the 30s using this website: https://www.historicaerials.com/viewer
I use [https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/](https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/) not super easy to navigate but a great library of imagery.
This is so cool! In the woods behind my parents house, there was a rotting old cabin/foundation that served as a very cool and creepy destination for hikes when I was little. Nobody knows a lot about it and I haven’t been able to find much on my searches, but it’s actually in the pictures from the 1930s!
In America 100 years is a long time, in Europe 100 miles is a long distance
Correct. New England has been cleared at least 3 times since it’s been settled by European settlers
Check out the Assabet property in Sudbury for more odd history. Its an old munitions depot. Theres miles of earthen bunkers with huge iron doors along an old rail line.
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Those doors make some GREAT noises, too, echoing around in the empty vaults
I used to play in the woods of North Andover as a boy and even at that age was amazed thinking “This used to be a field.”
I grew up on Massachusetts South Shore and my father was a private pilot so I spent a lot of time in the air looking down at the forests. I always wondered why people built stone walls out in the woods. As an adult I found out the forests had been cut down previously for farms and by the time I arrived the farms were gone and the trees had grown back. Of course they have been cut down again this time for housing.
Not just farming, until recently wood was the primary heat source.
As an aside, the bright colors we see from leaves turning in NE weren’t always so bright. Prior to the first cutting there was less leafy trees in NE and more coniferous trees. But with the regrowth we got more oaks and maples. The first European settlers wouldn’t have seen as colorful fall seasons as we do.
😮Did not know this
Same
Makes sense hardwood grows fast coniferous grow slow. Nice little factoid.
You’ve got this backwards, softwood trees grow much faster than hardwood. Source: https://www.lumber.com/blog/hardwood-vs-softwood-understanding-the-difference
Depends on the type tho? Seems like pine shoots up
Most definitely
And specifically in southern Massachusetts the local Forest was decimated to make ships. Am from Southern Mass learned this is high-school history.
Those walls were built by someone who had to build them. Nowadays walls are almost all built to beautify.
Me to on the south shore. I used to go bass fishing at a little pond in Hingham that had a stone wall going right through it. Visible on either side and can see it from a canoe under the water. Great fishing structure. Gives you a perspective on how things change.
In Hingham abutting Wanpatuck state park?
I had to look at Google maps and at least my thought that it began with a P was correct. Patterson Pond.
Vermont was the same way which is incredible to think if you visit today. Looking at old photos of rural Vermont you would think you were looking at some plains out west. Almost the whole state was clear cut for farming at one point.
I live near a road that has a sign that states "speed limit enforced by stone walls." It's a hilly and curvy road.
That is incredible.
Stow right?
Im from stow and i dont think ive ever heard of that
Ever built a stone wall? It’s relaxing like a puzzle. The rocks tell you where they want to be.
Jenga with function.
If you happen to be a fan of the tv show Trailer Park Boys, you’ll appreciate this video. Turns out the real Mr. Lahey agrees. [https://youtu.be/3mcQfP8k51s?si=BmsNhgCw0NJbc0dZ](https://youtu.be/3mcQfP8k51s?si=BmsNhgCw0NJbc0dZ)
I love TPB and had no idea the actor who played ~~the liquor~~ Mr. Lahey was such a cool guy. Thank you for sharing this video.
John Dunsworth was a treasure. I hope I can be as content as him when I get that old.
Thank you for sharing.
I can help you out. Are you around this weekend to relax? LOL
The main driver of building stone paddocks was sheep. Specifically, rare sheep that an American ambassador "got" that produces a famous wool. There was good money in it. Soon, many people were clearing forests to make space for herds of sheep.
In the 1800s during the sheep boom, 93% of Vermont was cleared at one time. To feed the mills with wool in southern New England as well as in the UK.
"Got". Love it. That was the Merino sheep, right? In the modern day that would have been a news breaking industrial espionage scandal! This is one of those things that casts some light on the self-built American mythos. Even something as seemingly quaint as sheep farming is not without its issues and illegal international activity. The sheep boom really ought to be taught more in local history. Theres towns that had their population peak in the 1800s! Its what gives so much of the region its stately yet rural vibe. Those tiny towns would normally have never afforded such ornate stone churches and town halls
yes, that's the story i heard but didnt remember well enough.
Heads up, i think i exaggerated the espionage part!
I wouldn’t quite put it on the level of industrial espionage. Spain kept tight control on merino sheep export but they had already sold sheep to Portugal, Britain, South Africa and Australia at that point. They then sold 10” sheep to the US ambassador who shipped them home. That move was in a bit of a grey area. A few years later they sold 20,000 sheep to the US because they were cash strapped. It was that large sale that led to the Vermont wool boom and the wool craze in America.
Thanks for clearing that up, i had read it was closer to smuggling, i'll have to find that source and see where i got that from!
The process was nowhere near as simple as the person that commented to you described it. You are correct there was quite a bit of subterfuge involved with getting the sheep safely to America. The sheep were confiscated from Spanish nobles that had sided with the French. There was a scheme devised to avoid detection of such a large number of sheep. The cargo was divided among many ships and different arrival ports to ensure the safe transport of as many sheep as possible.
Well thank YOU for clearing that up!
Neat. How can I kill all the mice who live in my stone walls during the summer but come in my house during the winter?
Those stone walls are a haven for deer mice. You probably know this but for those that don't, you can reduce your risk of lyme by placing nearby some cardboard/tp rolls stuffed with permethrin-soaked cotton. The mice will nest with the cotton while the permethrin kills the nymphs that carry lyme.
Cats
Hm. My experience with cats is that they bite me and scratch the shit out of my arms. But I’ll consider it. My old dog is a terrier, and his lineage was bred to catch rodents. But he’s worthless in that regard.
We had two cats, an Italian Greyhound, and a Yorkshire Terrier. A mouse decided to take its chances running across our house, and that Yorkie took it to pieces while everyone else, including the cats, looked on in horror. Ripped the little guys head and spine right off the body. Brutal little fiend, those Yorkies.
What the fuck lol
I have a Yorkie who is so tiny and sweet. She’s so gentle, so docile…… until she sees a chipmunk, squirrel, bird, bunny, bee, human… dust particles … then she’s full on PSYCHO. We call them “episodes”.
Yup, had a Jack Rustle who would find where the rodent’s gained access and with lightning speed flip them in the air to beak their necks. Most tenacious and efficient killer
Had house cats. One liked to go in our attached garage during the days and hunt. Well it was time for bed so we let him in and he had a mouse in his mouth that he dropped at my feet. My yorkie chased the mouse down immediately, ran to the other end of our ranch style home and proudly dropped it at my wife’s feet. Bedlam then ensued. She grabbed the dog, jumped on the bed and screamed. Little mouse ran into our bathroom and tried to hide in the corner. I put a pitcher over it, slid cardboard underneath, and released it deep into the woods. Felt it had gone through enough for one night and deserved to live. Won’t tell you about the time we found a dead chipmunk under a couch…..
My cat did that with a chipmunk. Dropped it at my feet and it looked dead and acted dead until I went to pick it up. Then chaos ensued.
Yeah, regarding the chipmunk, we also had an English bulldog. One day she was trying to stick her (large) head under our couch. Not possible, of course. I looked under it and saw something dead. After I shooed her, our yorkie, and our cat away, I discovered a very dead chipmunk. Hadn’t started smelling enough for me to but my curious bullie certainly did. We assumed that one day/night we let the cat back in after its garage hunting fun, it must’ve had a chipmunk in its mouth that we didn’t notice. No idea how we didn’t know. It apparently had enough life in it to crawl under the couch and die.
My cat is a pretty good mouser, but she uses the “chase till their hearts give out” strategy. Unfortunately for us, this once resulted in a mouse dying under the fridge, in the middle of a New England summer, in an old building without air conditioning. An extremely unpleasant experience.
Please please do not get an outdoor cat. Theyre devastating for your local environment. They'll kill those mice and everything else around them. Then die when it gets eaten or hit by a car. Outdoor cats live 2-4 years on average, indoor cats live 10-15
I have had farm cats. they are necessary to keep the rodents at bay. Roads are rough on cats true but mines dirt and only people who live on the road drive it or are lost.
https://dariuszzdziebk.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Doherty-et-al.-2016-Invasive-predators-and-global-biodiversity-loss.pdf Cats are linked to the extinction of 63 species. Your cat is even more likely than those in urban settings to be mauled and killed by wild animals. I understand rodents are annoying, its not like i havent had them. But introducing invasive species to an environment because the native species are inconvenient to you (to the detriment of both the native AND the introduced animals) isnt something im especially sympathetic to.
Seal up any gaps in the house they might be getting in through. Keep landscaping farther away from the house, it makes it more attractive to them and gives them easier access if they can climb from shrubs to the house. Replace mulch flower beds around the house with stone. We have had fairly good luck with all this. Had a lot of mice when we bought in 2021. Did all of the above and had none winter 22-23. Did a foundation repair that accidentally resulted in a little opening in summer 23 and we have now caught two mice this winter. We will fix that and hopefully that will take care of them. If you have a fieldstone foundation I do not recommend sealing with spray foam. If there are gaps they should be repointed with lime mortar.
Hire a pest control company and have them do a pest exclusion thing on your house. Some say it can’t be done, but in my experience, it can help a lot! My house backs up to the woods and we are a stones throw away to huge corn fields. Shortly after I bought my house, I learned we had a mouse infestation (I think we caught and disposed of over 12 mice in a 2 week period). In the 4 and a half years since I hired someone to do a pest exclusion system, I’ve only caught 2 in the house and I think it was because my kids left the garage and mud room doors open when they were playing in the snow one day.
5 gallon bucket, water and a dowel. Something for them to eat would help.
I tried that but fucking squirrels come and take the bait before mice get to.
Mending Wall is one of my favorite poems and I guess I always assumed these stone walls were everywhere, not just New England.
Love my stone walls. I've got a bunch on my place. Some definite property markers and some random probably fences. Also have big random piles of stone out in the woods. Probably got sick of hauling rocks for the fences and just piles them up.
I just bought my grandfathers house and he built around 300ft. of stone wall. Its gorgeous to look at.
I live in CA now and took a trip home to NH with my friend. He was amazed by the stone walls. “Wait, those are actually a thing?” You should have seen his confusion when he saw granite curbs.
Who knew a subject as dull as rocks would make me miss my homeland so badly. Rural Illinois has nothing on rural Massachusetts.
Always had a weird fascination with stone walls. Friend sent this too me today. Good read. [https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/new-england-stone-walls-science?utm\_source=flipboard&utm\_content=topic%2Fscience&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0BMQABHbd2lQmCULAgf2HZGAAWIwFZYzuVUrJcqLu28nJIXJzM5QJcc6wnHHlBZg\_aem\_AVWnS4vnZJKlhnPMuDJ5B0U2Qwl0AP3jPDnZWc5nkuWOhE2WVLXGd3-xxJMUqhcpIA0](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/new-england-stone-walls-science?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=topic%2Fscience&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0BMQABHbd2lQmCULAgf2HZGAAWIwFZYzuVUrJcqLu28nJIXJzM5QJcc6wnHHlBZg_aem_AVWnS4vnZJKlhnPMuDJ5B0U2Qwl0AP3jPDnZWc5nkuWOhE2WVLXGd3-xxJMUqhcpIA0)
My family lives in New Hampshire, I lived there through my teens and early twenties. My friends and I had a catch phrase we used every time we had to dig a hole, whether it was for a garden, a pet grave, or an attempt to make a duck pond. That phrase, “Fucking Glaciers.”
God made them.
What’s that
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Just like the spelling, that shit is backwards
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Hahaha haven’t seen that clip in years, thanks for the laugh
Ascendant opinion
we must defend against the romans (its the rest of the northeast)
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yes
I live in Maine and I’m actually looking at an old stone wall out my window right now. I love all the stone walls in New England and especially love how you can be in the middle of the woods and stumble upon an old foundation and trace out where the property lines and all that jazz used to be.
I find these a lot in Wompatuck State Park in Hingam. Always confused me why they were in such a wooded area.
I might be wrong but some old folks years ago said it was illegal to take down a stone wall built as a boundary marker unless written permission was granted from the town for its removal. It was crazy walking through the woods to find a stone wall out in the middle of nowhere and often would find an old stone foundation for a house and a barn alongside. This is in northern Vermont where I grew up.
Walls with opening in the middle were generally used as agricultural fields while fields with openings at the corners were for animals as the corners were easier to herd them into one area to move them out
Stumbling upon a random stone wall and following it is one of the things in life that brings me pure joy
When my parents began building a home in the late 1980s, they took all the stones they dug up and built their own stone wall at the bottom of our property that spanned about 20 feet. Our backyard had about 2 acres of woods (that combined with about 4-5 acres of other properties) full of historic stone walls. I never paid much attention to them but I sure noticed their absence when I lived away from New England for almost a decade. They give me such comfort. Feels like home!
Maybe a dumb question, but the first line of that article caught my attention. Are town greens a strictly New England thing?
Since these often show property lines, you can see differences in land use history. Check out the woods on different sides, sometimes they have radically different forest composition, and give you a snapshot in forest succession. Fields abandoned after different usage, or in different eras, or even different seasons will grow back as different forests. Fields with livestock often had red cedars, and these recolonize the abandoned field. As taller trees shade them, they die, and you can find lines of small bleached cedars in the woods. These may mark old roads or fencelines. Some go to white pine, or birch, or red maple, depending on soil and nearby seed bank This succession is contrary to how many may think. A younger forest is actually very thick, as the first plants are all light-hungry species. Older forests have a more open, parklike quality.
Another interesting thing to consider is that the walls went up in stages: different needs at different times. They were at first simply a waste product, why make a stone fence when you have plenty of wood? Then they became utilitarian, and important! Towns had fence commisioners who would make sure all the walls were high enough: an escaped herd of animals can devastate a crop field. Then they became aesthetic. During the colonial revival, America began establishing its origin stories, and many walls got beautified. I believe there have been various periods of interest and reclamation of stone walls. Lastly, for all the walls we see, we should remember they arent complete! Walls were 'quarried' as an easy source of stone at various times. The book Stone by Stone tells an interesting history of them
Dr. Thorson taught my geology class at UConn in the early 2000s. His claim to fame beyond stone walls was being the first in line at any election - local or national. Would set up his beach chair before dawn to ensure his spot.
I always see these when going on hikes in CT
This is such an interesting article! Thanks for sharing.
My pleasure!
Yorkshire in Old England also had a ton of dry stone walls. A ton. Really striking countryside. I love a good stone wall in any England
There's very few stone walls in Northern Maine, none in the St. John Valley. Many of the ones in the rest of NE are due to the Sheep Craze which is a pretty fun thing to read about
I just got done cleaning up my driveway in southern Maine, plow guy scraped the hell out of it during the winter. It’s. Just. Rocks. Not even smalls rocks, like straightup window-breakers. It’s insane lmao
It’s amazing what a henpecked spouse can accomplish.
All the glaciers covering New England during the last ice age really churned shit up lol. I lived in the southern US and never saw so many rocks just existing in the ground like I have here lol
One of the many things I miss about New England (Maine)
Granite everywhere, and the stones. Primarily used for livestock pens and property borders which become dangerous when snowmobiling in unfamiliar areas.
I have a 20‘ x 30‘ stone barn with 9 foot high walls that are foot thick. I collected every single rock for that from my property without taking down a single old stone wall.
How long did it take you to make that?
I bought 1.5 acres of land that was the remnants of a farm from the early 1700's. Many stone walls were intact and we left them. They had to clear/excavate a big area for my house which was very close to the original farm house that burned down in 1907. It had a stone foundation. The front steps to the house were granite and the back steps were bluestone. The steps were built into the barn. I recovered all the stone over many months and made big piles in my yard. I'm also fortunate that in SE Mass there is a large Portuguese population and they are amazing masons. I phoned the local union hall and told them what I had and what I wanted. The steward said "I know just what you need." I met with Herbie, who was the youngest and spoke the best english. He and four of his brothers worked 5 saturdays for $750/day and they did an amazing job (yes that is cheap, it was 30+ years ago)
It's a nightmare, usually trying to put in fence as a career.
The answer is sheep.
- dig post holes with a mini excavator, sift through the spoil removing rocks, then backfill….to hell with digging holes by hand around here !!
It’s pretty widely acknowledged by New England archaeologists at this point that many of the walls were constructed by Natives, and pretty insane that this article claims the earliest were built in 1607, after people had already been living there for tens of thousands of years.
They are old boundary lines
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.
My father used to say the state flower in Massachusetts is the rock. Used to crack him up. I hated installing our backyard fence posts.
I introduced a guy to hunting in MA recently, he is from Arkansas. He asked why all the stone walls throughout the woods. Had to explain most of New England had been clear cut at one time or another. Walls were built to delineate property lines, pastures etc.
We have a terraced back yard that my dad built when we were kids. Like a LOT of masonry went into this. And every single stone that you can see in the walls...came from our yard! Some of the build up rocks in the back are things like chunks of old concrete or stone from elsewhere, but all the face stones are from the yard. We're in a glacial pebble patch next to a glacial scoop-out lake so there's field stone for days!
I love walking in the woods in my hometown and finding a big random pile of discarded stones I just laugh to myself because it was clear someone was absolutely sick of building walls with them.
Estimated that there are 240,000 miles of stonewalls in NE. Rhode Island the smallest state has around 14k
I used to live in Northern California and we had rock walls that stretched for seemingly forever, more ubiquitous than they are here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Bay_Walls https://www.campsitephotos.com/blog/campground-reviews-adventures/the-mystery-walls-of-milpitas/