Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
[N]ew England wouldn’t be New England without its stone walls. Walk through the woods and fields of the region and before long you’ll probably bump into one.
How many are out there? By one estimate, New England has about 240,000 miles of stone walls. To put that into perspective, that’s longer than the coastline of the United States. Or, put another way, if you could somehow stack those stones into a tower, the moon would collide with it during its closest approach to the Earth.
Those staggering facts are from “Stone by Stone,” a book by University of Connecticut geology professor Robert Thorson. And that’s just the introduction.
You might not be able to get blood from a stone, but Thorson gets a good story from one. Though he has written a half dozen other books since “Stone by Stone” was published in 2002, Thorson says that whenever anyone asks him to talk about “your book,” he knows which one they are referring to.
Thorson was surprised by the stone walls he saw when he moved to the East. Having grown up on North Dakota and worked in Alaska, he was used to wide-open spaces. In New England, he encountered much smaller spaces, and wall after wall. “What struck me was how massive they were,” he says, not individually, but collectively. So he set off to discover how this came to be. Thorson made himself an expert on the walls – examining how and why they were built – and came to appreciate them in a way that he learned their creators did not.
The walls are as part of nature as anthills, Thorson says. “The ant doesn’t build these beautiful hills on purpose. The ant doesn’t even care about the hills,” he says. “We fixate on the ant hill, because we see it. The ant doesn’t. To it, they are just disposal piles.”
That is exactly what stone walls were. In the days before stonewall building became an art form, the walls were “linear landfills,” in Thorson’s phrase. As landscape historian John Stilgoe explains, “The stone walls of New England … were built by men interested far more in land-clearing than in fencing.”
Thorson discovered that the practical implications of physics determined the structure of stone walls: since humans’ ability to lift objects maxes out at about thigh height, that’s how high stone walls were built.
He also learned why most stone walls enclose small fields. Doing a little calculating, Thorson found that clearing an eight-acre field required 58 miles of walking, while eight one-acre fields would require less than 20 miles. Incidentally, most New England walls fall in the two- to four-acre range.
These walls weren’t all built at once, Thorson says. “I don’t think people swaggered out there and just heaved the stones to the side (and constructed the wall),” he says.
At first, pioneers found few rocks in their fields. Largely, they were dealing with so-called erratics, surface rock left behind by the retreating glaciers. What stones they did find, pioneers just cast aside in a pile. Only later did farmers stack them along the disused strips at the edges of fields. The soil beneath the stones was rich and fairly deep.
Then, as settlers needed more land, they began to clear the forests. The cutting and “improving” of the land continued to the point where Vermont was about 70 percent open fields by 1870. Today, with the decline in farming, the state is 70 forested.
With the trees gone, the soil was prone to freeze deeper. The resulting frost heaves moved rocks to the surface. As spring rains melted the snow, the land was more susceptible to runoff, which eroded the soil and exposed still more rocks. Finally, as the fields were planted and harvested, they lost still more soil and more stones rose to the surface.
By the early 19th century, some like to say, the state’s leading export was its children. They left to try their luck in factories to the south or in the opening lands to the west. They did not, however, leave because the land was too rocky, Thorson says.
In 1864, Louis Agassiz, one of America’s leading scientists of the day, said of New England: “… the ground has already been cleared to a great extent of its rocky fragments. … In the course of time they will, no doubt, disappear from the surface of this country, as they have done from that of Europe.”
By the time Vermonters and other New Englanders started quitting the land in droves, Thorson estimates, two-thirds of the rocks in the soil had already worked their way to the surface. Farmers would have perceived that the situation had gotten worse and worse over time, but, he says, “they had gotten past the peak of the heaving, and it was just like painting, a little touch-up job to do.” Farmers may have added the occasional stone to their walls, but that was about it.
Don’t be fooled by how rocky many Vermont fields look today, Thorson warns, that’s not a fair representation of what farmers left behind. “People with no memory and no geological background look at these fields and say, ‘what a nightmare,’” he says. What they are actually looking at is a field that could have been easily cleared if a farmer had been there to keep after it.
Thorson has a theory of why people have bought into the legend that early New England farmers fought horribly rocky fields to make a living. He calls it “the myth of the Eastern cowboy.” And it is just as misleading as the Western cowboy myths – Thorson points out that Western cowboys were common for only a couple of decades and had virtually no impact on the national economy. Those cowboy stories had three elements, he says: a person, an animal and an enemy. In that case, the cowboy, his horse and the Indians. In the East, the first two roles are played by the early farmer (think of the guy on those Minutemen statues, musket at the ready, Thorson says) and his ox. “And what is the enemy?” he asks. “It doesn’t work without an enemy. It is an imagined enemy” – the rocky soil.
Despite our images of the past, wooden fences were always more prevalent than stone walls in New England. We just have little evidence of these fences, Thorson says, because wood decomposes on a biological timetable, not a geological one.
Some sections of Vermont had almost no stone walls at all. In the “marble belt” and slate areas in the state’s southwestern quadrant, the glaciers smashed the relatively soft rock, leaving little need to build those linear landfills.
In studying stone walls, Thorson found that the thickest concentration of them was along the Connecticut coast to about Portland, Maine, and inland about 100 miles.
“Vermont is not the epicenter,” he says, “but it is the epicenter of the image of stone walls.”
