Abandoned stone walls found in the woods all over New England have a long and fascinating story. Long before their recent re-discovery in the mid-20th century, and before they began to tumble and decompose, the vast majority of stone walls were built by early American farm families using stones that heaved up from the subsoil. All of this took place long before the stones were buried by natural organic processes, and even longer before hey were glacially quarried from the bedrock and scattered over the landscape. The ice sheets responsible for distributing the boulders were merely scraping the surface of the hard, heavily fractured rocky crust of northeastern North America, which had been created much earlier, during the episode of mountain building responsible for creating the ancient Appalachians. That ancient rock was made of minerals that were made from elements that were made from universal mater, that was captured by our solar system during formation of planet Earth. Hence, the story of stone walls begins with the beginning of everything, and ends with the present moment.
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It's amazing to think that they were all done by hand, like this one I see on my walks:
Yeah, we've got a shitload of them here in California, especially in the Mother Lode. Most of them were built in the mid-1800s by Chinese coolies and their construction was so good that unless they were purposely destroyed, they're still standing.
ReplyDeleteThere's also a bunch that were built by the 'make work' programs of the 1930s. It easy to tell the difference of the two - the Chinese walls that are 100+ years older are still standing strong whereas the welfare walls are tumbling down. Go figure.
Growing up in rural MA, I often found stuff like this in the woods. They are field boundaries, and they were created when farmers cleared their fields so they could plant them. Those fields were littered full of stones. Even to this day frost heaves bring up more stone. My mother's kitchen garden had to be cleared of them every spring.
ReplyDeleteOld paintings of upstate NY and of NE show much of it was were clear cut in the colonial era, and then were abandoned in the early 1800s when when the Midwest opened up to settlers. All those places are now second growth forest.
Whole villages were abandoned, and it is not unusual to find cemeteries in the woods.
The 2.5 million acre Adirondack State Park was once clear cut for it wood and abandoned by loggers. NYS seized it for back taxes. And now it has more bears and coyotes than people. All of the Northeast is over run by forest now, more than it has ever had since the last ice age.