If you ever wander through the woods in New England, odds are pretty good that you’ll discover at least one rock pile while you’re in there. When I was a little kid, we assumed that these were the graves of native americans, because little kids are kind of guible that way - the ones like these flat on the ground, not these that are built up into stacks. Everything I’ve read about them says that they’re not graves, but some people do think that native americans did put them there (and other weirder stuff like on this page) and another theory I’ve read is that they were put there by early settlers who were trying to clear fields of the ever present rocks.
But are there any definitive explanations, or are these two theories still the best guesses we have?
I like to think about Indians and Vikings and UFO’s as much as the next person but I have hiked the New England woods for 16 years now and it is my interpretation that the ones you are asking about are just rock piles put there to get them out of the way. I have made some of them myself when I was reclearing our land and I hope future archaeologists don’t try to line them up with celestial bodies or something because they were just refuse piles for the never ending stream of granite I was trying to get up of the way of the lawn tractor. People in the past probably felt the same way.
Some of the more complicated structures are cool but I have to roll my eyes at the elaborate explanations for those as well. Some of those really were spring houses, glacial rock balancing acts, or maybe just simple but cool constructions by teenagers to show off. Granite rocks tend to stay where you put them for a very long time.
I hate to ruin the mystery but those rock piles are actually … just piles of rocks. As in somebody wanted to get some rocks out of their way and stacked them up there.
It may have been woods when you walked through it but almost all of New England used to be cultivated farmland. Not particularly good farmland which is why most of our farmland now is in other states. But a couple hundred years ago you worked with what was available.
One of the problems with farming in New England is the soil is full of rocks. So every season farmers would have to dig up all the rocks in their fields so they could plow and seed and harvest. (And working the field would cause new rocks to rise to the surface. It was a neverending process.) They would take all these rocks and dump them off in an unused corner somewhere. If you were a little more ambitious you’d stack them up because they higher they’re stacked, the less space they take up on the ground.
Two hundred years later you walked by. The farm’s gone and the field is overgrown with brush and trees. But the piles of rocks are still there.
And of course if you were extremely ambitious you’d realize you could put the rocks to good use by making a fence out of them. (Yes I live in New England and yes there is a rock wall in my back yard that was probably a fence years ago.)
That’s correct. Sometimes they used the piles of rocks to make boundary fences. But, the main goal was to get the rocks out of the way for plowing. The first time I planted my garden there was at least two bucketful of rocks that I removed. Every year, I plow (actually till with a tiller) and more rocks magically appear from the same spot of dirt. Not as many. But, every year they come from somewhere.
In many parts of New England, there are stone walls running throughout the forest. Ages ago, this land was inhabited by by people (often farmers) who would have to remove these rocks from the earth before they could do anything productive with the land. To put these rocks to some sort of use, they often used them to create walls marking the border of their property. Where I used to go to school in Connecticut, there was forest land all around, with numerous VERY long (I followed one for around half an hour once before it turned at a right angle and kept going) walls criscrossing each other all over, marking out dozens of individual homesteads that had long since been abandoned for greener pastures.
And of course, the best ‘out of the way’ place for the rocks was the nearest fence line, which is why even if it was never a wall, you’ll find rows of rocks out there. They’ll be marking the old, abandoned, disintegrated fencelines.
I not only lived in New England, I worked on a farm in New England. And I picked many a rock out of a field. The bottom line is you’re going to run out of a need for fencing long before you run out of rocks. So you might start out building fences and towers and mock wells. But eventually you just start throwing the damn things in that pile over by the tree.
They exist here in the Midwest, too. And they are still being added to each year or so.
On our farm in Minnesota, there is a big rock pile in the NW corner of the property, and we add to it regularly as frost heave brings new rocks to the surface. It’s in the corner because that’s a real hard place to get to for crops, so it’s usually skipped. The rocks are piled around the posts for a billboard that we donated to the local community college.
To go back one step further in answering the question, and unless I badly misremember my high school geography, most of those rocks got deposited where they are by glaciers during the last ice age.
What many folks today don’t realize it that a very large percentage of the New England forest was completely cleared during the colonial days. Between building and heating (and year round cooking) and laying out farms to feed ourselves, we cleared nearly all the available lumber except in really inaccessible places. Massachusetts has little original, first growth forest.
Nearly all the forest you’re walking in today was open land two hundred years ago and most of the relatively flat areas were planted with crops.
From what I understand the real exodus from New England occurred after the Civil War ended. For the first time New England farmers heard about arable land that was available in the Western US and that not everyone in the US had to put up with such poor soil conditions. Most of the abandoned farms reverted to forest very quickly. It’s not at all unusual to find stone walls or burial plots with stone markers a mile or two into the woods where there was once a working farm, here in Maine
A dry stone fence with a rail fence built over it meets the universal definition of a “lawful fence” – cow high and pig tight. The abundance of surface rocks and (before the Chestnut Blight) fencing timber in the eastern US provided a cheap and quick solution to a practical necessity.
If you look around in the Midwest today you will see lose rock piled in fence corners and along fence lines as the result of the spring ritual of rock picking. A good way to do thousands of dollars of damage to a quarter million dollar combine (combine harvester) is to run a rock through its works. You don’t want any rocks in your fields.
