Nope, it’s tough to make an epee out of wood.
They are old, like REALLY old, stone walls. Generally they were made by farmers to demarcate land, border off small areas of land, etc. After a few centuries, they fall over and apart and generally look like rock piles. My granduncle was a stonemason who made such walls the old fashioned way, without mortar, and he’d tell us about (and show us) examples of such home-grown walls in the woods.
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Many are just field cleared stones of which building fences was one use. Not all are from that though. There are stone mounds and some stone chambers from before the European settlers.
It should be noted that at least some of these stone mounds predate European settlement. Indians cleared land too, of course. Also see the article I linked above indicating that stone cairns sometimes marked the spots where warriors fell in battle, at least among southeastern Indians. Don’t know whether that was ever the case in New England.
The piles are usually around a single large rock that could not be moved to the fence. Since that rock couldn’t be cleared it was another spot to deposit movable rocks.
Yes, straight-grained, easy to split and resistant to decay they were used for split rail fences as well as furniture, housing, shingles, etc.
There used to be stone piles along fields all over the place in the glaciated areas of Wisconsin. In the early 80’s the owners started to sell these larger rocks for export to Japan. Later local developers started paying for these larger rocks, so the stone piles around here are very diminished in number and size. They of course left the small stones. They did pick stones with a stone boat when I was a kid and pile them at the fence line.
I grew up in a semi-rural Massachusetts town and as kids we would go out exploring in the woods behind our house. There were many rock walls that would just cut through the woods and they always fascinated us.
In fact, looking at Google images for my town, the aerial pictures were taken during the fall/winter (no leaves on the trees) and you can see the straight-line walls running through the woods between developed areas.
There is also a theory out there that some of those rock piles were put together by pre-contact period Native Americans as trail markers and/or those trails were based on lay lines based on (insert your favorite semi-mystical reason here).
Not saying I buy it, but since I had to sit through an hour long presenation by a Tribal Historic preservation officer and a very New Agey filmmaker connecting just these types of dots from the southern edge of the Cape out to Turners Falls I thought I would share.
As noted, most walls are “rock dumps” – places to put all the rocks from the ground you want to till.
It’s possible to built really gorgeous, well-fitted stone walls. This takes a lot of time and effort. A lot of farmers didn’t have this, so they just piled them up. Winter snows, ice, and expansion and contraction make these piles fall down, so every spring the farmers would walk the walls, ideally with his neighbor on the other side, and they’d puick up the fallen stones and do repairs. Hence Robert Frost’s poem and the “good fence make good neighbors” thing.
There are a few really old stone constructions in New England. My opinion is that the Indians built them, but theorists have claimed everything from Vikings and Irish Monks to Colonial settlers. Have a look at America’s Stonehenge (formerly Mystery Hill. http://stonehengeusa.com/
It’s a fun day out in the country, but I’m not convinced. There are similar such spots in New England. One of them undoubtedly inspired the “Devil’s Hop-Yard” from H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwitch Horror, and similar stories by August Derleth.
Oh God, I went to Mystery Hill once as a kid, and even at age 13 I realized somebody was romaticizing an old root cellar for profit. Loved the fact that it was all based on the sun rising over a certian point at the equinox, but the place was closed that early.
Rock piles are also used as trail markers in parks.
There are quite a few “stone circles” in New England-most of them well hidden, in woods and on mountainous areas. Did they have any ceremonial purpose?
There was one found in Eastern Connecticut, years ago-the archaeologist concluded that it was a kind of astronomical calendar-the sunrise at the vernal equinox would indicate the correct date to plant corn.
Was “Mystery Hill” something like that?
Have a look at the link – that’s what many people claim.
And I can’t say that the owners are “money-grubbing”. I’ve been there several times, and one of the owners gave the tour. He talked of cutting down the broad lanes of clear-viewing through the trees himself (just so you could have an unobstructed view of sunrise/sunset at critical times of the year). It’s clearly a labor of love, and belief. There are easier ways to make a living.
On the other hand, I’ve been to astronomical sites, including Stonehenge. This doesn’t impress me as one. The “stone circle” meanders all over the place, far away from its putative center, and it isn’t at all circular. The center isn’t clearly marked. Some of the stones meant to designate particular times of year aren’t really prominent in the way the Heel Stone is at Stonehenge. And so on.
On top of which, one of the guys who earnestly believed in the site back in the 1930s insisted on "reconstructing’ parts of it.
on the other hand, these are massive stone structures, using some enormous blocks (and a huge number of little ones). Some of it is undoubtedly the foundation and root cellar of the Pattee family, as even the proprietors agree. It’s been plausibly argued that the “sacrificial stone” is a lye leaching stone. But it’s hard to buy that a colonial family was heavily into megalithic construction. Not all of that massive stuff dates to the 1930s.
But it’s more likely to be the work of the local Indians – who had been there for thousands of years – than of Romans, Phoenicians, Vikings, or Fungi from Yuggoth.
Having spent the middle of last month helping to dig a 40’ x 10" x 1’ trench for a culvert, it suprised me how none of the hundreds of rocks we dug up would be appropriate for a stone wall. Some are as small as a golf ball and others the size of a butterball turkey, but to a one they were all oblong/rounded, which won’t do for walls (we did use some for a decorative border around the end of the drainage pool though) - you need flat rocks for a rock wall. Rock walls are omnipresent in New England, but I’m not sure where the right rocks come from.
No you don’t.
You need skill in fitting them together so they stay, and patience to find a rock that will match with the ones next to it. But with experience over the years, it can be done quite well.
Georgia has similar stone walls which were left by the Indians, usually on mountaintops. One which has been preserved sits atop Fort Mountain.
I agree but I am a little surprised elfkin477 doesn’t know that. I think she is from New Hampshire where long-lasting walls of irregular granite rocks are everywhere. Maybe it is one of those things you can’t see because you have always been around it. That was one of the first things I noticed when I visited New England the first time. I was amazed at those colonial granite walls, the labor they took to build them, and the skill required plus the fact that they just sit there for hundreds of years without any mortar.
I have tried to repair old stone walls on my own property and on family members property with varying degrees of success. I can fill in the odd gaps with fallen ones but I couldn’t build one from scratch. It takes a lot of skill and the rocks quickly get too big for a person to move alone. I have seen some really good examples of very long rock walls made up of nothing other than tens of thousands of granite rocks no larger than a bowling ball in every shape just built by careful stacking and they are very durable and long-lasting. They teach classes on how to build those around this area but it is a rare and hard-earned skill.
Willingness to hit oddly shaped rocks with a hammer and skill to break them into shapes you desire goes a long way too.
The guys around that are good at stone walls today are amazing. I’m always impressed at the rate they can assemble beautiful stone walls. While the technology to get the rocks there has changed the manual labor and skill involved in stacking them hasn’t.
In their spare time they must be pretty good at putting together puzzles too.