Virtually every rock wall I’ve ever seen, ones in good condition rather than tumbledown, look like this. They’re not perfectly flat, but they are flat on at least two sides, unlike the rocks we dug up which were rounded on all sides.
So I lived and grew up in the back woods of New Hampshire. So all of these geniuses who claim that these piles of rock were just kids, or maybe someone moving them out of there way, explain to me the rock wall with massive rock corrosion on it that I played near in the woods. It was old rocks that were piled and made a wall about 2-4 ft tall and went for at least a half mile if not longer. This wall also had breaks in it that were sometimes only a couple feet wife and sometimes almost 6 or 7 feet wide. Someone built these walls, and the corrosion suggest that it was a long time ago. Please don’t jump in with your own personal beliefs without having any idea what you are talking about. Do some research or have some personal experience before assuming knowledge on what you are saying.
I don’t believe anyone said anything of the sort. I am extremely familiar with very long granite walls dating back to the Colonial period in New Hampshire and the rest of England. They are hard to miss because they are all over the place. My 1760 house in Massachusetts has them too leading deep into the woods because it used to be farmland up until the early 20th century but has since been reclaimed by forest. Some of the rocks are so huge that I have no idea how anyone ever moved some of them without heavy equipment. Even a bulldozer couldn’t move one of them when we tried. The masonry is impecible because no mortar was used and yet they still stand over 200 years later. I learned to repair them a little through trial and error but even that is difficult for a novice. I could not build one from scratch even starting the same raw materials. For people in other parts of the country, these walls really are extremely well put together and long yet they appear all over even in the deep woods.
What is your objection? Nobody ever said kids made them. We only said that sometimes they didn’t need another wall so they just had to put them in a pile to get them out of the way so that they could try to grow something to eat.
I think you will find that people on this board generally know what they are talking about and this thread is filled with New Englanders (myself included). I don’t understand what you are disputing so you will have to explain if you want a better explanation.
Corrosion? How do rocks do that?
Pot, meet kettle.
For people that may not be familiar with these walls, here is what they look like but there are many variations.
Here is one that has very good rock fitting and is in great shape. These are very difficult to make.
Here is a colonial era New Hampshire rock pile. They didn’t even try to build a real wall.
Well I’m just going to ignore my research and personal experience and take a wild guess that someone put those rocks there.
Here’s a video of Ken Birnshein building a stone wall in Wisconsin. No mortar is used. Ken says he just finds the right shape of stone for the next gap. Neighbors, who always seem to have a surplus of stones, contribute all of his building material and they even deliver, glad to get them out of their plowed fields.
Fun fact - the entire length of the entire U.S. interstate highway system is about 48,000 miles long today. The entire length of stone walls in New England isn’t known exactly but it is believed to be well over 100,000 miles long and probably much more based on an 1871 study - note that New Hampshire, Vermont and the relatively large state of Maine are not included. Some of those walls don’t exist anymore due to development but most do especially in Northern New England. Maine itself is roughly the size of the rest of New England combined and largely undeveloped to this day. New Hampshire and Vermont are sparsely populated as well. It is quite possible that the existing length of stone walls in New England is still well over 200,000 miles.
“The amount of stonewalls in the back woods of New England is overwhelming, a person can not walk in the woods with out running into stone wall remains and boundary markers. Today there is no record of the amount of stonewalls there is in New England. But in 1871, the Department of Agriculture did a survey of the fences, approximately one-third of the fences in Connecticut were made of stone, amounting to 20,505 miles- this is almost enough to extend around the equator. Rhode Island had 14,030 miles of stone walls, Massachusetts had 32,960 miles of stone, a staggering 95,364 miles, more miles than there are in the coastline of the entire United States. Together, the states of New England had more miles of stone walls than the United States had miles of railroad track today. The work that went into them according to one estimate would have built the pyramids of Egypt one hundred times over. (Allport, 1990)”
But how could they have transported all the rocks from New England to Egypt?
Seltzer powered boats.
I think the rock piles are over dead bodies. People put them there as weight to make it more difficult for zombies to climb out.
I find the amount of time and effort put into stone walls is pretty amazing. It’s hard freaking work today and we have heavy equipment to get the rocks where we want them.
Whenever I’m out hiking and see stone walls going up or over mountains I just think wow someone had too much free time. Clearly the walls aren’t even at the edge of a field, they just decided that’s their property line and they were going to put a wall on it so it’s clear. just walking up some of the terrain can be hard work, to think someone was walking up there and moving around tons of 50 pound rocks as some form of twisted entertainment.
Not the one in my backyard. It’s just rocks heaped up on the property line to get them out of the way. I know that, because most of them are rocks I dug out of my garden and tossed into the “wall”.
My father had a large rock wall between his garden and the neighbor’s garden. They both contributed to it every spring.
I suppose there have probably been people who moved rocks in New England for other reasons. But i know that there are lots of rock walls that are just convenient places to dump rocks.
So people who lived and grew up in the back woods of New Hampshire may claim that someone built these walls and that it was a long time ago due to the massive corrosion. But I’d just like to jump in with my speculative personal belief that I assume these piles of rock are just kids, or maybe someone moving them out of there way.
Jgilbert328 didn’t include a picture of his rocks, but none of the other rocks look like kids.
What surprises me is not that people think that is would be really difficult to build that many stone walls - it was. Do know what is a whole lot more impressive than that? The stone walls were only a side effect of an attempt at large-scale agriculture and industrial efforts. All of New England was basically clear-cut until about 125 years ago. Do you have any idea how much work it takes to clear-cut millions of acres without chain-saws or heavy equipment? Even with modern tools, it is still a monumental effort on a scale that we can barely comprehend.
I have pictures from my ex-inlaw’s 300 acre farm in New Hampshire as well as my own 1760 house from the early 20th century. It looked like Kansas unlike today because they cut down almost all of the trees. Once that practice became unnecessary and uneconomical, the trees reclaimed the land and that is why you see stone walls all over the middle of the woods now. That used to be open pasture not so long ago.
There is no mystery to any of this and it is well documented. New England tends to suck for farming land but early settlers had to do it for almost 300 years. Once they could import food by railroad and they had other sources of income, that wasn’t necessary anymore so the clear-cut land ranging from Vermont to Rhode Island were reclaimed by woodlands. There is vastly more woodland in New England today than there was in 1800 or even 1900. Remains of old growth trees rot to nothingness but the stone walls remain as an eternal reminder of that period.
I was told that three men could build a rod of fence per day, one man laying and two men carrying.
Good fences make good neighbors
As New England was settled all the land was cleared and used for farming. The rocks were gathered to clear the fields and piled together, or put into walls Driving around New England now one can only think it was always forested, but that is not so. What you are seeing now is new forest, not the original. Only in a very few and very remote places will you see original forest from the colonial days.
So as you walk around in the woods and see rock piles, more than likely that is the reason.
Elves.
I was wondering when someone would mention Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”!
The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side.