Wood Lit - Spring 2005
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Exploring Stone Walls: A Field Guide to Stone Walls
Recently, I had the chance to examine an old stone wall in some detail. I was crouched under a hemlock tree on a ridgetop, wondering at dawn about the likelihood of finding a deer in the neighborhood.
Right in front of me was an old stone wall, long ago lost to the woods, more fenced-in than fence, partially cloaked by decades of fallen leaves and limbs. A steady stream of red squirrels was commuting to work along the top stones, and one squirrel, taking particular exception to my presence, scampered up a limb over my head to unleash a string of shrieking expletives, punctuated every now and again by a hemlock cone dropped expertly onto my head.
But later it was the old wall that stuck with me, a cryptic message from the past, the New England version of the cave painting or scratched petroglyph. Who built it? Why? When?
Fortunately, a copy of Robert Thorson’s new book, Exploring Stone Walls: A Field Guide to Stone Walls, soon landed on my desk. Thorson has spent a lifetime thinking about stone walls, and to help the rest of us organize our thoughts and observations, he’s used the format of a field guide to demonstrate and explain the wide variety of forms and functions of this classic New England structure.
For example, is the wall constructed of two rows of stone side by side, or only one? If one, the wall in all likelihood was designed as a fence or possibly a boundary line. If two, does the wall have cap stones, possibly quarried, on top? If so, the wall served an ornamental purpose and suggests wealth. If not, the two rows may have simply created a linear repository for smaller junk stones being dragged out of a field in need of organized disposal.
Thorson does a wonderful job convincing the reader that each stone means something, and that stone walls have always been too difficult and expensive to have been constructed by chance or accident. Each wall was built for a purpose, and each wall can shed light on the financial circumstances, intentions, and abilities of those who inhabited this land before us.
Exploring Stone Walls is divided into three sections: A Closer Look at Stones; A Closer Look at Walls; and Walls in Space and Time. The first part was a very close look at stones indeed – closer, in fact, than this geology major was ever interested in exploring. It covers so many Geology 101 topics so quickly that it will likely be impenetrable to the casual reader. But Thorson hits his stride in sections two and three, where he examines and classifies the various type of walls and then describes why different types of walls are unique to different parts of New England. Finally, the appendix includes a classification key, where, as in any good field guide, you can fit your specimen into the overall taxonomy.
Thorson writes, “New England is a place where human activities are so thoroughly blended into the otherwise natural landscape that the distinction between them is moot and meaningless. Stone walls are the most important, most visible part of this impact. They link historical sites into a heritage landscape. They link habitats into an ecological mosaic. They allow the history to be linked to the ecology, creating a landscape in which history and natural history are one in the same.”
I sure wish I’d had Exploring Stone Walls with me back in November, while I was waiting under the hemlock tree for that elusive buck. I could have figured out if that old wall was a single or a double, stacked or laid, and who might have built it and why. Plus, I could have used the book to keep those dang hemlock cones from landing on my head.
Chuck Wooster
© 2005 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author's consent.
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The Privately Owned Adirondacks
If you were to climb the recently reopened Azure Mountain fire tower on a clear day, you would see an immense arc of the Adirondacks, from the Park’s northern edge to the High Peaks. You might think you were looking at a vast expanse of public forest – it is, after all, inside a park. But by far the greater portion in view is privately owned.
It may come as a surprise that over half the Adirondack Park is private property. This land belongs to individuals, families, businesses, corporations, and clubs, and unless it has an easement or some other right of access attached to it, you and I can’t go there without the proper connections. This state of affairs may not fit the concept of a park in most people’s minds, but it’s a double-edged fact of life in the Adirondacks, one that renders the region both distinctive and a management migraine without surcease.
In The Privately Owned Adirondacks, Barbara McMartin has once again set her prodigious energy, research skills, and writing ability to the task of explaining how things work in the Adirondacks. Private holdings, despite their predominance, are by their nature less well known than the public parts of the Park, which constitute the “forever wild” Forest Preserve. And there are those who resent their existence. Yet they, and by extension the people who owned (and own) them, have played a major role in the tangled story of the Adirondacks for 250 years.
In her introduction, McMartin reveals her attitude toward her subject: “New Yorkers [recognize] that public land alone may not be able to protect all the park’s values – wildlife, watersheds, forests, the preservation of wilderness and open space. Private ownership of land is the basis of the forest and tourist industries. Without the latter, public access to the Adirondacks would be severely limited….This book is a celebration of the values of lands that remain in private ownership.”
Addressing trends she details in a subsequent chapter, she continues, “Reasons for owning land in the Adirondacks change over time, beginning with creating fishing and hunting preserves and exploiting the woods. Many early landowners hoped for profit in breaking up huge tracts. Some emulated the English landed gentry’s patterns of land ownership. Later owners sought land in this gentle wilderness that offered nature’s beauty and solace from an increasingly frantic industrial society. A few used their land as a means of displaying wealth…. Altruism among landowners appeared very slowly in the twentieth century, when people began to realize that protecting land was an important reason for owning it.”
The stage set, McMartin goes back to the beginning, when wealthy speculators snapped up monumental acreages in the years surrounding the Revolutionary War. These were followed in the early 1800s by rapacious lumbermen and, in their footsteps, railroad speculators. Ownership of land for the purpose of hunting and fishing soon followed; those iconic activities remain two of the principal reasons for ownership, although such ideals as privacy, protection of the forest, and family bonding grew over time.
The years following the Civil War saw a burst of sporting club formation as wilderness recreation became both more economically possible and more socially acceptable. This development brought about two themes that have dominated discussions among landowners to the present day, with no signs of being resolved: taxation and forest management. McMartin explains the evolving philosophies and the motivations, sometimes pure and sometimes not, behind steps taken to deal with these vexations. Leasing grew in popularity; with more intrigue than a cheap novel, it grew into a modern-day flashpoint as many of the large landholders that for generations leased chunks of their holdings to clubs have been gobbled up by mega-corporations that have chosen to divest.
In this, her 24th book, McMartin believes she has taken the quest for answers as far as she will ever be able to do. If indeed this is to be her final work, what a splendid conclusion to a career of helping us all better understand that conundrum called the Adirondacks.
Neal Burdick
A longer version of this review appeared in the September/October 2004 edition of The Adirondack Explorer.
© 2005 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author's consent.
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The Landowner’s Guide to Conservation Easements
In the world of forestry and conservation, one of the most significant developments in the last three decades has been the steadily increasing use of conservation easements. Through a process in which a landowner transfers the development rights to his or her property either by selling or donating those rights to a land trust, millions of acres have been conserved. Much of the early work in this field was to conserve family farms that were ripe targets for developers, but recently the largest conserved holdings have been forestland. Working forest easements ensure that the land will never be developed and that it will continue to be managed for the production of forest products according to sound principles of forestry.
In this update of the 2001 edition, Steven Bick and Harry Haney have put together a tremendous amount of useful information for landowners who are contemplating entering into such an agreement. Since the two are foresters and an adjunct and full professor of forestry, respectively, their book is more useful for owners of forestland than of farmland. The book often has a tone that is sure to rile up land trust staffers: “The popularity of conservation easements is at least partly due to the publicity and hype originating with the organizations that benefit by receiving them.” And “Be wary of anyone who attempts to portray a conservation easements as a tool…. Anyone who views a conservation easement as a tool is probably trying to accomplish something and then move on, taking a sense of fulfillment with them and leaving behind the responsibility for future consequences.”
But the authors are not anti-land trust, and their skepticism seems ultimately to be a healthy one. This is a cautionary book, one that guides landowners through all the elements typical of today’s easement deeds, including affirmative rights, restrictions, reserved rights, and terms and conditions. It covers the various tax (income, estate, and property) implications of placing an easement and makes it clear that everyone needs to carefully evaluate their own circumstances before assuming they’ll receive tax benefits from ceding the development rights to their land. Bick and Haney are constantly encouraging people to watch out for their own interests in order to have a successful outcome, which to the authors means that the grantor benefits from it.
The book ends with “There are many satisfied landowners who have created and granted conservation easements on their land. Whether a conservation easement matches your goals, or you choose to look into other alternatives, be sure to make informed decisions that will satisfy you and your heirs for all time.”
The Landowner’s Guide to Conservation Easements will help people make informed decisions and have a say in what the easement affirms and denies. The appendices are rich with examples of language from existing easements that are worth perusing if you are considering this route. At the heart of the authors’ advice is a sober understanding that a grantor and a grantee have different needs and goals. Bick and Haney assume that land trusts are well equipped to look out for their own interest in negotiating the deed. And they assume that landowners are not inherently so.
If landowners put aside for the moment the feeling of accomplishment they’ll get from having protected their land from future development, and go through the painstaking diligence the authors recommend, it is quite likely they can have their land and conserve it, too.
Stephen Long
© 2005 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author's consent.
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