Almost anyone who has walked in Vermont's woods must have paused more than once to puzzle over the stone walls that run like stitching through most of the state's wooded land. Even in dense forest, a mile from the nearest habitation, the stone walls speak of a tamed landscape: a farmer, his team of oxen, a stone boat, sheep and cropland.
Though thousands of miles of these walls were built in New England in the 18th and 19th centuries, very little is known about their origins. Giovanna Peebles, Vermont's state archaeologist, attributes the lack of written materials to the fact that stone walls were such a common part of every day life. Mention of them in diaries or newspaper stories 'was about as likely as writing about the fact that you reheated last night's supper in the microwave."
It is difficult to tell, for instance, when a stone wall was built because construction styles changed very little over time, though you can sometimes tell the footprint of a particular mason. 'I think you can probably identify certain very brilliant stone masons, as to their particular work. It's like looking at a work of art and knowing Picasso did this," said Peebles. Still, we don't know how many masons were responsible for the walls we see today, or how many farmers built their own.
We do know something, however, about what stone walls were designed to accomplish.
Little more than 100 years ago, 80% of Vermont's land had been cleared, either for farming or to sustain the potash industry that flourished in New England into the 19th century. Many of us have heard this figure before, but still find it difficult to absorb. All we see now are trees but m 1880, wherever you looked, there was open land, being used either for crops or for grazing animals.
Fences were needed to separate the two. As far back as 1642 a court decreed that "every man must secure his corne and meadowe against great cattell," though at that time fences were made of stumps or split rails and were only replaced by stone fences when wood became scarcer.
Jane Dorney, a geographer who does consulting work for the state and for private landowners who are interested in knowing more about the history of their land, uses Vermont's stone walls to determine how land was used in the past. The links between the nineteenth century farming landscape and the twentieth century forested landscape are so strong, she explains, as to challenge the traditional separation of humans and nature. We think of the forest as nature, and the field as human, but in fact we can't make that distinction. Much of the forest is the way it is because of past human activity.
"The process of figuring out how an area was used is like solving a multidimensional problem," Domey said. "People who like to solve puzzles like this kind of work."
Dorney believes, as do most archaeologists, that the tumbling down walls we now see once kept large and/or nimble animals where they belonged. Old photographs and lithographs show that stubby stone walls were extended with "stakes and riders" or with a thicket of posts stuck into the wall. Many old walls now have a strand or two of barbed wire running along the top, an indication that these walls were functional at some time after the late nineteenth century, when barbed wire came into general use.
Although stone walls were occasionally built as boundaries between one farmer's pasture and another's, Dorney believes that the most important role of a fence was to separate pasture from non-pasture.
Separating the Sheep From the Oats
One thing Dorney looks for is a row of large, old trees, older than the surrounding forest, growing out of one side of a stone wall. "These trees, most often sugar maple, white ash or black cherry, are on the side of the fence that once was cropland. On the pasture side, such palatable species would have been eaten by grazing animals, but plows and harrows do not approach a stone wall as closely as an animal does," Dorney said.
The kinds of trees you find on each side of the wall also tell a story. When cropland is abandoned the bare earth offers an ideal seedbed and trees, usually hardwoods, will colonize it within a few years. Gray birch is often the pioneer, but sugar maple can be quite aggressive and may form pure stands in which the trees are almost exactly the same age. Other factors, such as the soil type and depth, the depth to water table, and the amount of slope may influence which tree species become established.
On the other hand, pasture, being grass covered, presents a problem for many tree seeds and is recaptured only slowly over many years by members of the woody clan. Uneven-aged softwoods are strongly correlated with abandoned pasture. Peter Marchand, author of North Woods, believes that the relatively heavy, wind-disseminated seeds of conifers "work down to the soil surface and provide enough stored energy to develop a seedling large enough to compete successfully with grass." If cropland was used as pasture before being abandoned altogether, the forest might look similar on both sides of the stone wall. In these cases you will need to look for other clues.
Land which has never been plowed is often hummocky, a result of generations of trees toppling over and raising big mounds of soil with their roots. These pits and mounds persist for hundreds of years and are only erased by plowing and harrowing.
Along with the bumps, you may well find more rocks than on the cropland side of the wall. Some large rocks may have been removed or piled on top of one another when land was used as pasture, but most are likely to have been left, right where the last glacier deposited them.
Hawthorn and barberry are two sunloving plants that grow up in old pastures. Their thorns and prickles protect them from grazing animals and they may have gotten a headstart before a pasture was abandoned. Black locust is valuable for fence posts because of its resistance to decay, and though not native to Vermont, a patch of the trees was often kept in a convenient, out of the way place. Sprouts grow from the roots of older trees and a supply of fence posts may still be growing on a long-deserted farm.
There's Rocks in Them There Hills
Stone walls that march up steep hillsides indicate that even steep terrain was cleared and used for grazing. This evidence corroborates the view that the earliest settlers in Vermont were strongly attracted to slopes rather than to valleys for their farm sites. In particular they preferred south-facing slopes; early maps often show roads and houses on the south-facing sides of brooks, separated by an expanse of uninhabited north-facing slope. This pattern is repeated over much of the state: the spine of the Green Mountains runs north and south and most brooks run east or west, draining into the Connecticut River Valley or to the Champlain Valley.
Early settlers also showed a preference for the highest elevations at which farming was possible — roughly up to 1800 feet. At these elevations the soil warms in the spring sun and cool air drains to the valleys, where malaria was thought to linger. Because early farms were largely self sufficient, the distance to market was not a significant factor.
Some high elevation farms remained in use for a long time, which would explain why Dorney has found some of the most well-tended stone walls at higher elevations.
On the other hand, there are few stone walls to be found at the state's lowest elevations — along the Connecticut River Valley and the Champlain Valley. Here, the stones that were distributed by glaciers over the hills of Vermont were buried in a deep, fine sediment at the bottoms of post-glacial lakes.
Harvesting the Crop of Stones
Some fields produced abundant crops of stone and it was necessary to get rid of them. Most of the stones in a wall came from one side—the side that was cultivated, where they posed a hazard to farm equipment. Before spring plowing, removing the annual crop of stones that had been heaved up into the plow zone by frost action was an annual ritual.
The size of the stones in a wall may even help identify the crops that were raised, according to some writers. The presence of very small stones suggests that the adjacent field may have been grown to root crops, for which even small stones are a hindrance. If you raise potatoes you are always digging in the ground; when early farmers did this they threw the stones they found aside, later adding them to the wall.
These appear as part of the rubble or small stone filling inside a double wall. Depending on the soil type, finding a really large number of small stones built into a wall may indicate that the field was cultivated over a long period of time.
On the cultivated side, the surface of the ground will be far smoother than on the pasture side, and perhaps you can find a “dead furrow," the last, usually downhill, ridge that tends to grow in size each time a field is plowed because the smoothing effect of the harrow does not quite reach to the edge of the soil that the plow has turned over.
If soil has piled up against the inside of a wall at the lower side of a field this, too, suggests a period of plowing which causes more erosion than turf-covered grazing land.
The walls nearest the house and barn, according to Dorney, are often the finest. Perhaps this is because they were the first built and longest tended, but they were also the ones most likely to be seen by the neighbors. There was a time when, as one historian has said, "the quality of enclosures was not uncommonly taken as a measure of a farmer's competence."
The tumbling walls bordering abandoned fields today seem ineffectual and puzzling without a house and barn to give meaning to their shapes and patterns. There was a time, however, when the way they divided up the land was crucial to the whole economy and workings of a rural society.