Stone Fences

Mulak Reader - Stone Fences

Stone Fences is an essay that changed each time I re-wrote it. I used it in several publications, and part of it appears in my latest book. But here is the original, as used in Brown Feathers.

STONE FENCES

An Essay

A lady who would later become my wife sat next to me on a stone wall. We were in the woods on the pretext of locating some spring wild flowers, but I had ulterior motives as well. By an old caved-in cellar hole a lilac bush was in full flower. "Look at that." The lady pointed to the lilac. "Someone must have lived out here in the woods at one time." For someone who didn't know a lady's slipper from a ladyfinger, her recognition that lilacs are not naturally occurring wild flowers was pretty fair. But I was taken aback for a moment by the implication that she thought the woods in which we were sitting had always been there. People have an inertia-like inability to envision a past much unlike the present. I almost asked her who she supposed had made the stone walls we had been stumbling over all morning. But it was spring, and I was a young man who's fancy had turned to things other than lectures on land use in New England circa 1850. My reply went, "How about that! Aren't you warm with that sweater on?"

          150 years ago, we were an agricultural society, and farming was the way of life for the vast majority of the people in this country. In Massachusetts alone, 85% of the land was under intense cultivation during the time of the Civil war. That figure seems an impossible exaggeration until one walks the hills and woodlands: Nearly every acre of land is laced with stone walls—stone fences, some call them. They climb all but the steepest of hills, edge swamps and bogs, and attest to the fact that farmers' fields existed wherever there was enough topsoil for a root to take hold. They delineated yesterday's hay fields and gardens, rye and cornfields, and orchards and pastures where the rocks were too numerous or too huge to be cleared. Stone fences created cattle runs that channeled cows from barn to distant grazing fields. They bordered lanes and figure prominently on old deeds marking the boundaries of a man's land.
          Unlike those of wood and wire, stone fences were permanent, but that fact had little to do with why they were constructed in the first place. Dick Glidden, a displaced New Hampshireite, explained it to me this way: "My fatha' needed fences to keep the cows where they b'longed, but it was the depression and we didn't have money for bobbed wi'a. Now, we had those stones to be cleared from the property, and the shortest distance to carry 'em was to the edge of the field. Well, we started linin' up those rocks an' pretty soon we didn't need that bobbed wi'a afta' all. I imagine that's how farm'as had been doin' things for generations." With that in mind, one can begin to understand why there was no "North 40" on stone country farms. Fields were small. Even an acre can seem huge when a boulder has to be rolled to its edge. The settlers of the northeast must have quickly discovered that the limiting factor in laying out any field was the number and size of the rocks that had to be cleared from the land.
          And New England's stones can be persistent. My own experience with them came during the five years I owned a home on what used to be a farm in Wilbraham. Each spring, after the winter frosts had run their course, there would be a few new rocks showing in the lawn. Some were low enough for the mower to skim over, and I would have won a year's reprieve. But they grew farther out of the ground each winter, and eventually there was nothing else to do but attack them with shovel and pinch bar. By the time I sold that house I had a small stone wall of my own started along the wood line, and the rocks showed no signs of abating their siege on the lawn. I mowed just under an acre. The work that went on a 50-acre farm must have been onerous.

Some stone fences are little more than linear rock piles: After nearly breaking his back carrying a chunk of granite out of the way of his plow, it is understandable that a farmer would want nothing more than to just drop it. But here and there some truly artistic stone walls can be found. A century of winter ice and frost will break down any unstable pile, so there was more than a little skill that went into the construction of an enduring wall. Each rock had to be fitted against its neighbor to permit for seasonal expansion and contraction, and slanted toward the center for a self-stabilizing effect.
In the town of Hampden there is a wonderful example of a well-engineered wall. It stands shoulder-high and has nearly perpendicular squared sides, and although the fields it bordered are long-since overgrown, it runs through the woodland for a mile or more. The wall is completely intact except for a gap here and there where some huge and long-since rotted forest tree fell. Only the scattered stones testify to the breach's violent creation. Mister Hancock, who owns part of the land, tells me that the wall was there 70 years ago when he was a boy, and nobody then remembered who the artisan was. It endures today. Someone, long ago, knew how to build to last.

          Imagine for a moment living on a farm in the 19th century: Farming before the age of electricity was a bitter business. There were no machines to help with the work, no roads to speak of, no telephones and virtually no mail service. Each rural family had to be self-reliant if it was to survive. Some did not. There was no oil truck to call if fuel ran low, and no corner store to run to for a loaf of bread. Insecticides and fertilizers were unknown. Each family did things for themselves, from "putting food by" and laying in a supply of firewood for the winter to setting a broken leg or building a house. The work, all of it, was done by hand. Farm life was more than hard, it was a continuous cycle of drudgery. People literally worked themselves to death. Is it any wonder that two years of servitude and poor rations on a whaling ship seemed attractive to farm boys from New England? Summer, fall, and winter each brought its own particular type of toil, but spring was the time of the hardest work: There was plowing to be done, but first the rocks that the winter had heaved up had to be cleared from the fields.
          The west was opening up all through the 1800's. News would eventually reach even the most remote countryman, either through the monthly gazette or simply by word of mouth, and the promise of land free-for-the-settling tempted him, no matter how deeply his roots ran in the poor soil of his hill farm. Perhaps it was the first walk through his fields after the snow cleared that finally convinced the stone country farmer to quit. When a man has cleared rocks from the same fields every spring of his life, he knows that this spring's crop of stones won't be the last: There will be more next spring, and more the spring after that. Tempted by the lure of the west's free land, he might have returned to the farmhouse and said, "Hell an' tarnation, Sarah." (Or whatever it was that farmers used to say to their wives back then.) "Let's chuck this place and go to Oregon." Or Nebraska. Or California. Or any of the other places that his farmers' dreams were made of.
          If there were no buyers for the place—and frequently there were none for the worn-out hill farms—it was simply abandoned. The family cemetery was left behind. It sometimes contained ten or more generations. The barn that grandpa built, the new apple trees that should start producing next season, mother's lilac bush and the years of toil and worry were left where they lay. The Conestoga wagons that rolled westward were manned by hale farming families from the northeast. Although they carried much with them, they left far more behind. Ahead were Indians and tornadoes and droughts and sod deeper than a plow could bite, but they pushed on. To a New England stone farmer, the promise of rich flat land with no rocks to clear was lure enough. Like the boys who ran away to sign on whaling ships, the unknown had more to offer than the life they left behind.
          Not all the farms were abandoned. Modern dairy farms and orchards still dot the countryside from Maine to Pennsylvania, but they are located in prime farming areas, usually the deep topsoil of river valleys or flatlands. Even 100 years ago these were "good" farms, where a man could grow something other than rocks.
          But in the hills, nature quickly reclaimed the abandoned land. The fields grew to gray birch and poplar within a few seasons. Sumac and juniper followed the weeds into the dooryard. The old lanes grew over and were forgotten as the natural course of forest succession saw hardwoods sprout in the shade of the lesser trees. Woodland animals, which had been gradually displaced since the first fields were cleared centuries before, now returned; Ruffed grouse flourished in the second growth, the beaver ended his northern exile, and white tail deer, nearly extinct in New England in 1860, prospered.
          Remnants persist; Apple trees, unlike the farmer's other crops, needed little attention and thrive to this day throughout the northeast. The woodlands are sprinkled with monstrous oaks that could only have developed their spreading character by growing in the open for a century or more. But there is not much to be found of the old farms themselves. Reforestation has completely changed the landscape, and rust and rot and the passing seasons have a way of pulling down the accomplishments of men. Sometimes a stone or two remains erect in the woodland marking what was once a family graveyard. Of the houses and outbuildings, only the foundations remain under the moss and ground pine. And a few woody old lilacs and rose bushes continue to bloom each spring near what used to be the kitchen windows of those farm houses, having outlived the dreams of the farm wives who planted them. They bear silent testimony to the fact that someone did indeed "...live out here at one time."
          But of all the vestiges of these ancient farms, the most ubiquitous and enduring are the stone fences. They are the results of a way of life that no longer exists, but, like the wear marks and sweat stains on some well-used tool, theirs is a story obvious to anyone who will take the time to read it.

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This site was last updated 09/21/06