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Not Set in Stone

How New England Cares for its Rock Walls

By Dawne Shand | From Online Only | Dec. 12, 2008 

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.” –Robert Frost

This fall, when a Craigslist advertisement offered “some of the most beautiful stones in Rhode Island,” claiming provenance to a 1700s-era estate, Dr. Robert Thorson soon heard about it. The Connecticut-based geology professor and author of two books on stone walls has been collecting anecdotes about the disappearance and outright theft of stone walls for a decade.

Robert Thorson, a geology professor at UConn, oversees the Stone Wall Initiative.

Credit: Carol Davidge

In 1872, 240,000 miles of stone wall existed in New England. Today, although no numbers exist for surviving stone walls nor theft, the archaeological ruins of rural New England are being sold off to become the new landscape architecture for its wealthier cities. Not only are stones stolen from public lands, but private owners often sell theirs to meet a growing demand for weathered stones with a patina of lichen and moss in new yards. While some towns are working to add stricter penalties for wall removal, brazen theft in remote areas—including state parks, forests, and country roads—continues.

"The tragedy,” Thorson says, “is that the people who have deep pockets don't know where their stone comes from." According to the business manager of one of New England’s top interior design firms, Cebula Design in Newburyport, Mass., Jeffrey Adam says, “When people build these incredible mansions, the landscaping isn’t complete without them. Fieldstone is a very indigenous look.”

Thorson, a geology professor at the University of Connecticut, has traveled throughout New England arguing that local communities treat rock walls as something to be preserved. He launched the Stone Wall Initiative in 2002 to “promote the appreciation, investigation, and conservation” of the walls that have come to define the New England landscape. The group, part of the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History, has 1,000 members.

New Hampshire enacted its first stone wall protection in 1990, which protects walls from being destroyed during state highway projects. In the summer of 2008, however, reports of front loaders and dump trucks removing stone walls from rural roads and state forests brought the issue to the state’s attention.

“We have an ever-increasing problem with stone wall theft in New Hampshire,” says Jim Garvin, New Hampshire state architectural historian. He adds that the live-free-or-die state struggles with establishing a statewide mandate, especially on privately held land. Instead, the state encourages local communities to protect their historic assets.

It’s not enough, says Jennifer Goodman, executive director of New Hampshire Preservation Alliance. “Enforcement is weak, and fines are negligible.”

At least three towns in Connecticut have strict laws against dismantling stone walls; elsewhere in the state, the problem is common. In 2002, the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation listed its rural stone walls on its most endangered list to draw attention to the problem.

During the height of New England’s agricultural prosperity in the 1780s to the 1830s, stones began appearing as the unintended consequence of deforestation. Without trees, the ground becomes more susceptible to deep freeze. Frost pushes up the fissured stones that the Laurentide Ice Sheet had scraped away from ancient mountains 30,000 years ago. Each spring, farmers would find rocks, once buried beneath the forest, that had migrated to the surface. Faced with the annual harvest of so-called “New England potatoes,” farmers carried them to a field’s edge, making fences to mark boundaries. Out of practicality, the New England aesthetic was born.

As farms were abandoned, the forest returned. Today, this second forest hides thousands of miles of stone walls. Thorson argues that these stone walls may be a little-studied part of today’s forest ecology that provide respite for animals, a habitat for plants, and sediment control. More important, he argues, they are cultural landforms that embody the story of the country’s development.

Some landscape architects working in New England argue that using old stone is far less damaging to the environment than quarrying new stone.

In Hampton, New Hampshire, six miles of stone walls define the boundaries of Applecrest Farms.

Credit: Dawne Shand

At the 225-acre Applecrest Farms in the coastal New Hampshire town of Hampton, its owner, Todd Wagner, estimates he has six miles of stone walls on his property, which has been in his family for three generations.

At Applecrest, nature, not thieves or bulldozers, have ruined some walls. In some areas, hedgerows have formed along the free-form walls and toppled them. The old stone fences along the apple orchard are now retaining walls that have caught decades of soil and leaf litter, enabling a hedgerow to take root and cover the rocks. But Applecrest is regenerating. By spring, the “frost heaves” will bring more stones, and Wagner will build more walls in the tradition that his father taught him. Wall repair, according to the 39-year old farmer, is a winter activity—cold, icy, back-breaking work. Wagner learned the craft of wall building from his father and plans to continue it as he redirects the farm. A new batch of rocks puncture the field of rotting pumpkins left at the end of another fall season. “There are so many,” Wagner says. “We sometimes just have to give up.”

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