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Set In Stoneby Leigh MacMillen Hayes Walk along our woodland path with me and you’ll know that omething happened here ages and ages ago. To reach the path, we’ll first pass through openings in two stone walls. As we continue on we’ll come to a cow path where several pasture pines, massive trees that once stood alone in the sun and spread out rather than growing straight up, must have provided shade for the animals. These are the grandfathers of all the pines that now fill this part of the forest. Further out one single wall widens into a double wall, indicating a different use of the land. These stone walls stand stalwart, though some sections are more ragged than others. Fallen trees, roots, frost, weather, critters and probably humans have added to their demise, yet they are still beautiful. On an autumn morning the vivid emerald green moss and white, black and aqua-colored lichen are striking against the gray granite. Specks of shiny mica, feldspar and quartz add to the display. Glistening yellow, red and orange leaves contrast with the pine needles that lay scattered about on the stones. The fact that they are still here is a sign of their endurance . . . their perseverance. And the perseverance of those who built them. And yet . . . the stone walls aren’t what they once were, but that doesn’t matter to those of us who admire them. For me, these icons of the past conjure up images of colonial settlers trying to carve out a slice of land, build a house and maybe a barn, clear an acre or two for the garden and livestock and build walls. The reality is that in the early 1700s, when the lakes region was being settled, stones were not a major issue. The land was forested and they used this timber to build. It wasn’t until a generation or two later, when so much timber had been harvested to create fields for tillage and pasture, that the landscape changed drastically, exposing the ground to the freezing forces of nature. Plowing also helped bring stones to the surface. The later generation of farmers soon had their number one crop to deal with—stone potatoes as they called them. These needed to be removed or they’d bend and break the blade of the oxen-drawn plowing rake. Stone removal became a family affair for many. Like a spelling or quilting bee, sometimes stone bees were held to remove the stone from the ground. Working radially, piles were made as an area was cleared. Stone boats pulled by oxen transported the piles of stones to their final resting place in the wall. Eventually single walls, also called farmer or pasture walls, were built as boundaries, but mainly to keep animals from destroying crops. The advent of stone walls and fences occurred within a few years of homesteads being settled, but during the sheep frenzy of the early 1800s many more were built. These walls were supposed to be 4 1/2 feet high and fence viewers were appointed by each town to make sure that farmers tended their walls. Double walls were lower and usually indicated an area that was tilled. A typical double wall was about 4-10 feet wide and consisted of at least two single walls with smaller rubble thrown in between.
Today we’re left with these monuments of the past that represent years of hard work. Building a wall was a chore. Those who rebuild walls now find it to be a craft. Oh, it’s still hard work, but they do it because they choose to . . . because they enjoy it. Sam Black of Sweden, Maine, is one person who chose to rebuild the walls on the farm he and his wife purchased in 1969. He learned from some old-timers that his walls had probably been depleted when the Moose Pond causeway was constructed in the late 1800s and widened in the early 1900s. Purchasing local stone was the quickest and easiest way to find fill for the project. Left with partial walls, Sam taught himself how to rebuild them. He’s an engineer by trade, but soon learned to put a stone where it fit best and that it didn’t need to be perfect. “I had fun doing it,” says Sam. “It’s jigsaw puzzle time. You get the knack of it damn quick, but you may bust fingers up a bit.” He advises anyone who plans to rebuild a wall to invest in cheap leather gloves because granite shows no mercy. Sam tells me that when he began working on this project, his 4,000 feet of walls were in various stages. Some he had to rebuild from the ground up. With so many walls, he begged from one to complete another and used a wheelbarrow to transport the stones. Moving the stones was the most difficult part of the project. He’d create a pile to work with and found that some days he’d be happy to complete six feet, while other days everything fell into place much more quickly. While working, Sam says, “You get creative. You get smart. And you try to get the pretty edges out.” Facing the wall with the lichen-colored side out is the most aesthetically pleasing. It took him twelve years to complete his project–working on it one month per year, so in reality it took Sam a full year to rebuild the walls. His brown eyes sparkle and a warm grin crosses his face as he says he learned not to be too fussy. He found this hobby that became an obsession, therapeutic. “I spent as much time as my body could take. It was meditation time, like working in the garden. It’s one of those things you do philosophically and it lets you operate at a deeper level. You have time to think and contemplate as you work on the jigsaw puzzle.” While working for the New Hampshire Highway Department for over thirty years, Frank Eastman of Chatham, New Hampshire, learned to build stone walls from experience by tearing many, many walls down because they were so close to the road and the landowners didn’t want them. “By tearing them down I looked at how they was built. When we started cutting the ends off the walls, I looked at the ends of it and I could see right off what the old timers was doing, and I started laying one up and from that I learned what to do, what not to do and how to make it much easier.” Behind the back window of his pickup truck that we lean against to talk are the letters F-R-A-N-K spelled out in metal and frank he is. When I ask if he’s ever built a single wall, he says, “No, I ain’t that good at balancing things. You got to have a pretty good ability to make things balance and a lot of the times your rock will tetter until you put a small rock in just to hold it. No, I don’t want to monkey around with a single wall.” Nor does Frank use any string to form lines for his walls because he’s sure he’d trip over the string. Instead, as he demonstrates on his driveway, he picks up a stick, draws two straight lines and proceeds to work. Picking up rocks, he tosses them in his hand, then sets them down, always placing the straighter edge or face of the rock along the line. After setting rocks along the two lines, Frank begins to drop smaller stones in between as fill, which allow the outer stones to settle naturally. Of course, he’s using small stones to show me how the process works. It’s much larger stones that he actually works with. And like Sam, Frank wears gloves, though he prefers cotton. One of his standing memorials is the wall built from scratch at
the formal gardens of Eastman Hill in Lovell, Maine. His ancestor,
Phineas Eastman, had built the walls, but there was a bend that an
owner did not like. The new wall is about 300 feet long, five feet
wide and 32 inches high and made of local stone that came off of While Sam and Frank have years of experience in building stone walls, a recent newcomer to this craft is Karl Gifford of Baldwin, Maine. Karl’s story about stone walls is not exactly a straight line. He comes at it via trail work, building hiking trails, stairs, retaining walls and granite structures, which he’d done for ten seasons. In 2007, Karl decided to see where his stone skill was at so he enrolled in a course with the Dry Stone Conservancy in Kentucky. Walls are his main interest now that he’s started a business called Sebago Stonework ( www.sebagostonework.com ), though he continues to do trail work to support himself. Like the two previous gentlemen, his walls are all dry rather than mortar held. “Dry stone work, if well built, lasts longer than mortar structures,” says Karl. “It has flexibility in it.” And like the others, Karl likes to quarry the stone from the site if there is enough supply available. “It’s a bonus,” he says, “when it matches the land and area.” Occasionally he’s purchased stone from farmers who are willing to part with some of their walls. Karl’s hands constantly move imaginary stones as he talks. “Stone work,” he says, “means so many different things. The traditional dry stone construction means relying on the stone as the building material; not using anything else except placement and weight of stone to create the strength of the wall.” When building a wall, he explains, “I’m either looking for the perfect stone or trying to create the perfect space for the stone I’m working with. It takes a lot of practice, seeing what I need and being able to pick it out of the pile. Some days things move quicker than others.” Like Sam, he finds building or rebuilding a wall to be like putting a puzzle together. Karl reminds me that walls were originally built on two acre lots. I can see from our walls that they follow this size as they originally split up the property for pasture and tillage to separate the livestock from the crops. The more walls I encounter in the woods, the more respect I have for those who moved the stones and those who built the fences that became the foundation of life. Walk in the woods and you’ll inevitably find evidence that someone has been there before you–maybe not in a great many years, but certainly they’ve been there. Their story is set in stone.
BOOKS OF INTEREST Allport, Susan, Sermons in Stone, Gardner, Kevin, The Granite Kiss, Hubbell, William, Good Fences, Thorson, Robert M., Stone by Stone, Thorson, Robert M., Exploring Stone Walls, Wessels, Tom, Reading the Forested
Landscape,
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Drive our country roads where you’ll see many primitive wallscreated when stone was moved from the roadway and tossed into
a pile or wander through the woods and discover stone walls and
foundations in unexpected places. The sheep craze ended about
1840 after the sheep had depleted the pastures and young farmers
heeded the call to “Go west, young man, go west.” The Erie Canal,
mill jobs and better farming beyond New England all added to the
abandonment of local farms.
