When you’re hiking in the Northeast, you’ll inevitably come across stone walls deep in the woods. The walls you see today vary in size and construction, depending on their original purpose. Some were sturdy and built to last, while others were just simple piles of stones. Though they blend into the landscape now, these walls once marked ownership and the hard work of early settlers.
These walls are beautiful relics from the past, built in a time when heavy machinery wasn’t even imagined. Every single stone in these walls was moved, stacked, and maintained by hand. For farmers in early America, it was backbreaking work they had no choice but to do—either move the stones or risk starvation. They cleared fields for crops, using the stones they dug up to build boundary markers and livestock enclosures. By the end of the 19th century, over 200,000 miles of stone walls crisscrossed the landscape.
Interestingly, the first settlers in New England didn’t have to deal with these stones right away. The top layers of soil were rich and easy to plow, so they didn’t uncover the vast network of fieldstone buried beneath. Those early years of farming must have been a breeze. But eventually, the stones started surfacing, and clearing them became a grueling, centuries-long task.
By the 18th century, digging out stones had become as much a part of farming as growing crops. Farmers had to move a lot of stones to create fields that wouldn’t damage their plows and could support crops. Building walls was more practical than making big piles, as they took up less space and could also keep animals out if they were tall enough. But because of the many “two-handers”—stones so big they needed both hands to carry—fields often stayed small. Even larger stones required two or three people to move. Entire families would be set to the task of building stone walls while the farmer plowed, inevitably uncovering more rocks for them to stack. It’s incredible to think that these walls, built with such labor and without modern tools, have lasted for centuries.
Unfortunately for the farmers, this wasn’t a one-time job. Every year, more stones would be unearthed during plowing, and more stone walls would need to be built. For many religious farmers, which was almost all of them, these stones felt like a curse. Some even said it was the devil himself playing a cruel trick on the New World farmer. Without understanding geology or the Ice Age, how could they not think they were cursed when most of their land seemed to be nothing but rocks?
As farming declined and forests reclaimed the land, these walls were left behind. Today, they’re a reminder of a time when this now-forested area was a patchwork of small farms and when hard work was just part of daily life. The next time you’re in New England, take a moment to admire these stone walls, built by the sweat and toil of farmers and their families long ago, and imagine the exhausting labor of doing it all by hand.
Learn more about the fascinating New England Stone walls.