Why Maine's woods have so many rock walls | Assignment: Maine
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 เม.ย. 2024
- Anyone who has walked in the woods in Maine has at one point come across a wall made of large rocks and stones. Maybe you’ve wondered, what is this doing in the middle of the forest?
Join retired USM sociology professor and Maine Master Naturalist Dr. Cheryl Laz as she expertly narrates a brief history of stonewall building in Maine and New England. Learn about the origins of these walls, their significance to early settlers of the region and how they have impacted the natural history of Maine over time in this latest edition of Assignment: Maine.
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Living in New England, it's easy to overlook the significance of stone walls. Yet, every so often, I pause and contemplate a stone wall that I see disappearing into the woods, reminding myself that each stone was deliberately placed by a human hand. Someone picked up the very stone I'm looking at, thought about its placement, and carefully positioned it in the wall. It may seem like a trivial observation, but it helps remind me that the land I'm standing on was cultivated by living, thinking individuals just like me.
Oh you pause and contemplate do you---pompass ass
Bless you god sir / Ma’m…there’s not very many of us left that hold your obvious calibre…🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
The rocks were begrudgingly gather with sweat and blood as a matter of survival, however it is easy to romantisize the walls now that they are built.
I'm from the Gulf Coast and used to go everywhere. When I think of New England I think of rock walls. I see them in the woods off the road and you would never notice it in ones busy world. It's nice to know there are kindred spirits out there.
@@chipsdad5861 typical divide and conquer shill, you bots will try to drag down literally anything its honestly hilarious. Id say seek help but your a product of your environment and are functioning exactly the way they want.
Growing up in Mass. , we used to follow stone walls as kids, looking for dumpsites in which we would hunt for bottles. always amazed the stone walls were virtually everywhere.
I did my part in Maine to continue this tradition. I built 300 feet of standing stone walls in my yard and gardens.
I am doing the same in Mass. Connecting with previous builders from centuries ago is deeply satisfying. I've added to an abandoned run from one era - probably an unfinished sheep fence and in another area I've added some terraces along a Vernal Pool.
Respect
As Finn, those stone walls made so much sense immediately. If there's one infinite crop in Finland's fields, it's rocks. Every year they emerge from the soil, no matter what.
And it's too damned much work to carry them any farther than absolutely necessary.
Archaeologist here from RI. Glad all new Englanders can come together to appreciate shared heritage
Our family farm in Bristol Mills, Maine was from 1779-1973 ( 194 years). A land grant from my great- grandfathers duty as an officer during the revolutionary war. Ours was a 150 acre homestead, just across from the Bristol Mills dam and swimming hole. For several summers my older brother re-built many parts of the stone walls on the property back in the mid-later 1960's. At that time many stone walls were being damaged by snowmobilers climbing over them to access other properties. We had 110 acres on the farm and the other 40 acres were across the river and just down from the dam, where a mill was for many years. We visited Bristol Mills again in 2019, still just a quaint village.
I had no idea that stone walls are not everywhere throughout the north east.
Here in Pennsylvania they litter our woods, our countryside and farms. Many farmers still use the old stone walls as boundaries for their fields. I always find it amazing when I’m deep in the woods on some trail it seems no one has walked in a long time and I come upon a stone wall, long forgotten and stretching for what seems likes miles sometimes, and sometimes on very inhospitable ground, rocky and mountainous. Now I know they were likely sheep farmers! Amazing indeed.
I grew up in Ct. Our woods were littered with these stone walls as well. I hadn't realized that there was 75% deforestation in NE and that 50% of that was re-forested. Neat!
It's easy to forget this natural evolution of economies
I live in CT. There are stone walls everywhere in the woods here. It's so cool. It doesn't matter how deep into the woods you go, you still come across them.
This is exactly why I am a sustaining member of @mainepublic. Thank you for teaching me about one of the favorite things in my own backyard. Please, please, please more episodes like this.
Hi Greg, I saw your comment before I commented, so thought I'd let you know about my comment, about things in our own back yards. Check out my slideshows. Warning, it's kinda shocking. Maybe Cheryl, being a Phd and Master Naturalist, might do an episode on some big meteorites that damaged some big trees and left glass smears on the damaged trees. Pretty fascinating, and easy to see/imagine. I'd make a cool video, but I'm too busy... Go Maine Public Classical!
I look at all the walls running through the woods of Connecticut and always wondered about the people who built them. Awesome video!
I live in the Catskills of New York and have always been fascinated by stone walls. I always thought the two parallel walls were for wagons (early roads). Thanks for the great overview!
Thank you for this, we are lucky to have stone walls on our land here in New Hampshire in the middle of the woods just as you described. It's awesome to learn why.
Thank you, I loved exploring the southern Maine woods when growing up. My wife's grandmother lived in the 3rd oldest house in York county and behind it there was a complete village of stone walls and foundations. Incidentally the road in front of the house was originally a trolley track. I no longer live in Maine but here in northern NH I have found many old works like mines, quarries, logging railroads etc. I love to explore them all. There is a quarry near my eastern border that was used for my great great grandfathers house foundation. There is also a cellar hole from the civil war time when the man who lived there left and never came back. Thanks again.
The New Jersey 'Highlands' region also has many such stone walls - sometimes called 'stone-rows,' by locals. My take is that they(the New Jersey stone-rows)were built for the same reasons you describe: boundaries, inexpensive and lasting fencing and as a type of 'dumping ground' for unwanted stone/rock presences in tillable farm fields. Typically, the larger glacial 'erratics' were left in place.
Yes. On the Appalachian Trail in NJ there are many of them. Its hard to imagine that land deforested.
I'm a CT resident and hiker. There are so many rock walls out in the woods it's just a part of the landscape. I like the different degrees of sophistication and speculating what came first.
I always wondered what the forests were like prior to deforestation
Ancient, but native Americans also changed landscapes pretty significantly themselves.
Thank you for the informative video. We are in Connecticut and have an abundance of stone walls that are beautiful.
Good video. I'm in NE CT. Same here. Most wall building stopped after, the summer that never was, and many moved to Ohio. The parallel walls were also to delineate public roads. My town road is 2 rods(33') wide and was deeded to the town before the revolution. In the northern part of our town is a section of the old Kings Highway that is 3 rods wide. It is overgrown but protected.
My major advisor in Grad School(UCONN) did a study on stonewall dams. Building the stone wall and back filling it saved time for the builders before there was powered construction equipment.
Read some of Eric Sloanes' books about early New England for an interesting and relaxing read. Good Luck, Rick
Great video. I live in Livermore and have an enormous stone wall that borders the backside of my property. I love the fact that it’s there. It’s a very quiet, peaceful place to go sit and listen to and watch wildlife and to contemplate what the settlers had to overcome to survive. History fascinates me, and I also have The Norlands/Washburne home not far from me. That family perhaps helped build the stone wall that I sometimes go to explore. I feel blessed to have been born in such a beautiful state.
I’m now starting the long process of transforming my property into the homestead I’ve always wanted. Part of that process is going to be building stone walls on parts of the property as retaining walls and garden beds using the stones available. I’m also thinking about building a stone shed and greenhouse. Currently, the woods are a rubble field behind my house up hill and down hill. I have huge glacial erratics everywhere as well. Some day I will have a beautiful vegetable garden and perennial garden with boulders and stone being utilized.
Knowing the difficulty of moving those stones and overcoming some of the challenges involved in doing that gives me an enormous amount of appreciation and respect for the people who built the stone walls that cover our region.
I was just back (home) Maine last month for my honeymoon and i explained to my wife all about the stone walls! Weird timing!. Love it. Thank you!
Super cool! I'm from the Mid-Atlantic, so not New England but close, & we have some stone walls as well in my township. I didn't know they were really a New England (& evidently New England adjacent) thing, I just figured they were most places, but now that I think about it, I never saw any when I lived in the Northwest. Even if it's not a Jersey thing per se, it still instills a certain regional pride in me to learn that these things I see everyday & walk over without a second thought are actually such a unique aspect of the local history
The first generation of settlers needed to take the stones out of the land to make way for crops. But as New englanders know the stones keep coming to the surface.
I’m from Nova Scotia. We have stone walls here too. I’ve got them on my property. They are boundary walls for the most part. We were all New England at one time.
William Jarvis actually never got permission to import the Merino Sheep. He smuggled about 200 sheep in secret and kicked the whole thing off.
This is what Maine PBS should be!!!!
Thank you very much for sharing your research and experience on this topic with us. It was one of the first things I admired when we moved to the TriState area from San Diego, California.
Thank you, this was wonderful!
This is very interesting. We have a farm here in Ireland and straight away I could see a little bit of home in Maine. We have endless amounts of stone walls here. I always appreciate how each stone was laid by a human long ago, and when we can, we rebuild the fallen walls. But as shown in the video, trees grow through them and they are a lot of work to maintain. A neighboring (abandoned) farm to ours has a large wooded area filled with stone walls for fields taken back by the trees. Two or three generations ago there were many families and farms in that area, all long gone. Lovely video and many thanks
Lots of those here in CT too. See lots from highway and around in the woods.
I agree that most of the stone walls were built by european settler farmers. But there are claims that there were earlier walls that were there prior to the arrival of the Europeans. I have not seen any peer review archeologists supporting these claims except for some of the ancient arranged stones associated with the ancient red paint people habitations and burials that are found near shore lines.
these stone walls, which are all over western maine because of old sheep farming, are the best places to find forest soil while doing minimal damage to the forest. Find a nice run in a hardwood dominated forest and run the edge, pulling up all leaf mat that has developed going back into the stone cracks. Don't pull it off the wall more than 12 inches, throw leaves back down against the wall.....do it again in 20 years.....screen it, ad a hint of lime and wood ash, presto, grow anything, especially of you use compost tea on top........ yeah, use leaf mold soil for that too.
Beautifully shot. Well written. Production values were over the top. Kudos!
This is so awesome!!
I grew up in Pownal and climbed Bradbury Mountain many times. There was a huge sand ridge behind the house I grew up in, and it was obvious that it was used as a source of sand. And, across the street was a private quarry, (now filled in.) It was a source of large step stones and foundations for houses and the one-room school in town.
Fascinating!
I have a lot of stone walls on my NW Pennsylvanian hilltop. And sometimes piles of stones, too.this land was settled in mid to late 1800s, and the rocks are smaller, but they are otherwise very similar to new englands' walls.
When I was stationed in New England a very common sense explanation I learned from the locals, was that that the stones reappeared each spring being forced up frozen thaw. The farm folks would have to go out into their fields each spring and remove the newly upthrust stones before they could cultivate the land for produce or livestock husbandry. Of course, they would take the stones to their nearest boundary or section line and stack them thereby creating fences or boundary lines to keep most pesky critters out of their fields. Though rare today, there were many land titles that relied on these stone edifices for deeding surveys.
Thank you oh rock wall builders of the past for the stone walls in Newcastle that I picked over for rocks to face off the chimney in my house. A stone mason's ratio for stone selection is about 10 to 1, i.e. for every 1 stone used you have to have about 10 to pick from.
Someone farmed there for sustenance. Usually built by Irish paupers. Most of the 17th & 18th century. The northern new England towns largest crop was Potash. Which was exported to grease the wheels and cogs of the wool and blossoming cotton industries. Many towns had Irish "laborers" that lived on the far outskirts of the villages. Potash cauldrons were imported from England. Potash is the product of cooking trees in massive cast iron cooking pots. A mix of readily available birch, maple, oak, and other hardwoods would be cooked down to ash.
I grew up in Springfield MA & our 7th grade Social Studies teacher in 1961 told us that at the time Cows still outnumbered People in the state of New Hampshire.
Great video, very informative!
Thanks for showing . Chipmunks love those walls you're saying. Do deers and mooses and bears love them too? I wonder.
Stone walls are all over New England, not just Maine. Stone walls were built as land was cleared. Early land owners and surveyors were extremely accurate laying out boundaries using rudimentary tools.
Oh how I miss Maine, the people …. and USM. The happiest days of my life….
Good video I learned something interesting today
I grew up in eastern Maine on my grandparents farm and there were, and still are, stone walls all over the 100 acre farm. They were generally just inside the wooded areas around the hay fields, presumably picked from what were originally blueberry fields in the long distant past. I made some interesting finds in the refuse piles that often accompanied the stone piles and walls. Glass bottles, old metal tools and I even found an old Ford Model T that a large pine tree had grown up through.
It's honestly amazing what you can find in Maine's woods🌲
Central Franklin County, central Massa-choose-its, here. In the Quabbin Valley/Pioneer Valley town of Wendell, state forest, stone walls throughout. My 1.8 acre has 3’ tall /wide walls on 3 sides, used for livestock, in the 1880’s, and not built upon til, 1965.
Nice job!
I have a red stone wall made with some massive stones. It's Wamsutta formation and goes all around the Narragansett Basin around Providence, RI and up into southeastern MA (Attleboro and North Attleboro over to Seekonk, MA).
Part of it is timing. New England was settled much earlier than some other parts of the country. I have a long pile of rocks along the edge of my farm in Minnesota, but most farms here just have round piles of rocks. These fields were cleared after the invention of barbed wire, so there was no reason to go to the work of making a rock wall.
sure is weird walking far in the woods and finding a stone wall. then again, there could have been a settlement there or the main road/trail could have been around there. think how strong and how good a shape these people must have been. how about a video on how the trees were cleared back then?
You are likely to see stone walls in areas that were glaciated and that were cleared for farming prior to invention of barbed wire. In Minnesota, you are more likely to just have a pile of rocks in part of the pasture. I can remember (from about 5 years old) my grandfather loading up a sledge with rocks from the cultivated fields and towing it with his tractor to the middle of the cow pasture. The rocks were gradually displacing a pond in the low spot in the pasture.
I live in Halifax Nova Scotia Canada and have recently been biking and found similar walls in the woods pretty far from anything I found it pretty interesting
Very nicely done. Informative and interesting. I enjoyed the background music. Is it something I can down load from the internet so I can listen to it? If so, please point me in the right direction.
I never knew this was primarily a New England thing. I just assumed any place in the USA with rocky soil had them. Very cool.
Wow. I love the outdoors in New England, and spent many best summers from NYC hiking and camping in Maine. I've wondered what exactly the deal was with the stones for ~50 years, and now I know! Is the regrowing forests different species of trees and plants than that of the old growth forests?
I always thought the walls were a by product of clearing land to make it erable for crops.
I remember visiting my cousins in Pennsylvania years ago and we walked up the mountainside years ago to a meadow with no signs of habitation but there was a stone wall. Strange.
I lived in a house on a heavily wooded lot that had at one point been a farm; potatoes I believe. Swamp maple dominated the mix of trees; I've always wondered if the original mix of trees pre-clearing and growing back was different.
My yard in southwestern rural Connecticut is bounded and partially crisscrossed by these walls. As kids, we'd dig down a couple feet and move the stones from the wall into a circle around the pit, making a "rock fort". Sometimes put on a roof and camp there overnight. Because kids have boundless energy and imagination. At 60, I can't imagine myself doing that. Actually, I don't see kids in my neighborhood doing anything with natural masonry.
I did find 7 distinct species of lichen and moss in my 1 acre yard. Lichen being kinda like a symbiote of plant and fungus, I think.
Youl even find them in ponds and reservoirs from before they were converted.
The amount of effort that must have been put into building them is staggering! They had zero powered equipment to move things other than their bare hands and maybe a horse drawn sled of some kind . In Ct there are zig zag patterned walls sometimes in the woods too
Great video. Very interesting and well presented. 👍😊
It’s kinda like Ireland. 🤔
Have the here throughout NY. As well.
I’ve seen rock walls in remote areas of the Adirondacks and always wondered who made them
In Norway we name them STEINGARDAR. 😊.we have many of them.on my farm I got about 2 km in lenght still standing.
This is much better put than those greenway videos. Those others make me feel guilty for existing. This one makes me feel happy to learn.
The houses on my road in Maine are all still divided using rock walls as their property line.
the idea that no other part of the country has walls like this is strange...
the great smoky mountains have a lot of these walls.
around those parts it is said the germans that settled the area were responsible.
it is also said the Germans had a brilliant way of organizing the rocks to make building easier. sorting them by size before building to speed the actual construction process.
the French call it "mise en place."
translation "put in place" or "gathering" in English.
all production facilities from factories to restaurants use these techniques.
So, the first reason that stone walls were built was to get them off the field so that the ground could be plowed. There is an art to building a stone wall and many of them had serious foundations dug and the stones placed very carefully (sort of like placing stone to create a jetty along the shore: one needs to know what one is doing). The former walls today lay haphazardly because of freeze-thaw mobilization of the originally orderly placement. Shenandoah National Park in Virginia has many many of these, now lying in heaps marching through those woods.
And Virginia wasn't under the last glaciation and has miles of these.
How long do you have to look at stones , in order to present yourself as a master?
There are walls like this all over the place near my dad's vacation home. As kids we thought they were leftover from Vikings. 😂
That rocks!
Nature always takes the land back. I wonder, if all human life were just gone from the Earth tomorrow, how long would it be until only things made in stone were left?
Yeah they're literally everywhere in Connecticut.
If you have any interest in seeing Native American Stone work in Maine please contact me. I live in a remote area in the mountains and we have a ceremonial site on our property.
Scrolled the comments too far to see anything about native Americans. Crazy how this story about settlers keeps getting repeated without acknowledging many native Americans built stone walls and some even said they were there before they got there.
LOL...what a story to tell!
Many rock fences, stone walls are actually foundations and stone walls of the thousands of abandoned homes.
You like stone walls .. come to Ireland theyll blow your mind
Same for Wales!!
If you stretch the idiom, Prince Edward Island, Canada is just a “stone throw” from Maine but there’s nary a stone to be found in the entire province. So . . . Mainers, when can we expect our rocks back?
looks like any place in scandinavia
Ok Google, this recommendation was rock solid.
PA has stone walls in areas
It is amazing the small amount of time it took Europeans to destroy a beautiful place that my ancestors lived on for thousands of years but in harmony with nature not trying to be it's master.
These tiny walls wont hold sheep or any animal. And you need not enact the labor to clear rocks for sheep. In 1872 230k miles of stone walls were mapped in new england. There werent enough people to build them back then. Much of this was native American.
Uhhh… The text overlayed in the thumbnail should be “Maine Stone Walls”. Why? That text refers to a THING made of stone, hence calling for the two-word NOUN term, NOT a tense of the compound VERB, “to stonewall”.
Thanks for the correction! The thumbnail has been updated.
@@MainePublic Nice!!! I grew up in northeastern Connecticut, where there are many stone walls in the forested areas of that part od the state protected from development due to being a state or local park.
The Native Americans had farms and crop growing. They cleared land with stone axes for crop growing. They left much of the land forested because they did not have domesticated farm animals for meat and had to still hunt and fish for meat. So, some of the stone walls might be from Native Americans or the lower parts of the walls.
Unbelievable that there is no mention at all of native cultures use of stone
The amount that natives did was minor. I saw a video recently where some "expert" was discussing a pile of stones and how it had to be native because of the two parallel lines of stones coming out of it. The pile was a pile picked from plowing because they were generally small(the big stones would have been removed years before). The parallel line looked just like my piles when I took a loader bucket out of them.
They’re all over the northeast.
Running sheep or cattle the stone walls wouldn't have to be high. Sheep wouldn't climb on anything with holes or pockets. Ditto cattle. Think of cattle guards... if it doesn't provide sure footing they avoid. So no wood fencing on top required. Goats on the other hand would use them as playgrounds.
always called them stone fences
Tartaria
New Hampshire used to have the same thing before developers replaced them with strip malls and cookie cutter developments.
Stone walls are made mostly because of all the stones in the earth, can't plow a field with all those stones, so put them in a place that isn't too far and clears as much land as possible.
Is it because of all the pet semataries?
Hummus? 5:31
No, humus. Decomposed dead stuff in soil, mostly plants, very fine particles.
Why, well Sheep for wool
The real marvel here is somebody got a job with a sociology degree 😮
Now that is 🤣
Ya can't get there from hee-yaa
Natural Formations.