The Mystery of New England's Stone Walls (WEIRD ORIGIN STORY)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ก.ย. 2024
- If you want to hear the @VermontPublic podcast from Brave Little State about the origin of Stone Walls and Rock Walls in New England, go here: bit.ly/3HPfbaX
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Almost 100 years ago my father cleared rocks from fields building stone walls. His father aalso had a bluestone quary with the stones going to cities for sidewalks. When he had to leave farming due to a back injury and they built a ranch house he still built a stone wall behind the house to hold back the bank behind the house. My husband was facinated and dad told him how to build a laid stone wall. 8 years later my husband built his first wall. Within 12 years he was building laid walls for artist, lawyers and doctors. it is a lost art.
Ps...he wound up repairing several old stone walls on farms...
@@marjoriejohnson6535 In Hawaii, there are Tongans who build rock walls from the volcanic rock fields that range for miles and miles, in the vast Hawaiian desert that exist on the Big Island. It was a source of amazement for me.
ONe thing for the blue stone walls, make sure there are little chips to leave what is below solid. I have seen various blue stone walls here in NE PA and you can tell the ones put in by someone that knows what they are doing. Now the walls around fields, they are there just to be a place to put the stones. I built a deer stand with a base of 7 ft high and square of blue stone walls, with a door, then on top a 10x10 platform that is enclosed. For the Flint lock season after Christmas I have stayed in that thing for a few days. (pop out a window, put the insert in and fire up a portable wood stove and it is nice and toasty to hunt and sleep in.
@@Kelikaku the same here on Maui! ❤❤❤
What a wonderful comment! Thank you.
From the UK. I remember as a child watching my Father build stone walls in the farm fields. Fascinating to watch him do it. Like assembling a huge jigsaw puzzle and some are still standing some 50+ years later. Surprisingly strong structures.
The ones here in the NE US were probably built mid 1700's to mid 1800's, and maintained by the farmers into modern times. A lot of people left farming after WW2 it seems like, and abandoned the farms. Then the trees started growing through them and groundhogs burrowing under them. Dry stacked and well made, that even the totally neglected for 100+ years ones can still be spotted in sections in the woods in the winter.
@@canislatrans8285 yeah in the UK some of our drystone walls date back literally thousands of years.
@@canislatrans8285 I lived in a village here in the Lake district part of the UK that has a pre Christian fertility stone built into one of the walls called, The Priapus stone. Has the holes still in it where the women would stick their fingers hoping to become fertile.
@@canislatrans8285 modern walls then! Sorry my house dates back to 1400s and the field stone walls are probably much older.
@@xhogun8578 oh yeah, def! If I want to feel old history here, I have to find an old stone arrowhead or ax head. Or a giant oyster midden.
We got those stone walls all over Denmark as well. Every winter the frost make some of the buried rocks surface, so the farmers are still collecting stones every year. Mind you, where I come from, the soil has been used for farming for more than a thousand years, and farmers have collected stones during all this time, but nevertheless there are still new stones coming out of the ground every year. You would think that at some point all the rocks have been collected, but probably not.
These walls are even marked on topographical military maps, as I was taught when I was a boy scout, while learning to find my way around in the middle of the night, only with the help of a compass and a map. Cheers from Denmark
And now the old stone walls are great habitats for birds, critters and bugs. Especially the old trees that grows on them
Soon EU laws will forbid farming so no rock problems anymore!
@@puddintame7794 "Mister EU, do not worry, I am not farming, I am Spring quarrying rocks."
I always wondered why a field didn’t run out of rocks after being farmed for a few hundred years, how reassuring that fields farmed for 10 times as long can still produce stones ! 🤣😄
I got to see my great granddad’s farm in Western Norway and was amazed at the amount of dang rock in their fields. I now know why they thought the Planet Hoth known as Minnesota was so desirable of a destination. You don’t find that kind of stuff at that quantity in the prairies.
My father shared his Irish heritage with his 6 kids regarding stones and fields.
While he would drive his yard tractor pulling a cart us kids would follow picking up rocks from our 2 acres. Brings back the most non fond memories of childhood 😅
My granddad was a stone mason in Leicestershire UK, and he also worked on dry stone walls. Apparently some are hundreds, if not thousands of years old, and are held together by friction, gravity and skill.
Yup up in Scotland there is an entire sunken settlement called Skara Brae built from dry stone, it's about 5000 years old. It's absolutely breath-taking and a testament to the skills of those who built it as their home. Im from the UK (north west England) on borders of two areas where our dry stone walls are built of sandstone, other area's used slate or limestone or even boulders, some are built geometric and neat and other styles are more natural looking. The dry stone is everywhere here even in modern cities as well as rural area's. Our dry stone builders are wonderfully talented people and help keep our heritage alive in this ole world of ours.
those stone walls weren't just piles of rocks. They were carefully constructed without mortar and lasted for all those years in spite of people and animals climbing over them and plants growing in them. Some of the rocks were extremely large and would have taken team work to put in place. The trees that grew near them ended up providing windbreaks and shelter for smaller wildlife. Those old maple trees truly were huge. I remember them on my grandparents farm. Us kids could sit inside one hollowed out tree stump. The beautiful huge maple trees lining the road to grandma's house were cut down in order to widen the road.
Families were a lot bigger in those days living many generations on a farm. So enough hands to build the walls. And better don't have trees close to the road. They killed more than one when crossing the road. The tree always wins.
These rocks remind me of the Roman Wall in the North of England, built by the Romans to protect themselves from the hordes of ancient Celts that threatened them. I visited that wall when I went on a bicycle trip through England, it's still there and it is an impressive work of ancient architecture.
@@Kelikaku
Most of Hadrian’s Wall stones were quarried so that they all had more or less the same size to speed up construction.
Never occurred to me before that "team" work could mean horse teams. It sure;y did for those great walls.
@@chrisenglund9269 There is certain type horse drawn sled that is called a "rock boat" now days mainly used to train horses with.
I grew up in New England and it was not unusual to find random rock walls walking around in the middle of nowhere.
And now you know that there was a field once. So sometime it was near a dwelling.
Also grew up in New England. We had woods and hiking paths behind our street full of random rock walls. So much fun to make into snow forts as a kid!
That's really strange. I have never seen the rock walls in England do that.
New England was nearly all clear cut for sheep in the 1800s. When the industry fell, the trees grew back. The stone walls stayed in place of course.
Can't say I've ever encountered a walking rock wall before. Are the rocks particularly lively there or are the drinks just extra strong?
Here in Scotland you see these walls lining...practically every farm where I live, they're all made up from countless fieldstone, the fields that have been plowed for 200+ years STILL produce them, you still find them in the soil. Every year around main sowing season you'll see farmers pile up 3-4 foot tall piles of fieldstones. It's crazy to think how many are in the ground & how often they were used as a building resource for homes, walls, ovens, sheds.
Tom Wessels wrote a book I think you would enjoy. It explains the rock walls and other heritage indicators found in New England forests. The title is “Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England”.
Came to the comments to recommend that book! Also, Tom Wessels did a TH-cam version of the book, in the forest of course. The channel is called @NewEnglandForests
Thanks to the two of you for the lead about that info! Much appreciated! 😊
THIS video was informative also, and much appreciated!
I'm a stinky old truck driver who sees those walls all over the northeast, and I've always been interested in the what when and how.
Morgan, coming from an instructor, you have a gift for teaching! You're a very confident and knowledgeable speaker, thank you for the educational break from most of the influencer garbage on TH-cam these days ❤
Yorkshire has dry stone walls everywhere. We also have lots of sheep. Swaledales are a very common breed. Whilst I have seen lambs escape through wire fences more than once and rescued a couple, escapees from well maintained high drystone walls is negligible. Plus, maintained drystone walls don't rot like wood or disintegrate like plastic.
The walls also provide a place for the livestock to shelter from the elements if they want.
As someone with sheep and drystone walls in Yorkshire, I'd say that's not even remotely true. 🤷♂️
@@northernnaysayer1240 Well I'vve often observed them doing just that in the Scottish uplands.
@@northernnaysayer1240 The only sheep I've ever seen get over a drystone wall were Herdwick twins who used a stone stile in Langdale. Cue mother ewe sounding distraught and failing to do the same.
Yes, a proper drystone wall that's about chest high will definitely contain sheep. I saw many drystone-walled sheep pastures when I lived in the UK. They do need to be maintained, but it takes decades of neglect before they look like Morgan's walls.
This was a super cool history lesson! It’s awesome that you decided to let the walls return to the earth.
Love the “let nature do its thing” mentality ❤
Thanks Morgan for the great lesson on Vermont rock walls. What a storyteller you are!
Agreed
We have rock walls in Kansas. To clear fields of rocks. The gov. paid the farmer to build the walls they had to be just so tall and thick. A way for farmers to make extra money during the depression.
This was "THE" story about GOLDSHAW FARM. So interesting and easily interpreted. Thx Morgan.
Thanks for the content Morgan., you’re a great storyteller. Would love to see more of the pigs please. Love from Inglaterra
I gotta admit, your videos are the ones I'm the most exited about. Never though this would happen when I randomly got the video about Abby's chastity belt on my recommendations 😂
I’m a rock lover. This was a fascinating episode! Thank you Morgan!
"Stone Boat". Horse drawn contrivances that were dragged across "Pasture" or "Farmland" every spring. Frost in winter pushes rocks upwards. In order to plow, you gotta take the stones away in the spring. Back and forth across the land. Then, when folks got to the Ohio River valley, they sent letters home and said "Leave the stone boats there and come to Ohio, the topsoil is forty feet deep." That's why there are abandoned farms and stone walls all over New England.
Interesting. I grew up in Ohio in former cornfield neighborhood. I'm now in CO where the suburbs have to buy topsoil since it all blows away to KS.
Morgan, you have a gift for splainin' stuff. It comes out fast and fascinating! There are stone fences out west here, too, built by cattle ranchers on land with plenty of rocks. They were especially handy in areas with a lot of volcanic rock, which is extremely rough and almost sticks together. There are (or were) miles and miles of them. Now, many have fallen apart, but you can still see them from Google Earth if you know where to look, or even just driving around. Because the landscape is so sparse and dry where they were built, they are easier to spot. Anyway, thanks for the TED talk on stone fences!
There are even still ruts from the Oregon trail visible in some areas!
Im enjoying your info stories and I appreciate you and ur editor doing yalls best to keep it from being controversial. It allows me to listen to the whole story and reflect on the information.
You take amazing care of the land and the wildlife
I never thought about doing my part in helping wildlife and nature grow until I found you a few years ago. I learn more and more from you, how to take care of the nature around us
I love how you enjoy researching, and I appreciate that you share your findings with us....❤
This was Well Done, another interesting tale from Gold Shaw Farm. I was thinking a lot of this type of fence line was built because the British and European's built a good deal of these stone walls in their homeland. Really enjoyed listening in, thank you Morgan.
With the new fences paralleling the stone wall, you're building a wild life corridor between the two that will become home to many different types of wildlife. I can remember hunter in the Midwest complaining that farmers removing all the fencing to make larger and larger fields were killing the habitats of these game birds, rabbits, foxes and the likes. I know you have plenty of habitat for wildlife, but I'm smiling thinking of this being done back home. As a kid, walking the fences, scaring up game. I was never a hunter, not that anything is wrong with it, just not me. Your channel is soothing nostalgic of a simpler era of my life. Thank you.
This will be the most interesting thing I will have the good fortune to stumble across today. I love listening and learning from smart people who know how to work the land and respect the history. It's always a mind opening experience for me.
BTW - loved the Floyd clip as well as the "indelible" bit. Awesome dude! Subscribed. :)
I was just able to finish your uncomfortable questions video, and I know Allison isn't a fan of being on camera, but I'd love to see a video about ways you've worked together to overcome some of the challenges you two face with your ADHD. As the partner of somebody with ADHD I find that we are also struggling with some of the same things you've mentioned. Enjoy those farm doggies for me!
Life-long New Englander. I have always loved the old stone walls that dot the country roads here. A great reminder of what used to be, how we are in a constant ebb and flow of shaping the land in one way, and Mother Nature taking her turn to take back what we have done.
A wonderful video, Morgan. Thank you so much! And it sounds as though, although some of the techniques and materials might differ, you're farming pretty much as good farmers always have--in a way that gives you the infrastructure you need and 'leaves the farm in good shape." Thanks again.
I grew up in Connecticut and was taken to a lot of museums when I was younger especially the Pequeot Museum and I always took this knowledge for granted and recently took my partner who didn’t know anything about this! Thanks for making this vid and spreading this knowledge even further!
When i traveled to Ireland years ago, i was struck by the landscape under the plane, green fields with rock walls in random connected patterns, like you showed in your narrative. It was clear the rock walls were old and why they were there. It was fun to hear your Vermont history on this topic.
One point in the Brave Little State story you didn't mention is that the stones were often piled along an existing fence line. The wooden post/rails or a "zig zag" (rails without posts) are long gone but the stones remain. Additionally, I doubt many of the stone walls in New England were laid carefully to form a true barrier to keep animals in as the ones in Ireland/Scotland/England are. At least the ones I've seen, including a few on my Vermont property, are made of random shaped stones, generally without flat surfaces, of all sizes and shapes as are the ones in your walls. They may have been piled up in a line but it is the width of the line of stones that held the height, not careful dry stone wall construction. That is a craft and an art. Piling the spring "crop" (Vermont's biggest non money making agricultural product) on top of a well crafted stone wall would not work out well.
Thanks for the interesting history lesson! I recall seeing the old rock walls in New England forests when I was a kid visiting my grandparents. I had never made the association with glacial moraines. As a note - my mother was a Shaw in a neighboring New England state. And just in case there might be some connection - no, we don't want our rocks back!
New England helicopter pilot here... All of New England is covered in stone walls, more than the average person might guess because a lot of land that was formerly fields has re-forested, with the stone walls much more difficult to see. But when we fly, we see this amazing network of walls. And it's not just Vermont... Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, etc. The amount of labor that went into building all those walls is hard to quantify. And like others have said, when you clear your field, you're never done, because winter will bring up a fresh crop of rocks each year.
When I visit states down south, I love how, when you want to dig a hole, you just grab a shovel and dig. Here in New England you better also have a pick and a sledge hammer, because you're going to have to deal with a bunch of boulders as you dig. It's exhausting!!!
If you've ever read Stephen King's IT, there is a wonderful interlude where one of the characters describes a year on his family farm in Maine. Every spring started with the "rock harvest" where they'd go through the fields and remove rocks large enough to break the farm implements. The character asked his father why there were more rocks every spring when they always removed them. The father didn't have an answer. Now we know!
One of your best videos Morgan. Very interesting info, great story teller.👍👏👏
the music is too loude in the beginning. beside that super video!
I share Sponge Bob's feeling about stones. Love them.
They do not till the hay fields in our little patch of Vermont but they cut the hay twice a year most years for haying. I do find stones when I dig trenches and ponds too so the frost heave does have some supply farther down. Will be using ours mainly for landscaping.
Love them stones (and Brave Little State, another good one is Happy Vermont)
Drystone walls are a very British thing but different regions have different styles, and they tend to be more prevalent in the North than the South. There’s a particular skill to building them, and having tried to repair a damaged one, it’s not as simple as it looks!
Love those stone walls. A few still left here in Nova Scotia.
Just started the video, but a quick note: That music was completely drowning out your voice in the first 30seconds. Far, far too loud. :3
Thanks for this! I just stumbled upon your channel, and being a Vermonter myself (pretty much in the centre of GMNF), I really appreciated your discussion of stone walls/fences. As a friend from SoCal likes to say, you can always spot a Vermonter by their fascination with piles of rocks. Cheers!
I loved watching the bbc farm series and what I loved about it was the creation of hedge rows and how they used living trees and bushes to not only create a barrier but also to provide fresh fruits and nuts, as well as a way to dispose of rocks and branches, leaves, etc that would other wise be scattered around the farms. This then Decomposes and is able to fertilise the living hedge rows too. Win win situation.
Love your content. I love to see more pig chores and updates. They grow so fast.
I've noticed lately that the videos with songs at the start, often have them too loud compared to your talking. Maybe mix it a bit lower? :D
Long time viewer, very new New Englander. Back in the rockies where I grew up rock walls were only seen around cemeteries or some times churches. The rock walls here in Vermont are fascinating
45 years ago I took on my Aunt's farm. She was in her 70's. She showed me how clearing brush was used to augment the fences. It makes a formidable fence when done right. It also can be used to encourage boys to want to get up to catch the bus. School is easier than making a brush fence.
I would point out too, herd animals tend to follow straight walls naturally. There was an entire ancient hunting technique that relied on it where you could channel herds by putting gradually sloping up rock walls up to a point where they would become trapped. It isn't a guarantee or anything, just a tendency. But these rockwalls would also help keep animals in naturally.
You can even see it today driving past farms. How often do you see animals in the middle of the field versus bunched up in a corner. Nowadays, through time to build and technology, we have the ability to keep even the most stubborn goat inside a defined area. But how much more common is it to see the animals grouped alongside a line than just openly grazing, even on massive fields.
These stone walls likely helped keep animals in, even starting off simply as the easy pile line you could tow a plow towards easily. As the effect on animals was noticed, people likely began expanding them hoping for both an easy place to put the newly emerging rocks and an actual barrier to keep animals in or out of certain areas
In the 1800s some government agency (I think it was the department of agriculture) did a land survey of New England, and they found something absurd like 180,000 miles of stonewalls. With a little math it became abundantly clear that it is impossible to attribute that amount of work to a 200 year period of colonization.
The best moment was when you looked up a word. I loved that. Great video! Thanks!
Sorry I had to leave for a second, we had a small earthquake in So Cal and just as I clicked on your video. Apparently you know how to shake things up Morgan. I am fine it was a tiny one. Okay back to the show.😘
Oh word? I'm in socal too but it must've been too weak to feel it here
Whoa! That's scary! Be safe! Glad to hear it was a tiny one.
@@kirani111 I am in Woodland Hills on the couch kicking back and it was teeny tiny. I did not even get up. Just left the site to see where it was. So far don't know.
@@lydias2012 oh cool! I'm in Burbank. Nothing like a little earth shake to wake you up 😂
@@kirani111 It was a 3.5 it was by the coast in Topagna. It was one of those did a big truck drive by?No I am pretty sure that was a quake.
Always love to see Harvey's Mountain and Roy's Mountain in the background...
I enjoy supporting all of your videos but for some reason these farm story type videos don’t excite me at first. By the end of them though I LOVE them and the feeling of learning something completely new. Really creative and I’m guessing its going to be drawing a lot of folks in. Seriously good job Morgan. You never let us down.
Lordy, the work! The sheer brutal hard work of shifting that amount of stones, only to have more come through after every winter. It was a hard life.
I live in NE. One of my favorite things while walking in the woods is coming across these rock walls.
I thought Nebraska is all corn
@@bobby_greene Hahaha. Sorry New England.
I’m a qualified certificated dry stone Waller here in UK .
The only people having new walls built are people with plenty of money.
Some existing walls are maintained but very few farm walls are built.
25 years ago I taught people to build the walls the farmers would collect all the stones and pile them where they needed the next wall when enough stones were collected we would build the wall.
Thanks for making this. When I moved to Connecticut more than 40 years ago I wondered many of the same things. It seemed obvious the stone walls would not contain sheep. Then I learned they would build wooden fences on top of the stone walls. This would get the fence posts out of the ground. They wouldn't rot so quickly, requiring replacement. Else your farm could only grow so big. If your farm was too large, you would spend more time replacing fence posts and no more time to farm.
Also at "The Old Newgate Copper Mine and Prison" I learned they would let prisoners out on good behavior to build stone walls for farmers. It was said a "good man" could build 12 feet of stone wall in a day. That's work!
You are looking good, getting fitter I assume. Hope you are feeling well! Really glad that you share the stories, animals, and plans. Thanks for doing this, the videos always make my day. Greetings from The Netherlands.
It's Spring again! Time for the stone harvest! New England's stone walls are so cool. Thanks, Morgan!
Rocks in fields are also a problem Here in the upper Midwest (Southern Minnesota and northern Iowa) Instead of walls there are piles of glacial till rocks at the corners of fields. Every so often the farmer would hire high school boys to walk a field accompanied by a tractor and a flat-bed trailer to pick up rocks.
"the wall-building types". Love it!
Just south of Athol, Massachusetts on Highway 32 is the Fisher Museum at Harvard Forest and it has a fantastic exhibit on exactly this stuff. Specifically, they have a collection of 23 dioramas that portray a history of the central New England landscape from about 1700 onward showing the changes that settlers and their new habits and practices made to the land. The museum is part of a larger facility that is an old former farm that is now a Harvard University research and training forest and it's open to the public. There are outdoor trails and exhibits and since it is a former farm they actually have preserved examples of fields in various states so you can see the walls themselves and how the fields were defined by them and how these would have changed over the centuries until in places the walls and fields have been completely retaken by the forest.
For people who maybe don't get to access old New England farms everyday it is a great place to experience all of this.
I love all the stone walls around New England. They formed a crucial part of a lot of the games I invented and played when young. I am also glad that I didn't have to be one of the people who pulled them out of the ground and hauled them about. It never surprised me that farmers were glad to leave New England for land further west that wasn't just rocks with a bit of dirt in between.
The mix of types is also fantastic. I recall the rocky beaches of Narragansett Bay. There were beautiful huge boulders of white quartz and grey granites, and all sorts.
The alternate horrors and blessing of living on the terminal moraine of a huge ice sheet.
My dad was stationed in the Azores in the mid 1960's and he said that when farmers wanted to move cattle from one field to another, they took down part of their stone wall then put it back up after the cattle was moved.
I helped build part of a drystone wall it takes a lot of time, i consider them like a puzzle, you have to make sure it's sturdy and won't fall, fitting pieces together, i really enjoyed this ♥
Being from Massachusetts, I never thought about all the stone walls I've seen
So cool I live in CT and on my drive down to the shore there were so many stone walls!! They are so unique and beautiful
This was fascinating! I think stone walls are actually pretty. I love nature! It is always interesting to learn about the history of your farm.
That big tree will be homes for animals that you haven’t touched. Love the geology, geography and history you have given us. I think those fence posts are excellent. I’m used to heavy steel ones. Thank you. May you please take care and stay safe. Louisa. 👏👏👏❤❤❤🤩🤩🤩
Glad you mentioned frost heaves. NE is known for "growing" rocks.
LOVE the Letterkenny Clip - Well played.
I enjoyed your video and you are mostly correct but there is more!
As a New Englander I have learned a few things. The rock walls were used to keep animals corralled, in a sense. Maybe not sheep, but cows and such would not bother hopping the rock barrier, except for the occasional errant bovine or equine, as long as there was sufficient food to graze on they remained within.
Yes the soil here is rocky and yes they needed to extract them for farming, so they pushed them to the boundaries of their property. It was mostly for keeping farm animals in, but, over time it became a part of the surveying descriptions for "land patents". Land patents describe the "meets and bounds" of property by describing somewhat permanent fixtures like lakes, streams, rivers, ravines and such. The rock walls became a part of that land description for property boundaries. This is still the lawful means of describing land that is owned through a land patent ( which every property "owner" should learn about!).
In New Hampshire it is illegal to disturb stone walls for that reason, because it disrupts the lawful description of the surveying of such land.
if one can get a land patent, it takes such land out of the local tax purview. Unless you do, the land is owned by the state. Look at your title of deed for "your" property. It lists you as the "tenant"! Thus you do not own the land you think you own: The State claims ownership, you are a renter. Just try and not pay property taxes and you will find out who the landlord is( the STATE). If you get allodial title to your land through a land patent, you own it outright without ANY superior claims!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LOOK IT UP!!!!!
Lived in the UK and took course in building dry stone walls. A real art. Trying to find enough stone where I live in Canada to build a proper one.
We acquired an old farm in Maine where the stone walls were used to support fence posts along its length. Then the rean barbed wire to created the fence to keep their cows in. So the wall was used, indirectly, to fence in animals.
I grew up in Wisconsin, I have known everything you talked about since I was a child, only it was geographically about Wisconsin. Rock walls and (Since there were German immigrants,) 3 foot thick rock building foundations.We celebrated the Kettle Moraine, where the glaciers generally stopped moving south, and dumped what they were "bull dozing" when they started to melt and the glacier "Receded" (They don't really back up, the glaciers just melted at the southern most boundaries, and got shorter as they melted until the air (climate) kept them frozen way up north. At one time Wisconsin was also covered in water so there is much limestone , and some of it has amazing fossils of trilobites and ancient plants.
Minor correction: The glacier weathered the mountains and "smoothed" them as the ice moved across them (this also had the effect of the glacier picking up lots of rocks). The mountains long pre-existed the glacier. The White Mountains portion of the Appalachians formed roughly 124-100 million years ago. They were formed by a hot spot according to Google. The rest of the Appalachians were formed by continent collusion about 500-300 million years ago.
Basically, the only reason the White Mountains are considered part of the Appalachians is because of where they're located. They technically aren't related to the rest of the mountain range.
We have something similar here in Alberta. The rocks are simple dumped from the field along the old fence line, not because the farmers were trying to create a dry stone wall, but simply to get the rocks off the field so thet did not break the field equipment. These rocks were not moved by any machinery but moved on stone boats (heavy wooden sledges) to the edge of the field. I am almost 60 and when I was young I helped my Dad pick rocks with the stone boat behind our little tractor. In some fields you may find a copse of trees growing in a pile of rocks, the piles are generally put there for convenience, not anything structural. I have scavanged many a rock pile to create gardens and such.
I'm not a farmer, but hard to believe those fence posts will last in Vermont winters. That said material science can be surprising. After seeing the damage that deer do to @JustaFewAcresFarm fencing I'd be worried about some deer charging through the fence and causing the posts to snapping off in the cold. With the way wires are run through the actual post I could see replacing single posts in the middle of a line being a pain. Hopefully they are tougher in person then they look on camera.
Informative video. Being from New Hampshire, I was taught that history at a young age, and it was the first time I realized most of the land used to be clear. My mind was totally blown, as I just couldn't imagine this land without forest. I've even been told it is illegal to alter old stone walls. Not sure if that is true, but you might want to check if you do decide to remove or add to your stone wall.
Not gonna lie. I watched an older video from maybe a year ago. The total difference I’m seeing in you is crazy. I hope you’re feeling as great as you’re lookin man.
I can imagine, a 100 or 200 years from now, somebody growing something where the orchard is and being amazed at how wonderful the soil is - then finding these videos through what ever way back machine available and thinking they struck gold a second time !
This video rocked. Thanks for making it.
I learned a ton of new things today! Thanks for another great vid!
I'm a dry stone waller in the north of (old) England. Always fascinated that New England also has them. I'm currently rebuilding walls on my brother's farm that are between 220 years and 350 years old so they can last a long, long time. We know the age of many of the walls as they only appeared after the local enclosure act (1796 in this case) but others are a bit of a guess and figuring them out from old documents rather than maps. Sometimes you find clues such as old bottles that the original builders left in the wall.
The walls are a mixture of stones picked from the fields after ploughing and quarried stone - there are lots of small "quarries" dotted around the farm where they took an outcrop of rock and dug away at it. It takes a bit of "getting your eye in" to pick them out.
Depending on height of wall, etc., etc. I'd expect to do around 2-3 metres of walling per day (when I was a lot younger that would have been 3-4m per day) so you can see how much work and time they took.
The trick to stopping sheep jumping walls is to have the top stones slightly overhang the rest of the wall. Doing that means a wall only has to be about shoulder height to be effective.
Second/third the comments about Tom Wessels' channel, he knows his stuff
Loved the history lesson. Rock walls are so beautiful. Your land is beautiful and you cherish and respect it.
I was trained to and have built several stone walls along the Yorkshire coast.Interesting to see how our common ancestors brought this skill to North America.
that was the most refreshing video I've seen in a long time!
Growing up on a wheat farm in northern Montana in the 1950"s, I can confirm that picking rocks from the fields was an annual event. It was done by walking the fields beside a tractor and trailer. There was no intention of using them for anything, so they ended up in large piles at the end of the strips. It was drudgery, but finding an occasional arrow head, teepee ring, or fossil organism made the work lighter.
Our people lived in that area before contact, we L'nu were great Stoneworkers. Making walls , workshops , storage, canals and more .
I made a few stone walls on my farm “by accident”… same story, just getting them out of the way and a few years later, it looks like they’ve been there forever.
Wonderfully done...thanks for the interesting history lesson.
this was such a good video, great work!
I grew up close to the Okotoks Erratic, and it was super fun to climb all over.
I really like all the information and how it’s shown
That’s pretty cool history about your land. Great way to manage your land. Stay awesome!!! 🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸
These walls are very common in the UK in upland areas. Made from stone gathered up from adjacent fields as part of the original land clearance to make them cultivatable. Lots of work but free materials and lasts forever.
A definite skill needed.
Love New England. Thanks.
Reminds me of a poem by Robert Frost about 2 farmers doing their yearly rock wall maintenance.
Thanks for the informative podcast! At 13:41 could you please add the My Buddy Alfred intro? You mentioned Alfred and I was waiting for the song! LOL