The chapter explores hard-to-find firsthand material that Allport researched herself. In the materials, Allport discovered that Native Americans, enslaved people, and indentured servants built stone walls in addition to the widely-recognized Yankee farmers. As Allport describes in Sermons in Stone , the colonial settlers employed Native Americans in order to fill debts.
Those debts were sometimes accrued because actions that were once the norm for Native Americans were deemed illegal and punishable by colonial settlers. Colonists only saw a lack of improvements on the land. Sedimentary rocks are formed by the heating of magma in the earth, weathering from wind and water, and breakdown caused by intense pressure from the earth. Sedimentary rocks tend to be rather brittle because of all the weathering they have endured.
Gravel is one of the few sedimentary rocks that are helpful in building a stone wall. Gravel can be placed under a stone wall in a trench to prevent the wall from easily moving or sinking. Once the materials necessary to build a stone wall are in place, the building of the wall can begin. Rocks are placed usually with the largest ones at the bottom and using the method of "one on two and two on one".
This method means putting two smaller rocks in between two larger rocks and vice-versa to stabilize the wall. Throughout the farming centuries in New England, many farmers would find that their farmland would have many stones on it that weren't there previously.
Before a farmer plowed a farm, there were probably few rocks scattered throughout the farm. When a farm is plowed however, it causes layers of soil beneath the surface to push up their rocks from different soil layers to another. This problem was especially evident in New England because of its rocky and stone filled soil.
Many farmers would have to remove the rocks on their farm if they wanted to plow it again, only to find that they would have to repeat the process of removing stones. Many farmers either sold this stone found on their farm or put it into their own stone walls. Throughout the centuries of farming in New England, stone walls played an important role. Stone walls were more than just the mere decoration that they serve today. Stone walls were used as fencing, property lines, and animal pounds.
Most stone walls today are unnecessary as fencing and have become a sign of wealth. Stone walls are an important part of history that should not be overlooked.
Notes [1] Allport, Susan. Sermons in Stone. New York: Norton, 19xx Rocks and Minerals. New York: Golden Press, 6. Stone by Stone. New York: Walker and Company, Raymo Written in Stone. Connecticut: The Globe Pequot Press, Rocks and minerals New York: Golden Press, The Granite Kiss. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs.
The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbour know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance: "Stay where you are until our backs are turned! Oh, just another kind of out-door game, One on a side.
It comes to little more: There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours. Isn't it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.
I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father's saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours.
A New Hampshire stone wall in winter. Photo: Steve Curwood. Made mostly of granite, these walls serve as windows into the geological and cultural history of the region.
I went for a walk through an old farmstead with a stone wall expert to learn more. It's surrounded by stone walls, and we're joined now by Robert Thorson. He's a professor of geology at the University of Connecticut.
Welcome to Living on Earth, Professor. And I thought, well, I'm hired as a landscape archaeologist and a geologist and a scientist to teach. And I thought, I better go get myself a look at stone walls. And so I went to the Natchaug State forest, which is nearby in eastern Connecticut where I was working. And I just started walking a traverse. And I was going up over one after another, and another and another stone walls, and it just struck me that day.
What are these things? Why are they the size they are, the color they are, the mass they are, the continuity they are, the pattern they are THORSON: If you're talking about the abandoned field farm landscape of the 19th and 18th century, then almost entirely, it's the people who own the land and were using money from the land to do things.
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