Friday, May 05, 2006

Colonial or earlier?

By Geophile

Here's a wall shown to me by Frank Maykuth. It was interesting to me in particular because I grew up near it and I have a picture taken of me with my family when I was very small, standing within 20 yards of it.

It does not form an enclosure. It's one of those features, though, that I'm not certain about. It's probably just a field clearing wall built near the top of the Kittatinny for some reason, but the section below bears looking at.

To me the stone looks relatively new. The sandstone on the mountain is pink when cut or broken, and you can see pinkishness in the large stone. It does kind of look as if there had been a chamber of some kind here that was filled in, though, which is what Frank suggested.

Thought I'd put these pictures out there in case someone cared to comment.

3 comments :

pwax said...

I find it hard to believe such an elaborate structure would have been for field clearing. A loose pile of rubble would have been a lot easier and have done the same job. Also, I don't know about Penn. fields but that looks like broken rocks, not field rocks. Further, carefully graded/sorted rocks (mostly good sized chunks) do not represent a random sample of sizes which would be the case for field clearing.

Geophile said...

I see what you mean.

I haven't completely gotten over the fact that this existed within a mile or two of where I grew up and bonded with the land. I may have climbed around on this wall as a child. Yet I would have sworn that the area where I grew up had no old stone structures. If you don't have eyes to see it, this stuff just isn't there.

pwax said...

Yeah there is a lot of stuff hiding camouflaged as "stone wall" which people automatically ignore.