Retaining Walls (and a Woodbridge CT mention)

    The sentence in bold, italicized letters - also in parentheses - is my own editorial addition. -Tim

“To know New England well, one must know its stone walls,” claims Robert M. Thorson, author of the definitive history Stone by Stone (2002).”

  “According to Thorson, New England’s soil wasn’t rocky enough to support the building of stone walls before the arrival of colonists, who clear-cut the land.  That exposure, coinciding with a period of colder, drier winters in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, caused the ground to freeze to a greater depth. Conditions “worked together to accelerate the heaving of stones from the soil,” Thorson writes. Combine those circumstances with a dearth of wood for fencing—since forests had been cleared for farms and fuel—and the stone wall was born…”

   (Thorson believes, without evidence other than folklore about Yankee Exceptionalism, that:)

  "Most of our stone walls were built between the American Revolution and the advent of the railroad, when settlers moved from the coast into the rocky uplands and property ideals shifted from the communal to the private, Thorson explains. However, some stone walls in southern Connecticut date to the colonial era. Early on, Thorson says, farmers simply rolled stones into piles in the middle of their fields…The strongest kind, “disposal walls,” were constructed of two parallel walls with stone fill between them. Then there were “walking walls” with “broad capstones… laid flat, like a sidewalk,” Thorson writes."

“English-style” is the way one Woodbridge resident describes that same type of wall. I meet him one icy afternoon while I’m taking photographs and he’s walking with his dog. He rebuilt his own wall, he tells me, from the tumbledown remnants lining his small stretch of Sperry Road. He points east toward the Glen Lake reservoir, just over the rise. When the water is low, he says, old stone walls can be seen in the flooded valley.

“Left untended, every wall will come apart,” Thorson tells us. Some are even plundered, with or without landowners’ permission, to be sold at rates around $200 per ton, according to an Internet search. While Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island have protected their stone walls with legislation, Connecticut hasn’t, though they “may be protected under historic preservation laws,” the General Assembly’s website says.

Facts may help us get to know the old walls, as Thorson insists we should. But perhaps the best way is to bundle up and walk into the woods. Rounded and flat, bramble-covered and exposed, green with moss or white with snow, you can find them there, no longer keeping cows from corn or neighbors from one another. It seems we may love them more than those who built them ever did, which makes you wonder: What casual constructions of ours will our descendants value?

Written by Kathy Leonard Czepiel. Photographed by Dan Mims. Image features a fallen tree meeting a stone wall along Route 69. This story was originally published on March 9, 2018.

https://dailynutmeg.com/2022/03/02/retaining-stone-walls-redux2/