The True History of the Stone Walls of New England - The Atlantic

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” Robert Frost wrote in the famous opening line of his 1914 poem “Mending Wall.” That something sends the “frozen-ground-swell” of winter that “spills the upper boulders in the sun,” leaving Frost and his New Hampshire neighbor the springtime duty of picking up and replacing the rocks. Plenty of things want to get a wall down—above all, gravity—but, I have found, there is a countervailing force: Something there is that does love a wall.<br>People love walls, especially the weather-grizzled, lichen-blotched stone walls that crisscross the woods, hills, fields, and gardens of New England. I am one of them.<br>By the time Frost was composing those verses, on the eve of the First World War, many of the wall builders were gone, having abandoned the depleted soil of New England. Fewer hands were mending stacked-stone boundary markers and livestock fences, which were disappearing back into the forest. And yet, today, we live with a solid remnant of that astonishing feat of human labor—the quarter-million miles of stone walls that an 1871 survey measured in the American Northeast. Where those walls still stand, we cherish them as charismatic markers of the Yankee landscape. Contoured lines of stacked stones running across fields help organize the vista. Their geometry implies a reassuring sense of something permanent—and permanently right—about a deeply American scene, along with white clapboard houses, red barns, rolling hills, goldenrod.<br>I first became properly acquainted with stone walls after my wife inherited her parents’ Vermont home, in 2010. A ramshackle line of piled rocks ran between the garden and the meadow. One section had gotten pulled aside and left in a heap, and there the stones had lain for several decades, slowly gathering humus and turning into something resembling a small burial mound—until I came along and decided to disinter the stuff and pile it back up. My work was rudimentary, but I was enraptured.<br>Read: How hobbies infiltrated American life<br>Other modest efforts followed, and then came the coronavirus pandemic. In need of something to counteract the alienation of desk-bound remote work, I turned to the collapsed and spreading 70-foot vestige of a wall that bounded the beginning of the meadow. I attended a day course at the Stone Trust, an educational foundation in southern Vermont, where I learned the principles of building to a line, “battening” (the English style of tapering a wall inward toward its apex), and reinforcing with through-stones and copestones; my building became more proficient.<br>Bit by bit—which is the way with walls—my interest and knowledge deepened until what had begun as recreation morphed into a hobby job, mending other people’s walls. Eventually, I realized not only that I liked building walls, but also that I could scratch a subsistence living at it. In what probably struck friends and family as an act of lunacy, I quit my day job as an editor at this magazine and became a part-time waller.<br>Kelly Burgess for The Atlantic<br>The “sheep creep” allowed smaller animals, such as nursing lambs, to pass through the wall.

Kelly Burgess for The Atlantic<br>Kelly Burgess for The Atlantic

Just about everyone seems to like seeing stone walls, perhaps without looking at them quite as avidly as I do. My wife teases me when she catches me at it. As we drive around, she sees rural panorama; I’m examining the way a wall has been chinked and capped. Given the chance, I want to examine the particular construction, grasp the techniques of laying and locking stones together, try to divine the original waller’s signature. It’s not that anyone ever put their name to this work, but I’ve learned to see characteristic differences in how they tackled the subtle variance in the rocks that came to hand. If you get hold of a geological map, you’ll see that the underlying strata can change from town to town, changing, in turn, how you might make a wall stay up. Here, all schist and slate; there, all gneiss and feldspar. Never forgetting the occasional “glacial erratic,” a random massive boulder stranded by the retreating ice some 12,000 years ago and incorporated into a wall—because what else are you going to do with it? The way I love a wall is, in other words, to want to take it apart and put it back together.<br>In his paean to manual trades, Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford quotes the ancient Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, who believed that “it is by having hands that man is the most intelligent of animals.” Crawford, who swapped one career running a D.C. think tank for another as a motorcycle mechanic, argues that our postindustrial cleavage between work by hand and work by brain is wholly artificial—destructive, even.<br>His proposition appeals to me in two ways. First, living in the country, one is surrounded by people who make, build, and mend things. I am constantly awed by the brisk...