I was recently asked what I knew about stone walls, and why so many stone walls are in the woods. It was in the early 1800s when Merino sheep were first imported from Spain to Weathersfield, Vt. Merino sheep were well suited for Vermont’s cold climate, and they produced more and better wool.
It didn’t take Merino long to multiply in number. Every farmer wanted them. As a result, forests had to be cleared for sheep pastures. Many old photos of Vermont show complete hillsides void of any trees. Today, the forests have reclaimed the fields, so now the stone walls are in the woods.
The stone walls could also be used in deeds, which was much better than “the old maple tree 16 rods north.” The old maple tree is long gone.
The below history is from one of my favorite Vermont books, “A Book of Country Things.” In it you will find an excellent description of a stoneboat, and how to build stone walls.
Dad had a junk 1957 Chrysler in his upper field. He had a John Deere 330 tractor, and needed a stoneboat to move rock and firewood. The ‘57 Chrysler’s hood was curved in the front. We removed the hood, turned it upside down, and mounted two large eye bolts on the front to hook chains to. The tractor would haul the load where we wanted it. It worked very well.
Stoneboat
“A stoneboat is merely a large-planked toboggan, except the front end is not turned up so high. The planks was sawed special, nosed up at the end so that the front would run three inches or so from the ground. At the sawmill the planks was sawed straight to a certain point, and then put on the carriage at a diagonal and sawed the rest of the way so the nose turned up.
“The stone walls both fenced in the fields and cleared them out. In preparation for the wall they would plow the loam where the wall was going, and shovel it out more or less to the subsoil. Then they would draw the stoneboat along beside the trench, and roll the big ones in for foundation stones. Quite often they would wall off a ten acre lot, forty rods one way and forty rods the other. Sometimes it was only haphazard.
“After Gramp had rolled the big stones off into the ditch, and set them to suit him, he would draw the boat beside of it. As fast as the boat came along he would take off the small stones a man could pick up, and he’d place them right on the wall, and build it straight ahead just as easy as you please. He worked so fast you might have thought he was just throwing them in at random, yet when he got through, the wall was as solid as if it was one rock.
“I can lay a dry wall of selected stones – flat ones picked out with the right size and shape – the same as I can lay up a well; I’ll talk about that later. But I could never master the art of laying a fieldstone wall. Gramp done it for a lifetime, and I suppose I never had a chance to get the practice. The instructions he give me for laying stone was to make each stone touch as many other stones as possible. A wall was double-faced – that is, it was straight up and down on each side, making practically two rows of stones. The stones must lean in so that they would bear against each other in the center, and the odd-shaped stones that wouldn’t lay, what they called rubble, was filled in to complete the center.
“If the wall was to be real fancy, and they had the stones to do with, the flat or semi-flat ones was put on top, and called capstones. They would go clear across the wall from side to side. Those walls will stay up much longer than the ordinary throwed-up wall. When they come down, it is usually because somebody pulls them down to get the stone; digging up stone is too much trouble for people nowadays.”
This week’s old saying: “I ain’t land greedy. All I want is what abuts mine.”