Fieldstone walls are closely associated with the colonial American landscape. Paintings from the era of the Revolutionary War show them in the background of rural life, or as battlements used by the colonial militia to protect them from British fire. Longfellow made the connection poetically in his chronicle of Paul Revere's ride, in which the minutemen of Lexington and Concord gave the redcoats "ball for ball from behind each and every farmyard wall." The association between stone walls and colonial times is indeed real, especially on the outskirts of ancient towns like Concord, the oldest inland town of the commonwealth, but it is greatly exaggerated. The truth is that thick stone walls were quite rare during the colonial era, especially in the first century and a half of settlement.
Early chronicles, including Captain John Smith's Voyages (1618), William Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation (1620 to 1646), Francis Higginson's New England's Plantation (1630), Thomas Morton's New English Canaan (1632), William Wood's New England Prospect(1634),JohnWinthropsJournal(1630 to 1649), and John Josselyn's Two Voyages to New England (1674) do not mention the presence of stone walls. Nor were they of any real significance in most areas for the next hundred years. Jared Eliot's Essays on Field Husbandry in New England (1748 to 1760), the first treatise on agricultural practices in the British colonies—one that included detailed descriptions of how to enclose land, whether by fencing, ditching, plashing (integrating a mix of wood and hedge), or hedging—contains no mention of stone walls. Similarly, the anonymous American Husbandry (1775) comments extensively on both the purpose and the condition of colonial enclosures, but does not mention fences or walls made of stone.
Early settlements concentrated along the Atlantic coast and major Northeast rivers.
Ironically, one of the first mentions of stone walls in the colonies is from an archaeological context. According to the historian Howard Russell, the failed Sagadahoc colony from 1607 had "left behind Rootes and Garden Hearbes and some old Walls' to be observed by a visitor a decade and a half later."1 Apparently, they were first noticed not for their value as a building accessory, but as physical evidence of earlier human life, in this case the earliest English colonization in the Northeast.
Part of the explanation for the dearth of stone walls early on is cultural—the Pilgrims and the first generation of Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were agriculturists living a somewhat communal lifestyle. Another factor is resource based—wood for fencing was widely available, and not enough stone had yet accumulated on the surface of the soil. Most of the explanation, however, is geological. Successful plantations were established along the coast and its tidewater estuaries, and in river interval lands. These settings, which are distributed sporadically along the coast and large valleys, offered flat, well-drained topography adjacent to navigable rivers, a reliable source of freshwater, and a mantle of loamy soil. This is where the earliest settlements were begun, and where the colonists remained secure until hostilities with the Indians abated a few decades prior to the American Revolution. Hence, for the first century or more of settlement, movements of English settlers into the stone-dotted uplands were often restricted to the fringes of ancient coastal and river towns or to internal lands.
Although private property did exist, the earliest Puritan communities were highly regimented social colonies. The primary identity lay with the group, rather than with the individual, a pattern dating back to medieval times. This approach made good sense in a world where the settlers, clinging to the shore, looked out to see nothing "but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men," in the words of William Bradford, early governor of Plymouth Plantation. Some of the earliest settlers even had timber palisades around their village centers, which, at least psychologically, were not unlike those of European castle walls. From the village's defended center, the common folk swarmed out by day to work their fields, then returned at night, like bees to a hive.
Even without palisades, however, early colonial villages were always tightly knit and centered upon the church, which was both a place of worship as well as the seat of government. (Religious tolerance, particularly the constitutional separation of church and state, did not come for more than a century. How easy it is to forget that separation of church and state—something we take for granted—was an American, rather than a colonial, notion.)
Early village house lots often faced a single town street. They were large enough for a garden, but not for important agricultural work, which took place in communal enclosures where families worked their own plots of arable land. Livestock grazed together in meadows and marshes as part of a single herd, then were enclosed in a community fence at night. Plows and oxen teams were collectively owned and allocated.
Early Colonial Village (1640)
Layout of a colonial village.
The fences of early Puritan settlements were not designed to separate people from one another. They were agricultural devices used to enclose vegetable gardens, to protect cultivated fields from marauding livestock, and to shield domestic animals from the perils of the night forest, a chronic threat to livestock in seventeenth-century New England. The early Puritans experimented with Old World fencing techniques such as ditches and hedges. But nearly all of their successful fences were made of wooden pales; long pieces of wood were driven downward into the earth and spaced closely together, a fencing technique that would later evolve into the white picket fence of today. Saplings, split in half lengthwise, were especially easy to convert into pales, and saplings were abundant in abandoned villages vacated by Indians because of epidemics of European germs, notably smallpox. The fencing off of large tracts of private property, first with wood, then much later with stone, was alien to the seventeenth-century Puritan mind-set. The same was true in parts of Britain at the time, much of which was then largely an unfenced pasture.
The native tribes of New England also played an indirect role in the delay of the appearance of stone walls on the New England landscape. Mohegan, Nipmuck Pequot, Narragansett, Penobscot, Pamasquoddy, and many other tribes had tolerated European—Dutch, British, Swedish—settlements during the first half of the seventeenth century. They even encouraged them when it suited their needs, especially when the settled "whites" formed an alliance against their enemies. The natives sometimes were genuinely helpful, as with the case of Squanto, the Indian who helped the Pilgrims survive their first winters and who was alleged to have been present at the first Thanksgiving feast.
By mid century, however, it had become painfully clear to the Indians that the "palefaces" were here to stay, were becoming more powerful every year, and were even capable of genocide; English colonists attempted to exterminate all of the Pequots on the Connecticut coast in the late 1630s. Concerned for their own survival, a confederacy of formerly unaligned tribes waged a series of raids in 1675 to 1676 that came to be known as King Phillip's War, named after the charismatic leader of the tribes. In a typical encounter, a farmer was ambushed in the fields, the cluster of buildings put under siege and burned, the children killed, the young women carried away, and the livestock slaughtered.
King Phillips War was followed by nearly a century of conflict known as the French and Indian Wars, during which the shifting alliances between Indian tribes became caught up in the distant struggle between France and England for the right to rule North America. Hostilities finally ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1763, when France formally surrendered its claim to eastern Canada. Before that treaty, however, interior New England, especially to the north and west, was a danger zone ruled by tomahawks and flintlock muskets. Some of the most impregnable stone chambers, although originally constructed as storage sites such as root cellars, may instead have become fireproof fortifications against Indian raids.
The effect of native hostilities on New England's stone walls was to promote slow expansion of the original colonial settlements around their edges, rather than the founding of separate new ones, especially in the deep interior, far from the coast. Settlers who might otherwise have struck out to create new colonies in the wilderness instead remained in existing villages, crowded with their relatives, waiting for things to change. The delay caused by Indian hostilities coincided with, and reinforced, the delay caused by the lingering attractiveness of the river interval lands with their productive alluvial soils. Only after supremacy over the Indians and the British became assured, and only after the interval lands became full, would there be a burst of settlement in the wilderness.
The ideological breakdown of the Puritan culture also contributed to the surge. According to John Hart in The Rural landscape, "The original generation or two of Puritans were firm believers in original sin; they knew that they, themselves were wicked, and they assumed that everyone else must be just as sinful as they were." They knew that the community was strongest when everyone was kept "in the village because it was more difficult for people to misbehave when they were living side by side under constant surveillance. Those who lived on isolated farms were much more easily tempted to develop disrespect for authority, to indulge in strong language and stronger drink, and even to go so far as to accept bad weather and poor roads as excuses for failing to attend church on the Sabbath."2
"The New England clergyman wielded virtually sovereign power—an absolute monarch over his congregation," said Walter Blair, Theodore Hornberger, and Steward Randall in The literature of the United States. As the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries progressed, settlers increasingly asked themselves why they should live under repressive, centralized authority when fertile land free of savages lay to the north and west, ripe for the taking. Population growth contributed to the surge as well, along with a shift toward the pasturing of cattle for milk and beef.
Third- and fourth- generation Puritans, especially the young and restless, answered this call with their feet, moving inland from the coast and upward from tidal rivers toward the uninhabited interior where land was readily available. These sons and daughters launched the first great emigration from the ancestral colonies. The original seeds of settlement planted by the English in the coastal lowlands and interval lands had germinated successfully, and were now broadcasting seedling colonies in what had been, only a decade or two earlier, a "howling wilderness." These colonies would, a century later, broadcast another spawning of colonies to the American West.
While settlers were emigrating to the uplands of the New England Plateau, there were sweeping changes in land-use settlement patterns. Taverns began to replace churches as civic centers of influence. Towns were no longer laid out as islands in an otherwise unoccupied landscape, each a tight-knit community of like-minded souls. Instead, larger farms began to sprawl outward, away from established villages and along primitive roads. Individualism, which had always been an element, even in Puritan settlements, was on the rise.
Although some of the best arable land was still worked in common, especially by extended families, starting in the late 1600s farms were becoming independently owned and operated. Farmers became self-reliant in most things—defense, ownership, food, education, and technology—coming together primarily for spiritual reasons. This emigration to the inland plateau was American, rather than colonial in style, because it emphasized individual liberty rather than group cohesion, and self-stifficiency rather than export. From such inland farms would come the minutemen, whose values paved the way for American independence.
The shift from communal to individual land ownership and from densely populated villages to more isolated farms was a critical step in the eventual spread of stone walls over the landscape. This was the ideological force that lifted the farmers, their tools, and their stock above the stone-free lowlands, toward the lushly forested but stone-rich uplands of the New England Plateau. Two factors—a sense of private property and soil on stony till—critical to the proliferation of stone walls were now in place. The third factor—the taking of the forest—was next in line.
The pioneer moving into the New England Plateau during the early eighteenth century was not the romantic, buckskin-clad frontiersman made famous by James Fenimore Cooper in his leatherstocking Tales. Instead he was an ordinary farmer. A workingman with a wife and children, one who lived a humble if not hardscrabble life. In American Myth and Reality, the historian James Robertson writes, "The pioneer brought oxen and other draft animals to the frontier, pulling wagons and carts full of civilized goods . . . expecting to build a house and barn, to farm . . . to build a community . . . He was settling, and he intended to put himself down and stay put."3
Rarely did a family settle alone in the wilderness; rather, the establishment of towns was usually a corporate event. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, this often happened via the proprietorship system in which groups of worthy men formed a township or town, often just inland from those already established. Such like-minded groups acted essentially as a franchise moving to a new location. In other cases, fledgling towns wishing to grow in size—perhaps in order to justify the expense of a minister—offered the incentive of cheap, virtually free land, provided that settlers move in and "improve" (deforest) the forest. For example, Cornwall, Connecticut, in 1738 required that a settler clear and fence six acres within two years.4 Towns often subdivided when the population became dense enough to support two congregations; this eliminated the arduous journey of those most distant souls to church on the Sabbath. Finally, there was a trend toward the granting of land to individuals of wealth or prominence, land which was then subdivided and sold at market value. Attracting new settlers was part of the deal. It raised the property values of the remaining unsold lots. Such market-driven speculation in real estate helped to ensure that the inland was settled rapidly. It has been part of America ever since.
"Improving" land from its wilderness condition took place in stages. First, locating and examining property usually took place during a horseback journey into the roadless forest, sometime after the relentless chores of the growing season had eased. Locating the exact boundaries of a tract, even for surveyors, was difficult because the straight-edged polygonal land divisions of British law (squares, rectangles, parallelograms, triangles) bore little, if any, relationship to the irregular and gradational shapes of nature, at least on the scale of farms. Horizontal distances, called bounds, had to be measured with a chain dragged between the trees. Compass directions, called metes, were referenced to objects like "the old butternut tree," whose identity could be mistaken and whose permanence could not be guaranteed. Secular variations in the Earth's magnetic field, which caused the compass to shift in the direction it pointed each year, were particularly dramatic during colonial times, adding further confusion to an already difficult surveying job. The urban clerks and attorneys who prepared deeds and titles had little appreciation of either these global trends or of woodland reality.
The next stage was exploration and planning for an eventual move. Hills and swamps had to be located and counted. Ledges and stony ground, if present, had to be avoided. The warmest, sunniest, flattest land had to be found for tillage. A home site had to be envisioned. Resources—timber, firewood, stone, water, game—had to be inventoried. A family graveyard had to be located because deaths, particularly of children, were a fact of pioneering life. And the number of children per family and town was staggering compared to modern times, even though many people lived to a ripe old age. The birth rates were simply much higher than the death rates. Social security came from one's children.
Monumentation—physically marking the land—was the next stage, being mandatory for legal possession. Trees were blazed with an ax, often with an identifying symbol, like X or an angled pair of slashes, / /. Cairns (postlike stacks of stone) were built along property edges, especially on rough land. A line of brush could be cut, or a row of cedar posts pounded in—whatever it took to claim the land. Corners were usually marked with a small pillar of stones, or by selecting a large elongated stone and setting it upright in the soil, like a primitive obelisk.
The Indian tribes had relied on the irregular geometry of nature—rivers, ridges, and coastlines—to delineate their territories, which bounded tribes instead of individuals. They used political influence and violence to maintain their territories. In contrast, pioneering English settlers were legally required to clearly define their property boundaries, which almost always had straight edges. Although tensions between adjacent farms were low at first, subsequent crowding produced powerful territorial antagonisms between neighboring properties. Such crowding was brought about by rising population, the subdivision of farms through generations of patriarchy, and speculation in rising land values. This tension would inaugurate the first stone "walls" of interior New England.
"Good fences make good neighbors." So claimed the poet Robert Frost in his most famous phrase, one that was borrowed from an earlier almanac, and which had been used to describe South Carolina.5 Regardless, he knew that territorial tensions could be ameliorated with a clear expression of ownership. Hence, whenever possible, the lightly marked early boundaries—slashes on trees, small cairns of stones, wooden stakes—of the earliest pioneers were translated into permanent ones. If enough stone was available, a boundary "wall" would be built, often being little more than a knee-high stack of stone, like the one in Deny, New Hampshire, separating the poet from his neighbor. Such "walls" were neither livestock fences nor ornaments, but territorial markers made with stone. The poet and his neighbor walked "the line" each spring like wary foxes to repair their common boundary, ensuring that peace might prevail. (Humans are among the most territorial of all animals.)
Residual Puritan notions, handed down from the previous generations, were also factors underlying the urge to mark properties clearly, preferably with stone. The historian Peter Carroll writes: "Like most Puritan concepts, the social ideals transported to America reflected centuries of Old World experience." They enclosed their communities with "a protective wall which surrounded a people and assured them that the Lord would not forsake [them]."6 Thus, arranging stones in a line to mark the property edge went beyond simple territorialism; it was an almost religious act for the eighteenth-century descendant of Puritan thinking. Each line of stone unambiguously announced the boundary between the righteousness of one farm and the sinful chaos of the other; or between the good of the human community against the evil of unimproved land.
Photograph of a diorama depicting an early settler clearing a homestead.
Many stone walls standing in the woods today were thus part of a "territorial imperative." Over the next two centuries—as more land was cleared and as more stone accumulated in fields—these territorial markers were lengthened, straightened, emboldened, and embellished into ever more permanent "estate" walls of the late nineteenth century, which are essentially beautiful No-Trespassing signs written in stone. They had little, if anything, to do with agriculture.
After marking property boundaries, the next job facing the pioneer was the most strenuous one. He had to clear-cut the forest, beginning with a place for the house, then moving outward in a widening swath through future farmyard and fields. Solitary trees were sometimes left for pasture shade. Otherwise the land was clear-cut, shaved of every tree and brush.
The forest encountered by the colonists was highly variable. The ecologists David Foster and John O'Keefe explain: "The pre-settlement landscape was not a stable, monotonous, unchanging forest. Rather, it showed considerable temporal and spatial variation in the mixture and distribution of species and the pattern of vegetation. An ongoing process of natural disturbance—by hurricanes, other windstorms, ice storms, pathogens, and fires ignited by lightning strikes—led to differences in the age, density, size and species of trees across a wide range of sites." To the north—from southern Maine to New Hampshire to Vermont—cooler, moister conditions had led to a northern hardwood-hemlock-white pine forest. In the transition zone to the south, "cool ravines, on north slopes, and at higher elevations favored the growth of'northern' species, including hemlock, beech, yellow birch, sugar maple, poplar, red spruce, and balsam fir, IVlore exposed and drier sites on ridges, well-drained soils, and to the south supported 'southern' species, including white, black, and scarlet oak, hickory, chestnut, black birch, and pitch pine. Intermediate sites were characterized by a mixture of both groups, and in addition by white pine, red oak, white ash, black cherry, and red maple."7
The strenuous, acute task of clear-cutting was done over a period of several long summers, followed by winters back home, where equipment could be gathered, axes sharpened, seeds gathered, and plans made for the day when permanent residency would begin. Three or four years was enough to make the transition between ownership and permanent occupancy.
In slow progression, patches of so-called improved land expanded outward from each farmstead until they intersected with similar patches on adjacent farms. In the heavily settled parts of southern and eastern New England, forested towns dotted with a few clearings were gradually transformed into cleared towns dotted with a few remaining forest patches. As part of this transformation, miles of roads—most of them terrible—were then bordered by fields and fences instead of by wilderness. Primitive stone walls were a natural consequence of road building because the stones, exposed to horse and wagon traffic and erosion, had to be moved aside.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, when deforestation reached its peak, more than half of New England's native forests—as much as 80 percent in the heavily settled parts of southern New England—had been cut down and replaced with "open space," meaning tillage, mow land (land used for hay cutting), and pasture. Deforestation reversed the ecological pattern of plant colonization that had taken place during the much earlier transition of New England's postglacial parkland to continuous forest.
Less than 10 percent of "improved" land was used for tillage fields put to the plow. Remaining lands were divided roughly equally into meadow for haying and high-quality pasture. Rough, cleared lands, called bushpasture, were used for grazing, and so-called unimproved land was left as managed woodlot or because the land might have been too rough to manage effectively. The proportions between these different uses varied somewhat between lowland and upland, but the presence of all five functions was part of a general pattern requiring the removal of trees.
Generally speaking, the original settlers used the forest composition—the species of trees—to determine what use to put the land to. For example, "sugar maple, beech, and ash grew on productive sites that were suitable for crops; chestnut and oak dominated the broad, moderately productive uplands that made good pastureland; and hemlock and red maple sites were usually wet rocky and less Siiitable for agricultare."8
Those patches of forest left uncut were not necessarily unscathed. Livestock, especially during the first decade of a farm's existence, grazed intensively in the forest, removing the understory and damaging the soils. Additionally, there was a heavy demand for wood as fuel and for fencing. Sugaring—the extraction and boiling of sap—was another activity that had an impact on the forest, even when the trees were left standing. Tanneries needed hemlock bark, stripped from dead trees. Potash, made from the ashes of burned wood, caused losses as well.
The methods of forest clearing were similar across the region. Smaller saplings and shrubs were removed first, often by burning. Larger trees were often simply chopped down at waist level, especially if the land was needed as soon as possible. More often, they were girdled with an ax, a laborsaving process in which a ring of bark was stripped from the circumference of the trunk, killing the tree slowly, almost without effort. Stately trees, sometimes four hundred years old, died standing up, evolving into wooden skeletons whose limbs fell randomly and dangerously before they were finally cut down.
Many fallen trees, whether chopped or girdled, gave up their timber for houses, barns, and sheds. Settlers could make their own structural timber by sectioning and shaping trees into posts and beams. But sawmills, which performed this job more efficiently, sprang up in every foundling town.
Most trees were not destined for lumber. They were cut down, chopped or sawed into movable sections, wrapped in chains, and hauled into piles by a team of oxen. Although usually done slowly, sometimes this final phase of clearing became a festive neighborhood event known as a "logrolling," one not unlike that of a barn raising, during which the hard cider often flowed freely. Trees and stumps burned in huge, smoky fires that smoldered for weeks, similar to what is happening today in the Brazilian Amazon.
More rarely, specialized teams did deforestation. In the most well-planned, capital-intensive, corporate clearing projects, teams of workers handled different aspects of the job, following each other in phases. This tradition dates back to medieval Europe, where "one group (the in-cisores) cut down the trees, a second (extirpatores) took out the trunks, and a third (incensores) burned up the roots, boughs and undergrowth." This process was sometimes used in the most remote parts of Vermont and New Hampshire, when landowners or real estate speculators sometimes hired gangs of foresters. Their "only business [was] to cut down trees and open land for cultivation, build log houses and prepare the way for others."9
In southern maritime New England, especially near the large wealthy cities, slaves were used to clear the forest. For example, in Salem, in southeastern Connecticut, New London County, a wealthy man named Colonel Samuel Brown gradually bought up thirteen thousand acres of wooded land beginning in 1718, most of which had been Mohegan territory only a few generations earlier. Measuring nearly five miles by six miles square, he called it New Salem Plantation, modeling it after those of the South. He hired an "overseer and brought in 60 families of Africans—as many as 120 people—to clear the land."10
Something similar took place when landless groups of Native Americans were paid virtually nothing to clear land, or when prisoners, working as part of a chain gang, did it for free. However, these are exceptions to the general rule; most of the New England forest was cleared by the property owners and their seemingly countless numbers of children.
With the trees gone, the land was ready for pasture or seed, even if stumps remained. Early crops of grass and grain were sometimes put in before the land was plowed. First crops could be the best ones because the nutrients formerly locked up in the leaves and wood had been liberated by burning. Scenes of cows grazing around charred, rotting stumps or a farmer hoeing between them were common ones on pioneering plantations. After the roots had rotted sufficiently the stumps were tipped out with a team of oxen and dragged to the edge of the field. There, they became integrated into the first fences, which were usually amorphous mixtures of brush, stumps, and small logs called poles, with a few stones thrown in for good measure.
With the stumps gone, and the dense mat of roots rotted away, the final stage was to prepare the land for cultivation by stock-drawn
implements. Oxen were the preferred source of power. Timothy Dwight was fascinated by the process. He provides an eyewitness
account from near Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, around the beginning of the nineteenth century.
After the field is burned over, his next business is to break it up. The instrument, employed for this purpose, is a large
and strong harrow; here called a drag, with very stout iron teeth; resembling in its form the capital letter A. It is drawn
over the surface, a sufficient number of times to make it mellow, and afterwards to cover the seed. A plough would here be
of no use; as it would soon be broken to pieces by the roots of the trees.11
Note that Dwight did not write "broken to pieces" by the stony ground in this scene from New Hampshire, later dubbed the Granite State. He so loved to detail the sufferings of pioneers that he would not have missed this perfect opportunity to disparage the stones had they been a significant problem at the time. Apparently, it wasn't the stones that might wreck a pioneer's plow, but the living roots of trees. As late as 1775, the widely used farming manual "American Husbandry" didn't concern itself with stony soils. As late as 1792, Governor Jeremy Belknap of New Hampshire mentioned that the mineral soil, which includes the stones, "does not appear till after the earth has been opened and cultivated." Indeed, there is a dearth of early remarks about stony soils.
It would be an exaggeration to suggest that stones were absent from early upland pioneering settlements. Erratic boulders would certainly have been visible in many places, and almost every upland farm had patches of stony ground from which stones were taken as resources used for building fireplaces, foundations, and cellars. But a plethora of evidence—eyewitness accounts, historic descriptions, modern soil maps, field investigations, the journal of Henry David Thoreau—indicate that the cumbersome abundance of stone on cleared lands came later.
Since the cultural shift toward privatization of property required the construction of miles of fences, as well as a way to regulate their effectiveness, fencing laws emerged. They set the specifications for different types of fences, levied fines for substandard barriers, and established the legal grounds on which neighbors could sue each other. Fencing laws were not passed capriciously. Keeping animals and crops apart was critical to the economic well-being of communities, and was thus the source of rancorous debate, especially in early town meetings. This was certainly true of the town of Mansfield, Connecticut, whose records indicate that fencing and animal trespass were discussed at nearly every town meeting between 1703 and 1853.12
Four fjypes of wooden fencing (clockwise from top: picket, board, zigzag, post-and-rail).
Public officials known as fence viewers were appointed to ensure that fencing ordinances were being followed. They understood that a low row of poles or stones was sufficient to guide cattle out to pasture but would not be expected to hold back a horny bull in rut. Similarly, fences between pastures could be lower than those keeping animals away from more tempting crops like corn. Highest of all, up to eight feet tall, were the walls of town pounds (animal jails), which held animals that had already tasted the "call of the wild." In general, however, the legal height of a fence in the colonies was between four and five feet. A substandard fence prevented a landowner from suing owners of wayward stock, and vice versa. Empirically, it had to be "sheep high, bull strong, and hog tight." The last criterion was the most demanding.
New England statutes still specify the appointment, jurisdiction, and duties of the fence viewer, although their power is much diminished and hardly noticed. But in the late colonial period, they would cruise rural land like the state troopers of today, looking for trouble and writing citations.
Most early barriers were "expedient fences," made from the refuse of the clearing operation. Stump fences, made by dragging stumps to the edge of the field with their severed trunks pointing outward, were widely used, especially in the drier, colder air of northern New England, where they would last for decades. Brush and boulders were used like caulking to plug the holes between the whorls of tree roots in order to make a continuous barrier. In many respects, stump fences were very similar to the famed hedgerows of southern Britain, because the tangle of woody roots was frequently overgrown with ivy and wild grapes. Thoreau indicated that a very few "turf" or sod walls were built by immigrant Irish in his native Concord, Massachusetts, but they soon rotted away.
Log fences were made by stacking logs one above the other, parallel to the edge of the field, using stakes to hold them in position. Pole fences were made using the trunks of small trees and saplings that were either propped into position with piles of rock or held up by an A-frame. The use of ditches, standard technology in Britain, worked well in the flat, sandy fields near the southern coast and in some fertile interval lands, but weren't worth the trouble of digging in the till-covered uplands. Hedges also failed because they required too much attention, and because imported hedge-forming species were ill adapted to New World plant diseases (blights and rusts) and insects. Plashing (weaving material horizontally between vertical poles) and wattle (an even tighter weave of finer materials) were used only near gardens. Wire fences would not exist for at least another century.
These early ad hoc fences were soon replaced by wooden ones. Progressive attention to aesthetic considerations played a role in this transition, but also important was the loss of raw materials left over from the clearing operation. There were several standard versions of wooden fence. Most common was a post-and-rail fence. A hole was dug into the ground and the post was planted. Stones pulled from the hole were used as part of the backfill or to prop up the post as extra support. Once the posts were in place, usually at intervals of ten to twelve feet, the rails were attached by inserting them into a carved slot, by pegging or nailing them to the post, or by binding the rails with strips of bark or cordage. Owing to its resistance to rot, the preferred wood for posts was cedar, which was usually harvested from swamps, during the winter. Chestnut was preferred for rails because it decomposed slowly and was easily split.
The zigzag fence, also called the worm fence or Virginia rail fence, worked well on rough ground because digging and attachment devices were unnecessary. Instead, fence panels were laid out in a zigzag fashion, so that the rails in one tier were stacked above those of the next; usually five or six rails were sufficient. Least common and most expensive was the board fence, which was constructed of rough timber cut into boards six to eight inches wide, then nailed to a post; more rarely, boards were woven between closely spaced posts. Picket fences were not used in agricultural fields.13
Stone walls, of course, made an excellent fence because there were no posts, rails, or boards to rot. But during the early stages of improvement on pioneering farms, there was seldom enough stone, and even less time for the construction of walls. The progressive nature of the stone buikhip is well documented by twentieth-century scholars. The rural sociologist Michael Bell writes " [stone walls] . . . appeared over time and were built mostly wall by wall as the supply of labor and of stones worked up by frost and erosion permitted." The historian William Cronon wrote: " [Wood fences] were used until repeated plowing turned up the rocks from which New England's famed stone walls were finally built." The archaeologist Robert Sanford said, "Stone walls . . . are the effort of three or four generations of men and women, boys and girls."14 Except as intentional boundary markers on very stony ground, stone walls were usually not an early pioneering phenomenon. Instead, they were associated with farms that had been in place for a while, as it took some time to grow a crop of stones.