8

Rural Revival

Improvements in transportation — the construction of canals, railroads, turnpikes—were an important factor in the decline of New England's rural economy in the late nineteenth century. Radically different improvement in transportation during the early twentieth century reversed that decline. The gasoline-powered "horseless buggy" would, almost single-handedly, repopulate rural New England, a trend that continues unabated today.¹

The first Ford Model T cars rolled off the assembly line in 1908, and became affordable to the middle class within a decade. More than 15 million had been sold before the line was discontinued in 1927. The pneumatic tire, invented in 1916, increased the speed at which New Englanders could move along their bumpy roads. Leaded gasoline gave them the power to climb any hill and the distance to reach nearly everywhere. No longer were the vast majority of New England urban dwellers tied to the thriving metropolitan areas where they lived. Easier to keep than a horse and carriage, the automobile provided city families with the freedom to reclaim New England. Some were close enough to commute.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Governor Frank W Rollins of New Hampshire was distributing a promotional document titled "New Hampshire Farms for Summer Homes." President Theodore Roosevelt held a "Country Life Commission" in 1908 with the stated goal of enhancing the quality of country life. Cities that were once magnets for country folk reversed their polarity, sending many residents to the country, especially on weekends. Other inventions made rural life even more attractive, notably electricity, refrigeration, and telephones. Americans of the Gilded Age, the Jazz Age, and the Roaring Twenties, their economic success assured by industrial achievement, went looking for their roots on the farm. For the first time in American history, the compelling story of rural life was not agriculture, it was tourism and respite. Wild lands were no longer places to be feared: They were a tonic for the anxiety of urban life.

Other rural activities contributed to the revitalization of rural New England. Chief among these was forestry, which reinvented itself as a business and a profession as the trees grew back and when pulp paper was invented. Timber companies went on a splurge, buying trackless land. Universities, notably Harvard and Yale, responded by creating schools of forestry, which have since evolved into schools of environmental science. White pine—the weed of former pastures—became a commercially important wood product used to make boxes and cartons in an era before plastic and fiberboard. Tree farms, something an eighteenth-century pioneer would have had trouble conceiving of, sprouted up in abandoned fields. Planted in straight rows like corn, but taking longer to reach har-vestable size, trees were planted as crop monocultures. Maple sugar began to flourish as an export business now that the sugar maples, having sprouted in old fields and woodlots, had become good sized. The forestry salvage operation following the great hurricane of 1938, which blew down a swath of trees between Long Island, New York, and northern Vermont, brought thousands of underemployed city dwellers to the forested interior, many of whom never returned to the city.

Conservation, as a discipline and a profession, appeared outside the timber industry; wildlife, soil, and water were its principal themes. With urban America becoming increasingly dependent on public water supplies, trained scientists began to see watersheds as integrated natural systems rather than as geographic areas; hydrology, which evolved as a discipline within engineering, became an outdoor profession practiced by many other disciplines. Clean water and flood hazards became hot topics as early as the turn of the century. Between the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Cold War of the 1950s, engineers responded by building flood-control reservoirs, dams, and floodways on all the major rivers in New England, in an act of ecological hegemony that has since never been matched. Meanwhile, scientifically minded conservationists set the stage for the professional "environmental man­ager" who would appear scarcely a half century later, and for whom clean water, rather than wildlife or soil, was the defining management objective.

Farming, especially large-scale dairy operations, adapted as well and remained successful. Pasteurization and homogenization of milk, refrigeration, and sterilization of bottles allowed the milkman to become a familiar sight. "Milk sheds" expanded until they coalesced across the re gion. Specialty farms—the tobacco industry along the Connecticut River, apple orchards throughout Massachusetts, potatoes in Aroostook County, Maine, and poultry "ranching"—survived by increasing the scale of their production while simultaneously narrowing their markets.

With the rediscovery of rural New England during the early twentieth century, the technical professions focusing on the outdoors began to take more notice of stone walls on the landscape. Archaeologists, landscape architects, physical geographers, foresters, soil scientists, and engineers began to locate and describe them, often incidentally. Yet never in these objective disciplines did the subject of stone walls flourish. It was in the subjective domain of the humanities—art and literature—that stone walls would soon become hallowed ground. In a process that began slowly, beginning with the end of the nineteenth centiiry and contimiing up to the middle of the twentieth century, stone walls were being filtered through poetry, paintings, novels, photographs, and oral traditions, to become more potent visual symbols than sugar maples and church steeples. Eventually stone walls would become the signature of the New England interior landscape. As the writer Howard Mansfield states, we put them back In the Memory House.²

The changes in attitudes toward New England stone walls is illustrated by how artists, especially painters, treated them over the years. Works of the Hudson River school, painted before wholesale abandonment of hillside New England in the mid- to late nineteenth century, focused on the sublimity of nature, emphasizing the wild and primitive, rather than the tame, and the spiritual conquest of what was once wilderness.³ Their paintings of the northeastern United States contain hardly a fieldstone except for those shown in natural clefts and chasms.

In contrast, painters of the Impressionist school during the early twentieth century couldn't paint enough fieldstones. The art historian Harold Spencer writes:

The images created by these painters have a familiar look . . . [and] reveal the native sources of these Impressionistic images . . . old farms weathered by the years, fields mottled by outcroppings of ledge and sectioned by the ubiquitous stone walls . . .⁴

Many of these painters gathered along the Connecticut shore, in places like Darien, Fairfield, Old Saybrook, Old Lyme, and New London, close enough to New York but away from the city's hustle. At the abandoned property bought by the Impressionist painter J. Alden Weir and converted into a summer artist colony, they were able to paint an unusual mix of wall styles and forms; many of those paintings hang in galleries today. Some stone walls they painted were so primitive that they are little more than elongated piles. They also painted tossed walls from the time when the farm was cleared and pastured, and ornamental walls that conveyed a sense of wealth and protected privacy.

Weir, apparently not satisfied to paint landscapes, laid his own stone walls or hired masons to do the job in his stead. In one place, he framed a stream in stone, channeling it into a hidden rock gutter to ensure that it would stay where he wanted it. In another, he broke up a continuous wall, then marked its ends with colossal stones that look like pillars. If a wall interfered with his artistic vision, like the one on the ledge above his private pond, it was deliberately pushed over, tumbling back into its constituent fieldstone fragments.⁵

As the century rolled along, Currier and Ives manufactured thousands of images of rural New England, often painted with snow and sleighs in the foreground, and farmhouses and playful children in the background. The artists made sure to put fieldstone in nearly every scene, even if it was no more than a solitary boulder beneath a wooden fence. Stone seemed to be an essential ingredient for their art.

Photography would eventually overtake landscape painting as a way to portray the essence of rural New England. Samuel Chamberlain, the "photographer-laureate" of New England, vised stone walls to grace his masterwork, The New England Image. Photographer Wallace Nutting⁶ sold thousands of hand-tinted pictures of stately maples and blossoming orchards in his effort to romanticize, even sanitize, New England's past. Fanatical to show urban dwellers what they were missing, Nutting published his photographs in six volumes, titled Beautiful Maine, Beautiful New Hampshire, Beautifid Vermont . . . , each arranged by county. Altogether, 293 of his photographs showed rural agricultural scenery. Nutting's photos provide an extraordinary archive on the subject of stone walls, revealing that rural scenery was seldom complete without these ancient, decorative piles of refuse stone, now properly tainted by time.⁷

Old stone walls, deliberately left out of earlier paint ings, were now being painted into scenes, whether they existed in the actual landscape or not.

Ironically, the reduction in the physical visibility of stone walls between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century—by collapse and decay from natural causes, by their stones being stolen, and by the reforestation of the pastures they bounded—steadily increased their cultural visibility. A convincing explanation for this delayed reverence for what was once commonplace comes from a short, somewhat obscure, but seminal work by J. B. Jackson. He said historical preservation

. . . sees history not as a continuity but as a dramatic discontinuity, a kind of cosmic drama. First there is that golden age, the time of harmonious beginnings. Then ensues a period when the old days are forgotten and the golden age falls into neglect. Finally comes a time when we rediscover and seek to restore the world around us to something like its former beauty. But there has to be that interval of neglect, there has to be discontinuity; it is religiously and artistically essential. That is what I mean when I refer to the necessity for ruins . . . the old order has to die before there can be a born-again landscape.⁸

The "old order" of rural New England died slowly during the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the population from upland farming towns became intoxicated by the industrial power of cities and lured by the promise of the West. Conservative talk about the nobility of agriculture did little to stop the exodus of Yankee youth. New England had entered its interval of neglect. Pastures became woodlands, buildings collapsed, and machinery dissolved into rust. But the stone walls of that lost civilization survived as the remains of fences, cellar holes, graveyards, barn foundations, animal pens, charcoal pits, sheep folds, fords across streams, collapsed milldams, and odd piles. Carried forward with the stone were the oral traditions of a romanticized past.

The "new order" accelerated dramatically in the early twentieth century with the realization that America—first as an idea, then as a nation—had been conceived of and defended by independent English farm families living in small rural towns where individualism mattered. In art and architecture, this ideological shift became known as Colonial Revival, a backward-looking, somewhat sanitized view of the way things were, or the way certain groups thought things should have been. This cultural transition was fueled, in part, by those who were well off imagining themselves returning to a golden age, an epoch when cities were not overcrowded with European immigrants and with American blacks migrating northward from the Jim Crow south. U.S. immigration had already passed its peak near the turn of the century, and the nation was now adjusting to its consequences, most of which played themselves out in American ghettos.

Looking upstream from thriving industrial cities, those with opportunity acted on their "necessity for ruins" by seeking out artifacts of the golden age such as saws, axes, sap buckets, chisels, guns, sledges. They also reconstructed early villages to an idealized form, devoid of the poverty and squalor of the authentic past. Most important, they re furbished stone walls on rural properties that had been abandoned only one or two generations earlier.

Henry David Thoreau

These stone walls evoked in their new owners a feeling of a deep, almost mystical connection to America's past, especially when stumbled upon in the deep woods, where they are encrusted by lichens, stained by dissolving leaves, toppled by heaving soil, and smashed by falling trees that have long since rotted away. Instinctively, even casual observers could sense the human presence within each wall, knowing that each of its stones had once been lifted by a living, breathing person. By touching a stone, one could almost touch the hand of the anonymous person who had placed it there and appreciate the simple integrity of that life.

The very soul of New England had somehow gotten mixed up with rural farmstead walls. Henry David Thoreau penned his reverence for them in an undated journal entry for the year 1850: "We are never prepared to believe that our ancestors lifted large stones or built thick walls . . . How can their work be so visible and permanent and themselves so transient? When I see a stone which it must have taken many yoke of oxen to move, lying in a bank wall . . . I am curiously surprised, because it suggests an energy and force of which we have no memorials."

Robert Frost, poet laureate of New England and the sage of stone-wall worship, gave much thought to the "energy and force" pondered by Thoreau. His books are brimming with boulders and hardscrabble lives. More than any other person, Frost is responsible for weaving stone walls into the American consciousness. For him, stone walls were more than symbols. They were oracles.

Some may know what they seek in school and church,

And why they seek it there;for what I search

I must go measuring stone walls, perch on perch;⁹

Frost went beyond using derelict stone walls as powerful memorial symbols. He elevated them to the stature of the supernatural. "Pan with Us" begins with these lines:

Pan came out of the woods one day—

His skin and his hair and his eyes were gray,

The gray of the moss of walls were they

And stood in the sun and looked his fill

At wooded valley and wooded hill.¹⁰

The eyes of Pan—playful Greek god of the forest—are the gray stones in New England's walls. Robert Frost understood that the "valley and wooded hill" had to be abandoned and reforested before Pan could come "out of the woods one day." He understood, as J. B. Jackson would later explain, that ruins require a period of separation, a period of neglect, a time for the walls to tarnish with time. Later, the writer Eric Sloane rendered the walls into the memorials sought by Thoreau. "The plain farmer of two hundred years ago was weaving the fabric of a new nation and although there are no marble statues to his patriotism now, there are still his stone walls."¹¹

Through these and other writers, New England had learned to love its stone walls more as memorials to a lost world than they had ever been loved as fences. A psychological curtain had been lifted, revealing what had been there all along.

There's more to the aesthetic allure of stone walls than their memorial associations. Each is a work of art in and of itself. Every wall reflects personal—in some cases, artistic—choices made by its builder, from the selection of location to the size, shape, and placement of each stone.

Stone walls are aesthetically pleasing to all the senses. Sometimes stone walls even make music when two stones are struck. Each yields a different pitch and tone: clunk, thud, clatter, ping, rattle, and tap. The wind brings softer sounds to stone walls exposed on the edges of cleared fields and roads. Each catches the wind like a sail full of holes, compressing it through rigid slits, each a different size and offering a different edge to the wind. When the wind is blowing strongly, especially in winter, you can hear various pitches, depending on gaps between the stones and the velocity of the wind blowing through them.

The texture of stone walls can also be enjoyed using touch. Most stones are grainy and rough, with uneven surfaces and irregular lumps. But some stones are gracefully curved, others as flat as a tile. Some are polished smoothly, like a bowling ball; others are jagged and pointy, even dangerous. Some are colder and warmer than others. When wet with dew or green algae, some feel slippery.

As visual objects, stone walls have form, color, texture, shading, perspective, and endless variety. Their geometry varies from sharp-edge, angular slabs to perfectly rounded boulders. Their shading varies from the dark tones caused by deep shadow and heavy patina to the sun-bleached tones of the highest stones. Some walls have a grain like wood; others are a hodgepodge of form.

Color is perhaps the richest visual experience of stone walls. The pallet, although visually gray, ranges from rust to black. Mineral colors on exposed stone surfaces are usually dusky, or slightly powdery, owing to corrosion and the bleaching done by the rain and the sun. On a wall, the color of a stone is a blend of its constituent minerals. Muted earth tones become more vivid on freshly broken fragments, or when the stone is soaking wet. This effect is exaggerated even more when a stone is sheathed in ice because the ice refracts light like a lens. After an episode of freezing rain, green, lavender, and pink are intensified in a wall.

Quartz is a light-gray, often greasy-looking mineral common in coarse-grained stones. Mica crystals grow in the form of flexible sheets whose surfaces sparkle like shiny plastic. Feldspars are off-white in color and always break along gemlike facets. Calcite, one of the earth's most common minerals, is usually missing because it dissolves too easily. Dark minerals—pyroxene, olivine, graphite, hornblende, tourmaline, magnetite—are abundant in the volcanic rocks of the rift valley. Accessory minerals have more unusual shapes—soccer-ball-shaped garnets, crosses of staurolite, and cubes of pyrite. They embellish stones all over the Northeast. Children, who prospect stone by instinct, frequently mistake muscovite for gold and quartz for diamonds; their treasure hunting usually ends when they realize that something so beautiful can be worthless.

Life brings color to a wall in ways other than its minerals. Lichens paint the stones with pastel greens and brownish grays, although some are bright yellow, others reddish. Lichens are primitive plants (actually symbiotic masses of algae and fungi) that manufacture acidic solvents capable of dissolving the stone, allowing them to attach firmly, as though glued by epoxy. Lichens are very sensitive to the availability of sunlight, being as dense as chain mail where the light is strong and as sparse as polka dots when in complete shade. Another primitive plant, moss, remains green, even when frozen. Mosses are common where a wall is moist and shaded. Deciduous leaves and coniferous needles also decorate walls with brown colors, except in autumn, when the hues are more vivid. The deadfall from branches, especially when being consumed by slime molds, bracket fungi, mushrooms, and other decomposers, bring to walls almost every conceivable living color, from bright purples to iridescent oranges.

Walls in the woods can also change the olfactory landscape of their immediate surroundings. Most stones don't have much of an odor. If you smash or grind a small stone into dust, there is only a faint, earthy smell. It is life in general and microbial decay in particular that gives smell to the northeastern woodlands. Volatile elements such as carbon and nitrogen and sulfur are captured from the atmosphere by growing plants, used to make organic matter, then released again during decomposition in the forest mulch. When stone walls are warmer than the soil around them, they enhance local odors. When colder, walls are freer of the fragrance of soil. During a heavy rain, especially in late fall when the leaves are pressed flat to the ground, stone walls become vents for the aromatic gases being expelled from the soil by the infiltration of water, somewhat like a row of smokestacks above a microbial refinery that's fermenting away underground.

We even taste our walls. Unless artificially distilled, all of earth's water, including urban tap water, carries with it the dissolved constituents of stones. Marble is dissolved most easily, followed by brownstone, slate, schist, and gneiss, then granite. Sodium is most easily lost, followed by calcium, and potassium, and magnesmm, at decreasing rates. If not absorbed onto fine soil particles, or drawn into roots of plants, this dilute stone soup seeps down to the water table, where it flows slowly but surely to streams, wetlands, and wells. Thus, we imbibe our stones, our walls, recycled in every glass of water we drink, whether in bottles or from the tap. Earth's water, even in the snows of north Greenland, is mineral water. Our bones and teeth are built from it. Walt Whitman celebrated this concept in the opening lines of "Song of Myself:"

I celebrate myself and sing myself

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good be longs to you.¹²

The stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression combined as a death blow to many of the farms that remained. Thousands of New England farmers went belly-up. Many of their properties went into receivership for back taxes, then were transferred to the public domain as state parks and forests, thousands of which grace the countryside today. Other farming communities became water-management areas, like Quabbin Reservoir, which supplies water to Boston. Its impoundment flooded an entire nineteenth-century farming village, preserving it for posterity like a sunken shipwreck. With less money for leisure, many grand resort hotels fell into disrepair. With the population of tourists gone, the farmers who once fed them had no choice but to leave as well. For at least a few years, in some rural places, New England seemed to have been abandoned, once again, at least physically. But the allure of stone walls was there to stay.