Sometimes they reflect the artistry and precision of their creator, while others are merely piles of rocks, thrown out of the way by a farmer, undoubtedly worn down from the exhaustion of trying to grow enough food to support his family.
The ubiquitous stone walls of New England evoke questions about the men and women who built them, removing stones from their fields one at a time so that they could plow the land and feed themselves and their children. It must have been a brutish life they lived in a very stark struggle for survival.
Driving out Massachusetts Route 30 the other day, a road that parallels the Massachusetts Turnpike, I passed many of these walls, some disrupted by later construction while others in the same pristine condition as when they were built two or three hundred years ago, still marking property boundaries or what once was the edge of a farmer’s field. It’s doubtful that their creators could have envisioned the fate of their handiwork and their homesteads two or three centuries in the future, carved up and divided by roads and suburban or rural development.
There was no dichotomy between rural and suburban in their era; their basic geographic distinction was between rural and wilderness. Development for them didn’t involve teams of organized construction specialists. True, there were probably carpenters and masons, but the men and women who built these walls were likely responsible for doing all of that type of work for themselves.
As more and more people took up residence in this uncharted space, they developed a way of conducting their social relations, from a system of land titles that recognized the ownership of their homesteads to a division of labor that rewarded individuals and craftsmen who possessed particular skills.
Throughout this evolution to the complex society of today, many of those stone walls continue to bear mute witness to the struggles of the men and women who, stone by stone, had built them so very long ago.