By: Sarah Chase

Traditionally speaking, stonewalls were used as an enclosure for livestock, or as boundary line fencing. 

In nineteenth century New England, stone walls were elevated to a height of new, even legal, importance as property markers and enclosures … to the extent that when a stone wall was finished, it needed to be inspected by a fellow known as the “fence viewer.”  A fence viewer was a municipal worker, charged by the town to inspect fences to make sure that they were structurally sound.

If a stone wall was declared sound, then the owner of the property was not liable for any damages that might subsequently be done to his crops by other farmer's wayward or, most unspeakably … improperly fenced-in animals.

As farming grew more popular in New England, the need for adequate stonewall fencing increased dramatically. Before stone walls came into vogue, wooden rail and zig-zag fences had been considered the practical solution for fencing on farms.

However, in New England, wooden fencing quickly became a problem because once the land was cleared for the actual purposes of farming, too few trees were left standing or in reserve to build the wooden fences. 

Also, as many of us here today know all too well, wood has a tendency to bow and rot over time, which means it has to be constantly repaired and replaced. The growing inconveniences of wood were quickly solved by a logical transition toward the ample supply of healthy rocks, which are prevalent in every bit of dirt in New England.  Stone fences quickly, albeit somewhat laboriously, replaced the inferior wooden fencing.  Of course, this also provided farmers with a use for all those stones and boulders that were dulling their plough blades year after year. 

By 1871 approximately one-third of the some 61,000 miles of fencing in Connecticut were made of stone. 

In 1939 a mining engineer by the name of Oliver Bowles, approximated from old records and a Department of Agriculture survey on fencing, that New England was marked by well over 240,000 miles of stonewalls – that’s a distance more than equal to the entire U.S. coastline.  The mass of stone in these walls was greater than that from all the remaining monuments of antiquity combined.