Scott Smith often puts his finger on parts of Westport we too often overlook, or ignore. Today, he writes:
There are many scenic perks to living in the 4-season clime of Westport: the bright blooms of spring, the lush green growth of summer, the colorful hues of autumn. Winter has its charms, too, especially when the landscape is covered by a graceful cloak of snow.
But what I like best about the cold bare of winter is how it brings into sharp relief one of the defining hallmarks of New England: its stone walls.
What beauty! What mystery! Most evocative, of course, are the weathered old walls you come across deep in the woods, etched with lichen and moss. Ghostly traces of another age.
This, and the accompanying photos, were taken at the Newman Poses Preserve in Westport, and in Weston. (All photos/Scott Smith)
Connecticut’s oldest rock walls date from the early 1600s. Many of these legacy walls, especially those around colonial towns and old estates, are made with flat rock, hewn from the area’s abundant quarries.
Most of the old fieldstone walls you see in woodlots were raised in the latter part of the 1700s and early 1800s, after settlers moved upland from the rich coastal flood plains and river valleys to finish clearing the region’s primeval forests for timber, charcoal and homesteads.
At first this new farmland was very productive; the soil was deep and fertile, with few rocks. The surprising reason: After the ice age glaciers retreated some 15,000 years ago — they were a mile high over Westport — a thick layer of plant detritus built up over the centuries to cover much of the tumbled glacial debris the ice sheet left behind.
Seasons of plowing and grazing hastened erosion of the topsoil and uncovered these long-buried rocks. The newly unprotected soil would also freeze more deeply in the winter, and frost heaves moved stones steadily upward—several inches per decade. Stone is a better conductor of heat and cold than the surrounding soil, so the soil under the rock freezes faster than elsewhere. Since water expands about 10 percent when frozen, and the path of least resistance for a rock in soil is up, after many cycles of freeze and thaw, each spring stones rise through the saturated soil to the surface.
(The transformation of the region’s farmland and forest floor was abetted by the arrival of the earthworm, an invasive brought to these shores in the baggage and ballast of European settlers. To the Old World earthworm, this truly was the promised land, and in they rushed, colonizing new ground at 30 feet a year. Amazingly, before then there were no soil-dwelling worms in New England, having been routed far south by the glaciers. Some soil scientists lament how dramatically they’ve munched through the leaf litter and displaced native creepy crawlers, both above and below ground — but that’s another story.)
It’s estimated that there are some 240,000 miles of rock walls in New England, longer than the U.S. coastline. Some stone walls, particularly the thicker, double-width variety, delineated roadways and property boundaries. But many rock walls, especially the “tossed,” single-width kind, simply mark how far it was practical for farmers working with a team of oxen and a wooden sledge to move heavy stones to the edge of a field.
These walls were usually no more than thigh-high—about as high as a strong back can lift or lever a large rock in place. Most were never built to function as stand-alone fences, say, to secure livestock. Indeed, Robert M. Thorson, author of Stone by Stone — the definitive history of the region’s stone walls — suggests it’s more apt to think of them as “linear landfills.”
A few years back the Florence Griswold Museum mounted an exhibition of Impressionist paintings, Art and the New England Farm. In the eye of a 19th century painter, stone walls evoked the ethic of a hardscrabble agrarian lifestyle, one that was already giving way to the hubbub of city life. In an exhibition monograph, John E. Noyes notes that back in the day, many people regarded stone walls “as a scourge and eyesore that disfigured the land and marred the beauty of the landscape.”
I favor the Impressionistic view of stone walls, though as a suburban gardener who toils on a yard that was once an onion field, I can relate to mixed feelings about what old-timers call the region’s most enduring harvest: the Connecticut potato, the catch-all term for the rounded rocks that emerge from the dirt each spring.
Over the years, I’ve found that if there’s a patch of my lawn that’s bare or thinly grassed, chances are that just under the surface is a rock preventing the roots from reaching down into the subsoil. As the heat of summer dries the soil, it also bakes the rocks just under the turf, which in turn cook the roots above them.
Most of the rocks, spud-sized, pluck up through the lawn without a fuss, often leaving their indentation intact, which I then fill with a dollop of compost. The rocks get added to my humble stone wall and the earthworms get a treat of fresh organic material. As soil scientist Dr. M. Jill Clapperton said, “When you are standing on the ground, you are really standing on the rooftop of another world.”
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