Stone Fence
Another fog scene. These are more commonly called stone walls in New England. These stones were left behind buried in the soil when the last glaciers retreated. Settlers from Europe began to clear the forest that covered this area to provide heat in their cabins and to expose soil for farming. The freezing and thawing each year brought rocks to the surface and they were turned up during plowing. One explanation I read for the stone walls or fences is stones were carried from the plowed area to the edge of the property where a wooden fence commonly marked the edge. The stones were placed under or along the wood fence and when that fence rotted away there was a stone fence and each year more new stones were added. The poet Robert Frost's poem 'Mending Wall' contains the well known advice about why stone walls should be repaired 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
The following is from a website about stone walls in New England.
Constructing the walls was labor intensive. For comparison, modern masons typically lay about 6 meters of stone wall per day, Thorson says. He estimates that 40 million “man days” of labor would have been required to build the more than 380,000 kilometers of stone walls in New England — enough to build a wall from Earth to the moon — reported by an 1871 fencing census. “This is an awesome amount of manual labor,” he says, “but it is trivial when compared to the much larger effort of getting stones to the edges of the fields in the first place. That job usually had been done stone by stone, and load by load, by the previous generation.”
HFF