The stones in New England's stone walls were plucked from bedrock by the Laurentide ice sheet between about 30,000 and 15,000 years ago.
Typically this occurs in January when snow frames the wall from bottom to top and when the strengthening, crystal-clear sun casts strong shadows.”Īs we toured the walls, I learned their story: It begins with glaciers during the last ice age, meanders through the Colonial and early New England farming eras, ebbs during industrialization in America as the walls were abandoned and fell into disrepair, and continues today with their memorialization in poetry and refurbishment. “Like a negative to a photograph,” he writes, “walls are most visible when life is most invisible. Thorson notes in “Exploring Stone Walls,” his 2005 field guide, that January is one of the best times in southern New England for stone wall viewing.
The area features many notable stone walls in large part because of its proximity to what Thorson calls “the geological and agricultural center of interior New England,” which provided abundant stones of the perfect size and shape to make them. On a brilliant afternoon in January 2014, I joined Thorson for a guided tour of the stone walls in Brooklyn, Conn. Since the book’s launch, Thorson has spoken to thousands of stone wall enthusiasts, authored numerous articles on the subject, and seen his book become the basis of a documentary called “Passages of Time.” Like the book, the Initiative aims to promote scientific understanding of the walls and advocate for their protection as cultural and ecological resources. In 2002, Thorson published “ Stone by Stone,” his first book on the topic, and he and his wife Kristine founded the Stone Wall Initiative in conjunction with the publication, which Thorson describes as the first geoarchaeological study of New England’s stone walls. Laid stone walls along Route 169 in Canterbury, Conn. I ran a lab with graduate students and had funded projects … But I got interested in these stone walls as landforms, so I kept working on it.” At first, studying them was just a hobby for Thorson. Thorson - known to colleagues and friends as “Thor” - says he was “smitten” by the stone walls after moving his family from Alaska to Connecticut in 1984. My journey started with the book “Stone by Stone: The Magnificent History of New England’s Stone Walls” by University of Connecticut geology professor Robert M. Realizing that the trees in those forests weren’t particularly old, I surmised that those forests had once been cleared farm lands.Ĭasually wondering what had happened to the farms led to a journey of discovery through the forests and fields of New England. Driving north on Interstate 395 past towns like Norwich and Griswold, I was struck by the many old gray stone walls tumbling off into the forests along the highway. In 2007, I returned to eastern Connecticut, where I grew up. The history, science and poetry of New England's stone walls
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