Fencemakers Made it to the Moon

DEDHAM, MASSACHUSETTS--In 1794, at age 6, Asa Sheldon began carrying rocks to build stone fences. At age 11 he was sold into indenture by his parents and promised one pair of new shoes every two years. At age 21 he was released from indenture a free man and paid $100 for his years of service. He kept on building stone fences for another sixty years; New Englanders are like that. It may be that the stone fences here were the origin of the Protestant work ethic.

They still criss cross all the seven states of New
England and New York state besides, some three hundred years old, some only one or two centuries and almost all are in surprisingly good condition. they are monuments which, in their own way, are as impressive as the Egyptian pyramids and they contain ten times as much stone.

A century ago it was calculated that by piling one rock on top of two rocks and keeping on and on doing it, people in this section of the United States had erected 240,000 miles of stone fences, which is further than the distance from here to the moon. You don’t have to believe that, but remember you can believe anything if you try. There are plenty of people here who believe Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. It’s a matter of faith.

To this day, New England’s stone walls are the deep careworn lines in New England’s face and most of the small downs retain Fence Viewer as a municipal office, the viewer being charged with seeing that walls are tended properly and kept neat, square and true. One of the many beliefs which attach to the stones like the green lichens is that fences which run north and south are more stable than those running east and west. It’s a pity that no one ever figured out how to enclose a piece of property using north-south fencing only, but there are limits even to Yankee ingenuity.

As with Egypt’s pyramids, time is slowly gnawing away at the grey granite and gneiss boulders of the fences. Originally they had two purposes. One was to free the farmlands of boulders which the winter frosts heaved up every spring, a process so regular that two centuries ago there was a belief that rocks grew in the soil the way potatoes do. The other reason was that good fences make good neighbors.

However many of those fences now run through forests in an almost aimless pattern, enclosing nothing. Seventy per cent of New England’s farmland has been abandoned by discourage farmers and is now either new oak forest or even newer and to some people more exciting, blacktop roads and huge parking lots at malls with white paint making herring bone patterns on the asphalt.

A few experts remain, here and there.

One, author of the book went to investigate the poet Robert Frost’s wall, which still stands on his old property. “Something there is that does not love a wall/ That sends the grey rocks tumbling down.... She reports with some asperity that he was a better poet than a fence builder and it’s no wonder the rocks tumbled down.

Another local expert explains that the best part of a good rock fence is underground and unseen. Good fences were started in trenches which extended below the winter frost lines. Some may be three feet across the top and six or eight feet high but there are some, only one stone wide, which stand straight year after year, decade after decade.

One of the rules, and there are almost as many as there are fencers new and old, is that every stone in a wall should touch nine other stones.

The story is told of an old fence builder and a boy helper. “Who is going to know whether we bury stones beneath this fence?” said the boy. The old builder spoke in astonishment. “How can you ask such a question? Why you would know. And I would know.”