In Maine, Even the Stone Walls Have Stories A Pictorial History
of New England's Stone Walls European practice of common herding
- where a community's livestock is pastured under the eyes of
one herdsman - to the individual ownership of pastureland called
for some sort of fencing. Stone, home-grown stone, would help
solve the fencing problem - as well as help solve the problem of
what to do with it. Within a generation, the seemingly endless
supply of wood had begun to shrink. With the clearing of the
hillside forest, the protective layer of mulch on the forest
floor had eroded, thinning the insulating blanket that protected
the deeper soils from the effects of the freeze and thaw cycle.
This, combined with the absence of the protective root layer,
caused the long buried, glacially deposited rocks to work their
way toward the surface. As the cold reached down from above, it
froze to the top of a rock and lifted it just a bit. Some soil
slid into the void beneath so that when the next thaw came, the
rock settl