- My name is Cheryl L and I'm recently retired sociology professor from USA and a main master naturalist.

And I started studying stone walls because they were at the intersection of human and natural history.

Maine has lots of stones because we had periods of glaciation that really scoured the landscape and left behind a lot of glacial till sand boulders, gravel, all mixed together.

And as long as the landscape was forested, the stones stayed put.

But when European settlers arrived in the 18th century, they started cutting down trees for home building for barns, for heating, for cooking.

And before long, the land was pretty well deforested.

And once the land became deforested, freezing and thawing brought the stones to the surface, the earliest fences that they made were, were wood fences, but they ran outta wood pretty quickly and they had plenty of stones once the trees were gone.

So they started building stone walls for boundaries for fencing the animals in and out into pastures and outer crop fields.

The earliest settlers in Maine in the early 17 hundreds settled along the coast and the rivers, and then they, throughout the 17 hundreds, sort of moved inland and upland.

And while we think about stone walls as being built over generations and generations, most of them were really built between 1775 and 1825.

By 1840 or so, the land was pretty well deforested.

75% of New England was deforested, partly as a consequence of what was called sheep fever, a real mania for raising sheep.

In the early 18 hundreds, there was an embargo from the UK and really high tariffs, so it was really hard and very expensive to get wool from England.

Coincidentally, in 1809, a man named William Jarvis finally got permission from the Spanish government to start importing Marino sheep, which have really lovely wool.

And so it was a real catalyst for expanding sheep farming in Maine in particular, but in New England, more generally, raising sheep boomed and busted for between roughly 18, 10 to 1830.

Another little bump around the Civil War.

And then it just became not so profitable.

The sheep overgrazed, the land started eroding.

The farms just became less profitable.

The hill farms started to be abandoned really by the 1850s.

And as the farms were abandoned, they turned back to forest.

And that's why so many of the stonewall we find now seem like they're in the middle of the woods.

The landscape looked really different.

A hundred, 200 years ago by 1900 roughly half of that deforested land had gone back to forest.

So that 50 year, 60 year interval, when the farms were abandoned and trees allowed to regrow, really changed the landscape pretty dramatically twice over in a century.

The settlers built stone walls for lots of different reasons.

Some of them were boundary walls, really deliberately, carefully constructed.

They were meant to last.

Big solid stones, generally not terribly high.

It's hard to lift heavy stones very high, so they would've been maybe two to three feet high.

Other stone walls were meant for fencing.

They might've had wood fencing on top of the stone because to be a legal fence, a a wall had to be four to four and a half feet high.

And it's not easy to lift big stones that high.

So they would've been lower stone walls with higher wood on top.

That would've been to keep animals out of the crop fields and to keep them in their pastures.

Some stone walls look really messy and they look really messy because they were just places to put the stones to get them out of the field.

Another kind of very deliberate but efficient building was called cattle lanes.

And they were sort of two very long sort of parallel walls.

They didn't need to be especially high.

They didn't need to be especially carefully built, but they were used to guide cattle or other livestock from one pasture to another, or from the barn or watering place, right to a pasture to keep them, again, out of the crop fields so that the farmer could get them to go right where they needed to go.

So occasionally we'll find those sort of parallel stone walls.

The stonewalls were built really well.

They've lasted a long time, but even so, they're constantly changing.

The debris that settles on them form soil and hummus for plants to take root, sometimes hold trees, right, take root and grow through the middle of a stone wall or displacing the stones.

So while they are certainly long lasting and they don't look like they change very fast, they're actually in constant motion, constant change.

The ones that we're looking at around here we can tell have been here a long time and haven't been moved, and we can tell by the lichens and the moss that's growing on them.

There's so many things I love about these Stonewall, they're beautiful for one thing, but really the, the intersection of human history and natural history.

I mean, I really did start studying them for the, the natural history part because it, it enabled me to learn more about geology and about the landscape of Maine.

But they're also fascinating for what grows on them.

The lichens, the moss, sometimes ferns, wild flowers.

They're used by animals.

They're, I've, you know, been studying them and have little chipmunks peek out at me.

There's signs of animals using them for highways.

They run along them.

They are dining room tables.

You can see the remains of acorns and squirrel mittens on them.

So there's nothing not to like about them really are a distinctive Maine and New England land form.

In 1939, the US did a survey and found 246,000 miles of Stonewalls.

240,000 of them were in New England.

So New England is where the Stonewall are.

The other other parts of the country don't have like this.

And I think that's one reason why so many people in Maine and maybe New England more generally, are so interested in them 'cause they really are distinctive to this region.