Stone Walls in New England Stacked With History

Mike Minto has been building and repairing stone walls for about 20 years, but his journey to masonry was not a linear one.

“I’ve always had a deep interest in history, especially local history and Rhode Island history,” Minto said. “And when you’re working on these walls, there’s something really magical about it because you know that other people have put each of these stones into place.”

When Minto was in high school, he spent his summers working on a farm. Fixing collapsed stone walls was part of the job. He would become an English teacher and then a farmer, but his love of masonry kept tugging at him.

“I had a moment where I was really thinking about what do I want to really do with my life? And I started thinking more about how do I want to spend my days? I want to build my life around how I want to spend my days,” Minto said. “I didn’t want to have a nine-to-five job. I wanted to blend my career with a lifestyle.”

It’s a lifestyle that revolves around history and the outdoors. Minto is the owner of Rhode Island Stone Walls. Most of his work centers around restoring them, including at Casey Farm in Saunderstown. The property, which is owned by Historic New England, features more than 10 miles of stone walls.

“A lot of times walls will start to sag,” he said. “And if it’s a repair as opposed to a full restoration of a wall, you basically take out a section of the wall and you do it with two diagonals so that you can tie into the existing wall. And you’re generally trying to make it match what’s on either side of it so that it doesn’t look like you just fixed a spot in the wall.”

Robert Thorson is also mesmerized by stone walls — a fascination that began when he moved from Alaska to Connecticut in the mid-1980s.

“I could not believe how many stone walls were there in the forests of eastern Connecticut,” Thorson said. “And I just said, ‘What is that thing? Why are they different? Why do they look the way they do?’”

Thorson has been studying them for decades. He is a professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Connecticut. Thorson describes stone walls as a signature landform in New England. The region has hard, crystalline rocks that were spread out by retreating glaciers. As forests were cleared to create farmland, glacial stones were then used to separate fields and pastures.

“What happened is when you change the land by removing the trees, you change the physics of the soil and that causes the concentration of stone after you’ve settled,” Thorson said. “And when you have enough stone along a border, you can begin to do something with it, especially if you’re running out of wood.”

For Thorson, the walls represent hard work and tenacity.

“These stone walls are fantastic symbols of the new republic, the early Americans, the prideful development of a country before the troubles of the Civil War,” Thorson said.

But Thorson said the walls also reveal a darker part of America’s history.

“There’s no doubt that some slaves built stonewalls. And there’s no doubt that prisoners built stonewalls. There’s no doubt that there’s some nastiness associated with the construction,” he said. “But the vast majority are built by people who live on the farm with stones from the farm with money from on the farm.”

When asked how Rhode Island stacks up against the other New England states in terms of the amount of stone walls, Thorson said that Rhode Island was different.

“It wins the prize for having the most concentrated stone walls. And part of that has to do with the fact that it’s a small state just by measurement,” he said. “But most of it is it’s settled early on, very hard rocks by very enterprising people and they just stayed and stayed and stayed. And so the longer you stay in one place, the more the stone walls become built up and well organized.”

That includes walls in southern Rhode Island, where farming was big business and high walls were needed to keep in livestock. Farm records at Casey Farm indicate there was a farmer in the 1780s who built more than 900 feet of 5-foot walls around the barnyard and pastures in exchange for 650 pounds of Narragansett cheese.

Minto said the rich history at Casey Farm captures the essence of what he loves about the work.

“When you’re here fixing a wall, it’s like you’re transported back in time,” he said. “These walls are old, most of them. Some of these were built in the late 1700s. Most of the wall building in this area was more late 1700s, early 1800s but some of these walls are older than that because this land was cleared very early.”

Minto’s 19-year-old son, Ben, enjoys working alongside his dad. And he feels the responsibility of the job.

“I think all over New England stone walls are so important and historical and tell such a story that as someone who’s repairing or building them, I think you have a duty to do the absolute best you can and take your time with the work,” Ben Minto said.

It is work that provides a home and hiding spot for various animals, including chipmunks and snakes. Thorson said it is important that all New England communities have a plan in place to protect these historic walls.

“In some places you can go into a rural property and you need a permit to take down an old barn and you need a permit to dig a little peat or to take out a little bit of sand and gravel out of it. But you can do whatever you want with the stone walls,” Thorson said. “And I still think that preserving the heritage is worth it.”

Thorson encourages people to wander through the woods and go “wall watching.” He appreciates the detail that went into cobbling together all of these stones.

“It’s not just a wall. Somebody made it, some living, breathing person who cares about his breakfast and the fate of his children built that wall,” Thorson said. “And the cool thing about that is to somebody like me who comes from Alaska and arrives in New England, they unify this place in a way that nothing else does.”