Tom McLaughlin [04/25/2002]

By Tom McLaughlin

While driving around New England, I prefer to take alternate routes whenever I can. I keep a DeLorme Maine Atlas and New Hampshire Atlas in the car to guide me through the back roads. This time of year is especially good for wandering because woods are mostly bare of foliage. One can look deeper into the woods in the spring and fall and see stone walls almost everywhere reminders that New England was nearly 90 percent field and pastureland only a little over a hundred years ago.It's impressive how much work was done by our early farmers without the use of power tools. Here and there, I would see an excavator working to pull stumps and pile them around to be either hauled off or buried in the process of reclaiming a field from the forest. The first farmers had only block and tackle, crow bars and tripods to accomplish the same thing. The stumps they had to pull once held up trees 100 to 150 feet tall. Since they had to get a crop in the ground right away after moving here, they dropped the trees and burned them and left the stumps in the ground the first year, then worked to move the rocks and stumps in subsequent years. Some farmers would drag the stumps to the edges of their fields to hold in pasturing animals. I remember how old timers in Lovell sometimes referred to something as being "ugly as a stump fence." I can only imagine how ugly that was.Most surviving stone walls are simple affairs a single course of now-gray rocks, piled precariously. I remember walking along on top of some while growing up in Massachusetts. They weren't designed to hold up little boys and some rocks would give way and slide off as I scampered along. Other walls were works of art. Carefully and skillfully squared off with several courses, their stones fitting together precisely and permanently.It must have been discouraging for a farmer to still break a plow blade when, after all that work pulling rocks and stumps out of a field, frost action pushed up even more stones into the thin topsoil.During spring, it's easier to spot old cellar holes up close to the road that are hidden by vines and brambles in summer. Next to some stand split-granite walls which used to hold up an old barn. When they're on the side of a knoll, sometimes there are two or three courses of large slabs perfectly balanced on top of one another with smaller stones as spacers. The barn has long since collapsed and rotted away, but the skillfully-set slabs remain in place despite the action of frost and vegetation over a century. They even survived earthquakes such as the one that shook the region last Saturday. I feel enormous respect for the long-dead farmer who built those walls and I wonder why the place was abandoned. Did his children or his grandchildren or his great-grandchildren lack the work ethic he had and neglect the place? Was there some sickness that took out a whole generation? Did they send sons to fight in the Civil War who were killed or wounded too badly to work the farm? Did they give up on frost and stones and move out west on a wagon train? I have no way of knowing, so I drive slowly on and examine the beautifully-built stone walls parallel to the road and breaking off at right angles into the woods that used to be fields and pastures in the long ago.Continuing around a corner and over another knoll I find a still-functioning farm, its foundations still supporting house and barn. The fields around it are not overgrown to woods. A family cemetery is still visible in the back corner of one such field that overlooked the whole spread. Why this farm survived when the other didn't presents another mystery. Was this owned by an extended family that worked together better or worked harder? Did more than one family own it at different times? Was the soil better? Wast there a better water supply? Did a diptheria epidemic pass them by? Only the locals would know and I wasn't going to be in town long enough to find out. New England is full of such stories and I never tire of trying to read the signs on its back roads all around us. Tom McLaughlin is an eighth grade teacher who lives in Lovell, Maine.