No matter where you go in the New England woods, you’re bound to come across the iconic 19th century stone wall. They can be seen everywhere, including on the Midstate Trail. 

It’s commonly believed that the early New England farmers made these walls as they uncovered frost heaving rocks while plowing their fields each spring, which surely happened. But as to why and when the walls were built, it depends on the wall and who you ask.

Robert Thorson, a landscape geologist at the University of Connecticut, the founder of The Stone Wall Initiative, and the author of Stone by Stone, shares this view, “The walls are simply a disposal pile.” But Tom Wessels, an ecologist and the author of Reading the Forest Landscape, says that the earliest New England farmers fenced in their livestock with wooden split rail fences, which was much easier than lugging heavy stones up a hill to build a wall. Wessels believes that farmers would throw the rocks in a rock dump rather than putting time and effort into constructing an extensive network of walls. 

Nearly a quarter of a million miles of stone walls were constructed throughout our region according to Thorson. Wessels calculates that central New England alone has 125,000 miles of stone walls, a length that could wrap around the equator five times or extend more than halfway to the moon. Wessels believes that most of these walls were built in thirty years and that if these walls were in the Mediterranean, rather than New England, they would be the eighth wonder of the world. 

Some walls are older than others, depending on when the area was first settled. Walls were built between 1750 and 1850, when New England farms were in their heyday. But according to Wessels, most of the stone walls you see today in Central New England were built between 1810 and 1840, during a period known as “Sheep Fever.”

New England was about to experience the most profound change to the landscape since the Ice Age. It was an event that would see more than 80 percent of our forests cut down, hillsides eroded to bare rock, and natural habitats wiped out.

It was a shift from the small farm to larger commercial farming. Between 1810 and 1820 the number of textile meals in the region processing Merino wool multiplied threefold.

 It all began after France and Spain invaded Portugal in 1807, then Napoleon and his French army invaded Spain in 1808, toppling Spain’s King Ferdinand VII. 

A Bostonian financier, William Jarvis, was appointed by Thomas Jefferson to be the U.S. Consul to Portugal. During the chaos of Napoleon’s conquest of Spain, Jarvis seized the opportunity to obtain the previously restricted and much sought after Merino breed of sheep, known for its fine, soft wool. He imported 4,000 of them back to his farm in Weathersfield, Vermont.

Those 4,000 sheep eventually surpassed a million and a half in the next two decades. The boycott of British goods during the War of 1812 was an additional boon to New England’s farmers. Wessels believes that it was during this thirty-year period that most of New England’s stone walls were built to pen the Merino sheep.

But by 1840, as prices plummeted, new markets opened, and land became available for farming in the west; New England’s sheep farms were being abandoned, and by 1900 more than half of the cleared land was reforested once again. Today, these picturesque walls that once meandered through fields and pastures can be found throughout our forests.