Some Surprising History About Our Old Stone Walls
Opinion Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer’s interpretation of facts and data.
By Bill Primavera
When I first moved to “the country,” as I called Yorktown Heights in those early days, compared with my former neighborhood in Brooklyn Heights, it was to take a job as the public relations director at The Culinary Institute of America.
But the location of my country home was not quite in sync with where I worked, which was a full hour away by car in Hyde Park.
The reason for my not locating a shorter distance from my work was that I fell in love with a historic house, advertised in The New York Times, and in those days, I was very naïve about the challenges of commuting. After all, I had never owned a car when I lived in the city; all I needed was 15 cents for the subway. (Yes, we’re talking covered wagon days here.)
My choice of location was particularly harsh considering that it occurred at the beginning of the gas shortage in the early 1970s when motorists were temporarily required to limit their gas purchases to alternate days, depending on the numbers on their license plates.
At any rate, with careful planning of my gas purchases, that hour drive was not so taxing because more than half of it was along the Taconic Parkway, which has been described as the most beautiful drive in America.
En route, I would glance to my left and right, sometimes discovering some surprises, particularly in winter when the leaves were down, like the foundations of old homes or abandoned cemeteries. What I found particularly interesting were old stone walls wending their way through the thick woods. Yes, of course, I thought, these are the remnants of the old farms that used to be here.
Curious, I did more research on their origins and found some interesting information.
The building of stone walls, in essence, served three main purposes – it cleared the land for farming, it presented the material to delineate boundaries and to contain livestock.
In my research, I learned that Native Americans, enslaved people and indentured servants built stone walls in addition to the widely assumed farmers. Colonial settlers employed Native Americans in order to fill debts. Those debts were sometimes accrued because actions that were once the norm for Native Americans were deemed illegal and punishable by colonial settlers.
In fact, the concept of walls was part of a cultural clash. Ultimately, Indians were forced to adopt the European method of protecting crops from livestock, even though they had no domesticated animals of their own and even though fences were fundamentally antagonistic to their way of life. It was only a matter of time before these native Americans, having lost their territories and their traditional means of survival, would also be erecting fences – and stone walls – for the colonists.
Some of the labor was not debt-driven, nor paid, but rather forced. Some of the natives who worked for the settlers were free men who were paid a daily wage, but others were slaves, captives from the King Philip’s War of 1675 who had been subsequently awarded to colonists in compensation for their own participation in that war. (Who knew?) Both of these groups of Indians were probably instrumental in building stone walls.
Slavery was also a part of the history of the stone walls. Though many associate slavery with the Southern states, numerous northern farmers, I surprisingly learned, kept slaves well into the 18th century. Some day-to-day records and account books from northern plantations that survive to this day mention enslaved people who were forced to build stone walls.
So, as you peek out from your car windows on a lazy Sunday afternoon drive, especially in winter, and spy those ancient walls traversing the woods, you can be reminded of their deep history of the people who came before us and helped define how we lived and survived to this day.
Bill Primavera is a residential and commercial realtor associated with William Raveis Realty, as well as a publicist and journalist writing regularly as The Home Guru. For questions about home maintenance or to buy or sell a home, he can be e-mailed at williamjprimavera@gmail.com or called directly at 914-522-2076.
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