Customer Reviews

Stone by Stone: The Magnificent History in New England's Stone Walls

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"The stone walls of New England stand guard against a future
that seems to be coming too quickly. They urge us to slow down
and to recall the past."

This is only one of the many observations that Professor Thorson
concludes his marvelous book with. I must admit that his final,
summarizing chapter actually brought a tear to my eye - hardly
to be expected from a book on geology and regional history
mixed with, amongst other topics, some anthropology.

In other words this book has enough of everything to satisfy
every curiosity you might have about those tumbled down rows
of stones found in just about every New England forest and
suburb. A surprising wealth of information on numerous topics.
Fascinating scientific and cultural and historical background -
far more than one would ever expect to encounter considering
the topic. And Professor Thorson's writing style is commendably
clear and readable, with a poet's affection for his topic.

Quite simply one of the best nonfiction books I think I have ever
read (and I read quite a lot), for its perfect fusion of research, understanding and sentiment.

Almost an answer to my prayers during so many long, wandering and wondering forest walks.
I encourage you to read this book.

When I picked up this book I thought: "How can an entire book be written about stones walls?" As it turns out the author did not write an entire book about stone walls.

The author gives us the hisory of stone walls starting with the formation of the earth, through formation of rocks, the ice age and finally American history. There is actually more about geology that stone walls themselves, although the author tried mightily to write a few hundred pages about them.

The geology and history is well-written and interesting. I learned quite about when walls were generally built and how the stones came to be that comprised them. However, the last third or so of the book - that part devoted to the walls themselves was often redundant. It seemed the author was searching for words to fill the pages and stretching - like the last pages of a term paper you know should be eight pages but you have to make the assigned ten pages.

A chapter on builders and technique would have been more useful than the stretched parts.

There are pearls of interesting history and I am not sorry I read the book. I just wished it had been shorter by an excision of the redundancies and "stretches".

This is a book that I would like to give 5 stars, but then what would I give a book like Brothers Karamazov? Although written by a geologist, this is not a textbook for Physical Geology 101. In addition to the obligatory couple of chapters on formation of the rocks, which are exceptionally well-written, this book describes the cultural history and settlement of New England from the Pilgrims to the present day with interesting sidebars on ecology, agriculture, the environment, physics, and even poetry and painting.

A geologist has the remarkable ability to take small outcrop and reconstruct an intricate and detailed geologic history, often rich with mountains, volcanoes, former ocean basins, earthquakes, extinct creatures, and the like. Thorson applies this storytelling ability, which combines art and science, to stonewalls, but he never strays so far from the facts that any of his conjectures become unbelievable.

As a farmer, I am impressed with Thorson's thorough and accurate understanding of agriculture from the past up to the present day. This is important since agricultural development was the reason that the stones became so abundant and the walls were built. The book also contains some interesting discussions on urban verses rural life, including the recent development of "ruburbia", a blend of the suburbs and country that is taking over rural New England (including the town in which I live).

Thorson presents his case for the annual crop of stones on New England farms from an historical perspective and from his expertise in geophysics and geology. The writing style is clear but repeats information from one chapter to another. The basic premises are implied but not precisely stated and enlarged upon -1. Early settlers and farmers wanted land for growing food; stones "heaved" up every year on the land were looked upon as trash. The more land cleared of trees and brush, the more land available for growing food BUT the clearing added impetus to stones being heaved up. Settlers piled stones on boundaries of their fields, often leaving space between two lines of stones where brush and other trash was tossed. 2. The marks on these stones are not glyphs or any form of record, they are merely stress marks.

Thorson's book is fun to read on two levels - first as a scholarly "comeback" meant to take the wind out of the sails of high-flown rhetoric on the ethnic and socio-economic origins and meanings of stone fences. Second, the bits of history and geological information are just enough to allow the reader to understand without being overwhelmed ala James Michener.

Thorson's discussion of frost heave is so wonderful I no longer resent picking those damn rocks out of the garden. Well, I still don't like those damn cobbles and pebbles but at least now it makes sense. I lived on sand in Schenectady, NY for awhile and I almost forgot how easy mending that lawn was, you could dig without a shovel, but New England called me home and alas this is a land of rocks, but walking through the woods here in Massachusetts with its stranded rock walls, whose existence in trackless woods makes one wonder who built them, so long ago that the trees surrounding them are well over 100 feet high, humbles one, such a long history, so many generations gone, you can feel the hard labor that must have gone into hauling these tons of rock, these walls that run up and down hillsides through woods that haven't seen farming in over 150 years.

I loved the soil talk, the geology, the history lesson, this is real history, the story of the people, explaining the reasons for the individual decisions of the many; the big history moves are the result of the many many little historical imperatives.

If you live in New England or any other glaciated terrain, you should read this book, you will find your surroundings, your own neighborhood woods, a source of new fascination.

As a native New Englander, I have long held stone walls to be an intrinsic element of life. I remember playing as a child on the rows of grey rocks marking out fields on my grandfather's farm. When my parents built their new house on part of that farm, the old stone wall in front was preserved to bound the new lawn. One of the genuine pleasures I find where I now live is that when I walk out into our front yard, I am almost literally surrounded by stone walls from when that land was a farm, walls that I have now learned to name "tossed" and "single" as labels of style. As I drive to work I see miles of stone walls bordering the back roads and, especially after recent snow, I glimpse long, thin, arthritic stony fingers stretching across the hillsides beneath barren trees. At home when I sit at my computer desk, I look out the side window along one of those tossed walls, its glacier-rounded boulders grey-green with lichen. A few weeks ago I ambled along its line, retrieving stones that had fallen among pine needles and leaves, putting them once again atop the wall for another month, year, decade.

I find these old walls vitally beautiful - not particularly the prettified, careful walls of ornamentation, but rather those rough farm walls whose beauty is rooted in unpretentious utility. A New England stripped of these stone walls would be a place immeasurably poorer in ways not readily computed in dollars.

Robert M. Thorson, a professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Connecticut has detailed the origin and natural history and modern threats to these walls in "Stone By Stone: The Magnificent History In New England's Stone Walls." Road improvements and housing developments have been major agents in the destruction of these old walls, bulldozing away our stony history to clear room for something new, but more recently a more insidious development threat has been growing: the purchase and demolition of existing old walls to be re-erected (in a much more regular and "improved" style, I am sure) as decorative ornamentation for new-built mini-mansions springing up like mushrooms across the land, a counterfeit of old authenticity purchased by destroying the real thing. Thorson's book is a rallying point for those concerned about such loss.

But "Stone By Stone" is not mere polemic in support of the latest good cause; it provides an education in not only the history of the stone walls themselves, but also of the geophysical processes that quite literally underlie (and undermine) the walls. Thorson explains that few stones poked above the surface in newly cleared New England fields. For perhaps a few decades after these new fields were turned to tillage or pasture, they remained clear. And then, almost as if by magic, stones would emerge from the soil. Although plows played some role in this, frost heaving and allied causes were mostly behind the phenomenon, along with plain old soil erosion. Depending on soil type and rock size and shape and moisture levels and a host of other factors, the speed and sequence of stones appearing on the surface followed specific patterns, lasting a few or several decades until the supply of stones was largely exhausted.

It was when these "crops" of stone emerged from the ground cleared decades before that stone walls were usually built. Before then, in general wooden fences were used to mark boundaries and to keep animals in or out. These pre-existing fence lines were an inviting place to dump stones pulled year after year from the soil. And when there were enough, it was a natural enough step to pile these stones into more or less neat lines that conserved open space and incidentally made a more permanent enclosure. Although for special purposes walls were sometimes made with special care and artistic effort (such as walls around cemeteries or houses and near gateways), individual stones shaped and fitted together with precision, made perhaps even with quarried rock, walls around fields were generally made by "tossing" stones - rolling the biggest stones into place for the base, hoisting smaller stones by hand to pile on top. These might be a single row of stones in width, or a double row with the space between filled with smaller, random material. These are the typical stone walls found today in New England woodlands, the crop fields and pastures abandoned to revert back to forest.

We are not used to seeing soil as a virtually living being, in motion on a timescale not calibrated by clocks but by a calendar of decades. Thorson's book describes this invisible set of forces that act continually upon the tiny pebbles and grains of dirt beneath our feet, forces operating not randomly but patterned by fundamental physical laws, forces pushing rocks to the surface and coaxing the blanket of surface soil to slide, slide down the hills. Once stated, these notions are nearly self-evident. Nearly.

It is not often I read a book that literally changes the way in which I look at the world about me, but "Stone By Stone" has been one of them. It is a remarkably thought-provoking work. Anyone interested in the New England landscape, past, present and future, should read this book.

a good effort, and an admirable topic. but from thorson's approach, it turns out like a poorly built wall: some good pieces here and there, but the overall effect is disjointed. the chapters on geology and specifically on glaciation are tremendous, and clearly show the suthors expertise. however, he never really supports his thesis (and i should emphasize thesis) that stone walls should be revered like the canyons of arizona, for instance. no matter how hard he tries to convine otherwise, he fails to show stone walls should be treated as natural formations - a sissyphean task for any author. Also - the book would have so greatly benefitted from the author's attempt - even just once - to pick up a rock all by himself and walk across his lawn with it and plop it down somewheres. instead, he relies on computer models to calculate time and effort to build stone walls. he goes into some detail about the matter, including the calculation of a football team's metabolism compared to building stone walls, but it is beyond me why on earth he included all that since he never makes his point. he gets a cord of wood wrong too, it's 4x4x8 - not x 20 as he suggests. an interesting book, no doubt - but one that very strongly needed the guiding hand of an editor. i suspect this publisher was enamored of an academic attempting a popular work and just let things go untouched. in the end, it stays pretty academic.

This is a wonderful book. It blends science, history and art to create an interesting perspective on the stone walls of New England. Thorson discusses the geological aspects of stone, the various types of stone walls and how they were built as well as the process of frost heaving and the disintegration of old walls. I hope this book causes people who have looked at stone walls and have seen only rocks to take a new, deeper look at them. They, and "Stone by Stone" are quite poetic.

Robert M. Thorson is a geologist, and he truly loves stone. His deep regard for the substance shines through in Stone by Stone. Anyone who's been to rural New England is familiar with the scene - low, tumbled, gray walls snaking through just about any "undeveloped" patch of woods. While it's true that these structures were "built" by farmers, it was surprising to learn that the walls aren't all that ancient. Contrary to popular belief, the soils of New England were not stony and inhospitable when the first settlers emigrated from Old England. As it turns out, the rocks rose to the surface only after a century or so, the natural outcome of deforestation and continuous tilling practices. As 19th century farmers hauled them to the edges of their fields, and tossed them along the perimeter, the walls developed and served as boundaries.

Stone by Stone is much more than a dry history. Thorson is a wonderful writer, and he brings geology, archaeology, history, sociology, and poetry to his subject. How and when the rocks were made and came to be there, what types of stones make up the walls, the forces of entropy that cause them to fall, and the physical demands of building, and the mythos of the New England farmer are all covered. Liberally dispersed throughout the text are illustrations and photos, quotes from other authors, and snippets of lyrical poetry that do as much to illuminate as his competent prose. He closes with an eloquent essay on nature, history, and the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth that governs everything on our planet.

Well conceived, well executed, informative, and a pleasure to read.

A well researched story on how stones were made. It's almost like reading the story of creation but in geological terms. Thor takes the reader from the beginnings of time to an interesting peroid in early american history. He describes what the first settlers saw for a landcape, how they transformed it and the resulting consequeses of erosion; ie rocks. Lots of Rocks. The early settlers had to take those rocks out of the fields so they ended up as "stones" on a wall. This book is an excellant narative that explains the making of rocks and why the stone walls are in the woods today.