THE STONE WALL MYSTERY.

Ever notice how you can't throw a rock in Fairfield County without hitting a random wall of stones? It’s estimated there are more than 100,000 miles of old, disused stone walls out there, or enough to circle the globe four times!

And I’m not talking about the meticulously manicured stone walls that encircle your lovely home. The real mystery is why there are loads of these haphazard stone walls in places where there’s no logical reason a stone wall should exist. Who would build a stone wall, let alone hundreds of thousands of miles of them, in the middle of the forest? The answer is… no one. Because the walls weren’t built in the woods, you see, but in and around farms.?

It went like this: as farmers cleared those New England forests, they found rocks—lots and LOTS of them. The glaciers that receded at the end of the Ice Age left behind millions of tons of stone in all shapes and sizes. If you’ve ever tried your hand at home gardening, you know our Connecticut soil is still more stoned than Snoop Dogg.?

So very early farmers unearthed these plow-impeding stones from their fields using simple devices called “stone boats.” A stone boat is essentially a simple wooden sled pulled by beefy livestock. The farmers would roll boulders up on the stone boat and haul them to the edges of their field, where they’d pile ‘em up. This process was replicated at thousands of farms across the region, resulting in oodles of stone walls.

And it wasn’t a one time effort. A field would be cleared in the autumn, and as if by magic, there would be a whole new crop of hateful rocks in the spring. This is due to a process known as “frost heave.” As deforested soils freeze and thaw, stones shift and migrate to the surface. Because these stones kept reappearing year after year, early Nutmeggers used to speculate that the devil himself had put them there. It’s understandable!

Fast forward to the middle of the 19th century and New England was over 70 percent deforested by settlers, a rolling landscape of small farms as far as the eye could see. But by the end of the century, industrialization and large-scale farms led to thousands of farmers fields being abandoned, beginning a slow process of reforestation. And though the farms were gone, the stone walls remained. And friends, this is why today you find picturesque stone walls in the darndest places.

Are YOU interested in living in a land with tons of stone walls? We’ve got you covered!?

Click here to see a Curious Collection of Compass Connecticut properties that fit the bill.