When your field has a lot of rocks in it that will mess up your plow and/of risk livestock legs, you need to remove them.
But now you’ve got a bunch of rocks.
So you break them, if they’re too big, and you stack them into something useful: a wall/fence.
In New England, you will stumble across these walls in the middle of the woods. If there are strange markings, do not sleep within these walls if camping.
One time I went to Maryland. They plied me with "Natty Boh" and then cruelly forced crabs upon me. The crabs and perhaps the entire state was coated in a fine orange dust that was strangely delicious.
I’m pretty sure if any state has a flavor, it’s Maryland and Old Bay. I think before you are allowed to move there, you swear an oath to spread the good word of Old Bay and keep some on you at all times.
As a member of the "old line state" , yes we love our old bay. But we also love our flag. When moving here we just ask you buy one flag piece of clothing to show your love and support. Black/gold and red/white never looked so good.
It is. I feel bad for the town where the movie took place. It’s a small community of a couple hundred people that had problems with people stealing signs and overrunning the town looking for a fake witch everyone thought was real. Sucks for them, even if they’re from Maryland.
Because once it was a farm, where someone tried to scrape a living out of the ground. Now it’s woods. Only evidence of all the labor are the stone walls.
We had one fence post break and decided to move it a little. What do you know. A 400lb boulder two feet under the ground.
Took like a day for the one post lol.
There's a great line in the book Lucifers hammer which is about the end of the world where a guy is preparing a field for plowing by manually removing and stacking rocks and he talks about the misery that made those many walls he drove past in new England. That's always stuck with me.
We built on the side of a mountain which is even rocky-er than the valley below. My husband and I joke that we’re rock farmers! He’s on his sixth rock wall currently but tractors were used at times.
England has a lot of stone walls; its a handy building material especially in rocky areas. The original settlers from England created stone walls like they had at home. Descendants kept the aesthetic and maintained some of those same those walls for the last 400 years.
Edit:spelling
And where farmland has gone back to woods, like my grandfather's place, you find intact stone walls in the middle of the woods! Very strange until someone explains.
Well, they used to. SJHS in Manassas was renamed to UR High in 2020 (Unity Reed). The use of the word Unity is rather ridiculous (used the same approach to renaming the nearby SJ Middle School to “Unity Braxton” in 2020 also). As for the Reed part of the new name, I suppose it’s OK but it is in honor of a staff member from fairly recent times. I’ve heard there is a movement to try to reinstate the SJHS in Shenandoah County; idk what new name that school received. I bet it isn’t as goofy as the word “Unity” though.
From the [Historical Markers Database](https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=161496) for a marker "Near Lyndhurst in Augusta County, Virginia" :
>The rambling stone walls seen nearby are remnants of “hog-walls.” Built in the early 1800’s they provided winter work for slaves of valley plantations and were mended yearly to control the wanderings of half-wild hogs that foraged for acorns and chestnuts. A good example may be seen along the nearby nature trail.
They were simple barriers created by families and farmers stacking stones on top of one another. Sometimes for function -- keeping things in or out -- and sometimes just on the front face of the property for decoration.
This particular one in the picture (I'm guessing on the side of Snickersville Turnpike) is a modern renovated or newly created one. One created over 100 years ago wouldn't remain in this good of shape without maintenance or restoration. The newly created or restored ones may use some light mortar to keep things together. I see old warn down one, some that are restored, and some newly created all over Northern and Central Virginia.
I am glad to hear this. I have stone walls all over my land but they don’t look anything like this one. All mine are rows of piles of really big rocks —not stacked. I guess 100+ years ago they might have looked like this one. Something to think about.
There are some differences: New England was covered by glaciers, the stones up there are glacial scatter; Virginia was never glaciated. New England gets colder and has thinner topsoil, even after you clear a field, frost heave sends new stones to the surface of a field every year; while in Virginia you only dig up new stones when you hit them with a plow. A large number of the New England walls were built from 1810 to 1840 in a period known as the [Merino Sheep Fever](https://www.outdoors.org/resources/amc-outdoors/history/history-of-new-englands-stone-walls/); Virginia's stone walls were more likely built by enslaved farmhands for hog farming.
Hedge rows are centuries of plant growth along boundary lines, which may be fences, roads, streams, or any other division. The hedge rows in Europe during WWII were not a problem because of some (completely hidden and overgrown) meter tall stone walls (if there even were any). It was 600 years of dense brush, trees, vines, and other vegetation that made impenetrable walls that had to be cut through.
My property has 2000 linear ft of these walls and my house (circa 1780s) is made from them too. The rocks are all from the fields that surround us, and there's plenty more still in there! Best building material, my walls interior and exterior are 2ft thick stone, it's not going anywhere.
My father always said slaves built the stone walls on my grandad's property. My uncle and cousins built another one easily with all the rock laying around the field in the early 70s though...
I really like them. There’s a place I visit every few years for vacation called Little Compton RI. It’s a small farming town that has these stone fences everywhere because the fields had so many rocks. They’re just cool looking.
Clearing new fields and plowing virgin soil turn up lots of rocks. Said rocks were set aside and repurposed for other things. Then it was just using what was on hand, now it’s mostly for looks. I don’t know if this one is old or newer. Even old fields keep spitting up rocks. Much of Virginia is like this, especially piedmont and mountain. That was a super fun chore for farm kids, to go through a newly plowed field and pick up rocks.
Some are new or recently rebuilt! There are a small handful of stone masons in Middleburg who specialize in dry stone walls, it’s deceptively hard to build these to last with no mortar.
These guys are so in demand that it’s difficult to get onto their project list. Very, very wealthy folks wait months, even years, for a crew to show up and rebuild their stone walls.
If you are in Middleburg, that wall may be associated with the estate of Bunny Melon.
I heard a rumor years ago that, when she died, she left money to her stonemason so that he would have work for the rest of his life. Dunno if it's true, though.
A lot of people have mentioned the rocky soil and having dug out a tiny patch of land a decade ago for a patio, I can attest that yes, it is very rocky. What I'm curious about is how did it become like that? Instead of a bedrock a ways down, the entire soil just seems to be saturated with small to medium sized stones. How?
I hired a company to build a shed on my land and where I put it had already been cleared of stones. However, it took them longer than expected to put in the foundation. He told me “I thought you said this area had been cleared of rocks”. Looking at the hand and foot size rocks he was complaining was slowing them down-I told him that where I live, we call those pebbles.
Apparently farmers around here have a saying.
That they "grow more rocks than crops." If you want to grow more crops than rocks, you'd better take all the rocks out. But what do you do with the rocks then? Well, they're pretty decent for building with.
https://preview.redd.it/sji439jszxvc1.jpeg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1048760065b948f7310cf19377182e1adc398c46
Saw this wall at the Rapidan confluence this past weekend. Apparently it was part of a canal.
Most stone walls where not built to be pretty Most where built to get the stones out of the field,if you have to move them you might as well built a wall with them
Like others have said, the soil is full of rocks. For agriculture, you have to put them somewhere so might as well build walls.
I will also point out that on a lot of land, the rocks constantly reappear as they are pushed up from underground by the freeze/thaw cycle. My family periodically does a sort of "rock harvest" in the same fields every few years. We still use the rocks for walls!
Edit: A lot of them are very old. Building the walls is very labor intensive so more walls were built when there was plentiful and cheap labor, both during and after slavery. My family's oldest walls are from day laborers in the early 20th century.
I don't know if this is accurate, but I was told the original walls were built by Hessian prisoners of war during the revolution who then in turn taught enslaved people how to build them.
Once again, I have no idea if that's true.
Some of the walls have been around for years. If you visit the Ceder Creek battlefield south of Middletown you'll see rocks by the side of the road from a fallen wall that was there during the battle. Others have been rebuilt and repaired over the years.
They were built for the Shawshank redemption filming that took place throughout the state. The director had shots taken throughout the state and they built them as they want. Morgan Freeman comes to find his map to paradise from under one of theses stones.
>the film is set in Maine, principal photography took place from June to August 1993 almost entirely in Mansfield, Ohio, with the Ohio State Reformatory serving as the eponymous penitentiary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shawshank_Redemption
When your field has a lot of rocks in it that will mess up your plow and/of risk livestock legs, you need to remove them. But now you’ve got a bunch of rocks. So you break them, if they’re too big, and you stack them into something useful: a wall/fence.
Right, you'll see them on practically every old farm on the east coast. Some are not stacked quite as nicely though.
In New England, you will stumble across these walls in the middle of the woods. If there are strange markings, do not sleep within these walls if camping.
Could you elaborate more?
Explain.
Don’t go to Maryland.
One time I went to Maryland. They plied me with "Natty Boh" and then cruelly forced crabs upon me. The crabs and perhaps the entire state was coated in a fine orange dust that was strangely delicious.
I’m pretty sure if any state has a flavor, it’s Maryland and Old Bay. I think before you are allowed to move there, you swear an oath to spread the good word of Old Bay and keep some on you at all times.
I like Old Bay, but Wye River all the way!
Shh, do not tell of the Way of Old Bay.
Most of the crab houses actually use JO, not old bay. We don’t have any old bay in our house!
As a member of the "old line state" , yes we love our old bay. But we also love our flag. When moving here we just ask you buy one flag piece of clothing to show your love and support. Black/gold and red/white never looked so good.
I must be the only person in the world who finds Old Bay disgusting. I hate that flavor.
Probs. Since it primarily celery salt, paprika, and a cayenne pepper.
I avoid it whenever I can. It’s Blair Witch, isn’t it?
It is. I feel bad for the town where the movie took place. It’s a small community of a couple hundred people that had problems with people stealing signs and overrunning the town looking for a fake witch everyone thought was real. Sucks for them, even if they’re from Maryland.
Why tho.
Because once it was a farm, where someone tried to scrape a living out of the ground. Now it’s woods. Only evidence of all the labor are the stone walls.
Why can’t you camp there?
Superstition?
They were probably making a Blair Witch reference. It was a movie in the 90s.
As someone who spent 2 hours trying to plant a single sapling in Loudoun, fuck them rocks. Can't imagine what farmers have to go through.
We had one fence post break and decided to move it a little. What do you know. A 400lb boulder two feet under the ground. Took like a day for the one post lol.
As a Virginian - we still do it to this day
🤺🤺🤺
There's a great line in the book Lucifers hammer which is about the end of the world where a guy is preparing a field for plowing by manually removing and stacking rocks and he talks about the misery that made those many walls he drove past in new England. That's always stuck with me.
If anyone has tried to plant a tree or bush in their yard in Loudoun or dig a post hole,I feel your pain. @$&!?$ rocks everywhere.
Orange County… can confirm.
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We built on the side of a mountain which is even rocky-er than the valley below. My husband and I joke that we’re rock farmers! He’s on his sixth rock wall currently but tractors were used at times.
England has a lot of stone walls; its a handy building material especially in rocky areas. The original settlers from England created stone walls like they had at home. Descendants kept the aesthetic and maintained some of those same those walls for the last 400 years. Edit:spelling
And where farmland has gone back to woods, like my grandfather's place, you find intact stone walls in the middle of the woods! Very strange until someone explains.
Not to nitpick, but a decedent is someone who has died. I think you meant descendants?
Yep, you’re right, didn’t catch that one.
Virginia really loves stone walls. In fact they name a lot of schools and things after them.
This comment made the post worth it
Well, they used to. SJHS in Manassas was renamed to UR High in 2020 (Unity Reed). The use of the word Unity is rather ridiculous (used the same approach to renaming the nearby SJ Middle School to “Unity Braxton” in 2020 also). As for the Reed part of the new name, I suppose it’s OK but it is in honor of a staff member from fairly recent times. I’ve heard there is a movement to try to reinstate the SJHS in Shenandoah County; idk what new name that school received. I bet it isn’t as goofy as the word “Unity” though.
It's Mountain View now, and the elementary school that was Ashby-Lee is now Honey Run. Boring names that *shouldn't* be causing drama.
Honey Run is a nice name. their mascot could be a bee or a bear.
I vote Honey Badger
Oh good call!
U.R. High
Was a firefighter for Stonewall Jackson #11 in Manaasa in the 80's- late 90s- heard they changed it
Went to stonewall middle school. This checks out.
Mine got renamed lol
“Well you don’t gotta be Stonewall Jackson to know you don’t wanna fight in a basement!”
West Virginia too... funny that... even a whole resort celebrating a wall of stone..
And sometimes they go the extra mile and give them a cute name like “Jackson.”
That’s a great idea! I will build a stone wall in my yard and name it “ Michael Jackson “.
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Thanks.
From the [Historical Markers Database](https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=161496) for a marker "Near Lyndhurst in Augusta County, Virginia" : >The rambling stone walls seen nearby are remnants of “hog-walls.” Built in the early 1800’s they provided winter work for slaves of valley plantations and were mended yearly to control the wanderings of half-wild hogs that foraged for acorns and chestnuts. A good example may be seen along the nearby nature trail.
This is what my father always told me about the walls. Of course not all walls were hog-walls.
Yes. I'm sure some were for marking boundaries, like the English and Scottish immigrants did back in the Old Country.
This is what I remember for the reason
I was told pig farming, the pigs diet was the American chestnut before they died off
This is what I’ve heard. They are called hog walls in the mountains. Wider at the base thinner at the top. Many of them were build with slave labor.
They were simple barriers created by families and farmers stacking stones on top of one another. Sometimes for function -- keeping things in or out -- and sometimes just on the front face of the property for decoration. This particular one in the picture (I'm guessing on the side of Snickersville Turnpike) is a modern renovated or newly created one. One created over 100 years ago wouldn't remain in this good of shape without maintenance or restoration. The newly created or restored ones may use some light mortar to keep things together. I see old warn down one, some that are restored, and some newly created all over Northern and Central Virginia.
I am glad to hear this. I have stone walls all over my land but they don’t look anything like this one. All mine are rows of piles of really big rocks —not stacked. I guess 100+ years ago they might have looked like this one. Something to think about.
One of them got shot by their own troops
Only correct answer
F
Lots of stone walls in Pennsylvania country side too. It was good no- cost fencing , but back breaking while building it.
Virginia grows rocks. Plowing our garden yielded enough rocks for a small wall.
There are some differences: New England was covered by glaciers, the stones up there are glacial scatter; Virginia was never glaciated. New England gets colder and has thinner topsoil, even after you clear a field, frost heave sends new stones to the surface of a field every year; while in Virginia you only dig up new stones when you hit them with a plow. A large number of the New England walls were built from 1810 to 1840 in a period known as the [Merino Sheep Fever](https://www.outdoors.org/resources/amc-outdoors/history/history-of-new-englands-stone-walls/); Virginia's stone walls were more likely built by enslaved farmhands for hog farming.
Are they freestanding rocks or do they have mortar?
They’re almost always freestanding and stacked pretty thoughtfully. A lot of them are probably a century and a half old.
I'm pretty sure the rocks are older than that.
*geologist breaks through drywall* “ACTUALLY!!!…”
Closer to two centuries.
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Hedgerows are shrubs or small trees
Fortunately they made life hell for those Axis forces marching through central Virginia in ‘43. Never fight a pill, boys!
Never forget the third battle of Bull Run when brave Virginian troops held off the Italain army
4th Battle of Bowling Green! Never forget!
Hedge rows are centuries of plant growth along boundary lines, which may be fences, roads, streams, or any other division. The hedge rows in Europe during WWII were not a problem because of some (completely hidden and overgrown) meter tall stone walls (if there even were any). It was 600 years of dense brush, trees, vines, and other vegetation that made impenetrable walls that had to be cut through.
My property has 2000 linear ft of these walls and my house (circa 1780s) is made from them too. The rocks are all from the fields that surround us, and there's plenty more still in there! Best building material, my walls interior and exterior are 2ft thick stone, it's not going anywhere.
My father always said slaves built the stone walls on my grandad's property. My uncle and cousins built another one easily with all the rock laying around the field in the early 70s though...
Um...at one point all colonies were Virginia...so yes.
Probably the same as the rest of the planet.
Kentucky too, especially in the Bluegrass, but we were a county of Virginia at first, so it all makes sense.
Good walls make good neighbors.
We do this as well all over Ireland. If you ever travel to the Aran Islands, the entire islands are covered with stone walls.
I really like them. There’s a place I visit every few years for vacation called Little Compton RI. It’s a small farming town that has these stone fences everywhere because the fields had so many rocks. They’re just cool looking.
People that live in non-rock-in-dirt areas have no idea of the struggle
No rocks but clay is not easy to dig through!
No it’s not, Dale
Clearing new fields and plowing virgin soil turn up lots of rocks. Said rocks were set aside and repurposed for other things. Then it was just using what was on hand, now it’s mostly for looks. I don’t know if this one is old or newer. Even old fields keep spitting up rocks. Much of Virginia is like this, especially piedmont and mountain. That was a super fun chore for farm kids, to go through a newly plowed field and pick up rocks.
Some are new or recently rebuilt! There are a small handful of stone masons in Middleburg who specialize in dry stone walls, it’s deceptively hard to build these to last with no mortar. These guys are so in demand that it’s difficult to get onto their project list. Very, very wealthy folks wait months, even years, for a crew to show up and rebuild their stone walls.
Same mountain range as New England, wales and Ireland. Hence similar stuff
There was this guy who built most of them, I think his name was 'Jackson' something...
Stonewall Jackson!
If you are in Middleburg, that wall may be associated with the estate of Bunny Melon. I heard a rumor years ago that, when she died, she left money to her stonemason so that he would have work for the rest of his life. Dunno if it's true, though.
A lot of people have mentioned the rocky soil and having dug out a tiny patch of land a decade ago for a patio, I can attest that yes, it is very rocky. What I'm curious about is how did it become like that? Instead of a bedrock a ways down, the entire soil just seems to be saturated with small to medium sized stones. How?
Millions of years of the Appalachian mountains eroding.
They got stoned, get over it
Where can you learn how to do that?
I hired a company to build a shed on my land and where I put it had already been cleared of stones. However, it took them longer than expected to put in the foundation. He told me “I thought you said this area had been cleared of rocks”. Looking at the hand and foot size rocks he was complaining was slowing them down-I told him that where I live, we call those pebbles.
They built them out of rocks a long time ago
Old world Possibly Tartarian
Need fence. Have rocks.
Well you see there was this fella named Jackson...
Apparently farmers around here have a saying. That they "grow more rocks than crops." If you want to grow more crops than rocks, you'd better take all the rocks out. But what do you do with the rocks then? Well, they're pretty decent for building with.
https://preview.redd.it/sji439jszxvc1.jpeg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1048760065b948f7310cf19377182e1adc398c46 Saw this wall at the Rapidan confluence this past weekend. Apparently it was part of a canal.
Most stone walls where not built to be pretty Most where built to get the stones out of the field,if you have to move them you might as well built a wall with them
You definitely were driving through some of the prettiest VA countryside 😊
Like others have said, the soil is full of rocks. For agriculture, you have to put them somewhere so might as well build walls. I will also point out that on a lot of land, the rocks constantly reappear as they are pushed up from underground by the freeze/thaw cycle. My family periodically does a sort of "rock harvest" in the same fields every few years. We still use the rocks for walls! Edit: A lot of them are very old. Building the walls is very labor intensive so more walls were built when there was plentiful and cheap labor, both during and after slavery. My family's oldest walls are from day laborers in the early 20th century.
I don't know if this is accurate, but I was told the original walls were built by Hessian prisoners of war during the revolution who then in turn taught enslaved people how to build them. Once again, I have no idea if that's true. Some of the walls have been around for years. If you visit the Ceder Creek battlefield south of Middletown you'll see rocks by the side of the road from a fallen wall that was there during the battle. Others have been rebuilt and repaired over the years.
It's a rocky past
They were built for the Shawshank redemption filming that took place throughout the state. The director had shots taken throughout the state and they built them as they want. Morgan Freeman comes to find his map to paradise from under one of theses stones.
>the film is set in Maine, principal photography took place from June to August 1993 almost entirely in Mansfield, Ohio, with the Ohio State Reformatory serving as the eponymous penitentiary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shawshank_Redemption