STONEWALL: ONE OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST WONDERS?

"It's always amazing to me when I'm reminded that we do not have to go further than our own backyard to discover how incredible our little corner of the earth actually is." (Photo compliments of a Stonewall Acres site-owner.)

I was doing a little research to prepare for a project I’m planning for the upcoming season at Stonewall when I ‘stumbled’ upon some historical information about our community’s namesake. It’s not difficult to figure out within a short time how Stonewall got its name. All you have to do is take walk in the woods or a grab a glimpse at the properties decorated with stone borders and rock gardens or driveways lined with stones dug up by the site-owners found on their lot, to conclude that the title STONEWALL ACRES is an suitable choice.

What is interesting to me is that the inspirational land marks known as New England’s stone walls, have been compared to many of the world’s famous monuments such as Mount Rushmore and the pyramids!

In a study of the history of stone walls in New England and New York state, researcher Susan Allport’s says, “The work that went into them, according to one estimate, would have built the pyramids of Egypt one hundred times over.” Wow! So just imagine the early settlers who came here over 250 years ago and spent many laborious hours digging up, collecting and transporting tons of stone to create these endless boundaries used to divide their pastures and field can be considered to be of equal wonderment.

The fascination over the stone walls goes back way before our campground existed. In 1871 a survey done by the Department of US Agriculture on the “Statistics of Fences in the United States” indicated that the stone walls add up to more miles than railroad track in the entire country today. The last survey done was by a mining engineer in 1939 who estimated that there are over 240,000 miles of stone walls equalling the distance around the equator ten times or a straight line to the moon when at its closest to earth. That's a lot of rock.

New stones are constantly surfacing due to the ongoing freeze and thaw of the soil in the region but the stone walls built by our ancestors have survived the test of time and haven’t changed much from when their original construction made from stones left by the melting of the Laurentian Ice Sheet. An event that occurred over 13,000 years ago.

Now that's worth a being considered as one of the world's greatest wonders don't you think?

Happy camping,

Deb

REFERENCE: “The Walls of New England: A Forgotten Wonder of the World” by Curtiss Clark posted 11/10/2006. To read the complete article go to http://www.field-notebook.com/?p=119