Stone Walls – Tom Finneran
Wednesday, September 16, 2020
They must have been as tough as nails. Stubborn too.
_400_400_90_400_400_90.jpg)
A mid-week drive through Westport hit me like a sledgehammer.
Westport is a pretty town with lots of farmland and an apparently unending supply of massive rocks. Reports from the earliest European settlers document a land heavily forested, teeming with abundant wildlife. Predictably, those settlers started to clear the land, first for the purpose of obtaining timber for shelter, and secondly, for the purpose of planting crops.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTSo how tough were they? Try this as an exercise in imagination---let’s say there were thirty mature trees to an acre and you needed to farm ten acres in order to feed your family. You have to clear 300 mature trees from the land and there’s no McDonald’s down the road to feed the kids while you sharpen your one and only axe. The kids are hungry, the growing season is short, and the axe is dull once again. There’s no electricity for the not-yet-invented McCullough chain saw. There’s no gasoline. There’s no oil. And there’s no light whatsoever once the sun goes down.
Go try to chop down a mature tree with an axe. Go ahead, I have time and I can wait for a month or so. It is brutal, exhausting, dangerous work. And once that massive oak or pine is dropped, you must haul it from the land you hope to plant. Good luck with that little chore. I’m sure you’ll finish soon……….
Which brings me to the rocks of Westport, those very big, very heavy rocks.
Rural New England’s stone walls are legendary. Farmers dug massive boulders out of the soil and somehow lugged them to the boundaries of their acreage, building sturdy stone walls that still stand today. Take a drive through Westport or any other farming community in the state and you’ll see the evidence of their work. Indeed, ride through a wealthy community in Massachusetts and you’re likely to see many masons hard at work building modern versions of the original beauties. Of course today’s masons have backhoes, front end loaders, generators, dump trucks, and mixers going full tilt. Poor John Winthrop and his pals only had a horse or a mule and a handful of helpful neighbors. How they ever lifted those massive stones is a mystery to me. I suspect that there were a lot of crushed fingers and aching shoulders in creating cropland out of our hard New England soil.
Which brings me back to those tough, hardy, stubborn souls. They were some rugged and resourceful folks, both men and women. Even the children had chores, for farming and hunting are not activities for the old and the frail. Eking a living out of New England’s forests required many hands and strong backs.
All this and more hit me as I drove by Westport’s sturdy stone walls…………
Related Articles
- Finneran: A CV Free Zone
- Finneran: The World Gone Mad
- Finneran: America’s Secret Sauce
- Finneran: A Most Memorable Spring
- Tom Finneran: Life Slows Down
- Finneran: Of Mothers and Brothers
- Finneran: Joe the Plumber Makes his Exit
- Finneran: From Sea to Shining Sea
- Finneran: Super Bowl 54, Halftime Show Disgrace
- Finneran: Additions to History
- Finneran: The Mensch’s Mensch
- Tom Finneran: Silver Linings
- Tom Finneran: About All That Money
- Thoughts and Prayers – Tom Finneran
- Tom Finneran - Play Ball!
- From Seed to Garden to Plate – Tom Finneran
- J’ACCUSE – Tom Finneran
- Would You Go? – Tom Finneran
- Tom Finneran: Solitude, Attitude, Gratitude
- Tom Finneran: June Tidbits
- Tom Finneran: What I Miss
- Tom Finneran: Specimens
- Tom Finneran: This Is So Wrong, Parts Two and Three
- Tom Finneran: Will America Rise
- America’s Best College – Tom Finneran
