"How high was the "normal" stone wall in 18th c America" Topic

Spesificly nothern/mid atlantic states

Were they waist high or stommach high or hest high?

Most of the stone walls around here (northern Virginia) are about waist high. Not sure if these modern walls are somewhat more "manicured' than they would have been back in the late 1700s.

Timber fences (of varying types) seem to be more prevalent as field boundaries. Again, that's pretty specific to northern Virginia.

The short answer is that they vary. The walls were usually made when the farmer found a rock in his field so he dropped them in the same place, (his property line), so that they would be away from the plowing. I've seen them from ankle high to waist high and everything in between.

field stone walls? Like those that edge farms or specific walls to keep people out? field stone walls were stone dragged up during the plowing of a field, so however many rocks were there were what got piled up. I have seen lots of those and they generally never get above waist high since you have to lift them up to put them there. Also after several generations they have the tendancy to "sink" back into the ground with new soil adding up.

However since not to many castles were built in the mid-atlantic states the average I'd say is waist high.

I remember a lot of knee high walls when I lived in New England, but as Dn Jackson says, they varied depending on how much rock you had.

It depended on how many stones were in your field. You generally didn't depend on the stone walls themselves to keep in livestock; they could be supplemented by rail fence for that when needed. Stone walls were mainly just a way to remove the stones from your plowed fields (a never-ending process; remove some, and more rise to the surface) and dispose of them by moving them to the nearest edge of the field, and to demarcate the property line.

As these were dry walls (no mortar), and not usually professionally laid, they would rarely be over waist height. (Which is why they weren't much good for confining livestock, generally.) Field stone could also be used in building foundations, but that involved transporting them further than just to the edge of the field.

That's my opinion, anyway, from growing up on c.18th farms in Maine and western Massachusetts. For more information:

link

Allen

knee to waist high, varied type since it is mostly glacial debris

WOW, that was a lot of very good answers realy fast. thanks

About the length of a piece of string

wha…? they didn't call a landscaping firm to bring XX tons of stone for their stone walls?

It depends upon the amount of rocks in the field and how long it was farmed. Rocks worked their way up the surface by water freezing (and expanding) around the rock, and during the thaw cycle, dirt would fall downwards into the cavity at the bottom of the rock (still frozen, while the top was melted),,, so the rock would work its way to the surface. It took about 70-100 years to get all the rocks out of a field and in a lot of areas this was accomplised. In Europe, they had a few thousand years to get this done. It was incomplete and still is in a lot of the eastern US. However in a lot of areas it was easier to move to Ohio from depleted and colder New England and NY, NJ where there was cheap rich soil.

The first fencing for virgin land was to tear out stumps (hook into them and run around in a circle) and place them in a jumble with added junk to make a barrier. Sheep love to figure out the puzzle to get out. Cattle give up easier.

To keep sheep in, you needed mid-shoulder height fences. To keep cattle in (cattle were smaller then), you needed shoulder height fences. What they built was stone as high as it was and rails above that. "Snake" fences waste a lot of wood. If wood was scarce, alternately stacked rails with vertical retainers were used. Wire or stone or cap wood could be used to secure them together.

A stone foundation with rails on top would be the most likely thing to be seen.

Ok, first attempt

Stone fence made of stone
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It's a bit to thin, it looks like a morterd wall, if it was just stones places on stones, it would be thicker at the bottom

In New England, knee- to mid-thigh-high is most common. Sometimes people got more enthusiastic, though.
-Kle.

Well, the original walls were usually about 25 inches high. Some people wanted their walls to stand out from those of others, so they just sort of built them a hare bigger. At first it was almost accidental. For a long time people kept calling them 25 inches high, even though they really were as high as 28 inches. As crazy as this sounds, though, 28 became the new standard and people started building them 28 inches high on purpose. Eventually, people started calling them 28s. Of course, you can see where this is going, some people wanted their walls to stand out from those of others, so they just sort of built them a hare bigger…

Then two well known sculptors (twins, I'm told) decided to start making them out of plastic. They were actually calling them 28s by this time, though they were closer to 30.

Does this sound familiar?

I agree with most of the above. The stone fences were primarily boundry markers/disposal sites for what ever the plow picked up. The one's in CT seemed to be rather uniform in height, As to height, see above. The color tends more to browns than grays though. For example, Farmington CT has a lot of clay and the stones were more a reddish brown. Most other places seem to favor 'medium/umber' browns.
This is just personal observation, not scholarly. I had to tear down a few and load them in a truck for disposal in my early years.

Fences (stone and/or wood) were extremely important in 18th & 19th Century America. Most communities had laws requiring that livestock be kept fenced in. Most fences were made of wood and these were very high maintenance. I read a paper once that claimed that 25% of a typical farmer's labor was spent on fence maintenance. The habit of Civil War soldiers using fences as handy firewood was far more than a nuisance to farmers. The introduction of wire fences after the Civil War had nearly as great an impact on farm productivity as the emchanical reapers.