"Question about stone walls in America" Topic

Hello all.

In making terrain for 28mm AWI games, I had one thing come up that raised a question.

I live in New England, and I've seen thousands of old stone walls over the years, many dating back to the 18th Century.

I recently bought some stuff from Redoubt Enterprises, they have a pretty decently priced stone wall set for 18th Century gaming. But when I got it I saw a detail that has me wondering;

My question is, did stone walls in America ever have the stones piled on top vertically like they are on Redoubt's walls? My hunch is that it's more an English and European thing. But I don't know nearly enough about the history of those types of walls. I know that one big misconception about New England is that stone walls were used for marking property boundaries and field boundaries, when it reality many were there simply because it's where farmers stacked the stones along a line when they were clearing forest and clearing land.

Would appreciate what anyone might know about this particular style of wall and if it could be used for AWI games.

Thanks in advance!

In Philadelphia that is a very common wall design…except there would be gaps, kinda like crenellations in the certical stones. Whether it dates back to the18th Century is hard to tell though. Alot of New England stone walls were laid dry, ie. without mortar, so the vertical thing wouldn't work. I would use them in a game. Anyone who called you out on incorrect stone walls should be banned from your home for life.

Personally, I've never seen such a stone wall, even in photos. That would not stop me from using it in a game, plenty of immigrants in America then and who knows where the farmer who built the wall came from. I'm guessing that style is designed to deter animals from crossing it so I'd suspect use in goat country – or maybe deer deterrent. Curious to find out where such a wall was used and why.

Have not seen such fences in the catskills but would sure use them in a game.

They are not common, but there are some in the mid-Atlantic states.

Good question. I found some interesting links about New England stone fence geology and construction:

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Dunno about New England but that style of stone wall is very common in old England!

I bought a lot of the Armorcast rough stone walls after seeing them in a Brother Against Brother game I played in. Perfect for VA-MD area,at least. They also made the squared-off kind more suitable for Europe. Don't know what's going on with them now,I see complaints here about casting with the new owners. Acheson Creations makes various walls,some sections as cheap as 50 cents each.

Good sources from 79thpa. I would recommend looking for any books by Eric Sloane,lovely drawings of old house types,barns,and of course walls.He shows historic development of various types of walls in different regions of America,and even "life cycles"of walls.For instance why someone would go to the trouble of building a zigzag stone wall? For the same reason alluded to above,but here piling stones against a spit rail fence. When the wood rots away,only the stones are left to perplex later generations.

I have to say there's nothing like wandering through deep woods and stumbling upon the tumbled ruins of old stone walls. Something almost eerie about it…

..and "the vertical thing" DOES work on dry stone walling – literally millions of examples littering the north of England and beyond..

Wow, thanks for all the great info everybody, awesome links!

Seems like in England at least they did figure out ways to do the vertical stacking without any mortar, as Chokidar mentioned above. Very interesting!;

link

I've never seen it in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, or as you mentioned New England (or for that matter the Azores). Redoubt, being an English Company either made them more for English terrain or they figured that a stone wall is a stone wall and went with what they were familiar with.

Never seen it in the south

I've seen a lot of walls with the vertical stones on top in central Kentucky.

A wall would have to be chest high on a man to deter deer from crossing it. I live in a city that has the unique claim to fame of being where the most car/deer collisions take place thus you frequently see deer crossing the road. They clear fences like they aren't even there. Stone walls in the Missouri/Kansas area are limestone, either cut blocks or slabs laid with mortar or dry stone boulders or slabs. As the area sits on top of 900 feet of the stuff it was widely used but if you want a stone mason now you have to import them from Mexico.

It all really depended on the amount of time/labor available to create the walls. In the frontier of America, most farmers were more worried about clearing fields and planting crops than creating "fancy" stonewalls. As time and labor became available, rough piled stonewalls were improved in some instances. This would be more prevalent where people lived for more time, or had slave/indentured labor to build them (or very cheap labor).

Here are some example post AWI (definitely by the ACW) around Lexington, KY : link

And for Northwestern, VA (horse country): link

The dry stone walls used to be quite common in the Kingston (Ontario Canada) area. A legacy from our British colonial era and immigration no doubt.

Recently, they have revived the craft on Amherst Island not too far from Kingston. I remember seeing a TV program showing a master dry stone builder teaching about a dozen people of various ages over the summer months. BTW; the wall they were re-building was similar to the Redoubt wall that you have pictured above minus the top layer of stone.

So, I expect that these dry stone walls were quite common in North America wherever there was a British influence and plenty of material. Accordingly, I certainly think your walls are most appropriate for the AWI period.

Popsicle sticks. Gorilla Glue. Cat litter. Spray flat black and flat gray.
Flock.

I have never seen that type of wall in NY or any part of New England.
In fact it does not look like anything that I have ever seen in America.

I would not use that.

It might be more appropriate around a church or meeting house of some sort.

Hockle,I've seen a herd of deer sailing over a six foot fence like a wave.
And BTC, the people around Middleburg are old money. I'm not sure how prevalent those carefully sculpted walls are. Someone not far from me near Charlottesville has had a crew,obviously craftsmen, building walls for the entrance of their horse farm for the last couple of months. Lovely walls,a lot of money, nothing like the old ones I see lining the sunken dirt roads I walk down.

But anyway,Baranovich,if someone playing in your game starts criticizing your walls,that will be the least of your troubles. Use 'em.

As noted above, Britain is covered in stone walls, many very similar to those above, including dry walls with vertical topping stones. Many of them are very, very old, so it is not inconceivable migrants to the US knew how to build them.

It isn't hard, a few hours instruction and you'll be dry stone walling away…

hochlermp5: a chest high wall or fence is nothing to a deer. A garden fence should be at least 7-8 foot high to have a chance. Commerical apple orchard usually go with a 15-20 foot fence. It can be straight up or sometimes they slant out so that when the deer walks into the fence, it goes overhead to them about 10 foot further outside the orchard. Another technique is two fences, close together. Deer can jump high or long but not both.

A couple of things, mostly left out of 79thPA's good list of articles above are the following.

The working up of stones is a natural process caused by rocks being lifted by forming ice, and then dirt backfilling the cavities below the stone. Stone that is a certain depth down (defined by the frost line) will work its way up. In Europe, many fields surrounded by stone walls is rock free, as it takes about 100-150 years of farming and lifting to work upwards the rock in that zone, and the fields have been cultivated for more than that time. In New England/NY,PA the fields were just starting to get rock free, when better cheap land become available in the midwest.

A second thing is that most of this work was not done by human hands. Oxen were used with leveraged devices to lift stones completely out of the ground. Oxen were used to pull "stone boats" over packed snow to get the rocks to the edge of the fields. (Houses could be easily moved with oxen and sleds- zero friction !) Snow could be horse scooped up (and naturally drifted up) to get ramps to get big stones on the top of walls if necessary.

A third thing is that many stone walls near roads disappeared. Roads were built wide to allow wagons to avoid potholes. Stones from walls were used to fill the potholes and eventually created good roadbases for the future paving.

In South Central Tennessee I had a wall, as illustrated above on my property, That was part of a cemetery on my land. The oldest marker in the cemetery was for a man born in 1767 and died in 1848. In addition I have seen a number of stone fences that also look the same surrounding fields or erected along the road side. Most of these walls are between waist to chest high, depending upon the amount of rock available.

These are every where around the Ohio river and especially Kentucky but certainly date to the antebellum period