One of the things I miss about New England are all the stone walls snaking off into the woods. Most are also in disrepair, but one of the ideas about their construction was as a sort of stone holding area--a way for the farmers to store the stones that came each plowing season, as well as to define fields. Not much need for that anymore since small scale farming is pretty much gone from that area.
Anyone who has dug around in New England knows unless you are in a floodplain, you are going to be hittin rocks. When I was working as a contract archaeologist there, we used to go through so many shovels each digging season. Dig dig *clang* "Ouch". :)
Unlike in New England, masons in the Bluegrass region had to quarry their limestone, or haul limestone flags out of creek beds. It was quite a bit of work, I'm sure.
Photographs from the mid-1800s show a serene, beautiful landscape....farmhouses, Presbyterian Churches, and fences all built out of local limestone, a vernacular architecture that framed the lovely Bluegrass farmland. Plenty of this lingered well into the 1970s. Now, sadly, much of that visual paradise is being converted to generic subdivisions and shopping centers.