Stone Wall Club Rebuilds History, One Block At A Time

The Journal News ^ | December 12, 2004 | Sean Gorman

[jolie560]

At the Pound Ridge Cemetery, a stone wall runs along West Lane, its rocks stacked neatly atop one another, but one 25-foot section of the wall has crumbled away.

Restoring that portion is the latest project of the Pound Ridge Stone Wall Rebuilding Club,... "The stone walls are an integral part of the community," said Josh Arnow, a 47-year-old investment manager who helped found the group. "The walls were originally built ... to separate people, and we are using the opportunity to rebuild walls as a way to bring people together, bring neighbors together."

They fix the deteriorating structures the old-fashioned way — piecing the walls back together without cement. It can be very slow work and it takes a good eye to see how the rocks will fit into the wall, Arnow said.

[jolie560]

Stone walls are visible in most places in New England.

[partridge thatcher]

"The walls were originally built ... to separate people,

My family is from the New Canaan, Scots Corners, Pound Ridge and Stamford, area traced back as far as 1678. That cemetery contains 'ancient' ~ for this new world, remains of my ancestors, the Lockwoods, Thatchers, Smiths, Oxenbridge, Partridge and Hoyts.

The stone walls are not for "separating people", the soil is full of stones continuously being pushed up. The walls are where the stones were basically piled as a field was cleared. They served somewhat to delineate property boundaries as time went on, and to contain animals, or keep them out somewhat. But never were they built to "separate people". How obnoxious for this person and this publication to print this PC garbage.

These people's idea of restoration will be to bring in some professional stone wall builders that will completely miss the original fitting of the field stones without mortar, they will import rocks from somewhere that has nothing to do with this place, and end up with something that just doesn't fit the beautiful new england oak forest and bracken.

[jolie560]

I have lived on the NY-CT border and know the walls as places where rocks were "stored" until someone found a use for them---sometimes the use was for a 'fence', sometimes, the use was for a 'wall' that prevented erosion of a hill.

Some land-use maps in Dutchess and Putnam Counties (NY) cite stone walls as property boundaries. None of these are precise boundaries. Given the horribly stone-filled and rock-filled land, any attempt to clear a small area of land for growing crops produced a bunch of rocks that---indeed---seemed to GROW up out of the ground.

Sure frustrated me in making many a garden.