The stones are igneous rocks transported by glaciers, but they don’t indicate what you’re thinking.
The walls were built by farmers between 1600 and around 1900. They are field boundaries and property lines. Note that the area around them is full of trees. Ask yourself why someone would go to the trouble of building a stone wall around a bunch of trees. He wouldn’t. He was segregating his fields for pastures and different crops.
This illustrates the absurdity of the green movement better than any demonstration of logic or data. The farms were abandoned when refrigeration and trains made it possible to ship food quickly over long distances. It is not economical to farm 1,000 acres of corn in Connecticut when your competitor can farm 100,000 acres of it in the midwest. He can deliver it to the center of Boston or New York by railroad, while you have to haul it by cart on secondary roads.
Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania are covered with those stone walls. I’m sure they’re all over Virginia and the Carolinas, too. When the farms were abandoned, the forests grew back. Hence the trees you see in those areas aren’t as old as the ones on the uneven ground. The trees on the hillsides are much older. They weren’t clear cut. You couldn’t farm there.
From colonial times to about 1900, those stone walls marked open land that had been clear cut for farms. The farms closed as we moved to Kansas and Oklahoma. People went to the cities to find jobs in factories. The trees came back.
When someone tells you how we’ve destroyed the forests in modern times, show them those pictures. The northeastern United States was clearcut 100 years ago. That’s what those walls mean.
I lived in Virginia for a while. I have a friend that was hired to build stone walls around an estate in Loudon County, 480 acres worth, bought by some European rich guy. My friend is a mason, and had two crews working for three years to enclose the farm. They were hauling stone from all over, and even buying some old stone walls to disassemble and move.
Rocks are always "growing" and don't really need to be moved much. Just ask any farmer with a plow!
“The stones are igneous rocks transported by glaciers, but they don’t indicate what you’re thinking.”
I’m thinking the stones were left behind by glaciers that melted...presumably NOT because of man made pollution...
Back in the late 1800s, it was not economical to farm 100 acres of wheat in France when their competitors could farm 1,000 acres of it in California. O, how a once-mighty State has fallen.