LYME — There are hundreds of mysteries hidden in Lyme.
They’re from stone walls that Lyme’s earliest residents built to keep their livestock in place and to mark property boundaries where their farms once were.
“Lyme, like most towns in the Upper Valley, has all these old remains out in the woods … up in the hillsides, up in the mountainsides,” said Stephen Alden, president of the Lyme Historians, who is contributing to the New Hampshire Stone Wall Project by using Lidar, a mapping software that gives a close-up look at the state’s landscape.
“The use of Lidar really opens up an amazing window, an amazing view of the landscape,” Alden said. “With this information, we can truly find these things and lock them down.”
From 10-11 a.m. on Saturday, Alden will discuss Lidar and the project at the Converse Free Library in Lyme. Space is limited and registration is required by emailing Alden at nhstonewalls@gmail.com.
What can we learn from stone walls and why is that information valuable?
“It’s a mark of respect to tie our lives to these people,” said Alden, who has spent much time hiking in Lyme to identify stone walls. “History-wise, it’s a project of ours to understand what happened in the town over the 250 years of its existence.”
Lyme, like other towns in the region, was settled by European settlers who cleared the forests to make room for agriculture. The Lyme Historians want to know more about the families who settled there up to the 1820s, when the population peaked and began to decline.
The first map of the town was created in 1850.
“At that point, a lot of settlement had come and gone,” Alden said. “From the stone walls you can discover where a home might’ve been.”
Once project officials find a stone wall and mark its location, they then might be able to find out the farm’s name and the name of the family who lived on it, which could be connected to census data.
“The documentation is all spread out in bits of pieces here or there, that it’s going to take some effort to put it together in a meaningful way,” Alden said. “When you’re outdoors, you see the geology, and that often is the determination of where people lived and where they settled and why they went away.”
Stone walls are not something that’s strictly connected to the past. There are craftsmen who specialize in building new stone walls and repairing old ones.
Brian Post has been fascinated by stone walls since his childhood and now is executive director of The Stone Trust, a Dummerston Vt.,-based nonprofit organization with the mission “to preserve and advance the art and craft of dry stone walling,” according to its website. The organization also hosts workshops to teach the skills associated with stone wall building.
“We’re really teaching how the walls were built back in the 1800s,” Post said. “The skills really haven’t changed.”
In addition to being a craftsman, Post also is enthusiastic about the history of stone walls and what they can tell us about the landscape. Most stone walls in Northern New England were built between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.
“That was during a time when there was a real desire for wool,” Post said. “By clearing the land and ending up with, in many cases, overgrazing, you had a lot of soil erosion.”
That then pushed stones to the surface of the land, which the settlers used to build stone walls that were a variety of different heights and thicknesses.
“You can tell where people were emigrating from based on the building style,” Post said. “It’s a way of seeing the scale of the impact that the European settlers had on the land.”
That impact was huge. The 1781 census of dry stone walls found that there were 250,000 miles of dry stone wall in New England and New York state, according to Post.
“That’s about enough wall to go around the equator 10 times,” Post said.
Of course, stone walls eventually fell out of favor. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, barbed wire began to take the place of stone walls. Additionally, widespread use of cement beginning in the early 1900s further put the value of stone walls in question.
“They’re still highly valued for aesthetics and historic preservation,” Post said.
Lyme is only one piece of that puzzle.
So why are stone walls worth identifying? Maybe somebody bought a plot of land and decided to give farming a try, but couldn’t make it work because of the higher elevation and shorter summers.
Where the stone walls are there once was a family there that pinned their hopes on the land to sustain them, but it didn’t work out.
Imagine these early settlers and what their lives were like, and how incredible it is that the community they started is still around 2½ centuries later. What better way to honor them than to learn about them through the land that they once loved and that we still do?
“They worked hard to make a living there,” Alden said. “The result of all that effort and really across New England is all these stone walls.”
Editor’s note: To learn more about the New Hampshire Stone Wall Project, visit http://www.granit.unh.edu/resourcelibrary/specialtopics/stonewalls/. To learn more about The Stone Trust, visit thestonetrust.org. Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.
