West Then North

We have reached a corner that is adjacent to rich river bottom land.  Once again the border of our land is defined by stone removed from the field.  This line is less than straight and to the right is a huge mass of simply dumped stone.  Fallen leaves have rotted to become soil in the more than one century that has passed since stones were placed here.

A more recent event can also be seen in the top left corner of the photo.  The original farm barn was struck by lightening and burned to the ground about 1960.  The remains of the fire were hauled up the hill and dumped here over the edge.  When the fire debris was all placed here, what became the gravel bank was opened to provide fill to cover the mess.  When walking here an occasional encounter with protruding metal happens.

This is the view looking Eastward along this end of the property line.  The stone work is mine and my goal was to rebuild the original wall as far as the White Pine tree.  The steel pipe that was driven into the ground to define the property line is peeking up out of the wall.  The reconstruction of the wall was carefully done to preserve the original placement of this marker.

Looking to the North one can see more of a decent stone wall and a much improved Gravel Bank Road.  Goldenrod growing here along with wild berry canes really need to be removed.

Here we have returned to River Road.  The driveway is much improved from what we originally found.  Adjacent to the hill is another place where stone cleared from the field was simply dumped.  A bend in the road was needed to get around that pile.  Much of that removed stone was used to the build the wall just out of sight to the right.

At this point our land is only forty feet wide.  The right turn onto the lane is where our homestead opens up to its thirty-six acres.  The original farm contained a long stretch of desirable river bottom land that was sold first as house sized lots.  The retreating glacier left behind many interesting land forms up our hill creating an attractive site for a primitive homestead.  We have called this land our own since 1994.  Perhaps the time is approaching when this treasure should be placed in the care of younger people.

 

Early Harvest

This line of stones was dumped here long ago when pioneers first cleared for farm land.  For the most part, they are irregular, misshapen and twisted making them undesirable for wall building.  Access is easy and some of these stones have parallel planer surfaces.  These workable stones need to be placed in a wall.

The calendar identifies winter as the controlling season. The desire to be outside performing physical work is strong now.  With the ground still frozen, finding a suitable place to work is not easy.  The top layer or two of this stone pile is frost free and the stones can be moved.  Matching the conditions of the day with a task that could be done led me here.

As expected, some of the best wall stones were hidden under brush.  Later in the year green growth will hide these stones from view.  Today when these treasures were in plain sight it required clever thinking to safely remove them.  Brush grabbed my cap several times but no scratches were delivered.

Most of the stones in this wall face were harvested today.  The large red stone with the flat top is a rare find.  Stones like this tend to be round and they rarely split smoothly.  This one came out of the ground neatly trimmed.  Lichen grows on the flat surface so the split happened many years ago.  Usually large stones like this one are placed in the ground in the first course of the wall.  Such placement would partially hide its beauty so a spot at the top of a wall is perhaps a better use of this stone.

This picture may look like a stone wall but it actually shows a temporary stone pile.  Raw material has been gathered in one place so that it can easily be accessed when the next wall is underway.  Many faults are visible in this hastily thrown together pile.  Unsupported stone and large voids are easily seen.  Far to many places for critters to set up housekeeping are provided with this loose pile.

All stones tell the story of their creation but reading it is not easy.  Geology textbooks describe a vast inland sea that once existed here.  Sediments carried into this sea settled out of the water and fell in layers on the sea floor.  Most of the stone here is sedimentary in origin but some are red while most are grey.  How this stone that was once part of the sea floor came to be broken and rounded is a complete mystery.  How could all of that happen without the layers separating?   This stone will be handled with care and securely placed in a wall so that it remains intact.

Recent Stone Piles

Placing stone in ordered piles is deeply satisfying to me.  Physical exertion that changes chaos to order is its own reward.  Then the question will it last waits for an answer.  Years of inactivity here has allowed the gravel bank to reach a condition of stability.  One cannot walk here without sliding downhill with the stones that move when stepped on.  It seems an unlikely place to try to build a stone wall if permanence is the goal.  The purpose of a wall on the slope of a gravel bank is not immediately obvious either.

Gravel has many uses on our homestead.  Our driveway was built in part with gravel from this glacial deposit.  Time, a shovel and a wheelbarrow moved several cubic yards of gravel from here to the new driveway.  Large unusable stones unearthed while mining gravel needed a final resting place away from the area being worked.  A wall consumes large quantities of stone in a rather small place.  So the waste stone was pushed into the side of the gravel bank creating a narrow road.  More rubble was dumped here leveling the new surface.  In time this new road may climb to the top of the gravel bank.

This stone pile holds the material left over from the wall built near the road.  Little extra effort is needed to pile the stone rather than simply throwing it in a heap.  It looks to me like there is sufficient good stone here to build an extension on the wall near the road.  Universal support for this new project is lacking.  Some feel that the wall looks great as it is and that further work might mess things up.  Then the matter of the seam between the completed wall and the new extension is an issue.  It will be interesting to see what happens when the frost leaves the ground and another season of outside work begins.

This little project will likely remain unfinished.  Age has made it less smart for me to push wheelbarrow loads of gravel up hill to the driveway.  Hauling stone in a cart behind my lawn tractor destroyed its transmission.  I thought a ramp to permit the gravel to be rolled into the pickup truck represented a solution.  Becky felt that a more powerful tractor was a better solution.  She was right.  Now these stones need a new home.  Some of them a so large that I can only safely move them down hill.   They may just remain where they are.

Becky says about the stone wall down by the road "I rest my case."

Stone Detective

Our land was originally part of a 130 acre triangular shaped farm.  Roughly half of the land was quality  bottom land well suited to farming bordering the Unadilla River.  Twisted lumpy glacial deposits covered the higher ground.  1887 is the oldest date on deeds we have covering this land.  It was settled prior to the coming of the railroad in the 1860s.  The first deeded owner, Ezekiel W. Batterson, operated an inn on the primitive wagon road from Sidney to Gilbertsville.  Today's pictures were taken where the flat bottom land graded into the area of sloped gravel deposits.   Picture one looks at a primitive borrow pit.  Hand tools removed gravel from here to be used elsewhere on the farm.  Our machine opened gravel pit is adjacent to this primitive dig.

This break in the stone wall lies in line with the borrow pit.  Horse and wagon likely hauled gravel through this break in the wall to the stage road.  Spring road maintenance was the responsibility of the landowner early in our country's history.  Today this stone wall marks a property line separating our lumpy sloped ground from the rich bottom land.

Here we see two different methods of handling the stone picked from the field.  My guess is that the wall was built first as stone was unloaded from a horse powered stone boat.  Placing the stone in a stack kept the ground open for the next load.  The stone in the heap was likely thrown from a wagon.  If the stone was on a wagon, heaving it would be less work than placing it in a wall.

This is the the newest stone pile along our property line.  Lack of covering vegetation easily shows the relative youth of this pile.  The last farmer left this ground 24 years ago.  This stone pile must be older that that.  The height of this pile suggests that it was dumped from a tractor bucket.  The stones in this pile are also smaller than the stones in the wall.  Every year the frost sends a new crop of stone to the surface. The new crop contains smaller but more numerous stones.  There is never a crop failure with the stone.

All of the stone shown in these photos lies on the neighbor's land except the wall that forms the actual property line.  I have permission to use the neighbor's stone to rebuild our common wall.   That task is far down on the to do list since this ground is far removed from our house and gardens.  No one would see the restored wall by any means other than photographs.