The Real Reason There Are Stone Walls Everywhere in Connecticut

If you've spent any amount of time driving around Connecticut, you've probably noticed the stone walls. They're everywhere.

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They're along back roads, through the woods, around old properties and sometimes seemingly in the middle of absolutely nowhere. You don't really think about them because they've been part of the Connecticut landscape for so long. But eventually you have to wonder: Why are there so many of these things?

The answer has a lot to do with farming, glaciers and Connecticut being an incredibly rocky place. According to Connecticut History, thousands of years ago, glaciers moved across New England, scraping and reshaping the landscape and leaving behind an impressive collection of rocks and boulders. Then European settlers came along and started clearing land for farms. And they quickly discovered that Connecticut's soil apparently came with a bonus feature: rocks. Lots and lots of rocks.

Farmers had to get those rocks out of their fields so they could actually grow things. But instead of hauling every rock somewhere else, they put them to use. The stones became foundations, fences and, eventually, the miles and miles of stone walls that became part of the Connecticut landscape. Connecticut History has documented farms where stones that continually surfaced from the soil were used to build walls between fields and pastures.

And here's the part I find funny: Some of these walls look like they were deliberately designed to be decorative. They weren't. A farmer wasn't standing there thinking, “You know what this property needs? A beautiful rustic stone border.” He needed to get rocks out of his field, and apparently decided, “Fine. I'll put them over there.”

The walls also served practical purposes. They could mark property lines, separate fields and pastures and help keep livestock where they were supposed to be. Some were built alongside roads as well. Historical records from Connecticut even describe stone walls that were built along old roads centuries ago.

So the next time you're driving through Connecticut and see another stone wall running through the woods, don't just think of it as a pile of rocks. You're looking at the leftovers of an old agricultural problem that Connecticut farmers solved one stone at a time.

Basically, Connecticut's stone walls are what happens when you give farmers several hundred years of rocks and tell them to figure it out.