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| Wall behind 60 Nason Street, built to provide a firm base for the railroad tracks circa 1850. Site of current ARRT construction. Click on photo to enlarge. |
It helps to know that during the Colonial era stone was the
last choice of materials for fencing fields. Farming through the 1600’s consisted
of laborious clearing of small fields for vegetables, corn and livestock feed. These
plots were bordered by cut brush and branches. The fields were stump-filled and
worked by hand.
In time, the stumps of trees left in fields were rotten
enough to pull out of the soil and were laid along the border. As stones
emerged through the eroding soil they were added to the fences. Stump fences
were functional, but not handsome; hence the old-time insult “Ugly as a stump
fence.” When the stumps rotted away,
post and rail fences were built over the growing rows of stones. The goal,
always, was to keep horses, cattle, sheep and pigs out of the fields.
By the end of the Revolutionary War most of eastern Massachusetts was almost
denuded of trees. What wood was left was used for building materials, heat and
cooking fires. Stone fencing tall and strong enough to contain cattle took a
day’s work from two men equipped with an oxcart to gather stone and build just
10 to 20 feet of stone fence. Most of what we see crisscrossing New England was originally post
and rail over a low stone fence, and laid down between 1775 and 1850. Barbed wire, the easy
solution, was not perfected until 1874.
Compared to the surrounding towns of Stow ,
Acton , Concord ,
and Sudbury ,
Maynard has very few remaining stone fences. As farms were divided into lots
for houses and stone-bordered roads widened, many of the stones were hauled
away to build the foundations of new houses. For example, the houses on Maple Street were
built in the 1870’s with fieldstone foundations capped by brick above ground. But
some remnants of stone fences can be found in Maynard. The hiking trail from
Summer Street to the top of Summer Hill crosses a stone fence about half-way
up, confirming that the top of Summer Hill was once a near-treeless cow
pasture.
Extensive stone fences can also be seen along the south side
of ‘Track Road ’
(the old railroad right-of-way and future Assabet River Rail Trail) as one
walks from Maynard into Stow . The woods south of one of these fences is all
pine trees approximately 70 years old, suggesting that this pasture was
abandoned when the land was seized by the U.S. Army during WW II.
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| Copestone-topped wall near church on Walnut Street |
Stone walls are rarer than stone fences. Stone walls are what we see around
churchyards, cemeteries and facing the road in front of the well-off
homesteads. In Maynard there are
examples of these as mill races, river walls, and walls keeping private yards
from washing away onto the sidewalks or streets. A very large retaining wall holds
up the railroad right-of-way behind the apartment building at Nason and Summer
Streets. A hope here is that it will remain undisturbed as the rail trail is built.
Flat-topped ‘capstones’ line the tops of low stone retaining walls throughout
town. In contrast, ‘copestones’ were set on edge on tops of walls to discourage
wall sitters. Look for copestones near Maynard’s older churches.
Dry stonework, meaning constructed without binding mortar,
is always at risk of theft of stone - a big problem throughout New England . Thieves have been known to back up a truck
to a homeowner's border wall, or even a cemetery (!) and take the best stones
off the top.
Stone on town property is not up for grabs, either.
Tumble-down stone walls crisscrossing woodland are part of our collective
heritage, a reminder of farmland gone wild again, and should never be moved or
removed.
Poet Robert Frost famously wrote "Something there is
that doesn’t love a wall,...” He meant winter freezes. Bad enough, but
repairable. Once a wall is gone, it's gone.
The above is a slightly
revised repeat of my first column, published November 2009. Below, a column fragment, never published.
Stone is heavy. Every stone mason who has ever blackened a fingernail
knows this to be true. Granite weighs 168 pounds per cubic foot. Filling
a wheel- barrow with gravel will far exceed the safe load capacity of the
wheelbarrow. Tons and tons of stone are needed for a not particularly tall or
long stone wall.
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| This stone wall at the junction of Maple and Brook Streets is eight feet long, four feet high and tapers from three feet thick at the base to two feet at the top. Volume = 80 cubic feet. Mostly granite. Estimated weight = 10,000 pounds. |
Steel is heavier. Steel weighs approximately 490 pounds per
cubic foot. Pieces of rail on old and abandoned railroads across New England are 13 yards long a bit under 100 pounds per
yard. Going price for scrap steel is roughly 15 cents per pound. New rails are
marked near the ends with pounds per yard, manufacturer’s brand, and year and
month made.
Silver, surprisingly, is not much less dense than lead. The
two metals come in at 655 and 709 pounds per cubic foot, respectively. In movies where silver is being cast into
bullets (perhaps to shoot a werewolf?) the silvery molten metal is
actually lead, which becomes liquid at 621 degrees Fahrenheit. Real silver
melts at 1763 degrees and would be glowing red. Twenty-four carat gold is 1206
pounds per cubic foot. Standard-sized gold bars are 1.5 x 3.25 x 10 inches and weigh 27.4 pounds (400 ounces). In the movie The
Italian Job the Mini Coopers escaping with the gold would each have been
loaded with gold weighing more than the car itself!
In baseball terms, a regulation baseball is 12.8 cubic
inches – give or take a bit – and weighs 0.3 pounds. Granite carved to the same
dimensions would be 1.3 pounds; steel 3.7 pounds; lead 5.3 pounds and gold 9.0
pounds. At a late September 2016 price of $42.46 per gram, that solid gold baseball would be
worth about $175,000.
