Quite frequently I design a project that calls for one or more stone walls, and almost as frequently the stone I specify is New England fieldstone. Fieldstone walls are ubiquitous in this part of the world, and a good wall, even if it’s newly constructed, can help give structure and readability to a landscape.
Because I specify stone walls so often, I see quite a few stone supplier ads. A newish product, fieldstone veneer, has been advertised in the last few years. Fieldstone veneer is made by cutting chunks of fieldstone into small rectangular pieces; the face of the veneer is left rough and weathered, or with a split, not sawn surface. The rectangular form makes installing the veneer a relatively quick process, and gives an architectural, or at least strictly ordered, look to a wall face. The contrast between that ordering and the naturally textured surface presents quite an appealing finish.
When I see videos of the fieldstone veneer cutting process, though, my mind drifts to the disappearance of historic stone walls throughout New England, and I wonder if any of the projects I’ve worked on contain some of that stone, hauled from its centuries-old home and sliced into construction-ready pieces. This article from the National Trust for Historic Preservation outlines the problem: stone walls are being taken without permission or compensation from private properties and reused elsewhere. As far as I can tell, there’s no way of determining the provenance of stone — and cutting it up only makes identification even more impossible. We can only see the ancient walls disappearing from roadsides, yard perimeters, and woodlots, and hope that what we’re using has come only from legitimate sources.
Here is a photo of intact stone walls in winter. 
These are freestanding drylaid walls, and one of their structural merits is that they move with frost. Their jointing methods – no mortar used – and wall composition insure that the walls move with the land as it undergoes the freeze/thaw cycle, and the relatively large stone size keeps the walls from falling apart even as they move.
With the ‘recycling’ of New England fieldstone for mortared walls, as in this wall,
for instance, the cutting up of stones limits their future use, and the ability of future generations to recycle the stones once more. The argument could be made that veneer makes fieldstone a material accessible to more people because a veneer wall is less expensive to build than a full-depth stone wall — and it’s a valid argument. But the lifespan of mortared veneer walls has to be far shorter than that of traditional drylaid walls, given the nature of the freeze/thaw cycle, the shallowness of small veneers, and the prevalence of moisture in the New England winter — and that means that these walls will need maintenance and/or rebuilding sooner than the more traditionally built walls. Not to mention that if the natural stones themselves disappear, so too do the building techniques that produce the most stable and flexible kinds of walls for landscape use, and the possibility of being able to build them as readily as has been done in the past.
Is this a solvable problem? Is this a problem? I think that stone wall theft is definitely a problem, and I don’t know if it’s a solvable one. I’m pretty sure I haven’t explored the topic of New England stone walls, their disappearance, the metamorphosis of fieldstone into veneer, the use of veneer in landscape applications, or the costs (short-term and life-cycle) of veneer versus fieldstone with anything approaching thoroughness — but it seemed that recording initial thoughts on the topic would be a good place to start this particular conversation. Your thoughts?
Deborah Howe
Toby Wolf
My friend A. Carman Clark had died, and before the house was even emptied, somebody reported that a low stone retaining wall, even facing the road, had been removed. I went and saw it. It was a shock. In some states, that is a crime. Is it in Maine? Is it in Massachusetts?
Many people were outraged, but didn’t even know where to begin to find out where the stones went.
Here’s something related: Stone salvaged from places like the area being flooded by the Three Gorges Dam, cut in Asia to veneer thickness (thus keeping the labor and waste stone there) before being shipped to the West. Smart, sensible, practical, and sort of creepy. Here’s the operation’s web site, see what you think: http://www.rhodes.org/Tour/tour_what.htm. And another article, quoted on their web site, here: http://www.rhodes.org/Press_Coverage/msnbc/msnbctext.htm
The disappearance of Carman Clark’s stone wall has been repeated all over New England, and it is a shock to see what remains of such a ubiquitous and distinctive landscape feature, particularly where you’ve been used to seeing it forever. Old stone walls always belong to someone — and while some people will sell the stone from their walls, some walls do disappear entirely without permission.
The importation of salvaged stone is kind of creepy. You can get really beautiful weathered Indian granite, or Chinese cobbles obviously (and picturesquely) worn from centuries of use, or wall stone that carries the flavor of the wall in an area now underwater, and often it’s cheaper to buy than stone from this country. As a matter of economics, it may make sense to use Indian granite for a Massachusetts suburban drive court. Historically, it’s a bit weird. But New England for centuries has imported bits and pieces of other countries and other cultures. Which leads to the question of how saleable should the landscape elements of a distinguished and ancient civilization be? And what is the responsibility of landscape architects in specifying the provenance of fairly-obtained materials?
Hello all,
I have a lot to say so I will number the different points I want to cover.
1. Fieldstone is a renewable resource. The aging process that makes weathered fieldstone so pretty is repeatable in decades. This is very similar to the use of lumber from forests. The sad story is that for centuries the farmers of New England uncovered this stone as they were plowing, and instead of stacking it in neat rows or walls, they dug a hole and buried it. This obviously had a lot to do with the settlement of the midwest, where word spread that dreaded stone was no longer in the way. Most of the large scale farming operations have obviously moved west, but we also luckily no longer waste this precious local resource, and hopefully more people like yourself keep using this stone rather than the imported Asian stone. It is hard to fathom how a landscaping and architectural product would ever have to compete with an imported stone from the other side of the world.
2. Purchasing stone from a landowner is not only the right way to do business, we luckily have farmers and landowners with an abundance of stone. While you mentioned an isolated incident of theft, i wonder if anyone ever stole a tree from the forest. Both are extremely heavy and difficult to move without trucks and machinery making them very unlikely candidates for theft. I am not saying it might not happen, but the farmers don’t get paid much for the stone legally, why would anyone risk stealing it when it would be so easy to get caught?
3. Cutting stone to incorporate it to architecture, which my company does, is a green process. We start with a local and a renewable resource and we pre-process it in our shop to use bigger and more efficient tools and save money and resources for the project owner. Additionally, I make multiply the stone available for use. The dry laid wall will require a very selective qualification of stones, whereas processing the stone can not only make more stones qualify for certain uses, we also use less of the raw stone overall. For example, a piece of thin sawn veneer stone can take one raw stone and make it cover double the area because both the top and bottom are now stuck to the wall.
4. The stone itself will far outlive the mortar attached to it. Not only will a stone structure outlast any other building material, the aesthetics, the green benefits, and the contribution to your local farmers and local economy are enormous. This is an important issue and I am an expert in the subject. If anyone would like to come to my company and get a tour and overview, I would be more than happy to make an appointment and spend time with you talking about this. The key here is that at the same time we are having this discussion about beautiful natural stone that is now more visible and more in the minds of people like us, there are substandard building supplies being made from concrete and dyes that will fade in ten years, and completely negate all of the green building benefits of using real stone. Additionally, these companies are trying to use congress and the legislators to put natural stone quarries out of business by legislation regarding the shearing force on a wall. Architectural specs require the stone to weight less than 15 lbs per square foot. My natural stone comes in at less than 14 lbs psf, but the lawyers in Washington want to put stone quarries out of business by writing the rules so that fake stone from concrete is mandated by arbitrarily requiring “stone” siding to weigh less than 11 lbs psf, of which only a dyed concrete will qualify. This is completely unrelated to the topics already raised, but seems like just another example of how the multi billion dollar corporations are trying to prevent a small businesses like mine from playing on an even field.
If anyone wishes to discuss this topic furthur or has any questions about New England fieldstone, I would be more than happy to spend some time talking about my livelihood and how you can feel comfortable using it in architecture and landscaping.
Gerald Croteau
(617) 401-7305
Gerald, thanks for your comments. I appreciate your having read the stone wall posts, and your having responded so extensively – our aim with this blog has been to bring attention to issues that interest us, and to invite conversation with others interested in the same topics, and it seems that we have started a conversation on these topics!
To continue the conversation, I’ll respond to your notes in order:
1. Fieldstone is a renewable resource, it’s true; here in New England we have a wealth of stone. Some of it is intact granitic bedrock, some of it is more sedimentary in nature, some of it is individual stones, ranging from pebbles to enormous boulders, scoured up by the glaciers, ‘dozed along the bedrock, and dumped in immense deposits as the glaciers receded. In places, the glacial and sedimentary combine to make the distinctive conglomerate known as Roxbury puddingstone. Fieldstone is often glacial in nature, and may be underground because farmers buried it in some cases; it is certainly often underground because of glacial deposition. Coming to the surface with the annual freeze-thaw cycles, it has been the bane of New England farmers, but also the best material for miles and miles of boundary- and field-defining stone walls. (I can see why some landowners would want to bury it, but know too that many of those miles of walls came from stones just getting tossed along the edge of a field or woods as the land was cleared or farmed. I do that on our property, and it takes a lot less time than burying the stone!)
Anyway, stone continues to come up to the surface, and so in that way may be considered renewable. Stone walls, though, are only renewable by the sweat of someone’s brow. Farming is no longer a common activity in New England, though, and nor is the traditional boundary-making with dry-laid fieldstone. When an old stone wall is dismantled, more often than not it is not replaced in kind. If it is replaced, the replacement cost can be exorbitantly high.
So I can see an argument for using fieldstone to make veneer; there’s a lot of fieldstone, it looks good, it works well. It’s relatively local. (And veneer itself is easy to work with, too, and in ways more forgiving than drylaid wall construction.) Bringing stone in from Asia is a remarkable exercise in unsustainability, if you look at the resources required to ship such a heavy material such a long way.
I even can see the appeal of using fieldstone from walls to make veneer; you get a nice weathered face, maybe a little lichen, maybe some moss, on a new wall, without having to wait years for ‘character’ to begin to develop.
2. The theft of stone walls is indeed a problem, and this sort of theft has been documented thorughout New England. This link http://www.cbs3springfield.com/news/now/37835304.html
leads to a report on the consideration of both New Hampshire and Massachusetts legislatures to raise the fines for stone wall theft, something that would likely not show up on the docket if thefts weren’t being reported. The link to the National Trust article highlighted in my first stone wall post was dated 2008, and describes the problem as it presents itself in Rhode Island and Connecticut. The book Sermons In Stone (by Susan Allport, published by W.W. Norton and Company) discusses the problem as well, referring to the dismantling of old walls on private property in New England and New York. One woman in the book recorded how one 4’ high, 500-foot long wall on her property was taken over time; she estimated that for her to replace the stolen wall would cost her over $60,000. The book was published in 1990; nineteen years later, a wall that size would cost over $100,000. Theft like this does continue to happen, and it does so all around New England.
As you point out, purchasing stone from a landowner is the right way to do business. It’s the unscrupulous ones who take stone from private property without permission who both break the law and deal out hardship to the rightful owners of that stone.
I do have to mention that In rural places, timber does get stolen – see this link for more information: http://www.nyfoa.org/timbertheft/index.php )
Unless the owner is actually on his land in the vicinity of the wall being taken, the sight of trucks and machinery used to remove either stones or timber isn’t unusual, and isn’t always questioned by passersby. In more densely populated areas, the removal of a wall would likely be noticed and challenged, but the same kind of theft could take place on a quiet country road and not noticed for days, weeks, or even months, long after the thieves have left. And weathered fieldstone is desirable, so the risk may be considered worth it to those without scruples.
3. In my thinking, a veneer wall has its merits, and a drylaid stone wall has different merits. You have developed a remarkable operation for manufacturing veneer, and have built a successful business in that arena. I can think of several projects of mine that have used your veneer stone, and it’s dandy.
4. The idea of stone outlasting mortar was one of my points regarding the differences between a drylaid wall and a veneered wall. A well-made drylaid wall can last for centuries – unless, of course, someone comes along and dismantles it! A veneered wall may well be more susceptible to the weather, even if it has a cap, simply because the jointing tends to be vulnerable, over time, to the freeze-thaw cycle.
5. It sounds as if the regulations regarding stone weight versus the weight of concrete concern architectural structures. It sounds like a frustrating issue! As we’re landscape architects, those regulations are unlikely to apply to our work, but it’s interesting to hear the issue outlined.
It’s clear that all these issues are near and dear to your heart, which is what you want in a stone supplier. I want to say again that I appreciate your comments, and look forward to continuing the conversation some day.
Gerald – If you’re monitoring the comments but not the main blog, I’d like to invite you to comment on my new post, regarding the use of quarry waste in the landscape. I know my experience but I don’t know the stone industry in any depth, so I’d be interested in your perspective on this, as well as any corrections or clarifications you may wish to offer. The new post is up at http://www.takingplace.net. Thanks – Toby
Hi:
I’d like to second many of the points made in Deb’s reply to Gerald’s post, and add a couple of comments. First, living in rural Maine, we have both stone and timber thefts in our area. In the past year we have had at least two thefts of very large granite blocks from gravestone walls on a fairly-well traveled (albeit rural) road within a mile of my house. Clearly these took a truck and several people, if not heavy equipment, yet the thefts were not seen (or at least not reported) until noticed by neighbors in the daylight. And as for timber theft, I have an immediate neighbor who just had 70 acres cut over, and was never paid for the timber by one of the loggers. So there are many ways to steal large objects, not just by cover of night.
As for the renewability of stone, or stone walls, as Deb points out the process is neither limitless or rapid. Most of the field stones in New England were created not by weathering of bedrock but by deposition from glaciers, and the supply is not infinite. More to the point, the processes by which they were exposed from the 1700s to the early 1900s (clearing forests, plowing, soil erosion, and frost heaving) are no longer making many new stones. Of course, you can get them in quarries and gravel pits, and we have plenty of those. But the real issue is weathering, which takes decades or centuries. The really valued stones are weathered gray and covered in lichens and other growth, which is a long, long process.
Yes, you can pay people for their old walls, and this is obviously the source of a lot of material. Current property laws allow it, and few local ordinances stop it. But is this really ethical? People like Robert Thorson, who co-founded the Stone Wall Initiative, say no, and I tend to agree. In his view this is a matter of cultural heritage preservation, with stone walls being as much a part of the natural and cultural landscape as an old church or farmhouse. The website of the Stone Wall Initiative has much more information on this subject [http://www.stonewall.uconn.edu/]. Thorson’s books Stone by Stone and Exploring Stone Walls have much more information as well, and I would add them to Susan Allport’s Sermons in Stone (mentioned earlier) as great reading on the topic.
I’m not a stone mason, landscaper or landscape architect, by the way, but a cultural anthropologist with an interest in cultural heritage (and stone walls). And I’m considering putting together a week-long course here in Maine next summer that would hopefully include some of the experts and issues discussed here.
Thanks,
Kreg Ettenger
Kreg, thanks for your comment. Weathering is such a desirable feature of New England fieldstone, and if people would consider ‘growing their own’ patina on quarried stone that might help ease the problem of theft. Robert Thorson even has a recipe for developing patina on his Stone Wall Initiative website, at this link: http://www.stonewall.uconn.edu/ConserveTimeTarnish.htm — I may give it a shot on some unweathered stones.
This post has raised a lot of interesting issues, and if anyone else wants to chime in with thoughts or observations, feel free; we’re happy to keep the conversation going.
Check out http://www.stonewall.uconn.edu/ for a comprehensive education on the issues regarding stone walls, especially historic ones. Robert Thorson is the one whom you want to contact. There is no one out there that I know who is more knowledgeable and passionate about stone walls and their preservation. Oops, now I see someone else mentioned him and his web site. Great!
Theft is a widespread issue but goes underreported. A neighbor of mine had part of his stone wall stolen twice in seven years. The police had the license plate the second time, but didn’t go after the guy presumably because it wasn’t worth the effort.
We’re trying to educate the police and the public in Massachusetts about theft through legislation, education, and general awareness.
Jeff Kotkin
Framingham, MA
Jeff, thanks for your note — it’s great to see that this post has triggered conversation! Is there a Massachusetts organization educating people about stone theft, or does the ‘we’ in your last sentence refer to the Stone Wall Initiative?
Deb,
The “we” refers to a small group of citizens in Framingham, but we use the SWI site for guidance. I’ve met with Robert Thorson twice and have been in communication with him-he’s a wonderful resource.
Jeff