WHEN IN YOUR STATE • December 18, 2025
At its peak, New England had an estimated 240,000 miles of stone walls. They were built by families who cleared the land, fought a revolution, chased a wool boom, and then walked away. The walls they left behind tell a story. The Laurentide Ice Sheet was the principal glacier covering North America during the last Ice Age. Between about 30,000 and 15,000 years ago, the ice scraped across New England. It stripped away the ancient soils, scouring the land down to its bedrock, lifting up billions of stone slabs and scattering them across the region. When the ice melted, it left behind a rocky mess that would take thousands of years to bury. When Europeans first arrived in New England, the land was densely forested and covered with a thick layer of topsoil and humus. By the mid-1800s, 75 percent of New England was clear cut. Without the natural vegetation to hold and replenish the topsoil, the soil eroded and eventually exposed the more stoney glacial soils below. The rocks that glaciers had buried thousands of years earlier were back at the surface, and farmers had to deal with them.