Perhaps the best house I ever owned was on Taunton Hill Road in Newtown, Connecticut. Set on four park-like acres in a neighborhood of horse farms, the property was surrounded by an ancient fieldstone wall, a commonplace in the northeast. Dividing the estimated length of 240,000 miles of stone wall by the geographic area of the New England heartland yields about six linear miles of stone per square mile of land. Like lakes in Minnesota and canyons in Arizona, they’re impossible to miss, reports The Smithsonian magazine. They were used to delineate property lines so you knew were your farm ended and your neighbor’s began. But there was much more to these ubiquitous fences than that.
© 2024 John Oliver
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