Stone Walls and Hedge Rows

I have a soft spot for old hedgerows and dry-laid limestone walls. Once ubiquitous in the rural landscape, they have all but disappeared. Only remnants remain to remind us of the settlers who came here to wrest a living from the land, to farm. One would be hard-pressed to find a diversified farm today, but in the nineteenth century every farm was diversified. They had to be if the farmers and their families were to have food to eat and a little money to buy the few things they could not produce.

Every farm kept a variety of livestock – a few pigs, a few cattle, a milk cow, workhorses, and chickens. The land was devoted primarily to wheat, corn, and pasture. Fences were required to separate the animals from the row crops and to keep them from wandering off down the dirt road.

Farmers around here had two fencing material options: dry-laid stone walls and rail fences. Back then there were few trees to provide rails, so the most popular option was building stone walls. Limestone is plentiful in this prairie that once or twice in geological history was an inland sea. Countless marine creatures lived and died in those waters, their skeletal remains falling to the bottom. Over time these layers became stone, four-foot-thick layers of calcium carbonate and other minerals. Imagining the length of time that took makes my head swim.

A few more eons and those limestone layers are eroding and breaking into chunks. The early Willow Springs farmer had only to turn the soil or take a wagon to the creek to get plenty of stone wall material. The down side, of course, is that stone wall building is back-breaking work and stone wall-building requires a lot of searching for stones that fit together in a stable way, but farmers built them, even in the hilly woods here at Paradise. A walk through our woods reveals numerous remnants of stone walls. I never see them without imagining the original settler and perhaps his son, laboriously gathering stones and fitting them together into a wall to keep their cattle from straying.

Another fencing option appeared in the 1880's: the Osage Orange hedge fence. This option was not back-breaking. It involved planting seedling trees and, as they grew, bending and weaving their branches into an impenetrable barrier to their stock. Trouble was, it took a long time to grow and, once grown, it had to be pruned and shaped. Oh, did I mention that the Osage Orange has wicked thorns?

The introduction of  barbed wire later that century caused farmers to lose interest in the former two options and both stone walls and hedge rows became obsolete.

Most stone walls have been torn down or have fallen apart. Most hedgerows have been bulldozed to make more room for crops. Only remnants remain, such as this one in our neighborhood.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer