Question about those old stone walls in New England

I was hiking near a old farm in Vermont last weekend and noticed these stone walls running through the woods. They just stop in the middle of nowhere with no house or field nearby. It got me thinking about how they were built by hand back in the 1800s from clearing fields. Is there a reason some of them end so abruptly, or did the forest just take over faster than I'm imagining?

2 comments

2 Comments

davis.casey1mo ago

Just stop in the middle of nowhere" - same with people who ghost you after a good conversation.

simonmoore1mo ago

That hundred-foot mark is actually a pretty common stopping point for walls like that. The original surveyors would lay out a property line and the farmer would just build to that boundary, even if there wasn't a house nearby yet. A lot of these walls stopped dead at the edge of a neighbor's land or a ravine that was too steep to bother clearing. And yeah, the forest took over way faster than you'd think - like 30 years of neglect and a field full of rocks turns into dense woods you can barely walk through. Those walls weren't abandoned mid-job, they just marked the line between "cleared" and "not worth the effort.