School of Rock

At an all-women stone-wall building workshop in Vermont, Amy Waldman discovers a tradition as rich in camaraderie as it is in craftsmanship.

- Amy Waldman

TONE WALLS ARE a landscape feature you take for granted until you try to build one. This thought came to me as I attempted to heave a stone the size of a snowshoe and the weight of a small child five feet off the ground. I was near the end of a day of wall building. For eight hours, 16 of us, all women, had hauled and lifted some 24 tons of stone. My will was unflagging. My arms were not.

I had no previous experience in building a stone wall or any prior inclination to learn how. But after hearing about a course in the subject offered by the Stone Trust (thestonetrust.org), in southern Vermont, I decided to sign up. It was 2021, and the country felt unsettled. I wanted to put my hand on something solid, to make a material connection to America's past.

Dry-stone walls (dry because no mortar is used) were once ubiquitous in the Northeast. An 1871 Department of Agriculture report tallied 252,539 miles of walls in New England and New York, according to Susan Allport's 2012 book, Sermons in Stone. The walls divided fields, penned in sheep, and marked property lines (often divesting Native Americans of land access). They look almost organic, but while natural forces-notably glaciers may have delivered the stones here, it took millions of man-hours to dig up, haul, and stack them. Today the walls still curve along roads or rise unexpectedly in woods, a testament to the days when New England was one of a new nation's agricultural mainstays.