The True History of New England’s Stone Walls: Why we love them, and why I build them (Matt Seaton, July 19, 2026, The Atlantic)
[T]oday, we live with a solid remnant of that astonishing feat of human labor—the quarter-million miles of stone walls that an 1871 survey measured in the American Northeast. Where those walls still stand, we cherish them as charismatic markers of the Yankee landscape. Contoured lines of stacked stones running across fields help organize the vista. Their geometry implies a reassuring sense of something permanent—and permanently right—about a deeply American scene, along with white clapboard houses, red barns, rolling hills, goldenrod.
I first became properly acquainted with stone walls after my wife inherited her parents’ Vermont home, in 2010. A ramshackle line of piled rocks ran between the garden and the meadow. One section had gotten pulled aside and left in a heap, and there the stones had lain for several decades, slowly gathering humus and turning into something resembling a small burial mound—until I came along and decided to disinter the stuff and pile it back up. My work was rudimentary, but I was enraptured.
Other modest efforts followed, and then came the coronavirus pandemic. In need of something to counteract the alienation of desk-bound remote work, I turned to the collapsed and spreading 70-foot vestige of a wall that bounded the beginning of the meadow. I attended a day course at the Stone Trust, an educational foundation in southern Vermont, where I learned the principles of building to a line, “battening” (the English style of tapering a wall inward toward its apex), and reinforcing with through-stones and copestones; my building became more proficient.
Bit by bit—which is the way with walls—my interest and knowledge deepened until what had begun as recreation morphed into a hobby job, mending other people’s walls. Eventually, I realized not only that I liked building walls, but also that I could scratch a subsistence living at it. In what probably struck friends and family as an act of lunacy, I quit my day job as an editor at this magazine and became a part-time waller.
