Growing up on a hill farm in Vermont, I did my fair share of picking stone. Picking stone meant loading rocks and stones onto a stone-boat. Every farm had a stone boat in the old days. A stone-boat is a flat bottom sledge made with hardwood planks with a low profile so you can roll heavy rocks onto it. Even though boulders, rocks, and stones are all made of rock, we called them what they were according to their size. Boulders were too big to move. Rocks can be picked up and carried, or rolled if to big to pick up. Stones can be picked up in one hand and thrown, at least a "stones throw away."
When the first settlers came to New England, they found the landscape strewn with rock of different sizes. Most of the early settlers came from the British Isles where their forefathers built stonewalls for fences and boundaries. As the settlers moved from Southern New England northward, thousands of miles of stonewalls were built between 1700 and 1850. It was said that in those days, two men with a team of oxen and a stone-boat could build a three-foot-high wall a rod (5.5 yards) per day.
Even after the stonewalls were built, clearing rocks out of the fields was a never-ending chore. Every time a farmer plowed a field, a new crop of rocks would come to the surface. It was the crop that never failed. There was an old story going around about some boys from Barre that were riding the back roads in their car. They were probably drinking a little and stopped beside a field where a farmer was piling rocks onto a stone-boat. The boys thought they would have a little fun with him and asked what he was doing. "Picking stone," he replied. "Where'd the stones come from?" they asked. "The glacier brought 'em," he responded. To try to pester him further they asked, "So where'd the glacier go?" "Back for more stone," said the farmer.
As the tractor replaced horses and oxen the stone-boats were pulled by a tractor and the work continued. There were always gaps where the frost would heave, causing rocks to roll off the wall. The farmers repaired the stonewalls as they needed to, but a lot of the smaller stones were thrown into a pile to use for something later. Most of the piles never got used and have long since been buried under leaf litter.
Like most of the Vermont farms our little one hundred plus acre hill farm was crisscrossed with stonewalls. One of our upper pastures had a four to five foot stonewall running up one side of it that was so impressive that Dad named it the stonewall pasture.
Growing up in the 1960's we didn't have cell phones, video games or outside influences to entertain us. We sought out adventure in our own small world using our own imaginations, and what an adventure it was. Boredom was unthinkable and if you were bored your parents could find plenty of work for you to do. One of our fun things to do was to walk on the stonewalls. We tried to walk as far as we could without falling or getting hurt. It's not really an adventure unless there's some risk involved. And sometimes a rock would roll under you so you had to jump to safety, hoping the rock wouldn't roll on you. If the rocks were to big for us to put back in place, we just hoped that Dad thought it was caused from a frost heave from the past winter.


Forest and field change through the ages, but those stonewalls stand as a lasting tribute to our forefathers’ toughness and self-reliance to live free. And as our Declaration of Independence, which many of them helped to bring about or defend, states that they and now we, have the right to 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Ken Batten grew up on a small sheep farm in West Topsham VT. He was a logging contractor, soldier and rural mail carrier. He now lives in North Hyde Park VT with his wife Tina-Marie. You can contact Ken at kenbatvt@gmail.com or PO Box 5 N Hyde Park VT 05665

Have a story?