If you walk along paths cut through the thick woods of pine, beech, and maple in my corner of New Hampshire, you’ll see walls of stacked stones rise out of the ground like granite serpents surfacing from a sea of ferns and leaves. These walls tell of a time when the landscape looked different. During the 18th and 19th centuries, 80 percent of the Monadnock Region was clear-cut of old-growth trees. This was not mindless timber harvesting but a scheme of managed survival. People needed logs for building homes and common houses, fuel for cooking and heating, and wood to create furniture, tools, barrels, and boxes. Most importantly, though, they needed to make room for livestock.
This period of New England history has been referred to as the “Sheep Boom.” Lasting for roughly 50 years from 1790 to 1840, farmers flocked to southwestern New Hampshire to raise the Merino sheep whose wool was needed to feed the great textile mills of Manchester and Nashua, as well as those of Lowell, Worcester, and Whitinsville in Massachusetts. After they harvested the trees, the farmers needed to figure out a way to keep millions of sheep enclosed in the new fields. As many of the landowners were of English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh stock, they used a familiar material that New Hampshire offered in abundance: stones. Thus, the towns surrounding Mount Monadnock became peppered with a seemingly endless maze of stone walls delineating fields for grazing sheep.
