I have lived in New England for going on 19 years.  Yet one of the aspects of life in New England that I still find quaint and charming is finding stone walls.  In fact, as I have been driving around Orange getting to know our new community, stone walls continue to captivate my interest.  Stone walls feel quintessentially New England.  We can recall the famous poem from Robert Frost “Mending Wall” and the oft-quoted line, “Good fences make good neighbors.”  This single line has been interpreted in many ways.  Though it’s always worth remembering our Christian call to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.  Maybe meeting his neighbor each year to help fix the wall between them was an act of love because these men worked together to care for their properties.  Teamwork makes the dream work?

Anyway, Matt Seaton recently reflected on his love of New England’s stone walls in The Atlantic— “The True History of New England’s Stone Walls.”*  Matt and his wife inherited her parents’ home in Vermont and Matt decided to repair a stone wall that had once separated a garden from a meadow.  The stones had been piled in a sad heap for years.  That small project sparked something in him, and he signed up for a class at the Stone Trust to further perfect his craft.  He even quit his day job (as an editor at The Atlantic) to become a part-time waller.

Robert Thorson (a landscape geologist at the University of Connecticut) estimates that there are 100,000 miles of old stone walls still present here in New England.**  To put that into perspective, that is enough to circle the Earth four times!  One of the reasons these stone walls were erected was purely practical.  Farmers cleared forests for crops and land for livestock to graze.  The soil in New England is notoriously rocky because of glacial recession at the end of the last Ice Age.  What to do with all these stones in the soil?  Might as well make use of them.  Farmers would pull these stones from the fields and pile them on the edges of their land.  Sometimes they would be used as fences for boundaries or within one’s land to differentiate land use (a garden and a meadow for instance).

So I guess when life hands you lemons, make lemonade. 
And when your land has an endless supply of stones, build a wall! 

Grace and Peace,
Rev. Lauren

*Matt Seaton, “The True History of New England’s Stone Walls,” in The Atlantic, July 19, 2026.
**Anna Kusmer, “New England Is Crisscrossed With Thousands of Miles of Stone Walls” Atlas Obscura, May 4, 2018, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/new-england-stone-walls

Photos by Rev. Lauren Ostrout of stumbling upon a stone wall while walking along the road in Orange, CT and in the forest in Colchester, CT.

The Orange Peal Pastor’s Note 8/5/26