Editorial Review:
There once may have been 250,000 miles of stone walls in America’s Northeast, stretching farther than the distance to the moon. They took three billion man-hours to build. And even though most are crumbling today, they contain a magnificent scientific and cultural story—about the geothermal forces that formed their stones, the tectonic movements that brought them to the surface, the glacial tide that broke them apart, the earth that held them for so long, and about the humans who built them.
Stone walls tell nothing less than the story of how New England was formed, and in Robert Thorson’s hands they live and breathe. “The stone wall is the key that links the natural history and human history of New England,” Thorson writes. Millions of years ago, New England’s stones belonged to ancient mountains thrust up by prehistoric collisions between continents. During the Ice Age, pieces were cleaved off by glaciers and deposited—often hundreds of miles away—when the glaciers melted. Buried again over centuries by forest and soil buildup, the stones gradually worked their way back to the surface, only to become impediments to the farmers cultivating the land in the eighteenth century, who piled them into “linear landfills,” a place to hold the stones. Usually the biggest investment on a farm, often exceeding that of the land and buildings combined, stone walls became a defining element of the Northeast’s landscape, and a symbol of the shift to an agricultural economy.
Stone walls layer time like Russian dolls, their smallest elements reflecting the longest spans, and Thorson urges us to study them, for each stone has its own story. Linking geological history to the early American experience, Stone by Stone presents a fascinating picture of the land the Pilgrims settled, allowing us to see and understand it with new eyes.
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
Messy Work  2005-07-10
I became so angry at one paragraph of Mr. Thorson's book, that I decided to write a review attacking it. You may find the guilty paragraph on page 141, if you dare.
In it, Thorson calculates the number of man-days needed to build New England's stone walls. His most obvious problem is with numbers. He writes that four rods equals sixty-four feet. Actually, it equals sixty-six. More impressively, Thorson mistakenly calculates that 240,000 miles is the same as 819,088,710 feet, instead of 1,267,200,000. He is off by about four hundred million feet. He should have noticed that his first estimate was accurate to the nearest ten thousand miles, his second to the nearest ten feet.
Moreover, in his discussion of how many feet a waller can work in a day, Thorson reveals a lack of common sense. He writes that modern masons lay 20 feet of wall in a day, whereas modern British masons can only lay 15-18 feet a day. Those lazy Brits! One may wish to compare these two rates to that of old New England farmers. According to Thorson, these farmers could lay stone fence at 64 (or 66) feet a day, over three times as fast as those in modern times.
In case we are befuddled by his leaps in logic, Thorson provides an endnote, which, alas, only further reveals his incompetence. First he notes that his calculation covers only the act of building a wall, not the act of carrying over the stones. Then why does he write that farmers needed oxen to help them build their walls?
Next, Thorson writes that he needed three statistics to make his calculation: the number of hours in the work day of a farmer, the number of miles of stone wall in New England, and the average rate of construction. Why did he need to know the number of hours in a work day? None of his statistics were in hours! We turn to the only possible solution: perhaps, Thorson was given his statistics on wall-building in feet per hour and converted to feet per day. Let us examine the three groups he studied: old New Englanders, Brits, and Moderns, to see if this may be the case. For the New Englanders, Thorson quotes a source: "four rods a day;" no need to convert here. For the British, Thorson gives the statistic: 5-6 yards a day. If he had converted, it would have been from a source which wrote that Brits make walls at .675 to .75 yards an hour; no source would ever estimate in such terms. The only place Thorson could possibly have used the eight-hour-day would have been in calculating the labor rate of the modern mason. But in giving his statistic, Thorson does not cite anyone. If he used someone's statistic and then converted, he should have cited. If he did not use anyone's statistic, then there would have been no need for him to convert, and the eight-hour-day would have been completely useless. Thus, Thorson's third piece of "required" information, the eight hour day, is either not required, or indicative of academic dishonesty.
This completes the critique. Admittedly, my judging a book by one paragraph is unfair. Yet, Mr. Thorson chose to include this paragraph in his book; it is indicative of him and his research. As such I do not trust either one.
Densely enjoyable  2005-03-02
Thorson's discussion of frost heave is so wonderful I no longer resent picking those damn rocks out of the garden. Well, I still don't like those damn cobbles and pebbles but at least now it makes sense. I lived on sand in Schenectady, NY for awhile and I almost forgot how easy mending that lawn was, you could dig without a shovel, but New England called me home and alas this is a land of rocks, but walking through the woods here in Massachusetts with its stranded rock walls, whose existence in trackless woods makes one wonder who built them, so long ago that the trees surrounding them are well over 100 feet high, humbles one, such a long history, so many generations gone, you can feel the hard labor that must have gone into hauling these tons of rock, these walls that run up and down hillsides through woods that haven't seen farming in over 150 years.
I loved the soil talk, the geology, the history lesson, this is real history, the story of the people, explaining the reasons for the individual decisions of the many; the big history moves are the result of the many many little historical imperatives.
If you live in New England or any other glaciated terrain, you should read this book, you will find your surroundings, your own neighborhood woods, a source of new fascination.
Fascinating and comprehensive 2003-12-07
This is a wonderful book. It blends science, history and art to create an interesting perspective on the stone walls of New England. Thorson discusses the geological aspects of stone, the various types of stone walls and how they were built as well as the process of frost heaving and the disintegration of old walls. I hope this book causes people who have looked at stone walls and have seen only rocks to take a new, deeper look at them. They, and "Stone by Stone" are quite poetic.
Solidly Magnificent 2003-11-22
"The stone walls of New England stand guard against a future
that seems to be coming too quickly. They urge us to slow down
and to recall the past."This is only one of the many observations that Professor Thorson
concludes his marvelous book with. I must admit that his final,
summarizing chapter actually brought a tear to my eye - hardly
to be expected from a book on geology and regional history
mixed with, amongst other topics, some anthropology. In other words this book has enough of everything to satisfy
every curiosity you might have about those tumbled down rows
of stones found in just about every New England forest and
suburb. A surprising wealth of information on numerous topics.
Fascinating scientific and cultural and historical background -
far more than one would ever expect to encounter considering
the topic. And Professor Thorson's writing style is commendably
clear and readable, with a poet's affection for his topic. Quite simply one of the best nonfiction books I think I have ever
read (and I read quite a lot), for its perfect fusion of research, understanding and sentiment. Almost an answer to my prayers during so many long, wandering and wondering forest walks.
I encourage you to read this book.
More Geology Than Walls  2003-05-24
When I picked up this book I thought: "How can an entire book be written about stones walls?" As it turns out the author did not write an entire book about stone walls. The author gives us the hisory of stone walls starting with the formation of the earth, through formation of rocks, the ice age and finally American history. There is actually more about geology that stone walls themselves, although the author tried mightily to write a few hundred pages about them. The geology and history is well-written and interesting. I learned quite about when walls were generally built and how the stones came to be that comprised them. However, the last third or so of the book - that part devoted to the walls themselves was often redundant. It seemed the author was searching for words to fill the pages and stretching - like the last pages of a term paper you know should be eight pages but you have to make the assigned ten pages. A chapter on builders and technique would have been more useful than the stretched parts. There are pearls of interesting history and I am not sorry I read the book. I just wished it had been shorter by an excision of the redundancies and "stretches".
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