The first European settlers showed up in the area where I live in 1659, 351 years ago. The first Native American “settlers” showed up 10 or 15 thousand years ago (or 14, 649 years earlier). Modern stone building theory says that except for rare occurrences, the first guys built it all – or taught the Indian survivors of all those epidemics and wars how to do so since they’d work cheap.
The closer you get to Plymouth Rock, the more time you can give those European people, up to an extra forty years, to have accomplished this feat so that they can take credit for building an estimated (in 1871) 252,539 miles of stone walls in New England and New York which is enough stone wall to encircle the earth ten times.
That 1871 date messes up my math above. Those Europeans lose about 100 years of valuable stone building time. They must be pretty tired, building all that quarter million miles of stone “fences” in only 251 years.
I take some comfort in finding this article that shows me how the theory came about:
"The Pliocene Pussy Cat Theory" by Lorenzo L. Love
http://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume7/v7i5/pliocene-pussy.html
Something that also seems to get lost in the "research" is the fact that stone wall building is impossible in the winter months. That is, of course, if the walls were made as a result of "field clearing". You can't clear a frozen field, buried in snow. You can't set a good, sturdy stone wall up above 2 feet of snow, on frozen ground. It will collapse as soon as the ground thaws.
ReplyDeleteToo bad, because I'm sure those guys had a lot of time in the winter to get that wall building done.
So, that leaves the good months to build the walls. You know, the time of year when they had all those other chores to do.
So that's 62.75 years less time, so now it's down to 188.25 years (if they worked on rainy days as well) for that quarter million miles of stone...
ReplyDeleteI tried to research this a little bit last night, but didn't get very far. I did find two things.
ReplyDeleteOne forum (I think it was the metal detectors group) said 17 feet per day for two men and an ox was considered a good day's work.
Second, the 1870 census information on line is pretty detailed, but there was no category for "stone wall builders". I find that a little surprising because, if my math is right (and going with the 17 feet per day theory), there should have been about 800,000 laborers working on stone wall building in 1871 to make this all happen. You would think that would be deserving of it's own category!
I wonder if the improbable research people might have someone interested in looking at this?
Has anyone actually ever tried to document the amount of stone work in any state with any accuracy? I would imagine that to be a monumental feat. Your strongest argument lies in stonework that is in remote areas, and areas that were never actually worked or inhabited by colonial settlers. The more stonework you can find in places European settlers never really lived, the clearer your point will be to unbelievers.
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