The Zigzag "Stone Wall" Dissenter (Nonnewaug CT)

    Here in Nonnewaug (extending throughout Pootatuck, and even into Mattatuck and Paugussett), it is my observation that many zigzag rows of stone falsify Eric Sloane’s statement that “One of the minor mysteries of old fences is the zigzag stone fence. Why would anyone place stones in such a fashion? The answer is simple: the stones were thrown there during a clearing, piled against an existing snake-rail fence. The rails rotted and disappeared, but the stones remained, winding across the land in the same crazy manner.”

      Here in Nonnewaug, field checking includes observations of triangular flat topped rattlesnake head-like boulders, similar to those of linear snake effigies, occurring at certain points of the zigzag rows of stones. 

Here in Nonnewaug many zigzag row of stones turn to linear rows, in some cases still retaining a boulder or stacked stone snake head.

     Here in Nonnewaug, the statement and the image used by the Gages in “How to Identify and Distinguish Native American Ceremonial Stone Structures from Historic Farm Structures”  that “If you find a zigzag wall that has even in/outs then you have a farm wall” are also falsified by observations of a large number of consistently  “even” ten foot/three meter long segments of stones creating these zigzags. The 1934 aerial photograph that includes the site of the Nonnewaug Wigwams  is a striking image of these often carefully constructed “even” zigzag stone constructions. It’s possible that some of these zigzags have wooden fence rails placed on top of them in the 1934 photograph, making some of them very visible. Field checking also reveals evidence of a number of decomposing chestnut rails on top of these zigzag rows of stones.

          If a zigzag stone fence is composed of random stones plucked from a plowed field that have been tossed against wooden rails, then would this indeed have the more “regular” and “even” appearance as opposed to stones intentionally “serpent stacked,” recalling these powerful and protective Spirit Beings?

  Here in Nonnewaug, I interpret the majority of these zigzag stone constructions to be Indigenous Great Snakes rather than the later “messy” field clearing debris of the post-contact period. I would suggest that the addition of wooden rails was to meet legal property ownership requirements under colonial law, “improvements” to otherwise “vacant land.”

  And yes, of course, here at Nonnewaug, a few other statements are drawn into question:

Gages “Farm Wall Criteria”

‘A sketch map or aerial photo shows an organized layout of fields.’

(Implies Indigenous Peoples were “unorganized,” implies enclosures were unrelated to Indigenous Landscape usage rather than later cultural appropriations.)

   ‘There are openings in the wall to allow access to the fields.’

   (Serpent Gateways at openings, guardian spirits of whatever was inside the enclosure – sometimes wide, sometimes narrow. Sometimes a “step/stone turtle shell” in an otherwise continuous fuelbreak.

 May have a stone wall lined "road" leading to the fields called a cow lane or cow path.

(Remnants of zigzag and linear rows of stones, exhibiting Indigenous Iconography,  still line both sides of many roads, including Nonnewaug Road, evidenced as well in the aerial photography of 1934 before many of the roads were paved and widened.)

May have a wall with multiple notched stones evenly spaced out (about 6 ft apart).

(Many may be Horns possibly placed behind/above snakeheads in the uppermost course of stones, “serpent stacked” smaller effigies that are part of a larger Horned Serpent or Great Snake effigy. These stones may also be horned medicine people or spirit effigies, some of which may also be "about to sing." )

Curtiss Hoffman

I strongly disagree with my friend Curtiss Hoffman when he writes (in part, in "Stone Prayers," page 61): "As Allport and Thorson have shown, New England colonial farmers built thousands of miles of stone walls to separate fields, either to control movements of livestock, or as property boundaries. However these walls are generally made of well-laid stones and are higher than one course of stones, and they also run straight in one direction, and meet at right angles, and tend to be continuous for considerable distances, wherever they are not dilapidated or punctured for cart paths. What I am calling "stone rows" lack some or all of these features: they tend to be made of smaller stones which are more haphazardly laid; they may be only one or two courses high, so they would not be able to function to keep animals in or out...they meet other walls at non-right angles..."

   (Allport and Thorson (et al) are repeating a colonial myth related to “Yankee Exceptionalism” that completely ignores the idea that Indigenous Peoples of the Northeast built with stone. Many “walls” featuring Indigenous Iconography, both zigzag and linear, are “well laid” and “higher than one course of stone,” and in my experience do extend for “great distances” and do meet at “right angles.”

“Haphazardly” is hardly the term for some of the more massive and exceptionally well built stacked stone constructions that have managed to survive unmaintained over hundreds of years of time.  

 

    Before 1990, I might have told you the same old story about the mystery of zigzag stone walls that almost everyone still repeats, derived from the writer and artist Eric Sloane. Since 1990, when I began “ground checking” what should be “Yankee Farmer built stone walls,” I became more inclined to suspect that the oldest of the stonework was made by Indigenous Peoples over an undetermined number of years. And I can’t find one yet, a zigzag stone wall that fits the Eric Sloane conjecture turned fact method of construction, although in a small number of places, the angle segments are filled with what appear to be dumped field stones from later field clearing of plowed enclosures for a short span of distance. I have also come across one example of old chestnut rails placed on top of a series of single stones.

 

    My little Case Study of “Zigzag Stone Walls” mostly comes from around where I live, an English Watch House overlooking the former floodplain fields associated with a late Woodland/Contact Era Pootatuck village known as The Nonnewaug Wigwams, occupied in 1672 when colonists fron Stratford CT arrived, and “abandoned” sometime around 1740. The Indigenous place name probably refers to the stonewall-like diagonal fish weir in the river of the same name. And yes it’s the “Nonewaug” Cluster in “Stone Prayers” by Curtiss Hoffman, a place where I do vaguely give out locations by saying “in plain sight most everywhere one goes.” My experience and observations are that the oldest and most numerous of “stone walls” are probable snake effigies that served in part as fuel breaks and water control on a Sacred Landscape that was in part a garden and in part similar to a great and vast cathedral.

 

An incredibly beautiful example:

https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2017/04/grey-fox-serpent.html

 Way too many more examples:

 https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/search?q=zigzag

At Rock Piles over the years: 

https://rockpiles.blogspot.com/search?q=zigzag