"There once may have been 240,000 miles of stone walls in America's northeast, more than the distance to the Moon. They took three billion man hours to build. And even though most of them are crumbling today, they contain within them a magnificent scientific and human story - if you know what to look for.".

"Stone walls tell nothing less than the story of how New England was formed, and in Robert Thorson's Stone by Stone 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 were parts of ancient mountains thrust up by prehistoric collisions between continents.

During the Ice Age, pieces were cleaved off by glaciers and deposited - sometimes hundreds of miles away - when the glaciers melted. Buried over centuries by forest and soil buildup, the stones gradually worked their way back to the surface during the Little Ice Age, only to become impediments to the farmers cultivating the land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who piled them into walls. Thorson shows that while the walls were often useful as boundaries or fences, they were primarily "linear landfills" constructed simply 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."--BOOK JACKET.