Day 3... Rocks, Boulders in New England

Hello friends!



The House, notice the Rocks



The purpose of this blog is to sell enough of the special piece of pottery I am working on to hold off the tax sale of my house... in July.  Yikes!  I am not asking for handouts, times are tough for everybody, (what about these CT gas prices? $4.05?), I am looking for people who want to help by buying a piece of Americana Art, something made here in the USA.  My goal, by posting this blog, you're help passing on this blog, and getting some followers, is that I will be able to sell 1,000 of these special, $10 pieces over the next year. That will not be so difficult if you will all sign up and help pass it on!  There may be a shipping fee.. haven't thought that far yet. Haven't even decided for sure, what the pottery piece will be.  I am working on something and will post it within the next few weeks.

In the meantime, I will jabber on about the house you will all help to save!

More about Rocks...

In New England, rocks grow up out of the ground to disrupt and hinder our lives like taxes. I suppose it is the frost heaves over the winter that push the rocks up. They really do seem to grow each year. Millions of years ago rocks were broken and  carried here by ice flows. They are buried all over the landscape. Rocks the size of baseballs, rocks the size of cars and rocks the size of houses. There is a rock sitting on the top of a hill a mile from here called Sunset Rock.  A hundred years ago, the hill was cleared of its trees and you could sit on top of the 25 foot cone shaped rock and watch the sun set.  This is typical of New England... http://www.neara.org/Moore/balancedrocks.htm. The largest of these glacial boulders was a rock I visited in New Hampshire. The Madison Boulder is sitting on top of the ground, 83 feet long!!!! 23 feet high and 37 feet wide. That's about 5,000 tons... and that's just what is above the ground! http://www.newhampshire.com/state-parks/madison-boulder-natural-area.aspx





So farmers clearing there fields had to remove some of those rocks. They put them on skids, hooked up the horses or oxen and made a maze of walls that would serve as barriers for the livestock.



The Stone Wall and Me



Originally, the Birge family, (the folks who built my house), cleared about 200 acres of  rocks. The 15 acres that Nathaniel Birge inherited in 1830, has lost all but a few feet of its stone walls. Removing stone walls is illegal in most of New England, but developers tend to ignore this. Stone walls are part of the charm of our landscape. Its a shame to see them go.

Out of the original 15 acres that was attached to this house, only 1 acre is on the property deed, along with 50 feet of stone wall placed there over 200 years ago.



This is a typical story of any early house in any early New England town.  Three 1637 houses still survive in New England.  Hundreds dot our landscape today, woven in amid new constructions and reproductions. The easiest way to tell a house is really old, is by its foundation. Cellars in my area were  made with large granite blocks that can be seen from the road. These blocks, typically about 24x48x 24, were hauled into position by teams of oxen from nearby quarries.





Enough about rocks. Tomorrow... lets talk about clay and bricks, early colonial bricks!

By the way, you can also subscribe by email below and post comments or interesting bits you have found... Do you like stone walls? Roger? Anyone?