on hill farms the rocks kept surfacing from erosion as well as freeze/ thaw cycles, thus many walls/ piles were built up for decades - the walls/ piles that are still almost perfectly intact were almost certainly built by slaves - this was a valuable specialty that was passed father to son with these slaves being hired out for this work, as well as performing it for the owner - the land owner that was a "do it yourself" loose lay stone wall builder did not have the skills/ experience for the walls to exist unmaintained for over a 100 years of frost etc.
This has been done for thousands of years all over the world. If you travel in the mountains anywhere in Asia, there are huge cairns at the tops of passes. It's also an old tradition in tundra areas of northern Europe. We found huge cairns marking routes in areas lacking trails in NW Iceland (Hornstrandir penninsula) last year.
If you hike above timberline in the Colorado Front Range near Denver or Boulder you will find low, very old stone walls covered with lichen. Most hikers/peak baggers don't notice them, but they were made thousands of years ago. Studies by Benedict during the 1980's determined that the walls were constructed to channel game such as deer during a time when the climate was much warmer than now (the Altithermal period after the Ice Age). Native tribes moved high on the mountains because the plains became oppressively hot.
Last edited by Alligator; 05-13-2016 at 20:41. Reason: Don't troll.
I don't know about that. I've built more than one stone fence/retaining wall at our cabin, and after decades, there's been no movement. The trick is to remember to use gravity against itself. If you're building a stone wall, the wall has to be about 2 stone-layers thick, and each layer has to tilt slightly toward the center of the wall. That way, when gravity tries to pull down one side of the wall, it is sliding against the other side (which is also sliding against the first side), and the sides keep each other up. With no mortar between the stones, any rain will simply drain away without finding the tiny cracks that can be expanded by the normal freeze/thaw cycles. It really doesn't take any special skill - any farmboy from early New England could do it.
Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass - it's about learning how to dance in the rain!
A lot of comments by people that have not seen the rock piles. Need to see them to understand the question. The piles, 30 or more at least, are sometimes neatly stacked in squares about 6'x6'x6' and at other times look like they were dumped out of a truck. They are not attached to each other and appear to be randomly placed around the section. It would take a crazy person to go that far up a mountain to farm such a small section of land, and believe me, there are more rocks on the ground than any farmer would leave in a field. I've seen some stacks on a smaller scale other places. I cannot find a definitive answer as to what they mean, The best I've heard and to which I lean is that Indians sometimes had a sacred place. They would go to these places and offer something to their gods. These rocks could reflect many years of a local tribe members making a pilgrimage to their sacred land and basically building alters to honor their gods. I'd surely like to hear from someone with a definite answer.
If you faint in the face of adversity then your faith is indeed small--Solomon
The freeze/thaw cycle pushes previously buried rocks to the surface. Picking rocks is a Springtime ritual where I grew up. Stone walls and fences were built with the rocks picked out of fields. My family has lived in the same area for 200 years. There has never been a year where the fields didn't need the rocks picked. Thats a lot of rocks.
post civil-war, the population of Maine dropped by 1/2 between 1865 and 1870 as returning soldiers talked about how easy farmers had it elsewhere.
Read more about stone fortsBack in the Woodland period of American Indian history, about 1,500 years ago, the natives who lived in the region north of the Ohio River began building a series of stone walls or "forts" on top of isolated bluffs or hills. They placed the boulders they found in the region's rolling hills and creek beds in rows, stacking them to heights of six feet. Today, at least 10 stone walls remain on isolated knobs throughout southern Illinois -- some with steep drops on three sides, others along the edges of bluffs.
I found this by a simple search of Sarver Hollow. These folks were not slave owners, or sharecroppers, but homesteaders who had to improve the land for 10 years to claim ownership. Part of that improvement was to clear the land for farming which I guess included moving the rocks. There's even a picture of one of the piles. If still in doubt, the Craig County Virginia Historical Society can provide the details.
http://johncarlinsvirginia.blogspot....ver-cabin.html
Could be the same except there were no signs of any cabins or farming when I went through about 5 years ago. If there were "a lot" of piles as big or bigger than that shown and they were more squared off then the mystery is solved. The same stone structures have been found in Mississippi and they claim them to be created by Indians, possibly Indian burial grounds.
If you faint in the face of adversity then your faith is indeed small--Solomon
The Sarver Hollow Shelter was built in 2001-02 and it is just a very short walk over to the remains of the Sarver Cabin. It's listed in Wingfoot's 2001 Trailguide as Sarver Cabins and he refers to it as a homestead location. If you take the time to read the article I listed earlier you will see that the cabin was built and homesteaded sometime prior to the Civil War. There's no telling how many farms you will cross on the AT that you will find no trace of today. Between Brown Mtn Shelter and Hwy 60 in Viriginia you will see evidence of an entire community in a very narrow valley that follows a creek. There's a heck of a lot more evidence to support homesteading and farming in that region than Indian burial sites.
Cows eat about 10 Lbs of food a day, grass don't grow on rocks very well, so even if you didn't Plow to grow crops, you would move the rocks to (as mentioned above) a rock you couldn't move, or make a fence to free up more ground to grow critter feed (sheep & goats & horses also eat grass). There is a rock pile, , , OK, was, the creek took it years ago,,, on my parents Ohio farm. Did moving all of those rocks make a difference? Don't know, but I recognized those rock piles as soon as I saw them this year, have seen them in many parts of the country, so some farmers seem to think it helps,,,, along the lines of "every little bit helps!"
Curse you Perry the Platypus!
Cherokee Indians lived in that area too, didnt they? Farmers, fairly well developed civilization. Would have assimilated very well into early American society, except for Andrew Jackson and finding gold.
Perhaps it was a Buddhist Stupa that you encountered in the forest. A holy relic to be circumambulated, it creates merit.
Of course I've hiked that section of the AT. Three times so far. And I've spent the night at Sarver Hollow Shelter and explored the ruins of the Sarver Cabin, evidently more times than you. Don't argue with me, argue with the historical society, the descendants of the Sarvers and posted historical facts about Sarver Hollow.