I used to work for a company that did GIS mapping of guard rails, lines, and road signs. Part of what we always ended up doing was massaging the data we received from the Lidar mapping to line things up to exact locations for clients. If this map is accurate, I salute whoever spent the time fixing the details.
I can see portions of a few walls that are out in spots that used to have a road over 100 years ago but now are reclaimed by the forest. Some of areas are densely overgrown now. Nice work.
For folks not from New England: it's very normal to walk through inhabited the woods in New England and come upon a seemingly totally random stone wall in the middle of nowhere.
Much of New England is 2nd(?) growth forest -- the original forests were chopped down to make space for farmland. The soil is incredibly rocky, and so farmers would go through there fields and chuck the rocks to the side, making the walls. Eventually people realized that New England's rocky soil was not very good for farming/local farming became less important as food was able to be transported longer distances, and much of the farm land was abandoned and eventually reforested -- with the only the rock walls remaining (or at least that's what I was taught growing up there).
Apologies for the vacuous pos, but all these walls out in nowhere has been such a long long mystery to me!
It seemed so hard to imagine why anyone would have needed these, that folks were so worried about property lines! Never any evidence of fence posting, often not high enough to really do much (that might have been a shift over time though, wall falling/dirt gathering). But wall after wall, through forest after forest!
My first thought is for historical research. It would be quite a bit of help if you have some old town or settlement map that you can compare to/overlay with a LiDAR stone wall map.
I am not sure, but it may also serve historical preservation purposes if that is an issue, e.g., if administrators are deciding on land partitioning and/or development plans.
I'm not affiliated with the site I submitted, but some just really love stone walls, especially those of us here in New England. I'm part of a "New English Stone Walls" Facebook group that has ~65,000 members.
To me (I'm in CT) there's something really cool to be in a forest surrounded by trees but see a perfectly made stone wall just there in the "middle of nowhere." I think about how much time and effort it took back in the early ~1800s to clear all that land, move all those rocks across fields without modern machinery, and put so much effort into constructing these walls. Some are over 6 feet wide and many are in incredible shape for being put together ~200 years ago.
There's also the "Stone Wall Initiative" spearheaded by Robert Thorson of the University of Connecticut that also has tons of info:
Tom Wessels has a great chapter in Part 1 of his "Reading the Forested Landscape" video series about New England stonewalls. [0] A common myth is the walls were built over time due to the rocks being pushed up by the frost but that's not true!
The over 125k miles of stonewalls were built in just thirty years because of sheep.
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[ 7.0 ms ] story [ 43.6 ms ] threadMuch of New England is 2nd(?) growth forest -- the original forests were chopped down to make space for farmland. The soil is incredibly rocky, and so farmers would go through there fields and chuck the rocks to the side, making the walls. Eventually people realized that New England's rocky soil was not very good for farming/local farming became less important as food was able to be transported longer distances, and much of the farm land was abandoned and eventually reforested -- with the only the rock walls remaining (or at least that's what I was taught growing up there).
It seemed so hard to imagine why anyone would have needed these, that folks were so worried about property lines! Never any evidence of fence posting, often not high enough to really do much (that might have been a shift over time though, wall falling/dirt gathering). But wall after wall, through forest after forest!
I am not sure, but it may also serve historical preservation purposes if that is an issue, e.g., if administrators are deciding on land partitioning and/or development plans.
To me (I'm in CT) there's something really cool to be in a forest surrounded by trees but see a perfectly made stone wall just there in the "middle of nowhere." I think about how much time and effort it took back in the early ~1800s to clear all that land, move all those rocks across fields without modern machinery, and put so much effort into constructing these walls. Some are over 6 feet wide and many are in incredible shape for being put together ~200 years ago.
There's also the "Stone Wall Initiative" spearheaded by Robert Thorson of the University of Connecticut that also has tons of info:
https://stonewall.uconn.edu/
(He also has a really good "Stone by Stone" book available on Amazon.)
The over 125k miles of stonewalls were built in just thirty years because of sheep.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcLQz-oR6sw&t=129s
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/4c801e35f200493ebff...
("Hillshade 2023" and "Hillshade 2023 SE illumination" are the two I use.)