STONE WALL

Stone Fence at Shaker Village

Robert Frost touted the value of walls or fences when he penned the famous lines, “good fences make good neighbors.” He spoke of the fences built in New England, but the Appalachians built more good fences of dry stone walls in central Kentucky than anywhere else in the U.S. We discovered a gracious plenty when we recently visited Berea and surrounding towns in the Blue Grass area of this state.

These beautiful old walls border pasture land along the curving, rolling hills near Danville and Lancaster, Kentucky. Barns painted black and bearing quilt designs on their faces loomed in the background and formed a weird contrast of color to our idea that all barns should be painted red.

During the 18th century, stone walls in Kentucky were built by Irish and Scottish immigrants who later taught black slaves to lay them freehanded with no mortar, and the walls cover mile after mile of Blue Grass country — ageless walls hewed from rock formations and quarried to create sturdy enclosures. Something about their timeless appearance inspired a feeling of safety in me. We weren’t surprised to discover more of the walls at Shaker Village in Pleasant Hill that apocrypha reports surround forty miles of the village.

To better understand the formations from which stone was extracted for the many walls throughout the Kentucky countryside, I purchased a book about geological formations on Kindle but got lost in the chapter about Geologic Time. Unlike Louisiana geologic history, the history of beautiful rock formations in Kentucky hasn't been determined by information supplied from oil drilling. I did learn that the deposits of heavy minerals during the Citronelle formation were formed during the Pliocene and are the likely source of stones for fences. Vickie Sullivan, our intrepid photographer, captured these stone walls in shot after shot but complained about the light working against photographing their natural beauty.

Stonemasons aren’t plentiful in Blue Grass country today, but a Dry Stone Conservancy near Lexington, Kentucky has a mission of preserving dry stone structures and trains artisans in the building and maintenance of these “good fences.” Their mission perhaps validates Frost’s enigmatic line about good fences making good neighbors, and I think the poet probably meant that such structures imply a mutually agreed upon and shared responsibility of upkeep. However, his “Mending Wall” has been the subject of many interpretations that question the integrity of so-called “walls.” A more practical interpretation could be that builders of these walls wanted to keep livestock from wandering away from home.