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An Old Indigenous Stone Row?
Following a Trailside Stone Row in the Bolton, Vermont Woods
This past weekend, I followed part of an old stone row, the term I use for what some call “stone walls”, deep into the woods along a trail in the Jericho and Bolton, Vermont area.
The placement of white quartz stones in and atop the stone row, and the presence of non-traditional coursework which seemed to include potential Great Serpent iconography led me to wonder about the potential for an Indigenous origin for this stone row, which some assume to be an old farmer’s construction.
That’s an understandable assumption, given Yankee Lore and the context: our forests and woods in Vermont are all pretty young, in relative terms. Agriculture cleared 80–90% of Vermont’s tree cover by the beginning of the 20th century. Many of today’s “woods” were farms, orchards and working forests 150 years ago, so stonework in the middle of nowhere now might have been part of a farm back then. Ergo, that’s gotta be a farmer’s stone wall in those woods. Right? Who else’s would it be? Well…
That’s really the big question I’m asking — is some of this stonework actually older work? Indigenous work? Was it later adapted and built upon by European settlers for their uses, giving us what is now a blended landscape?
This is not a new question, nor is it mine alone. Researchers both amateur and professional have been documenting Indigenous built stonework in New England since the 1970’s. Indigenous voices in the United South and Eastern Tribes ( USET) began to pass Resolutions acknowledging and asking for help in protecting what they termed Ceremonial Stone Landscapes in the 2000’s. I’m actually a relative newcomer, having only begun looking into the question myself in 2019.
I learned early in my research that the oldest documented stone construction ever found in Massachusetts was a 4000-year-old Indigenous-built stone wall constructed as part…
