The stone boat: An early farming practice that shaped the landscape in Woodbridge

Before the age of machinery, farming was a physically demanding endeavor and by necessity dictated many aspects of daily life. Nestled in the rocky, hilly terrain of New England, the land in Woodbridge presented its inhabitants with the intertwined challenges of geography and climate. The farmers who lived here in bygone days had to wrestle with these realities to cultivate the land, relying on manual labor and simple tools to grow their crops and raise livestock.

The words of one Woodbridge farmer, Nathan Platt Peck (1843-1912), echo down through the years to us as he expressed a pervasive sense of confinement he seems to have felt – of being tied to the wearying obligations of his farm. Edward Clark makes clear in his talk to the Historical Society that farming was Nathan's way of life, and it was how he provided for his family. But while the lawyer is careful to express his respect for his neighbor the farmer, he goes on to poignantly describe Nathan's outlook:

“I remember that one day at a gathering about the Woodbridge church, when it came late afternoon he remarked, “I shall have to go home to milk; all my life I have had to get home to milk.”

Early agricultural practices in Woodbridge reflected the broader patterns of subsistence farming common throughout New England. With a relatively short growing season, families cultivated what they needed to sustain themselves, with any surplus traded or sold locally. As transportation improved in the 19th century, Woodbridge began to experience a gradual shift towards market farming. Dairy farming became more prominent, and the town's farmers began producing goods not just for their own families but for nearby urban markets, primarily in New Haven, as well.

However, the increasing competition from the more fertile lands of the Midwest and the lure of industrial jobs in the growing cities eventually led to a decline in agriculture in our area. Despite these changes, the legacy of Woodbridge's farming past continues to shape the town's identity, and remind us of the resilience and resourcefulness of its early inhabitants.

An example of this involves one of the most labor-intensive and iconic farming practices in early Woodbridge, the work required to clear the farmer's field of stones – a task that not only prepared the land for cultivation but also left a lasting mark on the landscape in the form of stone walls. The rocky soil of New England was notoriously difficult to farm, and each spring, as the ground thawed, stones would push up to the surface in a phenomenon that was known by the old-timers as heaving. As a result, it was necessary to remove 'new' rocks each spring before crops could be planted – a never-ending cycle of manual labor back in the day. So each spring, the stones were painstakingly gathered and repurposed to create what today remains as an extensive network of stone walls that crisscross Woodbridge.

These old farmer's stone walls served multiple purposes: they marked property boundaries, kept livestock contained, and provided an enduring solution to the ever-present problem of too many stones. The construction of these walls took place over centuries of cultivation and even now stand as enduring symbols of the ingenuity required to farm in such a challenging environment.

In one local family's correspondence there's an account of farm work by Harriet Peck Wilson (born 1893), a daughter of Silas Judson Peck (1867-1943) and Eva Hollenbeck Peck (1869-1947). In 1978, she wrote to her nephew Silas Peck Mansfield describing her father's upbringing on his grandparent's farm located on Ansonia Road in Woodbridge, during the late 1800s. Harriet wrote:

“The work on the farm was very hard – such long days. 'Old Grandma' [this is Mary Adeline Baldwin Peck, 1812-1906] would call him at 4:30 A.M. calling 'Silie, time to get up' and the day started at that time. There were hired men to help, but most of the work fell to Father. 'Old Grandma' was like an overseer, getting the work done. A farm of 128 acres meant a lot of different kinds of work – cows to be milked morning and night (no milking machines), barns had to be cleaned every day. Each season had its particular work. Spring – plowing (with horse and plow), planting of seeds by hand – then cultivating. Summer there was haying with horse and hand labor (no tractors).

I can remember (vividly) Papa and the hired man picking up stones – all the stones had to be cleared from the fields. A stone-boat was used and a pair of oxen pulled it. The stones were taken up the lane and put on a great stone pile, a great high pile of stones, on the land that is now Old Barnabas Road – the road where your Mother's house is located. It was a back-breaking job. All the wood that was used in the house had to be cut and sawed. There wasn't much time for rest and reading – never-the-less, Father did read and read. He read to us children, at night. Si, I want you to know how hard our ancestors had to work. This was before he was married [in 1889] – and went on after he was married, also.”

The stone boat that Harriet Wilson describes was a simple but effective tool used by farmers in New England, including those in Woodbridge, to help with the arduous task of clearing fields of stones. Essentially a low, sled-like platform, typically made of wood, it was designed to slide easily over the ground and was used to haul heavy loads of stones, logs, or other materials that needed to be moved across the farm. Farmers would load the stone boat with the rocks they had gathered from their fields, often using a lever or pry bar to lift particularly heavy stones onto the platform. Once loaded, the stone boat would be pulled by oxen or horses, or in some cases, by hand, to the location where the stones were to be used to build the stone walls that enclosed the field.

Let's look at the stone boat in action – here is some historical footage captured in Woodbridge at the Agricultural Fair, an annual event that took place up until the early 1930s. Evidently, the fairs featured a rock hauling competition of some sort, and the camera here captures various teams, consisting of farmer and horses, as they take turns pulling a stone boat piled with some very large stones. These were certainly some hard working horses!

This old film – converted to a video format suitable for uploading to YouTube back in 2014 so it can now be watched online – is not only a look into the past but also offers a glimpse of how the past can continue to inform the present, inspiring and preparing the observer to embrace the future. What ingenious thinking will assist the people of Woodbridge as we grapple with obstacles and struggle to persevere as a community today? How do we move aside the boulders that appear with regularity, to clear the way for the planting we must do to ensure tomorrow's harvest? Are there lessons from our collective past we should study? The author William Faulkner (1897-1962), writing in 1951, reminds us:

“The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”

It certainly seems that the web keeps up its spinning — perhaps all the more in this age of the World Wide Web. And in fact just earlier this week, on August 26th 2024, another old recording newly made available on YouTube heaved to the surface yet another reference to the old stone boat. In a lecture given August 19, 1982 and titled “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People” the celebrated mathematician Rear Admiral Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (1906-1992) shared 'pearls of wisdom' with her audience, including several references to the olden days of her youth. Grace Hopper was a computer science pioneer (and the namesake of the Yale residential college previously known as Calhoun College) and in this lecture, she harkens back to the ingenuity of the old farmers moving stones, to remind us: when they needed more power to do the job, they didn’t wait around to grow a stronger ox, they yoked up two instead!

Here's a description published in the journal ArsTechnica:

“Hopper was a very popular speaker not just because of her pioneering contributions to computing, but because she was a natural raconteur, telling entertaining and often irreverent war stories from her early days. And she spoke plainly, as evidenced in the 1982 lecture when she drew an analogy between using pairs of oxen to move large logs in the days before large tractors, and pairing computers to get more computer power rather than just getting a bigger computer—“which of course is what common sense would have told us to begin with.”

In the opening passage of her lecture, Grace Hopper also summons up a scene for us that's reminiscent of a few previous posts here on TownHistory (see 'Old toll roads of Woodbridge,' 'Friends of the 1897 Woodbridge and Seymour trolley line' and 'Dangers of the roadway in the early 1900s'). She says:

“Actually, I can remember when Riverside Drive in New York City along the Hudson River was a dirt road. And on Sunday afternoons, as a family, we would go out and sit on the drive and watch all the beautiful horses and carriages go by. In a whole afternoon, there might be one car; cars were enormously expensive. They were individually built. There was no such thing as gas stations. If you went on a long trip you got five gallon cans of gasoline, put them on the back deck, strap them to the car, and took your gasoline with you. If you broke down in the middle of Utah, you wired back to the manufacture, and then he sent a man out with a part and he worked  on the part 'til it fitted your car. And along came a gentleman named Henry Ford with two concepts: standard interchangeable parts and an assembly line, and he started to build Model Ts. I think we've totally forgotten how tremendously that changed the world. You could have any color you wanted as long as it was black. They cost between three hundred and six hundred dollars and people started to own cars. Naturally, once they had cars, they demanded roads. We built them. Gas stations appeared, garages were stocked with interchangeable parts, they appeared. People found they could move to suburbs and drive to work. And then of course they wanted to shop near home, so we had to build shopping centers. I think we've forgotten the tremendous developments that followed from the Model T Ford.”

But in an ironic twist (given Hopper's admonishment that we heed the collective common sense of our forebearers), the recording of this lecture itself had to wait 42 years before it could be viewed, “because of the obsolete media on which it was recorded” which threatened to make the technological feat of conversion nearly impossible. Finally, after months of popular demand and an arduous request effort, the National Archives and Records Administration managed to retrieve the footage from the National Security Agency and convert it for upload. Thank goodness the old film canisters of the Woodbridge Agriculture Fair were converted a decade previous – before the necessary equipment was swept into the proverbial dustbin of history.