What does this week’s #flashbackfriday have to do with Robert Frost?
The image below, photographed in the early 1900’s, is of a dog guarding their Cheshire County farmhouse, with a beautiful stone wall behind them!
Have you ever been out on a hike and seen old stonewalls in the woods, or maybe you even have an old stonewall on your property? These old stonewalls represent property lines of historic farms and homes!
In 1914 (approximately the same year this Cheshire County image was photographed!), Robert Frost penned his famous poem “Mending Wall”, with the well known phrase, “Good fences make good neighbors”.
Now what exactly does mending wall refer to? Robert Frost’s “Mending wall” are the stone walls that we still see in Cheshire County today!
“Mending Wall” was written about an annual activity most farmers in Cheshire County would have taken part in! Each year, neighboring farmers would work together to rebuild the stone wall that met at both of their property lines.
Walls were built from boulders and stones which were cleared from the farm fields or other land that was built on. They were then strategically stacked and then re-stacked each year as the stones would shift through the seasons.
The next time you see a stone wall on a walk, drive, or hike, you can picture the annual task between farmers, as they would hoist these stones back into place.
Read Mending Wall, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/…/robert-frost-mending…
Photo Credit: Keene public Library and the Historical Society of Cheshire County
December 17 – ROBERT FROST