Fieldstone

Fieldstone is a nuisance for farmers seeking to expand their land under cultivation, but at some point it began to be used as a construction material.

Collections of fieldstones which have been removed from arable land or pasture to allow for more effective agriculture are called clearance cairns.

[4] In Canada and the northern United States, the advance of the Laurentide Ice Sheet pulverized bedrock, and its retreat deposited several dozen meters of unsorted till in previously glaciated areas as far south as New England and the Upper Midwest.

Because the stones are widely disseminated, removing fieldstone is a widespread and costly activity in early agricultural settlement.

To prepare fields for cultivation, farmers need to remove these stones, which requires significant manual labor.

[5] Depending on the harshness of winters, this task needed to be repeated whenever frost levels churned new stones into soil surfaces.

Fieldstone became abundant throughout New England and Eastern Canada as European settlers began to clearcut forests for timber, wood fuel, and agricultural expansion.

[5] According to an 1871 agricultural census, more than 380,000 kilometres (240,000 mi) of fieldstone walls were constructed throughout the region, representing 40 million days of human labor.