Stone wall plunderers leave a heritage in pieces

Pilferers have been here, just as they have been at historic stone walls across the state, loading swiped stones into pickup trucks for new uses in 21st-century walls, patios, recessed gardens, and swimming-pool margins. Along with the stones, they are stealing, rock by grayish rock, an iconic emblem of New England’s cultural heritage.

“We’ve had rampant thefts from stone walls throughout New England,’’ said Jim Garvin, the New Hampshire state architectural historian. “What’s happening is that the cash value of weathered stone from a stone wall has become very big.’’

Thefts in some cases have become large-scale operations, like one last year that dismantled a 500-foot section of wall in the Leslie C. Bockes Memorial Forest in Londonderry. “It was clear from the evidence that heavy equipment was used to remove it,’’ said Jack Savage, spokesman for the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, a nonprofit group that owns the tract.

Now, New Hampshire is getting tough, enacting strict new penalties. Updating a 1791 law that fined thieves $15 for stealing stones, a bill sponsored by Day that Governor John Lynch signed last week will assess triple damages against thieves, plus attorney’s fees, to restore a picked-apart wall. The considerable expense of rebuilding such walls could make the penalties quickly add up to thousands of dollars.

“I’m delighted. I think it’s wonderful,’’ said Robert Thorson, a University of Connecticut geology professor who has meandered more than 20,000 miles across the region to study what he calls the “closest thing New England has to ruins.’’

New England’s six-state landscape is believed to have lost more than half the stone walls that once crisscrossed its farmland and forest-cleared pasture, a web of piled rocks estimated to have totaled 250,000 miles, enough to reach to the moon.

Much of that loss was considered appropriate in the distant past, when the walls were seen less as historical markers than as sources of cheap and easy-to-quarry rock; they were crushed for gravel to pave muddy dirt roads. But in recent decades, the walls’ growing cultural appeal has made them attractive - to contractors and developers looking to meet a heavy demand for decorative stone and to preservationists trying to protect them.

“People are building antique reproduction furniture all over the place, but nobody’s taking apart old furniture to build new furniture,’’ Thorson said. “But we’re taking apart old walls to build new ones.’’

Today, an estimated 100,000 miles of walls remain in a region that often takes the rocks for granted. In Massachusetts, for example, state law dates from 1901 and penalizes thieves the now-laughable fine of $10, said Brian McNiff, a spokesman for Secretary of State William Galvin.

Despite New Hampshire’s stiffer penalties, catching scofflaws could be tricky. Many stone walls exist deep within the woods, in well-hidden places often forgotten after old farmland was abandoned in the 19th century. But pilfering also happens brazenly along well-used roads, and even then it can be difficult to stop thieves.

One farm owner in North Hampton, who asked that her name not be used, said she has chased thieves in her pickup truck, only to lose them as they sped away on curving roads.

Thorson estimated that half of New England’s stone walls were built between 1775 and 1825, or between the Revolutionary War and the completion of the Erie Canal, which helped spur the new industrial age. Within that window, New England farmers used a seemingly endless supply of rock, painfully unearthed from the soil, to mark the boundaries of their property.

The labor was arduous, but the effect - repeated over and over, from farm to farm - became a brand of cultural identification that is unique in the country. Other parts of the United States have stone walls, Thorson said, but they tend to be spotted only sporadically. Within New England, he added, an area without stone walls is the exception.

“That sense of linkage between the people of today and those of the past tends to be a very evocative thing,’’ Garvin said. “It’s become part of the understanding of the New England consciousness.’’

Historians and conservationists, however, realize that what looks like history to one person can look like moss-covered rocks to another. But a small cadre of preservationists has begun to beat the drum.

“It’s a reflection of who we were and how that land was used,’’ Savage said. “There are tourists who come to see the quaint New England landscape, and we get rid of it. It’s from these small incursions, repeated again and again and again, that the land slowly changes.’’