It is near impossible to roam through the forest of New England and not notice the abundance of stonewalls lining and breaking up the landscape.  I caught an interesting video on you/tube recently, entitled "Secrets of the Stones".  Some highlights that immediately caught my ear are listed below...

The effort to build the hundreds of thousands of miles of stonewalls would have been the most costly and labor intensive undertaking in colonial history.  Yet there is not even the slightest mention of this massive construction project in the historical records.  Native Americans were not fence builders, they respected the land and did not partition it for any reason, most especially to mark personal possession.

A most interesting point to ponder; when one looks at the sheer length of the stonewalls, 240,000 miles that were estimated in 1939 using the data from the department of agriculture’s report on fences from 1872, it is quite clear that this was an engineering feet of gargantuan proportion.   

Using simple calculations and allowing for one day’s rest out of every week, with a mandatory three-month break when the northeast winters made it impossible for any outdoor work, it would appear that if the early colonists constructed these stonewalls between 1620 and 1872, they would have had to average:

• 4-miles a day, or
• 1/3 of a mile every hour, or
• 1-foot every two seconds.

And they had to average this consistently each and every year for 250 years, regardless of the devastating Revolutionary, Civil and Indian Wars.

Clearly this was not the case, for there are no significant records of any major expanses of walls or other megalithic structures.  Since it would have constituted the largest construction project in world history, It would have been an effort worth recording in some small way.