As the snow disappears in March, it’s time for the farmer to get out the stone boat and go to work. For those who might expect some stupendous example of the shipwright’s craft — a boat made of stone — sorry, no. It’s a few planks fastened together, flat to the ground, that you drag across fields to clear away rocks that magically show up every spring, no matter how thoroughly you got rid of them the year before. You can almost imagine Old Lucifer down below, rubbing his hands together in glee as he commands these rocks to rise up from the underworld to plague the plowman.
Stone boats have gone by dozens of names, and it’s hard to know how many survive as farms continue to disappear. In eastern New England, you could find “rock boat, stone board, stone drag, stone scow” and “stonebolt,” which caught on after someone misheard “boat.” If you were hauling logs, you would likely call it a “dray.” In the South, “flat, flatboat, slide” was common, the Midwest had “mud boat, mud sled” — often with runners, while “slip” was used in the Rockies. It’s also been called a “rock-” or “stone sled” everywhere except in New England and the Great Lakes.
On our farm, my father would announce on a Saturday in spring that it was time to “pick stone,” and off we’d go, filling up and dumping the stone boat several times. “Anything bigger than a softball,” Dad said, but the real challenge was digging out the boulders. Sometimes you’d see what looked like a basketball-sized rock barely sticking out of the ground, start digging, and discover it was a 200-pound behemoth that you’d have to get a chain around to pull out with the tractor. It was an important job, because if you didn’t do it, some of these monsters would “stop the plow” and cause a lot of damage. My grandfather told me that if you were using a horse-drawn plow, hitting one of those would not just break the plow points, but really hurt your arms, and if you were pulling the plow with a tractor, it could make the front end rise up on its back wheels and throw the driver off. Plows were eventually built with trip mechanisms that now prevent the worst of these accidents.
The limestone rocks that we found in Central New York were called “hardheads,” a term used all through the Great Lakes region, but not so much in New England. However, New England can claim its own unique rock term, as I learned when I wanted a garden here, began to dig, and unfortunately hit what my neighbor told me was “ledge.” I had no idea what he was talking about until I realized he meant what most of the world calls “bedrock.” This use of “ledge” is found throughout New England, but the English-speaking world in general considers “a ledge” an outcropping, usually forming a cliff.
There has never been any shortage of rocks on Granite State farms, yielding a good crop every year. Our ancestors dumped their stone boats at the sides of their fields, creating what in New England, New York and Pennsylvania., are called “stone walls,” but known elsewhere as “stone fences, stone rows” (New Jersey) or in the Midwest “stone hedges” —which seems a bit fanciful, I think you’ll agree.
Now, many of the rocky fields of New England have grown up to woods. Corn fields where farm families once battled nature for their food, and meadows where hay was harvested for the horse power that made survival possible, are now snowmobile trails through stands of hardwood and pine. On your next walk in the woods, think about the stone walls along your path, all dragged by stone boats, pulled by oxen, horses, or tractors to their final resting place. Think also of how many boulders there still are out there, lurking under the surface, waiting to stop the plow.
Dale Coye is a member of the American Dialect Society. He has taught English and the humanities at several universities and worked in area theaters as a dialect coach and director. He grew up on a dairy farm in central New York and now lives in Wilton.
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