Changing Times

Few early New Englanders got to settle on fertile river-bottom land capable of producing much more than a subsistence living. Before the opening of the frontier west of the Appalachians and, after the Civil War, the lands west of the Mississippi, tenant farmers were forced to farm ever less fertile slopes in western New England. Nevertheless, they cut the trees, stacked the rocky glacial debris along the edges of the new fields, and attempted to graze sheep, goats, and cattle on thin-soiled hillsides as they tended small plots of vegetables and hunted for much of their meat.
After the Civil War, many tenant farmers simply abandoned their considerable and generational efforts along with their absentee landlords when they lit out for the fertile prairies of the mid-west's great rivers and plains. Within a century frost tumbled their laboriously built walls, and forest quickly reclaimed their sloping, untended fields. Today, anyone strolling through a Berkshire hillside forest stumbles across the remnants of countless mouldering stone walls, almost the only sign of a once concerted human population scraping little more than a subsistence living from these ancient, glacially scoured hills.