June 25, 2021
Even though cedar trees are considered invasive and have a tendancy to make a nuisance of themselves in pastures, I'm rather fond of the prickly things. Like a stonewall in the middle of a hardwood forest, cedar trees can help tell a story of how the land has been used over time.
Cedar saplings, which pop up constantly in fields, are one of the few plants that neither sheep, nor cows, will eat so if the pasture doesn't get mowed, the saplings soon become trees. A good stand of cedars in a field can be a tell tale sign that the field has been a pasture, not “just” a hay field. If the field stops being mowed or grazed altogether, it will naturally return to forest, and at some point, the cedars get overtaken by taller more aggressive trees. When I see an old cedar tree surrounded by dense forest, I can imagine a 100 years earlier cows or sheep grazing in what must have been wide open fields.
Somewhere near that cedar tree (or stump) will be a stone wall, and that wall can help complete the story. If the wall consists of a single layer of boulders, the field (which is now a forest) was probably plowed once, the boulders moved to the edge of the field, and the area planted with grass. If, however, the wall consists of many layers of smaller stones piled ontop of that first layer of boulders, the field was at some point used to grow crops. It was the frost heaving of bare ground on cultivated fields that brought New England's glacial till to the surface and the annual tilling precipitated and required the removal of a never ending supply of stone. Pastures and hay fields, on the other hand, don't produce stones because the grass covers the bare earth and the frost neither penetrates as far, or heaves as much.
Near the wall there might still be pieces of barbed wire, which indicates the pasture held either cows or horses. Less often, traces of woven wire fencing can be found - which indicates the pasture at some point likely held sheep. If near that single layer stone wall there is no evidence of fencing and there are no cedar trees around, it was either a hay field, or possibly a pasture that was abandonded before the 1870s - when the use of metal fencing became wide spread. The size of the trees can help determine when the farmland was abandoned and the forest returned.
We use our cedar trees for a myriad of practical things, from fencing, and rails to walkways. Durable and rustic, there is beauty and comfort in their utility. There are fence posts on our farm that are from my grandparents time, with strands of rusty barbed wire embedded in them. Orginally meant to keep in the cows, tufts of our sheep's wool hang on them now. An old courderoy road made with cedar logs still traverses a swampy area - some of the logs are 100 years old and still going strong. There are, in fact, standing cedar trees on our property that have been dead for longer than I've been alive. Having escaped the initial cow's grazings and the forest's inevitable return, they are sentinels of a bygone era, legacies of our agrarian past.