Down East farmers have joked for centuries that the best crop in Maine is rocks. Now it appears the joke is on them. All those boulders they laboriously piled up in endless stone walls around the edges of their fields have become their descendants’ latest cash crop as landscape architects and home builders scour the countryside to meet the demand for authentic stone walls for their upscale clients.

“Stone walls have become a very popular item with our customers,” says Barbara Wallace at Wallace Landscape and Garden Center in Northport. “People like the look of old weathered stone, and the only place you can find old weathered stone is in old stone walls.”

Landscapers all over the state are paying “rock farmers” upwards of a hundred dollars a cubic yard and more for stone walls that they then resell to homeowners who are eager to decorate their new front yards with the look of ancient Maine. “A lot of people with large tracts of land and a lot of stone walls are getting good money from selling those stones,” observes Wallace with a chuckle. “Whoever thought that would ever happen?”

In a way, the new market for old stone seems almost inevitable. Over the past few decades the trendsetters have “discovered” just about every other aspect of Maine farm life, from country kitchens to saltbox Capes to post-and-beam barns, and adapted them to modern uses far removed from their agricultural roots. One wonders what is left to find.

Luckily, as any plowed field will demonstrate, rocks are still the most reliable crop in the state, and there seems to be no apprehension among Maine’s rock farmers that they will run out of anything to harvest anytime soon.

(Published August 2002)