The widespread use of fieldstone for houses, barns, and mills is quite well-known and a number of structures survive in the area remain in fine shape. However, the stone culture of early Pennsylvania was quite elaborate, and stone was used for practically for every purpose. Fieldstone arched bridges which dotting the landscape by the hundreds just a century ago or more ago are now rare. Even more rare, if not impossible to find, is the coping style roof trim which adorned the stone walls of the arched bridges to protect the courses of stone from the elements.
Today stone walls are most often capped with blocks of cement or mortared stone with cement. But in the days when there was no cement, the top of a stone wall was vulnerable to soaking up rain water and thus, the mud-lime mortar would deteriorate and the wall would crumble. To protect the top of a stone wall, early masons mortared blocks of wood in the last course of stone upon which a short roof was fastened. The roof or coping was most often finished with two or three rows of wooden shingles. When coping was put on a cemetery wall it was most often angled that the rain water would fall within the walls keeping the grass nice and green. For bridges, the coping roof was angled to the outside. One of the best examples, still surviving in the Oley Valley, is the coping trim on the old Hoch cemetery near Lobachsville. Although the rows of wooden shingles have been covered with roofing tin, the outline of the coping is quite evident.
Picture a typical Pennsylvania Dutch farmstead with coped garden walls, terraces, barnyard, and an occasional arched bridge to compliment the huge Swiss-bank barn and large stone manor, not to mention the bakeoven, smokehouse, springhouse, etc. This stone culture was something to behold. Of all the practical places to have a stone wall on a farm, the most ideal was the barnyard. Normally, the barnyard enclosure was done with a five rail wooden fence; this accommodated all the animals in the yard, including the pigs. However, this manure palace was hard on the sturdiest of locust fence posts, and so if one could lay up a stone barnyard wall it would last indefinitely. Another advantage of the stone barnyard wall was that it could be incorporated in terracing if the front of the barn was too hard at the hill.
One of the best examples of a terraced stone barnyard is that of Ben Fox’s just south of Pricetown, Ruscombmanor Township. Here is a barnyard wall almost twelve feet high from the meadow below! At least eight of the twelve feet are part of a terrace at the side of the hill. On the farmstead of Johannes Keim, near Pikeville, there is a second stone barnyard more typical of the style to be found on the flat bottomlands of the valley. This six foot wall still contained traces of the original wooden shingle coping roof. In most cases people buying stone farmsteads overestimate the durability of stone walls and terracing.
In many instances, the walls have survived the last one-two hundred years, only because they have been cared for and the coping replaced or repaired. The inner construction of an old stone wall is not much more literally than mud. If the protective top of an old lime mortar wall is allowed to decay, it will not take long for the wall to be reduced in ruins. Likewise, if an abandoned house of stone is allowed to stand without a roof it will soon be reduced to a ruin. Our ancestors knew the importance of roofing, and many of them made sure a stone structure had a decent roof, if nothing else.
Richard L.T. Orth is assistant director of the American Folklife Institute in Kutztown.
