Stone cold preservation

“Lay a stone, make sure it doesn’t wiggle. Lay another stone, make sure it doesn’t wiggle,” says Russell Waddell (B.S.’11) explaining the fundamental unit of sturdiness inside the 4-foot-high, 52-foot-long rock wall before him in a park in Lexington, Kentucky.

He’s simplifying it, of course: These rocks are intricately knit, and different sizes have different jobs to form a stable structure. There isn’t any mortar or cement, though. The wall is held together by friction and know-how in an Old World technique that Waddell spends his days trying to preserve.

Done well, “the stones are kind of locked-in together,” he says.

Waddell, 40, is bundled against a dismal March morning in a black puffy coat. A tan ball cap overhangs his short ruddy hair, reddish-brown tortoise shell specs and a day’s worth of beard.
To prove his point, he lifts high a booted foot like someone ready to flush a gas station toilet and heaves it into the stacked limestones.

The wall comfortably resists the blow. He’s pleased and a little relieved. “I was really hoping nothing moved.”

The nonprofit organization he leads, the Dry Stone Conservancy, built this wall in a marathon, 25-hour stint to raise awareness about this type of dry-laid stone construction that people in the region often encounter and seldom know how to fix, Waddell says. This one was built five years ago, expressly to give adults and kids an opportunity to stack rocks under the tutelage of more calloused hands.

“It’s not a perfect fence, by any means,” Waddell says, “but it’s still standing.”

The perfect ones can stand for centuries.

Dry-stone masonry has been a hallmark of this fertile, gently hilly part of central Kentucky, called the Bluegrass region, since the late 1700s. It takes the form of uncounted miles of rock fences, as these low stone walls are known locally, which line roads and cleave the boundaries of farm fields, pastures, gardens and cemeteries. It also forms structures like bridges stout enough to carry vehicular traffic and retaining walls that constrain earth.

The tradition here likely originated with people of Scottish descent, who were some of the region’s earliest settlers and well-schooled in optimizing the fruits of a rocky landscape, according to the history book “Rock Fences of the Bluegrass,” by researchers Carolyn Murray-Wooley and Karl Raitz, Ph.D. Rock fences held up against fire, water and insects and were eminently recyclable. Wood, on the other hand, rotted at a frustrating pace and took up a valued commodity.

Dry-stone walling reached its zenith here in the mid-1800s. Over time, its utilitarian uses fell victim to the demands of speed and economy and to the whims and might of a mechanized world. Farmers pulverized rock fences to enlarge fields and to work them with machines, like tractors. Turnpike fences were cleared to make way — and material — for wider roads. By the early 1900s, the transfer of technical knowledge had faded as well.

The Dry Stone Conservancy formed in 1996, with Murray-Wooley as founding director, when a project to widen miles of scenic roadway increased the need for masons who could build new rock fences — to preserve the original aesthetic — and tend to historic ones.

Since then, the organization has taught some 10,000 people from across the country in its public workshops, Waddell says. Almost 250 have passed the conservancy’s certification exams, entering a professional hierarchy of masons, journeymen and master craftsmen, and repopulating a workforce.

“When you think of Kentucky, you’re thinking of bourbon, you’re thinking of basketball, you’re thinking of horses. You ought to be thinking about rock fences, because they’re daggone everywhere,” Waddell says. “It’s preserving the sense of place.”

Much of the conservancy’s work is for the state, either repairing structures or documenting them ahead of road work, and building projects commissioned by private landowners. The work funds the organization, which doesn’t charge membership dues, and provides its certified masons opportunities for paid, on-the-job training to get the experience they’ll need to level up.

The conservancy’s reputation locally has made it a nationwide resource, too. Waddell fields calls from homeowners around the country, and his organization has been hired to advise or handle repairs on dry-stone projects for more than a dozen National Park Service sites. It also regularly is contracted to send masons to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, to repair crumbling Revolutionary War fortifications.

Waddell took over as executive director (and sole full-time employee) in 2022, after working part time for the organization since 2015. Once there, he began attending public workshops and eventually climbed to the middle, journeyman rung of certification.

A native of Bristol, Virginia, he arrived at the conservancy just a few months after learning about the existence of dry-stone walling, during a weekend retreat while in graduate school at the University of Kentucky, studying historic preservation. “I had no idea what it was,” Waddell says. One hand-stacked retaining wall later, he was hooked. “It’s the coolest thing in the world.”

In the Lexington region, Waddell is surrounded and still can barely get his fill.

The park with the marathon-made fence is an oasis in an industrial area. But within a few minutes’ drive — as a soundtrack of smokin’ bluegrass pickers and fiddlers smolders from the dash of Waddell’s Dodge Ram pickup — he passes a statue of Secretariat and suddenly green shag unfurls in endless waves. All along these roads, two-way streets with room enough for one, stalwart rock fences line the margins.

Many of them are familiar to Waddell but are hardly static. He points out one section of fence that’s collapsed under a fallen tree branch — a potential future gig — and places where aged handiwork disappears beneath the creep of foliage. Later, on another bucolic shaded lane, he’s flabbergasted to see the process in reverse.

“Who sprayed all this honeysuckle?” he says. “Look at this wall. This was — I’m staggered right now — this was all covered. I had no idea that was even there.”

“When you think of Kentucky, you’re thinking of bourbon, you’re thinking of basketball, you’re thinking of horses. You ought to be thinking about rock fences, because they’re daggone everywhere.”

Along the roads and in the farms and woodlands beyond, the dry-stone masonry is a mix of old, new and new patches on old fences. Waddell parks at an estate on a country road in Versailles (pronounced ver-SALES), just west of Lexington, where last year the conservancy was hired to build a showstopper gated entry. (This fence he doesn’t kick.) In the center, a metal gate is held by two 3-foot-square pillars about as tall as Waddell, each attached to 25 feet or so of rock fence that ends in another huge pillar. Both stretches of fence are inlaid with a jaunty window made of rocks radiating in a circle. One end has a set of stepping stones protruding on its backside, for fence-hopping ease.

On the same property, the conservancy has been commissioned to build a rock fence with a 7-foot “moongate,” a standing circle of masonry big enough for LeBron James to walk through.

Several miles down the road, Waddell steers the truck onto Hermitage Hill Farm and stops beside a pasture and barn, at a C-shaped rock fence he and another mason finished in early 2022.

Its high, gray walls are punctuated with long rocks that serve as seats in a space filled with green grass that flows in from the opening. Eventually, this will be a cemetery for farm owner Linda Pavey’s rescued and retired horses, her pets and, at some point, herself. “It’s a true family cemetery,” she says.

Pavey, 64, plans to reserve the honor of inaugural burial for her first horse, Brennan, who died in 2003, the namesake of her Brennan Equine Welfare Fund, a nonprofit that gives grants to other horse rescue shelters and sanctuaries. She hopes this summer to bring his remains to Kentucky from Ohio, before adding those of five other horses.

“I decided it would be nice to maybe have a final resting place for them,” Pavey says. She had long admired the region’s rock fences, and though she didn’t have one on the 54-acre farm, she did have an abundance of stone and thought to call the conservancy.

To both Pavey and Waddell, there’s an appeal to the relative permanence of dry-stone structures, though from different sides of the coin: For Pavey, it’s about the fingerprint that people leave on land they care for, which someday might be a touchpoint to the past for future generations. For Waddell, it’s feeling that touchpoint; it’s continuing the work of hands long gone.

“If I had it my way, I would only do historic stuff just for that reason. I don’t know why I find that so fascinating,” he says. It’s a feeling he gets fitting a rock back into place knowing that “the last time somebody touched this might’ve been 1880.”

He narrows it down even further: “It’s an appreciation for the time spent on something. I think that might be what it is,” Waddell says. “So if I fix an historic wall, [it’s like]: let me help the person a hundred years ago out and put this back.”