On Wednesday, November 5, Robert M. Thorson spent the afternoon and evening with Oliver O’Donnell and the staff of Hill-Stead Museum sharing their mutual love of its stone walls. Thorson gave a guided tour at 3:30, attended a reception at 5:00, and at 6:00, gave a brief PowerPoint presentation before sitting down with Oliver to have a conversation about the walls of this magnificent historic place that could also engage the audience. This blog posting provides an easy way for those in attendance and anyone else out there to easily access the published resources that supported my talk.
It also provides a chance to highlight my main takeaway, and one central point – The Theodate Wall — a motif unique to Hillstead.
TAKEAWAY: The stone walls of Hill-Stead do more than frame the landscape. They support it physically, anchor it chronologically, and decorate it with a unique style. Most importantly, they channel the visitor away from one world and into another.
THEODATE WALLS: A style unique style of double wall emulating waist-high double walls of the lane connecting the Gundy to the main house, built as a single tier without courses. Theodate Pope Riddle, the owner of Hill-Stead, deliberately selected traprock volcanic stones tarnished to a dull gray patina with a tinge of green, and inserted them into the wall so that their slightly rounded jagged polygonal shapes were highlighted. Inserted randomly among the stones of the named volcanic formations (Talcott Basalt and Holyoke Basalt) are the barn-red, sandstones of the rift-basin and even more rarely, exotics from distant lands to the north. Near the top of the wall, workers inserted a hidden Y-shaped bead of mortar to hold the top together that was hidden by a loose top layer of stones called a puddle cap.
PUBLISHED CHAPTER: Thorson, Robert M., 2010, “The Stone Walls of Hill-Stead,” in Gorman, James, Ed., editor, Hill-Stead, The Country Place of Theodate Pope Riddle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010). This is a beautifully illustrated published book with a short chapter on its stone walls.
INTERNET LINKS
The Atlantic. Stone Walls and the American Revolution.
https://stonewall.uconn.edu/2025/10/18/celebrating-the-unfinished-revolution-with-stone-walls/
This article is featured in a special issue of The Atlantic titled “The Unfinished Revolution.”
Celebrating the American Revolution with Stone Walls. This blog posting links to the Atlantic essay “Why Concord: The Geology of the American Revolution.”
Smithsonian. New England’s signature landform. “Best History Writing of 2023.”
This essay provides a broad overview of New England walls with special attention to the role of poet Robert Frost in calling our attention to the phenomenon. They became more valuable as symbols and landscape than they ever were as fences.
NPR Academic Minute. Human ecology and Stone Walls.
In two minutes the listener can begin to understand why the original walls were less art than they were the results of human ecology, incidental outcomes of the farming effort. This was true of the original walls at Hill-Stead. Theodate walls took this symbol and transformed it into outside sculpture.
The Public Historian. “Conserving the Historic Walls of New England.”
This peer-reviewed article in the scholarly journal “The Public Historian,” lays out the argument for conserving stone walls and a plan for doing so.
PUBLISHED TEXT: The section in Chapter 8, “Rural Revival,” in Stone By Stone: The Magnificent History in New England’s Stone Walls from page 192-200 is particularly apt for Hill-Stead. An audio version is available from Tantor Media and is widely available on streaming services.