Stories in Stone Weekend

Join the Putnam History Museum for the third annual Stories in Stone Weekend! On July 12, gather at the PHM or join in live online to hear Susan Allport discuss her book “Sermons in Stone: The Stone Walls of New England and New York.” Then on Sunday, July 13, put what you’ve learned into practice by hiking out to Mead Farm. In this hike, PHM staff will discuss the stone walls we pass, the foundations of old farmhouses that still dot the landscape, and yes, the three stone chambers on the path!

“Sermons in Stone: The Stone Walls of New England and New York” by Susan Allport

July 12, 5PM – 6:15PM
In-person at the Putnam History Museum (Limited seating!) and streamed live online.

What do we actually know about stone walls? About the people who built them, and why? Stone walls are not simply monuments to the skill of Yankee farmers. The historical record makes clear that many were built by slaves, Native Americans, indentured servants, and children. Sermons in Stone is the surprising and illuminating history of the walls, a story that begins in the Ice Age and that has been shaped by the fencing dilemmas of the nineteenth century, by conflicts between Native Americans and colonists over land use, by American waves of immigration and suburbanization. See below for Allport’s biography.

History Hike: The Stone Chambers of Mead Farm

July 13, 9AM – 11:30 and 1PM – 3:30 PM Hike Sessions.
Meet at the Dunkin Donuts Parking Lot (1090 Route 52, Carmel, NY 10512).

PHM’s Education and Public Programming Manager Kara Mattsen will lead hikers through what was once the 19th-century Mead Farm. The trip will include visits to three stone chambers on the property as well as highlight several impressive stone structures on the way. Putnam County’s mysterious stone chambers have long been the subject of debate; join us on the hike to see for yourself! The hike is medium difficulty, about 2 miles total, out-and-back. Please plan to carpool as parking is limmited at the trailhead.

Susan Allport is a writer specializing in science, nutrition, and health. Her latest book The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s were Removed from the Western Diet and What We can do to Replace Them was published by the University of California Press in September, 2006. Her previous books are The Primal Feast: Food, Sex, Foraging and Love (Crown, 2000); A Natural History of Parenting (Crown, 1997); Sermons in Stone: The Stone Walls of New England and New York (Norton, 1990); and Explorers of the Black Box: The Search for the Cellular Basis of Memory (Norton, 1986). Both The Primal Feast and A Natural History of Parenting won Washington Irving Book Awards. Allport also contributes essays, travel articles, and book reviews to The New York Times, Gastronomica, Audubon, The Hartford Courant, The Providence Journal-Bulletin, The American Scholar and The Missouri Review and lectures at the American Museum of Natural History and numerous other locations. In 2004, she was the McGee Professor of Writing at Davidson College in North Carolina. Allport was a graduate student in the Department of Human Genetics at Yale University. She obtained her M.S. from Tulane University in 1976 and her B.A. in English from the Claremont Colleges in 1973. A member of the Author’s Guild, the Morgenthau Preserve, and the American Oil Chemists’ Society, she lives in Pound Ridge, New York.