Today, we can scarcely imagine the Herculean effort involved getting these stumps out of the ground. Think about wrestling the tenaciously anchored, hulking stumps from the earth using only hand tools, block and tackle, and horses. Picture digging deeply around each massive buttress to expose the roots, chopping or sawing off each thick root one by one, then somehow pulling the ponderous stumps loose from the ground and dragging or pushing them to the margin of the cleared areas with horse or oxen teams.

Finally, the roots and stumps were tipped up on edge in straight rows, roots pointed skyward and interlocking to create the fence.

Back-breaking Work

In Sketches of America Past, author Eric Sloane wrote, “Stump pulling...(was a) spring chore. After the ground had heaved and settled when winter was done, roots were looser and the big tree stumps were then easier to pull out. The tough roots were almost impossible to burn, so farmers used to push them into a fence. Even now, on some remote farms, you will find root fences almost a century old.”

A century or two ago? Mostly. But in the tree-covered mountains of northern Pennsylvania, fewer than 100 years ago, affordable land was available to anyone who could endure the isolation, physically remove the trees, and farm the land they cleared.

Years later, we occasionally visited this farm where my father had boarded. I recall the Hoffman girls, adults by then, cutting hay with hand scythes, then loading and hauling it to the barn in a wheelbarrow. At that time the “stump puller,” a log tripod with a pulley system worked by horses, still stood over and was attached to a large indurate stump.

Granddaughter Remembers

A few years ago, a granddaughter of that farmer, Janice Hoffman Wilson, now in her eighties, penned a reminiscence: “I remember the stumps and my family’s hard labor that created the beautiful lane entrance to the farm. Traveling the lane, (bordered on each side by the stump fences) to Grandma’s house excited me.”

Today, the enormous old uprooted stumps in Beulah Land are but a curiosity. Only the most decay-resistant remain, displaying fence-row gaps like a snaggle-toothed grin where the less durable of them have long ago moldered into the soil. Few who pass by here notice the stumps: fewer still know the story behind them.

Land stripped of trees was once seen as land gained for farming, but in reality not all forest soils turned out to be well suited for agriculture. The mountain-top farms of Beulah Land ceased to exist many years ago. The land quickly returned to its wild, forested state and was purchased by the Pennsylvania Game Commission and hunting clubs.

The old barns and the Hoffman home fell down long ago. Only a decadent apple orchard, a roadside line of sugar maples, and stone foundations remain of the farm. The decaying stump fences still stand guard along the lane, a reminder of quieter times and a tribute to the rugged hardiness of a pioneering people who, hardly a century ago, gambled against nature for a chance at a better life.