The Adams Estate landscape is truly magnificent and includes perhaps the finest collection of period stonewalls in New England. The walls within this preservation district represent a century of stone work starting in the mid 1770's. The earliest example is a three rod wide hayways lined with huge somber smooth round-stones. The later example is the legendary engineered cut-stone wall pictured above.
This scene on Little's Pond Road, known historically as Image Hill, shows only a 1/4 of the mile long wall designed and built in the 1860's by the Honorable Isaac Adams.
Quarried on location from surface outcrops of granite, this monumental undertaking required a dozen stone cutters plus 100 Oxen and 50 teamsters working from sunrise to sunset for three years. During the project, Isaac utilized steam powered precision rock drills and iron rack-n-leaver come-alongs ten feet long.
When the stone work stopped, Isaac had created what would become a legend. The wall is wide enough to drive a team of oxen on top. At two places the wall towers 16 feet above the ground. Legend has it that the stones are laid as deep into the ground as they rise above it. Some of his mammoth granite blocks would tip the scale at three tons. The total weight of this extraordinary New Hampshire granite wall has been calculated at over 100 million pounds.
What did this immense undertaking cost the Honorable Isaac Adams? The estimated is $350,000 in his day. The equivalent cost today would be a staggering $7,200,000.