Curtis Fields

  Earlier this week my lovely and thoughtful fiance brought me home a couple of books on stonemasonry from the library, one of which was a thin little volume called The Forgotten Art of Building a Stone Wall by Curtis P. Fields. A Yale graduate and retired director of the Yale University Alumni Fund Association, Fields and his wife spent their last years on Penny Wise, their 200 hundred-acre farm in Vermont, where he learned to rebuild the miles of stone walls that snaked around the property.
  The book is touching in Fields' genuine enthusiasm and appreciation for the craft of stone wall building, but otherwise uninformative and at times, misleading.  His knowledge of stone wall construction basically came from the teaching of an old Vermonter, one Mr. Littlefield. This Mr. Littlefield taught him to split stone using wedges and how to stack flat rocks on top of one another, but that is pretty much the extent of it. Fields recommends the use of flat stones and doesn't even approach the art of round-rock wall building.
  I was intrigued by the descriptions and photos of the hand-tools they used to split stone with in the fields, particularly the long chisel used to "drill" holes with. The product of the modern age that I unfortunately am, I have never drilled a hole in stone with anything other than a hammer drill; and I am now on the hunt for a good drill chisel. All in all, it was an enjoyable one-hour read--being a short, illustrated 61 pages in length--but I wouldn't run out searching for a copy or add it to my personal library.

Postscript
That being said; Mr. Fields, (who passed away shortly after the writing of his book and who may be up there somewhere reading this) your passion for stonework is noted and appreciated, as is the effort you put forth in the writing of your guide. I hope you are building stone walls in the great beyond and I hope the stones are lighter there than they are here.