ONE OF THE CURIOUS experiences in walking on the East Side of Providence is passing next to an extraordinary stone wall bounding Angell, Hope, Lloyd, and Arlington streets. Eight feet tall and tapering upwards from a base more than three feet wide, it runs for over a mile in length, enclosing the bounds of the old 39-acre Ebenezer Knight Dexter farm.

The wall was built in the 1820s and 1830s, a source of such pride and accomplishment that as each section was finished the year of completion was carved in stone: on Lloyd Ave, 1829, 1836, 1835. On Angell, 1837, 1838, 1839. On Stimson Avenue, 1836. And on Hope Street, where the wall was dismantled when the street was widened and then rebuilt a few feet to the east, the original carved date is supplemented with the apologetic amendment: “Erected 1833/Rebuilt 1876.”

In the 1820s and 1830s there were no dump trucks to haul the 7,840 cords of stone to the site. At 128 cubic feet to a cord, this works out to in excess of a million cubic feet of stone delivered by ox cart. There were no cranes to lift the stones into place, no cement mixers to make mortar to bond everything together. This wall was made entirely by hand, one stone at a time, with deliberate, analytical, finger bruising, exquisite labor. By sorting, judging, and placing just the right stones into the just the right positions, the masons built a structure that fit so tight that some original sections the original “dry wall” construction stand unaltered 175 years later.

The wall now encloses the Aldrich Dexter athletic fields at Brown University, though it precedes Brown’s ownership there by well over a century. When the wall was erected in the 1820s and 1830s Brown was a small school of three buildings and no athletic teams or facilities, and no need of a farm half a mile away from its tiny campus on the top of College Hill.

The thought naturally occurs to the rambling pedestrian walking along the streets of the East Side: What could have prompted this enormous output of labor and expense? Who would make such an investment of time and money to wall in a farm? Why would anyone take the trouble to hand carve dates in boulders of granite, the hardest of all New England materials?

The answers to these questions lie in the early records of the Town of Providence, to whom, in 1824, Ebenezer Knight Dexter, bequeathed his land. He intended it to be used as a working farm for the benefit of the poor of the town. Dexter had a clear idea of what he wanted, and the terms of his will were quite specific. He left the town land and funds to erect an asylum to house the residents, “to be appropriated for the accommodation and support of the poor of the town and for no other purpose or use whatever.”

To prevent any opportunistic use of these funds by the town until they got around to constructing the asylum, he stipulated “that said town shall, within five years after my decease, erect a building or buildings on said farm suitable for the use and accommodation of the poor of said town.” This the Town of Providence faithfully did, hiring the local architect John Holden Greene to design an asylum building very much like the academy building he had designed in 1819 for what is now called the Moses Brown School a few hundred feet to the north. The Dexter Asylum was completed and ready for occupancy in July of 1828, well within the five years he stipulated.

However, Ebenezer Knight Dexter had another requirement. He wanted a wall around the farm. Not just any wall, but one high, wide and solid. And, as with the construction of the asylum building, he stipulated specifications on size and construction deadlines. Violating these terms would be a deal breaker for his bequest to the town. “This devise,” he wrote, “is upon this further condition, that said town shall within twenty years after my decease, erect all around upon the exterior lines of said farm, . . . a good permanent stone wall, at least three feet thick at the bottom, and at least eight feet high, and to be placed upon a foundation made of small stones, as thick as the bottom of the wall and sunk two feet into the ground.”

Perhaps Dexter wanted to spare the town’s poor the indignity of passersby gawking at them. Perhaps he wanted to spare the townspeople the sight of a hundred or more indigent poor clustered together next to the Friends’ school. Whatever his motivation, it is clear that this wall was meant to be a social barrier. It was far higher than needed to contain the cows and pigs and sheep kept on the farm. The only use of a wall that high was to prevent visual contact. He wanted it to be eight feet tall above ground, and if the town did not construct it on his timetable and to his specifications, it would forfeit this sizable bequest.

Although Ebenezer Knight Dexter’s children did not survive him, there were enough collateral relatives hoping to qualify as secondary beneficiaries that there would be no such thing for the town as fudging on these requirements. And so the wall was built according to his specifications. The dates cut in each section of the wall were not only a matter of pride. They were the visible and incontrovertible proof that the town had meet the terms of the bequest.

Incredibly, the Dexter Asylum was actively maintained on the East Side of Providence until 1957. So restrictive were the terms of the bequest that the City of Providence dared not abandon the operation for fear of losing the property and its associated funding.

In 1957, the Rhode Island Superior Court ruled that the poor of Providence whom Dexter had intended to support were no longer being benefited by the presence of a farm on the East Side. The property was sold at public auction and was purchased by Brown University, which 50 years ago this spring started demolishing the buildings to create athletic facilities there.

Today not a single building from the Dexter Asylum still stands amid the tennis courts, swimming pool, hockey rink and parking lots. All that remains is Ebenezer Dexter’s stone wall, curiously high and wide. In its day it was doubtless surely regarded as a marvel. By the 1830s it was probably the largest civic structure ever built in Rhode Island. Today its very size, and the dates carefully carved to face the public streets, are all that is left to remind us of the determination of a benefactor to enclose the farmland that still bears his name.

Robert Emlen lives in Seekonk.