NORTH KINGSTOWN — George Morabit owns 157 undeveloped acres in town, much of them coupled together by long zippers of gray stone that trail off into woods and disappear beneath thickets of green thorns.

The land has been in his family since the 1700s. His ancestors and their field hands built the walls, topping them off with each miraculous spring crop of “New England potatoes,” as new rocks — frost-heaved perennials — came to be called.

The walls are history, Morabit says, and deserve protection. Which is why he sued a neighbor, Dennis Hoag, after Hoag broke through one section of a stone wall they share to open up his house lot.

“It’s despicable,” Morabit seethes, made all the more “abominable” by the judge’s ruling against him.

Superior Court Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson determined Morabit’s lawyers miscalculated the value of the damage and barred a jury from hearing the case. Morabit is appealing.

New England’s old stone walls, which for generations have stood as icons to forebears’ gritty resolve against an inhospitable terrain, are prompting much emotion these days.

In the state capitols of New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut, lawmakers are pushing legislation to protect stone walls from thievery and destruction.

In April, more than 120 people packed the Meeting House at Tiverton Four Corners to hear geology professor and author Robert M. Thorson wax poetic about the cultural-significance of the region’s old stone walls.

“We’re turning archeology into architecture,” he warns of the growing practice of contractors using the rock of historic walls to decorate new homes. “Take a Chippendale piece of furniture and use the wood to make something else. Have you lost anything? I say you have.”

Several Rhode Island communities are studying a three-year-old ordinance in Smithfield that prohibits property owners from removing or destroying their stone walls. Smithfield has softened the loss of property rights by offering a $5,000 tax assessment credit for those who keep their stone walls in good shape.

Why all this interest in what were refuse piles long before they were postcard images?

James Garvin, New Hampshire’s state architectural historian, says the reason lies in our yearning for the past as New Englanders move further away from their rural roots.

“There’s always been that stereotype of New England being rock bound with stern Yankee farmers, and that was true,” Garvin says, to a degree. “But we have moved so far away from that now and as hard as we want to cling to that legend we don’t have much to look at anymore but these old stone walls and maybe an occasional agricultural field.”

That landscape is no longer taken for granted. Indeed, for many New Englanders, the walls, whether they frame a pasture or seemingly run wild off into the woods, evoke a sense of place, of belonging — of home — not to mention deep admiration.

“There is something strong about them,” Garvin says of the walls, which grow gray and lichen-covered over time. “I think it’s a combination of what nature has done to them over that time and a sense of awe that human beings could wrestle so hard and engage in such a labor for such a long time.”

BY THE END of the Civil War, more than 240,000 miles of stone walls— enough to circle the earth 10 times at the equator — spread like capillaries over a virtually treeless New England, according to one engineer’s 1939 estimate.

The ancient stones would have remained buried had the first European settlers not cleared the forests, says Thorson, a geology professor at the University of Connecticut, who has become a sought-after wall authority since publication of his book Stone by Stone in 2002.

One of the biggest misconceptions about early New England settlement is that the first plows struck rock the moment they sank into virgin soil. Actually those who settled along the New England coastline had a mantel of rich topsoil at their disposal, the result of 15,000 years of composting.

But once the forests were cleared, the topsoil began eroding away. Without trees for protection, rain soaked deeper into subsoil generously seeded with the rocky detritus from the last ice age. In winter the moisture in that soil froze and expanded, pushing the rocks towards the surface.

Within a generation or two, those first settlers’ fields were strewn with new rocks — “New England potatoes.”

Most of New England’s stone walls were built between the Revolutionary War and the period just after the Civil War when agriculture prospered and industry had yet to lure large populations into cities. Farmers have given the stones differing value over time.

Initially the stones were debris to dispose of. Farmers stacked them along their property lines and used them to separate animal stock. Most walls were waist high because it took too much effort for a man to pile the rocks any higher. Smaller rocks filled the gap between larger stones on the outside walls.

In Rhode Island, Thorson says, the walls were generally a bit higher because the area had been settled longer than, say, the mountainous regions of Northern New England. More people and longer periods of farming meant more rocks needing discarding. Many of the local walls also took on more ornamentation. Building stone walls became an art form, a skill still practiced by Narragansett stone masons.

From the 1880s — when people began abandoning their farms for the promise of easier city work — through the early 20th century, the stones were seen as a resource: as a cheap and ubiquitous building material.

In an era before ready-mix concrete, communities used the stones to build bridges, line drainage ditches and crushed them for road beds.

Now, says Thorson, stone walls are experiencing a third stage of value: cultural resource.

“It’s very much like if someone were to give you an arrowhead, you wouldn’t say, oh, that’s a nice piece of quartz, you’d say ‘What a nice arrowhead.’ It would have cultural value.”

People now realize that what took decades to build, can be erased with a front-end loader in an afternoon.

“And how do you know if your great, great grandfather and one of his sons hadn’t had their last conversation beside that wall?” asks Thorson. “You just don’t know.”

IN NEW HAMPSHIRE, which woke one day in 2003 to find that its stone-faced emblem, the Old Man of the Mountain, had slipped off Cannon Mountain, blatant thievery helped spur this year’s legislation to protect stone walls, says Garvin.

Last year thieves stole rocks from a stone wall in the Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown. Months later, 500 feet of wall went missing in the Leslie C. Brookes Memorial Forest in Londonderry. Private property owners have also reported trucks arriving at night and carting off parts of their walls.

With stones fetching $300 a ton and more at stone quarries, the walls are an inviting target for thieves.

The proposed legislation would replace a 19th century statute and its $15 fine for wall vandalism with a law that sets triple damages for the cost of restoration and lawyers fees. The bill could potentially mean a fine of several thousand dollars.

Some ardent stone wall protectors in New Hampshire have even talked of fining owners for removing their own stone walls. But such an infringement on property owner rights doesn’t have a prayer in the Live Free or Die state, says Garvin.

“People don’t like the idea the state would forbid someone from selling something that is on their own land…They already have the right to sell timber and gravel on their property so why not stone walls?”

Garvin says stone walls “are a hot topic right now but they’re also a popular topic.”

Across New Hampshire “we have people mapping the walls and cellar holes, making photo essays and writing books on the subject.”

In Massachusetts, the stone wall legislation would raise the fine for disturbing a stone wall from $10 to $500 and also threatens six months in jail. Connecticut lawmakers are considering something similar.

Rhode Island led the region in acting to preserve stone walls, though some say the state law has little teeth.

During the mid 1990s when many coastal communities came under heavy development pressure, state legislator Leona Kelley of South Kingstown pushed through a law requiring road crews to repair stone walls flanking local and state roadway projects if they damaged them. Two tourism councils and the state Department of Transportation picked up Kelley’s lead and began an education and restoration project.

Since then, a few towns, such as Portsmouth, have imposed fines of about $100 for tampering with stone walls along community roadways. But Smithfield’s ordinance takes protection further than any other New England community, experts say, with it’s prohibition against altering or demolishing any stone wall built prior to 1900.

Sandra Mayer, a member of the Smithfield Conservation Commission, drafted the ordinance and inspects walls to see if their care is worthy of the $5,000 tax assessment credit.

“People in the past,” she says, “have felt free to just disassemble the walls and use the rocks for other purposes and sometimes developers have come in and knocked the walls over.”

Under the ordinance, if a land owner or a developer destroys a stone wall, they can be fined daily until it is put back the way it was, using the existing stones. The ordinance has caused developers to redesign projects, says Mayer.

Mayer acknowledges the irony. The walls’ original builders would likely be the first to object to the town telling them what they can do with their property — their own rocks. Yet, Mayer says she’s heard no complaints. “Most of the time when people discover they can get the tax exemption, they want it.”

“I get phone calls often enough from neighboring communities, asking about the ordinance,” Mayer says. “It tells me it’s an idea that is long overdue. It also tells me people in New England respect history.”

tmooney@projo.com