Let's go get stone

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Fred and Wilma may have had it right; living in a stone house can be give residents a sense of comfort, security and solidity.

Of course, non-stone age stone houses have a lot more features and conveniences than the Flintstones enjoyed but their owners can still steal a little atavistic joy from living in a home made of one of the most basic of all building materials.

6 stone homes on the market now

Stone walls have the kind of color, contour and texture absent in many other materials. Exterior walls of stone blend organically into the country side and interior stone walls and fireplaces infuse dwellings with atmosphere and character.

Stone homes come in many different flavors; nearly any architectural style may be rendered in stone. Great swaths of the old world are covered with cities, villages and hamlets in which the main building material is whatever the local builders could dig out of the ground.

Many European settlers arrived in the new world with carpentry skills and they found the eastern shores of America were heavily forested. Since those trees had to be removed anyway so the land could be turned to farming, why not put the wood to use for houses and barns?

Few stone houses were built early on. Even today, the older parts of towns in Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire are more often graced with clapboard, wood-frame houses than stone even though there was no lack of the raw materials available.

But as colonists carved farmland from forest they found that much of the soil, especially in New England, Pennsylvania and New York, came with a bumper crop of rocks. Each year, plows would turn up more.

The majority of those stones wound up in dry walls that marked the boundaries of fields and properties. Many of these walls survive today even after new forests have swallowed up the old farms themselves. Walk through a New England woods and you'll almost always come across any number of walls cutting through the trees.

But it was also natural to use this cheap source of building materials to put up buildings as well. So these areas sometimes boast pockets of stone houses, barns and stables.

The rough, natural-hued fieldstone tends to endow buildings with a kind of understated opulence. Greg Culver, a Connecticut builder who owns one, says they impart a warmth and comfort, a solidity, that feels elegant but, "You don't have to dress for dinner."

And stone houses wear well. If the mortar is cared for, the walls re-pointed when need be, the homes can last a long time.

In parts of western, 18th century New York, small cobblestones, little larger than a fist, were utilized as cheap building material before the Civil War. These often egg-shaped rocks came courtesy of Canada, brought to the region by the last glaciers of the ice age. Rounded by tumbling action as they were bourn along by ice and melt water, they form an odd but attractive chapter in the history of the state's domestic architecture.

Most builders opted rather for the flatter varieties of stone, the better to more easily stack them, like bricks, and to minimize the mortar needed to cement the rocks together. But they could be of almost any size and the results were often a jigsaw puzzle of large and small pieces.

Other areas where many fieldstone houses were built include the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania, the Lancaster area, Bucks County outside Philadelphia and western New Jersey. New England, of course, has its fair share as well.

And when homebuilders build something special, something that will last, and that will appeal to both the hearts and minds of discerning buyers they often choose one of the oldest of all building materials.

The Flintstones would be gratified.

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