Farley is sitting in front of a wall we built over 14 years ago. No,Farley didn't build it. He wasn't there.
It was Steve Fraser and Matthew Ring who successfully completed their DSWA certification tests doing two separate sections on it, and then later I built another 20 feet connected the sections and finished off the west end of the wall.
A newly hired employee with the town, director of works, drove by the day I was finishing up and told me the wall, though set well back from the road, was on town property and that it had to be taken it down.
The owner of the property went to the town and requested that it not have to be taken down, as for one thing, it acted as barrier to keep his children safer in the front yard. (A car had the year before careened into the wire holding up the telephone pole on the front lawn where his children were playing)
Also, there were many trees and other walls and fences much closer to the road that the town had not required to be taken down.
I found out that in that meeting the newly appointed town official put his foot down and said to the then council. "Either that wall goes or I go."
The town was in a funny position. Anyone who saw the wall loved it. Petitions were signed. Wallers from around the world wrote to try to save the wall. A publisher of a stone magazine wrote and asked that it be spared and added that if the town would be so silly to have it dismantled, he was going to come personally and do a story on it, as a way of exposing such a municipal folly.
The controversy of the wall went on in a kind of muted way for years. The people who owned the house were told they had to take out special insurance on it. Each new owner of the property still has to take on this cost.
Suffice it to say, as you can see from this photo, the wall is still there and, I heard just recently that the town employee vacated his job. I looked it up and read yesterday on line in the archives of a local paper, that he left "without any explanation" in 2017.
