As increased farming changed Litchfield's landscape, farmers clearing land for crops and livestock dug up large deposits of granite and gneiss and used the readily available stones to build boundary markers and animal fences. The simplest walls were "thrown" or "tossed" walls, simple rows of piled stones at the edge of a field or pasture that required little experience but regular upkeep. Most old New England walls were "stacked" walls, with stones arranged neatly like firewood, sometimes in two parallel rows leaning against one another for added stability. Where a mason or quarryman was present, people could build a "laid" wall, a more stable and elegant structure of cut or quarried stones layered in a weave pattern. In Connecticut's forests, the American chestnut was once plentiful and valued for its quality, appearance, and useful wood and fruit, providing food for humans, livestock, and wild animals, durable wood for furniture, posts, fences, shingles, and flooring, and fuel, especially as charcoal. Beginning in 1904, a blight devastated the American chestnut population, killing some 3.4 billion trees in less than forty years, though disease resistant varieties are now bringing American chestnut trees back to Litchfield. Early settlers in Litchfield also reshaped the land by clearing forests to create open meadows, whose fast-growing grasses fed grazing livestock, especially cattle. Although many of the town's meadows gave way to residential development and farmland, the wet meadow on Meadow Street is the last meadow there, and wet meadows as a type of wetland support a high diversity of plant species and provide habitat for many birds, insects, and mammals.