Partitioning the landscape: fences in colonial Virginia

he replied with much warmth and emphasis, that they had omitted the most important item of the whole.... "Fences, fences," said he, "They cost more and are of more importance to us as an agricultural people than any other department of Domestic industry!"(1)

Calhoun's concern about the exceptional expense of fencing was shared by many during the nineteenth century in the wake of intensifying timber and land shortages. Similarly, from the seventeenth century on, others had echoed his recognition of the significant role of fences in the colonial and national economies. Small wonder, then, that the census compilers failed to number fences among mere domestic products such as bushels of corn or felt hats. By 1850 the fence had been an integral element of the American landscape for more than two centuries.

Not only certain nineteenth-century statisticians took fences for granted. Many of those in charge of historic sites have failed to preserve or re-create period fences, thereby stranding buildings in sterile, incomplete, and often misleading settings. However, in recent years there has been a growing awareness of plantings, paths, fences, and other vanished features and their importance in creating honest and engaging evocations of life in earlier times.

The design and placement of a fence, as for any building, were determined by local conditions and requirements. Even within a single locality or a single property fences assumed different forms, achieving a diversity rivaling that of any other building type [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Fences varied principally in materials and construction depending on whether they marked a boundary, provided security, or were simply decorative. Thus a study of traditional fencing must be based on an understanding of resources and needs in a given place at a given time. Reconstruction of colonial fences in Tidewater Virginia over the past fifteen years has relied on the identification of different designs and construction methods as well as a consideration of broader developments in the Chesapeake Bay region during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.(2)

Enclosing open spaces to define and protect them is an ancient and widely known concept.(3) But it was fencing practices developed in the British Isles during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that colonists later transplanted to the Atlantic coast of North America. There the British traditions became mingled with the contributions of other northern Europeans and Africans. Another and perhaps the most decisive factor that shaped the fences of colonial America was the nature of the land. The presence of such barriers as waterways and mountains, the sparsity of settlements, the availability of stone and timber, and above all the agricultural potential of the soil determined how fences were built and what jobs they performed. Although most American fences were firmly rooted in the English budding tradition, the philosophy governing their use and location often departed from English convention. This was particularly true in Virginia and the other southern colonies.

The landscape of late medieval Europe included the kinds of fences that appeared in colonial Virginia [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE I OMITTED]. Fences in the Middle Ages defined and secured urban properties and monastic complexes, workyards, and kitchen gardens, and sometimes pastures and cultivated fields.(4) Crop and grazing lands were held and worked in common so fences did not so much express ownership as provide protection from external dangers. Beginning in the late fifteenth century this communal system changed dramatically in many parts of England as a major increase in population and the growth of towns stimulated the demand for agricultural produce. The individual ownership of land became more lucrative, and, as the number of landowners multiplied, so did the number of enclosures, especially since much of the newly privatized land was given over to cattle, sheep, pigs, and horses. By the time the settlers departed for Jamestown in late 1606, English common law compelled livestock owners to confine their animals to their own properties by means of a "legal fence" - that is, one of acceptable height, density, and strength. Owners of cultivated land, on the other hand, were not required to fence their crops. If a stray animal damaged a field of crops its owner recompensed the farmer whether the farmer had enclosed his field or not.(5)

The earliest British settlers in America, wishing to get on with raising livestock and farming, reversed English fence law to suit their new circumstances. Unlike England, the colonies contained vast expanses of unimproved land, few and scattered settlements, and little available labor for herding or extensive fence building. The most practical solution was open-range grazing, with the ownership of cattle established by branding or other distinctive marking. Colonial law soon required the farmer, not the stockman, to build legal fences and assume responsibility for damage to his land.(6)