IN REMEMBRANCE OF SPLIT-RAIL FENCES

When I was in high school, my father decided he wanted to erect a split rail fence around our yard to compliment the log house in which he was raising his brood of six children. His was a long-range plan that required moving fencing from his old homeplace near Cumberland Falls to his new home in Whitley City. The fence rails had been split from dead chestnut trees by himself and my grandfather in the 1920’s and were strung out through the woods for what appeared to be a hundred miles. My father’s spur-of-the-moment decision turned out to be a crusade that spanned several years, but, eventually, he achieved his goal, and a weathered split rail fence encircled our yard like victor’s laurels. My shoulders hurt just thinking about it.

    I believe I am on firm ground when I claim that the frontier of English expansion in North America moved westward one rail fence at a time. Both the English and the Scots-Irish, whom the English brought in to provide a buffer zone between themselves and native peoples, were primarily, farmers and keepers of livestock. Then, as now, the control of large species of animals like cattle, horses, and sheep requires strong fences. In the British Isles, those fences were constructed, mainly, by planting hedges of hawthorne and by stacking fieldstones in long rows to enclose pastures and gardens. Most of the timber was used for firewood and building materials, especially ship building, and, by the mid- seventeenth century, there was precious little even of that available. Not so in the Americas, however.

    When the first boatload of permanent English colonists waded through the Virginia surf in 1607, they found themselves enveloped by an environment rich in wood building materials. Vast forests of hardwoods suitable for the construction of homes, churches, businesses, and fences were available for the taking and the first Virginians got to work doing just that. Soon, timber-frame houses were springing up like mushrooms after a rain, all of them built from native materials especially the mighty oak trees.

    With the arrival of large livestock, sturdy fences followed in short order, but not of the type commonly seen in England or Ireland. The immediate demand precluded the planting of hedges, and a scarcity of stone prohibited the erection of rock fences. So, the colonists did the next best thing which was to build post and rail fences. This entailed the boring of holes in an upright post, buried in the ground, and the insertion of lateral poles to create a fence that was strong and durable at least for a couple of seasons. Unfortunately, the buried posts rotted quickly, and the fence collapsed when the first heavy animal brushed against it. Something better had to be found. Enter the split-rail fence, or as some would call it, the worm fence, or the zig-zag fence.