FARM FENCES. 
155 
FARM FENCES 
Among all the difficulties attending the culti- 
vation of land in the United States, nothing is 
more constant in taxing our ingenuity and 
purses than the construction and repair of our 
fences. It is only in the hardest and most 
rugged soils, and where cultivation is also the 
most expensive, and of consequence the least 
remunerating, that stone, the most indestructible 
of all fencing materials, is found in quantity and 
kind, which will admit of its use in point of 
economy. Yet the manner in which it is thus 
used, although costly at first, being from $1 to 
$3 a rod, serves the double purpose of clearing 
the land of a heavy incumbrance, and working 
that incumbrance into a durable enclosure ; and 
such mode of disposing of it is perhaps the best 
under all circumstances. 
The use of stone fences, therefore, can be only 
locally applied, and in the aggregate to only a 
fraction of the country ; the best and most ex- 
tensive agricultural regions being without sur- 
face stones to any extent, they require other than 
timber, a material which will be efficient, 
durable, and cheap. 
I might with great propriety, at this junction 
of my discussion, go into a very proper homily 
upon the quite unnecessary, and, to landholders, 
expensive incumbrance to which they submit, 
and for all I can say, will continue to submit, to 
wit : that of tolerating in the communities and 
neighborhoods over whose local regulations they 
have the entire control, the running at large of 
farm stock of every description, and more par- 
ticularly those pests of every farmer, either 
good or bad, when thus let loose — hogs and 
geese. And why it is that they do thus submit 
to it, not even themselves can tell ; but they do 
submit to it ; and so long as they are therewith 
content, why, upon them be the penalty; and 
that penalty is a double tax upon themselves, to 
an amount which would be astonishing and pro- 
nounced unendurable were it imposed upon 
them by any power outside their own premises ; 
but as they never give themselves the trouble to 
think of it, or cast it up, they seem to be quite 
content under its operation — therefore let them 
sleep in their blissful enjoyment. I will only 
say that a tax infinitely less exacting than this 
imposed by the mother country, burst out into 
the American Revolution, and separated the 
American colonies from Great Britain. 
Assuming, as is the fact, that stone for fences 
in the greater part of our country is out of the 
question, what is the material for constructing 
them to the best advantage ? I know of but four 
methods, and they are as follows: — 
1. Earth thrown into a mound on- one side, 
which is excavated from a ditch on the other, 
and thrown into a regular embankment. 
2. Hedges, with or without a ditch on their 
sides. 
3. Wood of various construction. 
4. Iron wire. 
These, I believe, constitute all the ordinary 
materials at command for fencing purposes, and 
I propose to examine them briefly. 
1. In the deep soils of our prairie country, 
earth or sod fence has been used to some 
extent; but the friable nature of the soil thus 
used, acted upon by the frosts of winter, and the 
continual goring and treading of cattle in their 
efforts to oyerleap it, makes this an inefficient and 
expensive structure. Although resorted to as a 
desperate effort to secure their fields by the 
farmers in the early settlements of the prairies, 
these sod fences have been abandoned as fast as 
other materials could be substituted 
2. For partly the same reasons, hedges have 
not succeeded. And with the charecteristic im- 
patience of us Americans to wait for anything, 
except our children, to come to maturity, (and 
man fast getting too impatient for that, by 
striving to make men and women of them before 
they fairly get into boy and girlhood,) not one 
man in ten will plant a hedge for fear he may 
want to sell his farm and " move west" before it 
is grown, and thus lose the cost of it ; or if he 
does not move, that he may want to change the 
lines of his fields or his farm, and thus his hedge 
become useless. Besides this, our climate is 
too extreme in its changes from heat to frost, 
and too dry in summer for the proper growth of 
hedges, as in England ; and they are also ex- 
pensive to grow and mature, expensive and 
troublesome to keep in repair, occupy a large 
space of ground, and, perhaps more than all, 
serve as harbors to innumerable vermin to 
destroy and prey upon our crops. At all events, 
for more than a century past they have been 
thoroughly tried in different sections of our 
country, and volumes have been written upon 
them, and yet twenty miles of " good and suf- 
ficient" hedge can hardly be found in the 
United States. I consider, therefore, that the 
adoption of hedges- for farming, to any great 
extent, is out of the question. 
3. Wooden fences are the universal enclo- 
sures of our farms, excepting those parts where 
surface stones are an absolute incumbrance, 
and in the cost of construction and repair of 
these, we pay a tax that not one farmer in 
five hundred ever thinks of, and which, if he does 
think, he dares not calculate. 
Wooden fences are of several kinds, some of 
which I will enumerate. The first, the cheapest, 
and the best for a farmer commencing his farm 
in a wooden country, is the zig-zag rail fence, 
called in several states " Virginia fence," made 
of rails ten to twelve feet long and averaging 
four to six inches in diameter. This kind of 
fence costs in construction only, including the 
cutting, splitting, hauling, and laying it up, when 
the rails are within half a mile of the fence to 
be railed, at the very least $15 per thousand, or 
for a twelve-foot rail with a five-foot, worm, 
(and six is better,) seven to eight rails high 
with two rails for lock at each corner — 30 cents 
a rod. Then it takes the very best and most 
durable kinds of young timber, which must be 
added to the cost, and this depending entirely 
upon its market value where the fence is 
located. 
The second and next cheapest kind is post 
and rail, which, at the cheapest, can be built for 
