Picket fence

“ Such a pretty walk it was, too! through a thicket of birches, down a little hill-side into a hollow full of hoary chestnut-trees, across a bubbling, dancing brook, and you came out upon the tiniest orchard in the world, a one-storied house with a red porch, and a great sweet-brier bush thereby; while up the hill-side behind stretched a high picket fence, enclosing huge trees, part of the same brook I had crossed here dammed into a pond, and a chicken-house of pretentious height and aspect,—one of those model institutions that are the ruin of gentlemen-farmers and the delight of women. ”

“ With the advent of the summer visitor the picket fence has enjoyed a popular renaissance and they look very much at home around old or reproduction Cape cottages. When June arrives the fences form a handsome background for the multitude of climbing roses that tumble over them in colorful cascades. The summer people have also made frequent use of the split-rail fence which was certainly used on the early Cape but never as widely as some other types. ”

“ But the grass was uncut in the yard, and the lack of a veranda, and the tight-closed doors and windows, made the house seem lifeless and lacking the savor of human presence. There was a white-painted picket fence around the yard ”

“ These baskets are made secure by driving a stake through the center of them and into the ground. On top of the plank they lay basket plates, also acorn baskets. Around the grave a picket fence is made by driving the pickets into the ground, a strong hazel withe is tied around them about twelve inches below the tops. At the middle of the head and the foot of the grave a strong post is driven into the ground that stands much higher than the tops of the pickets. To these posts a cross-beam is fastened or tied and on this a number of deer skins are hung. ”

“ Having done this, you are ready to commence building the fence. One man spreads the strands, while another places the picket between them; the other end of the picket is then raised up and placed between the upper wires, and then driven up with an axe or mallet. In inserting the pickets, the wires are to be crossed alternately, as shown in the engraving. The pickets should be dry and should be about three inches apart. It takes two persons to build this fence successfully, but it can be built more rapidly by three ”

“ The owner of the tree has put around it a very decent picket fence of pine lumber,—I do not know where he got it,—and any man who will give him a franc, he will lend him a knife and he may cut his name on the fence, but if he will not give him a franc, he must not do that, and he must not carry away any of the tree. ”

“ When a Dyak village is in need of food the entire community, men, women and children, repairs to a stream in which fish are known to be plentiful. Across the stream a sort of picket fence is erected by planting bamboos close together. In the center of this fence is a narrow opening leading into an enclosure like a corral, the walls of which are made in the same fashion. When this part of the preparations has been completed a party of natives proceeds up-stream by canoe for a dozen, or more miles, taking with them a plentiful supply of tuba root. ”

“ When I got to the door, I found that the barn, to which the waggon, must soon come, lay just to the right, and overlooking the path I must take to the wood. In front of me lay a garden surrounded by a picket fence, to the left of me was a small gate, and that by passing through that gate would throw me into an open field, and give me clear running to the wood; but on looking through the gate, I saw that my captor, being with the team, would see me if I attempted to start before he moved from the position he then occupied. ”

“ O'Neill turned and rode that way, peering down satisfiedly at the dark forms of the Bar B beef steers bedded down on a rise of ground just back from the creek and the mosquitoes and close to the fence.
“What did I tell you, Morenci? Now, rout them up and we'll haze them on down the fence toward Picket Pin. If it’s through a fence they want to travel, they may try the other side of the fence on Picket Pin and welcome—and the farther they drift, the safer they’ll be, though it will make more work for the Bar B riders.” ”

“ The fence is fastened to the post with common fence staples. When this style of fence is used on one side of a pasture or highway, its effectiveness may be increased by a singlePage 41 strand of barbed wire stapled to the posts above the pickets, and a strand of plain wire strung along the bottom to stiffen it. The fence will then be as in figure 56. Such a fence will last many years, and for most sections of the country is the best and cheapest combined cattle and hog fence that can be made. For a garden fence it is equal to the best picket, and at one third of the cost. ”

“ In time both fences were down, and only the “myrtle” in front and the pie-plant bed and berry bushes in the rear marked the division between our yards.
[Pg 59]
Mother would try shaming them out of it by wondering (to them) who could be carrying off our fence boards, and the wily Jean would reply, “It’s a shame, Mrs. Arnold, such people ought to have something done to them,” when perhaps that very morning Mother had seen her slip out, knock off a picket or two, and hustle with it into the woodshed. ”

“ The portion of the yards extending into the water are the most troublesome and most expensive to build. In some cases, rather elaborate wooden picket fences are used in the water yards. These are more permanent but are more expensive to build. ”

“ He made a neat picket gate in the fence where the walk opened on the roadway and beside the fence he had hollyhocks, and sunflowers, the latter trying every day to see Melissa, and turning their heads resolutely from sunrise until evening and going to sleep [200] every night with their faces toward her home, which was in the West. ”

“ The stringers are eight to twelve feet in length, and usually one of the flat sides is sufficiently smooth for receiving the pickets. Let the stringers project a few inches beyond each post, adding strength to the fence, and should the posts decay, new ones may be driven in on either side, and the stringers readily attached by heavy nails or spikes. With timber that splits freely, a man can rive out five or six hundred pickets in a day. The construction of the fence is plainly shown in the above engraving. ”

“ For enclosing poultry yards, garden and grounds, a cheap fence with pickets of lath often serves a good purpose. If not very durable, the cost of repair or renewal is light. Figure 50 shows one of this kind, which is sufficiently high for the Asiatic and other heavy and quiet fowls. ”

“ As to wire fences, they are useful enough for keeping sheep in, and come in well for inner fences, being sufficiently cheap and easily set up. But they will not keep out wild pigs, and cattle, accustomed to force their way through the thickets of the bush, mistake wire fences for mere supple-jack, and walk straight through them. Wattles interlaced on stakes make first-rate protection, but they can only be used [Pg 192] with economy when the supply of them is close handy.
The fence most commonly seen on new farms, and that may fairly be termed the pioneer's mainstay, is a simple one of stakes. ”

“ It is a pleasure to know that one of the most expensive, and certainly the most hideous, fences ever in vogue here is falling into disuse. I mean the worm-fence—called worm because it wriggled over the landscape like a long brown caterpillar, the stakes being the bristles along its back, and because it now and then ate up a noble walnut-tree close by, or a kingly oak, or frightened, trembling ash—a worm that decided the destiny of forests. A pleasure it is, too, to come occasionally upon an Osage orange hedge-row, which is a green eternal fence. ”

“ JAGGED WIRE A rail fence is more than that on a country dawn moving by lots over hill & stone; it barely pauses in the small of the field's lap, then is caught in grey positioning as light unfurls the sky. All is a matter of perfect blistering - dauber wasps are seen to heave the moistened wood in chunks to mossy furrows, benign in their firm embrace upon alabaster trees. There, crusts of heavy nails, marked like fortresses, droop in their rusty mail. Mostly ants, in open canter, move in as upon an urn & lance far more than jagged wire the breath of stillest air. ”

“ The only evidence of man’s interference, except the buckwheat-field, was a dilapidated worm-fence, and this is one of several instances where beauty increases hand 196in hand with decay. The older such a fence, the better; when merely a support for Virginia creeper or the rank trumpet-vine, it is worthy the rambler’s regard. Wild life long ago learned what a safe snug-harbor such ruined fences offer. It puzzles even a mink to thread their mazes, and the shy rabbit that has its “form” in a brier-hidden hollow of the crooked line feels that it is safe. ”

“ Rail fences had several distinct merits: they provided a practical use for some of the trees felled to clear crop and pasture land; they required little repair; they blended esthetically into the surroundings and landscape. Mountain fences have been described as “horse-high, bull-strong, and pig-tight.” W. Clark Medford, of North Carolina, has told us how worm fences (right) were built:
H. Woodbridge Williams Charles S. Grossman
“There was no way to build a fence in those days except [Pg 31] with rails—just like there was no way to cover a house except with boards. ”

“ The Park afforded good leaping in those days. Some of the fences were still standing around the abandoned gardens, and new ditches and old brooks were plenty. Vixen gave me lessons in fencing which a few years later, in time of graver need, stood me in good stead. She weighed less than four times the weight that she carried; yet she cleared a four-foot fence with apparent ease, and once, in a moment of excitement, she carried me over a brook, with a clear leap of twenty-six feet, measured from the taking-off to the landing.
Her feats of endurance were equal to her feats of strength. ”

“ After a week of weeding in the vegetable garden, Collie was put to work repairing fence. There were many miles of it, inclosing some twenty thousand acres of grazing-land, and the cross-fencing of the oat, alfalfa, fruit, and vegetable acreage. The fence was forever in need of repair. The heavy winter rains, torrential in the mountains, often washed away entire hillsides, leaving a dozen or so staggering posts held together by the wires, tangled and sagging. Cattle frequently pulled loosened posts from the earth by kneeling under the wire and working through, oblivious to the barbs. ”

“ They stationed themselves at the field gates and bars with pitchforks, rakes, shovels, sticks, and dared the surveyors to come on. A poor chain-man, not quite as nimble as his pursuers, made his leap over a fence, quickened by a pitchfork from behind. Even women and children joined the hue and cry, pelting the strangers with stones and dirt whenever they had a chance. ”

“ When the two or three lower rails, and also the stakes, are of wood, capable of resisting the effect of damp, such as cedar, black ash, &c., a well-made fence will last for an indefinite number of years, but otherwise seven or eight years suffice to rot the lower rails, and to make constant patching necessary, which is almost as bad as making a new fence, for, to get at one of the lower rails, the fence has to be taken down for many lengths on each side, and never can be relaid so well. ”

“ If the wind had not veered around completely, one of the fences must run north-south, the other one east-west, and we were in the southeast corner of some farm. Where there was a fence, I was likely to find a farmyard. It could not be to the east, so there remained three guesses. I turned back to the west. I skirted the fence closely, so closely that even in the failing light and in spite of the drifting snow I did not lose sight of it. Soon the going began to be less rough; the choppy motion of the cutter seemed to indicate that we were on fall-ploughed land ”

“ When I cross one on a fence, I love to pause in mid-passage and look down into the water, and study its bottom, its little mystery. There is none so small but you may see a pickerel regarding you with a wary eye, or a pigmy trout dart from under the bank, or in spring perchance a sucker will have found its way far up the stream. You are sometimes astonished to see a pickerel far up some now shrunken rill where it is a mere puddle by the roadside. ”

“ The man lay in the dry grass of a tiny glade that ran down to the tree-fringed bank of the stream. On either side of the glade was a fence, of the old stake-and-rider type, though little of it was to be seen, so thickly was it overgrown by wild blackberry bushes, scrubby oaks and young madrono trees. In the rear, a gate through a low paling fence led to a snug, squat bungalow, built in the California Spanish style and seeming to have been compounded directly from the landscape of which it was so justly a part. ”

“ As these fences, from their serpentine course, occupy at least six times as much ground as a common post and rail fence, and require also a great deal more wood, they are mostly laid aside whenever land and timber become objects of importance, as they soon do in the neighbourhood of large towns. ”

“ They are much the colour of the tree trunks, and until startled are easily overlooked in the bush. They are off with most wonderful grace and agility the moment they are disturbed and can even clear the high barbed wire fences by which the runs are bounded provided they approach at a right angle. When running parallel to the fence they cannot get the necessary foothold for a big enough spring. ”

“ For the fence shown in figure 119, two augur holes are bored a few inches apart, and small poles driven to serve as posts. Rails or round poles of the usual length are laid to the desired height, and the top of the posts tied together with wire. In situations where timber is less plentiful, a single stake is set into the base, as in figure 120, braced, and barbed or plain wire attached by staples. Besides the advantage of being easily moved, these fences can be prepared in winter, when there is little else to do, and rapidly set in place at any time when the ground is clear of snow. ”