Partitioning the landscape: fences in colonial Virginia

Magazine Antiques, July, 1998 by Vanessa E. Patrick

To be credible, a re-created fence must bear a functional relationship to the site on which it is built. Thus, a beautifully joined fence with turned pickets and urn-topped posts is both too elaborate and insufficiently protective to enclose a workyard. It also does not belong in colonial Virginia, far from its place of origin in Federal New England. Similarly, expansive and utilitarian Virginia rail fences are inappropriate for urban locations except at the outskirts, where town gives way to countryside. Reconstructions that incorporate such anachronisms as galvanized wire nails instead of wrought-iron nails or elements obviously produced by modern power tools also fall short of the ideal. Fences so low or enclosures so incomplete as to deny their practicality are unconvincing, and except for reasons of safety have no place on a properly re-created historic site. Even early style fences used to camouflage museum parking lots and trash yards should be carefully designed so as not to be misleading.

Re-creating a traditional fence begins with a consideration of the nature of the historic site. A good example is the fence at the Public Hospital property of 1773 at Colonial Williamsburg in Williamsburg, Virginia. Archaeological excavation revealed the foundations of a substantial brick building and two flanking rectangular runs of large postholes and molds.(39) Documentary evidence identified the postholes and molds as the vestiges of large paled fences built during the 1790s to enclose exercise yards for the patients. Planners of the reconstruction combined these written accounts and illustrations of similar, approximately contemporal, institutions with an understanding of late eighteenth-century fence-building to re-create structures of great visual and educational value. Nearly twelve feet high, the fences incidentally allow the optimum placement of an entrance for the handicapped and certain mechanical units while concealing these modern features from view.

The property at Carter's Grove in James City County, Virginia, on which the reconstructed slave quarter now stands, contained only a brief line of small postholes and no documentation to indicate the character of the enclosures.(40) However, archaeological and documentary evidence from other slave quarters combined with a knowledge of traditional fencing and Virginia building practices suggested the kinds of fences most appropriate to the time and place [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 6, 7 OMITTED].

These reconstructions were developed within the larger context of how colonial Virginians perceived and shaped their surroundings.(41) Slave or free, rich or poor, landowner or renter, town or country resident, all built fences to organize and control the land [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 4, 5 OMITTED]. The traditional fence was not only a practical structure, it was a most eloquent expression of aspiration and achievement.

1 American Cotton Planter, new series, vol. 2 (1854), p. 54, cited in Clarence H. Danhoff, "The Fencing Problem in the Eighteen-Fifties," Agricultural History, vol. 18 (October 1944), p. 168.