Marc Fisher had an article in the Post about walls, which touched on fences, which included a quote from an expert which I found to be wrong!! I commented there, which I'll copy here:
"From the nation’s earliest days, when only white male landowners could vote, many built fences on their land to show their neighbors they were eligible voters, Dreicer [the expert] said."
This is irrelevant to the theme of the article. Irrelevant because a fence to mark boundaries of ownership isn't like a wall. Think of our northern boundary: it's marked, but neither fenced nor walled. We have the symbol of ownership (US sovereignty ends and Canadian begins) without needing a physical barrier.
But I call BS--I'm sure Dreicer never built a fence. A fence requires work, both to build it the first time (particularly stone wall fences but even split rail fences) and work to maintain. You don't build a fence to declare ownership; you build a fence to keep animals in or out. That's why we used to have fence viewers. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fence_Viewer. BTW there are interesting regional and historical differences whether a landowner was required to fence his/her animals in, or to fence to keep free-ranging animals out.
Land ownership in the 13 colonies was marked by the
metes and bounds system
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