The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

Fences

The splitter then followed along the median line to keep the split true from end to end. Sometimes it took two wedges only, but three or four were really better. It needed great skill to avoid splintering, and an inexperienced hand would waste both time and logs. White cedar, indigenous to Ontario, made the best rails. Some are still to be seen in the rural areas, having long ago outlived their makers.

IN THE upper drawing is a straight rail fence, not split, with stakes, one on either side, with no wiring. And the stakes are not a split rail either. The stakes must have been carefully and deeply driven, and the rails with approximately the same end sizes, or the fence would easily have collapsed.

The second drawing is of a typical, good, oldfashioned snake fence, with the rails split and merely piled one upon another, without stakes or wire. Those breachy type cattle soon discovered the possibility in the loose upper rails, and soon the whole herd was grazing over yonder in old Will's alfalfa, where they rightly shouldn't be, dang 'em.

HERE we have a straight rail fence, not split, and not snake, showing the supporting stake driven deeply in on one side only and to which the rails are wired.
The lower drawing is different again, being a straight split rail fence with stakes driven deeply about a rail width apart at the overlapping junctions, the split rails being laid between the stakes from the ground up, and resting on each other. No wire was used, and the stakes were at about ten foot intervals. In this case the stake was apparently stouter and of split rail, with the lower end sharpened. The stakes must have been thoroughly rigid or the whole fence would have collapsed.

All drawings, with few exceptions were, of course, of fences actually existing in the era from 1935 to 1940 and were undertaken in the field by Dr. Jefferys.