Building fences on the farm
I’ve been pretty glad that we aren’t needing to build or mend farm fences during this winter cold spell that we’ve been having lately. Cold winds and frozen ground don’t go well together with mending fence. Of course, on the farm, things don’t always go by your seasonal preferences, and sometimes you have to get out there and fix fences even when the weather is bad.
Building fence with my Dad is actually one of my very earliest memories. It would have been about 1944, not long after my Dad had bought our farm from his brother, my uncle Gene. I would have been only about 4 or 5 years old, so I wasn’t big enough to really help, but I was there with Dad, and I thought I was helping, even if it was only handing him staples, or carrying the fence stretcher from here to there. Dad was running a new fence all along the south line of our farm property, from Otter Creek westward to the road to town, so it was no small job. There were four strands of barbed wire, stretched tight and stapled to new split oak posts which had to be driven into the ground with a post maul. Although I was too small to do much, I was a Dad watcher, and a “let-me-try-that” pest, so I learned quite a few things about building fence that would be useful later when I was bigger.
Usually today, for build- ing barbed wire fences, we use steel T-posts, driving them into the ground with a special weighted tubedriver which slides down over the top of the post. You raise it by handles on each side, and bring it forcefully down with both arms, driving the post into the ground. Some people even have power drivers that take much of the physical work out of setting the posts in place. Once a strand of barbed wire is stretched tight, one fixes it to the Tpost by wrapping a heavy wire fastener around it and around the post.
Fence-building was considerably more work when Dad was building that south fence back in the mid-’40s. First, one had to cut oak logs from the woods, using a two-man crosscut saw. My Granddad usually helped my Dad with the sawing back then. He and my Grandma lived on the farm just north of us then. The logs were cut to about 6 foot lengths, the length of a post. Then, Dad split the logs into sections, using steel wedges and a sledge hammer. He would find a crack in the wood that would make a starting place and drive in the little wedge. That would open a slot for starting the bigger wedges. Working along the log, a few wedges would usually split out a post section. The fresh wood post would then be sharpened on one end, using a double-blade ax. Once we had enough posts to make some progress on the fence line, we would haul them out to the line in the wagon. I got to drive the horses sometimes, although Dad was sitting right there and could take the reins in an instant if he needed to.
We had a long, heavy punch which was made from the axle of an old car, sharpened to a point on one end. We used that to start a hole in the ground for each of our fence posts. We even called our punch tool a post-hole digger, but it didn’t dig like a two-handled real post-hole digger, it just punched a hole in the ground. Dad would wobble it side to side and around to form a hole narrow at the bottom and wide at the top. The hole pretty much matched the sharpened end of the wooden post. I could help Dad move the post into position for driving, but it would be several years before I would be big enough to swing the post maul. The post maul was a heavy hammer, with a solid metal head shaped like a big can, and with flat striking surfaces. The handle was much like a sledge hammer handle. Dad would first set the hammer on top of the post, to get the feel of the distance, and then would tap it a few times to steady the post; then he would swing the maul down and around and come down on the top of the post with a “WHOCK!” I was thinking “I bet I could do that if I was bigger!”
When I actually got bigger, years later, and was WHOCKing posts myself, I soon learned that it was not just a matter of being strong. There was a skill about it, and cautions to take. It was very satisfying when your power swing brought the maul head down on the post with that solid WHOCK! It was not so good if you missed your aim and tore off part of your post, and it was worse if you let the maul swing down toward your foot or your shins. Like using an axe, you have to learn to anticipate where your swing will take the head if you should miss your mark. You don’t want it swinging around to hit you. Fence work can be dangerous, and I haven’t even talked about tightening and stretching the barbed wire! On the farm there is a bit of risk to many of the tasks one needs to handle. A part of farm life is learning to handle safely the risks that are always there.
••• Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at joe369@centurytel.net, or call 621-1621.