Good fences make good neighbors,” wrote Robert Frost, and he meant that fences did more than just enclose space; like his woods and roads, they bounded a social and psychological landscape. That fences also form a kind of historical document is suggested by the photographs on these pages.

The earliest urban examples quite naturally reflected the architectural styles of the homes they surrounded. Fashionable Georgian town houses of pre-Revolutionary days had elaborate wrought-iron fences and gates, the designs copied from European stylebooks and the ironwork itself often imported.

During the early nineteenth century the versatile craftsmen who functioned as architects were responsible for the overall design of a house, including the exterior trim. They topped their fence posts with carved urns, acorn clusters, or the pineapples that symbolized hospitality, and worked their pickets into pleasing patterns. In the 1820s, when domestic architecture turned to the simpler styles of the Greek Revival, fences followed suit. Straight white pickets echoed the lines of the large white columns fronting houses, and flat caps topped fence posts of simple squared timbers.

The Victorian age saw builders of houses and fences alike forsake the cool precision of classical design. Using scroll saws, artisans turned out highly imaginative fence posts that resembled miniature Gothic steeples or lush baskets of fruit. At the same time, innovations in cast iron resulted in the sinuous fences, railings, and brackets that still characterize the streetscapes of Savannah, Charleston, and New Orleans.

Even though rural fences rarely matched those in town for beauty, they reveal much about the social arrangements of their time. Not only did fences physically define the settlers’ relationships with one another, they also marked the boundaries between civilization and wilderness.

Some of the first country fences were composed of sticks and stones—universally available materials. What today’s New Englander calls a stone wall is known in western New York and Pennsylvania as a stone fence; in northern New Jersey it is a stone row, while from West Virginia and into the South it is a rock fence. Most of these belong to the Northeastern states, though, where glacial debris was abundant; the sight of a stone wall, running through miles of New England’s heavily wooded hills, still remains strangely moving.

Virginia can claim the invention of the wooden rail fence, also known as the snake or worm fence. It survives today only as a handsome relic, preserved in small chunks in national parks and historic sites, or marking the driveways of elegant estates. Although now virtually extinct, until well after the Civil War this was considered the national fence, winding from Maine to Florida and as far west as the Mississippi. But despite its ubiquity, the rail fence was totally impractical: it took up too much room, it needed constant repair; and it consumed incredible quantities of wood. It gave way to a simpler version, the stake and rail fence, which required half as many rails and remains