Fences Organized the Rural Landscape

In Peter O. Wacker’s 1975 classic Land and People: A Cultural Geography of Pre-Industrial New Jersey, there is in one passage a single reference to a second volume that never appeared. It was his intent in that second volume to describe the built environment—the buildings and structures that people built upon the land—and the geographic contribution that they represented. He labored on that volume for the rest of his career, putting it aside when other projects had to take precedence, but coming back to it from time to time. He left a nearly-complete manuscript at the time of his death, but he labored especially to complete his chapter on farmers’ fences, a subject that has been ignored by almost every other New Jersey scholar. It was his hope that this chapter, at least, would see publication. “Pete” passed away in March 2020, from complications of a failing heart, at age eighty. This special feature is a lightly edited production of Wacker's chapter on fences, courtesy of Robert Craig.