Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2011
The cost of fencing the farm was a topic of constant discussion and complaint in American agricultural circles in the second half of the nineteenth century This prosaic topic appeared continually during the period 1850 to 1880 in agricultural journals, state agricultural bulletins, and annual reports of the Federal Commissioner of Agriculture.
1 Two excellent articles on fencing in this period are: Clarence H. Danhof, “The Fencing Problem in the Eighteen-Fifties,” Agricultural History, XVIII (Oct. 1944), 168–86,Google Scholar and Hayter, Earl W.: “Barbed Wire Fencing: A Prairie Invention,” Agricultural History, XIII (1939), 189–207….Google Scholar
2 Smith, Henry M., “Barb Wire and the Fence Question,” The Tenth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture, 1882, pp. 202–3.Google Scholar
3 The following discussion of fences is from Primack, Martin L., Farm-Formed Capital in American Agriculture 1850–1910 (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1962), pp. 67–77.Google Scholar