Ada Swineford

Well, since I previously reviewed a book on cattle guards (The Cattle Guard: Its History and Lore), it seems OK to review one on fence posts. Central Kansas, as anyone who’s driven on I-70 knows, is devoid of trees. It was even more devoid of trees when the first European homesteaders arrived (since one of the first things they did was plant trees). Central Kansas also had a series of railhead towns in the 1860s-1870s as the Kansas Pacific pushed west toward Denver; successively Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, and Dodge City; these were endpoints for the great cattle drives north from Texas. Homesteaders did not take kindly to huge herds of cattle wandering through their farms, but the State didn’t want to anger the cattlemen too much; thus, Kansas passed a Fence Law; you were not obligated to fence your homestead but if you didn’t you couldn’t get damages if livestock wandered in. The concurrent invention of barbed wire made fences actually practical; the only remaining problem was to find a way to string it on the treeless plains.

The problem turned out to have been solved in the Cretaceous with the deposition of the Greenhorn Limestone. Near the top of the Greenhorn was a 20-30 cm thick bed of especially good limestone; on most farms in the area it could be easily reached using a horse-drawn scraper to remove overburden, drilled with homemade rock drills, split with feathers and wedges, broken to length with a sledgehammer, and hauled out with a horse team and a “wishbone” sled. Then dig a posthole, lever rock upright, wrap the wire around it, and repeat. Backbreaking work, of course, but it probably broke the monotony of all the other backbreaking work on a 19th century farm. What’s more, this particular limestone actually became harder with age; weathering caused the surface layer to recrystallize and “case-hardened” it.

Authors Grace Muilenburg and Ada Swineford are locals who produced this history of the Land of Post Rock, covering the geology but also rock quarrying technique (including interviews with locals who remembered doing it), regional history (the area was settled mostly by central Europeans – Czechs, Bohemians, Volga Germans – and Scandinavians) and lots and lots of pictures. It was quickly discovered that not only did the Fencepost Limestone make good fenceposts, it also made good ashlar masonry, and thus many of the homes, churches, and businesses in the area were built of the stuff – and are still standing, since it’s resistant to all the weather the Great Plains can throw at it. I’ve been on the outskirts of the post rock country – Dodge City and Hays – but never to the heart; I’ll have to assay a trip. “Home on the Range” was written here.

Good maps, lots of photographs, and well-referenced. Written in 1975, but I imagine rock doesn’t change that much.… (mehr)