The 40-foot spite fence
In 1876, railroad baron Charles Crocker was buying up a block of San Francisco’s Nob Hill. When his neighbor Nicholas Yung wouldn’t sell his small house, Crocker walled it in with a fence 40 feet tall. Yung threatened to put a coffin on his roof, supposedly to advertise his business. The fence stood until 1905, after Yung’s family finally sold. (Our townships cap backyard fences far lower than that, so close neighbors are safe.)
Source: Mental Floss
A fence longer than the drive to Los Angeles
Australia’s Dingo Fence runs 5,614 km (3,488 miles), mostly 6 ft wire mesh, built from 1880 to 1885 to keep wild dogs away from sheep country. It used to be longer still, over 8,000 km, before it was shortened. Even today it outruns the roughly 2,700-mile drive from Lansdale to Los Angeles.
Source: Wikipedia: Dingo Fence
“Good fences make good neighbors” is a trick
The line comes from Robert Frost’s 1914 poem “Mending Wall.” But it’s the neighbor who says it, and the poem’s narrator spends the whole poem doubting it: he wants to ask why fences make good neighbors at all.
Source: Poetry Foundation
A fence is just a short “defense”
“Fence” is a clipped form of “defense.” It meant protection in the early 1300s and an enclosure by the mid-1400s. Swordplay became “fencing” in the 1500s, and around 1700 thieves started calling a buyer of stolen goods a “fence,” because the deal happened under the defense of secrecy.
Source: Online Etymology Dictionary
New Zealand’s bra fence
Around New Year’s 1999, a few bras appeared on a farm fence in New Zealand’s Cardrona Valley. By early 2006 there were close to 800, and the local council ordered them removed as a “traffic hazard” and an “eyesore.” They kept coming back. Since 2014 the “Bradrona” has lived on a private driveway nearby, and by June 2024 it had raised $180,000 for the New Zealand Breast Cancer Foundation.
Source: Wikipedia: Cardrona Bra Fence
The invisible fence started on Pennsylvania roads
The buried-wire “invisible” dog fence was patented in 1973 by Richard Peck, a traveling salesman who worked in Pennsylvania and kept seeing pets killed along the highways. One modern wrinkle: PA One Call doesn’t mark those wires, which is why we ask where yours runs before we dig a single post hole.
Source: Wikipedia: Invisible Fence
74 tons of fence, carried by hand
At Valley Forge National Historical Park, the zigzag “Virginia worm” rail fences are rebuilt the old-fashioned way. In 2023 a six-person volunteer crew installed about 4,000 hemlock rails, each 11 ft long and 25 to 50 lb, moving roughly 148,000 pounds of fencing by hand.
Source: National Park Service
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