By Carol Pelosi
One of my favorite books is “Cattle: An informal social history,” which talks at length about the differences between farming in New England and much of the South, differences largely based on the origin of the people in those regions.
Northern farmers came largely from Britain, where farming was highly controlled and fences and hedges separated farms and the areas in a farm. It was people from the Celtic areas of Scotland and Ireland who came to the South with a heritage of large and small cattle “farms” where the cattle ranged free.
That brought to mind the Kelly Lally’s description of farming in Wake County in the later 1800s when both black and white farmers turned to the tenant system except those who owned their own small farms. Only a few had large acreages.
The entire farming economy was depressed with prices for crops low. Because many farmers, tenants and owners, had little or no collateral or cash they found it difficult to buy the seed and fertilizer to start a crop. The North Carolina legislature, like many other states across the South, enacted a “crop lien” law in 1867, allowing farmers to use a future cash crop as collateral for goods bought on credit. One unforeseen result was the proliferation of rural general stores, over 80 outside Raleigh in 1872 when there had been only 11 in 1867.
Cattle and hogs still roamed free. An iconic picture of the Wake Forest College campus about 1880 includes a cow grazing on the side of a dirt street. But as the century went on, the cotton industry boomed. Lally reported that “cotton was produced on 93 percent of Wake County’s farms by 1879, making Wake the state’s leading cotton-producing county at that time.”
If you are raising a good cash crop like cotton, you do not want cattle and hogs wandering and foraging in your fields. So beginning in 1873 legislators began introducing “stock” or “no-fence” laws to force all farmers to keep their livestock within fences at all times. There was fierce opposition but a law forcing fencing in Wake County was passed in 1879 though it did not really go into effect until six years later.
There were small farmers in southern and western Wake who did not have enough pasturage for their stock or access to rivers or creeks, and they were “up in arms,” Lally reported. In White Oak township landowners said the law was “apressive to 9-10 of ower citizans thare not being ¼ of ower Township under cultivation. Therfor the Stock Law is of no fenafit but an Ingerey Except a few that has cut thar timber and sold it to the Rail Road and now wish to force others to keep up thar stock to acomidate them. Perpetuites and monopolies are contrary to the genius of a free State and aught not to be allowd.”
Nonetheless, the law was upheld. Because counties adjoining Wake did not have stock laws, the county commissioners appropriated the money to build and maintain a fence around the entire county border. There were gates on all roads.
One of the consequences of the law was a decline in livestock production. “Wake County’s livestock losses between 1880 and 1890 were even greater than those of the Civil War period.” Rural population growth was also slow, with many people leaving farms to work in the new Durham tobacco factories or later in Wake Forest’s Royall Cotton Mill and other new cotton mills.
Those left behind on farms were “among the poorest citizens in the nation, especially those who had become enmeshed in the crop lien and tenant systems; the farmer believed that ‘he worked longer hours, under more adverse conditions, and with smaller compensation for his labor than any other variety of man on earth,” Lally wrote, quoting John D. Hicks in his “The Farmers’ Alliance in North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review,” April 1925.
I could not find any reference to the type of fence – the new barbed wire or the traditional rail fence – how much it cost, how many miles it covered and when it was dismantled after a statewide law was enacted that required livestock be fenced in. But I have asked Wake County what is in the county records.
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