SLAVE WALLS AND STARVATION--CONSIDERING THE CULTURAL CONTEXT OF KENTUCKY ROCK FENCES

Rock fences are an iconic geoheritage landscape element of the Bluegrass region of central Kentucky. Although sometimes vaguely referred to as “slave fences” in local conversation, and taken for granted in romanticized late 19^th-century and early 20^th-century depictions of antebellum Kentucky, these extensive dry-laid stone walls are a product of a complex confluence of limestone availability, wood-resource depletion, early nineteenth-century land-use changes in Ireland, famine-induced Irish emigration, labor exploitation, American racism, and shifting economic patterns following emancipation. Most early fences (1775-1840) in the Bluegrass region were made of wood. As demand for fuel and building materials led to decimation of available forests, stone fencing became an economically viable alternative material. For centuries, many Irish farmers had long stacked rocks along property or field boundaries. During the Irish famine crisis (1840’s), some poor Irish people were employed in public works projects to construct fences--often at random with no clear property-boundary basis--as a charitable public works project. As these people were able to escape economic hardship in Ireland and travel to America, they brought this dry-laid fence method with them. The Carboniferous limestones of western Ireland have similar characteristics to thin-bedded Ordovician limestones found in central Kentucky. Early Irish-led pre-Civil War fence projects also involved impressed enslaved African-Americans, who thus learned the skills of fence building, and then were able to apply those techniques as tradesmen following emancipation. Following the Civil War most of the 19^th-century fences were constructed by skilled African-American tradesmen. Both the immigrant Irish and enslaved African-Americans experienced significant racism and discrimination—in very different ways and to different degrees—during the nineteenth century, and the voices and stories of their hardships were nearly lost during romanticized considerations of Kentucky history in the 20^th century.