Fencing material and type date pasture abandonment and its grazing livestock

Evidence

The site has a stone wall but no evidence of other fencing. This pasture was most likely abandoned sometime between 1840 and 1865, the first peak of land abandonment, prior to the mass-production of wire fencing, as people migrated to the Ohio Valley and then farther west. … The site has a combination of stone walls and wire fencing, or just wire fencing. This pasture was abandoned after 1874, when wire was first mass-produced. … The wire is barbed, the pasture most likely held cows or horses. … If the wire is smooth mesh, woven wire, indicating the pasture may have held sheep. — Tom Wessels, Forest Forensics, 55

Categorization

• XREF: Dating rural abandonment by artifact type parallels the material-culture inference used in A Midwife’s Tale-era New England history and Echo of site-history reading. — connects to: Field observation can date land abandonment from tree growth records — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 207

Related

• Field observation can date land abandonment from tree growth records (similarity 0.84)

Broader Connections

• Field observation can date land abandonment from tree growth records #expands (0.85) — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 207