“Good fences make good neighbors.”  So said Robert Frost’s neighbor—twice—in “Mending Wall,” coining a phrase that has been used umpteen times since, usually out of context, but with a similar purpose.  Fences proliferate in our modern city and suburbs, walling in, as well as walling out. Whether three or eight feet high, wood or metal, picket or solid board, fences define our spaces, our interactions, even our society.

In Memphis, as in other historic cities, new fences are changing the look of older neighborhoods. At one time, rear yards in midtown were defined by wooden picket fences, rustic twisted wire, or later, chain link, covered with creeping vines or climbing roses. One could survey the entire block from the backyard, trading greetings and passing along plants with the neighbors without straining on one’s toes to see over the fence.  Front yards were open, a terraced expanse of green lawns without the interruption of hedges or fencing. Children played games of kickball or freeze tag across neighboring lots, and only the occasional change in grade or watering habits differentiated one property from another.
    

In this photograph taken in the early 20th century, on the far left one can see part of the tall lattice "privacy fence" built around the rear yard of this new home.  Photo courtesy of the Memphis/Shelby County Public Library and Information Center. 

Now, however, rear yard privacy fences are the norm, and front yards are often delineated with hedges and, occasionally, fencing. The Memphis Landmarks Commission (MLC) reviews fence construction in all five residential Landmarks districts, and fences and driveway gates make up about 30 percent of all Certificate of Appropriateness (COA) applications. Rear yard privacy fences have been seen so frequently by the Commission that it has delegated rear yard fence construction to its staff for review, and the typical six-foot-high, dog-eared board fence is routinely approved, as long as it meets the neighborhood guidelines for location. Front-yard fences are less kindly received, however. Members of the city’s two largest – and most outspoken – neighborhood associations, the Central Gardens Association and the Evergreen Historic District Association, have voiced opposition to front-yard fences. The rationale is that these areas were developed during the City Beautiful movement, when open front lawns were gaining favor and residential development in Memphis was at an all-time high. Open front yards contribute to the established neighborhood aesthetic and are enjoyed by the entire community, with the continuous lawns considered community space, although privately owned.
    
But this ideal was attained only after the turn of the century. Prior to that, fencing, especially in the front yards, was far more prevalent, for practical as well as aesthetic reasons. Larry R. Ford writes, in The Spaces between Buildings, “In the . . . suburban areas of nineteenth-century North America, where houses were set back from the street and occupied only a portion of the lot, fences were common. Most often they were low, see-through white picket or wrought-iron fences, which did not interfere with the visual dominance of the house. They did not so much enclose space as delineate it, creating neat edges for gardens. They were also functional, keeping domestic animals in the yard and keeping out potentially troublesome creatures like stray pigs, goats, or dogs.”
    

Historic photographs of Memphis dating from the late 1800s show yards enclosed by fences in a variety of styles and materials. The Italianate, French Second Empire, Romanesque Revival, and Queen Anne mansions of Memphis’ elite were enclosed by wrought iron pickets supported by cast iron posts, or sometimes by masonry walls topped with rails of iron pipe. More modest houses showed rustic split rail fencing, or the ideal wooden picket fence. Purposeful as well as beautiful, fences surrounded the front yards of houses in the neighborhoods closest to downtown—Victorian Village, Beale Street, and Vance-Pontotoc. The wrought iron and masonry fences in front of the Mallory-Neely House and the Molly Fontaine House (now Cielo restaurant), both in the 600 block of Adams Avenue, still remain and exhibit this trend.

Wedding party with wrought iron fence in the foreground.  Photo courtesy of the Memphis/Shelby County Public Library and Information Center.

    
More modest houses on the oldest streets in midtown were fenced, too. Historic photographs of the Queen Anne cottages located on the 200 block of South McLean, in Central Gardens, show wrought iron or slender wood pickets surrounding the front yard. McLean was one of the first streets to develop in the neighborhood, set solidly in the late Victorian period as evidenced by its architecture, which still stands, and its fences, which have been removed.
    

South McLean Boulevard looking north near intersection of Linden  Avenue circa 1899.
Photo courtesy of the Memphis/Shelby County Public Library and Information Center.

Wrought iron fencing was often lost during scrap metal drives during both World Wars, and wooden fencing undoubtedly rotted away after time. Another factor—progress—also contributed to the now-unfenced character that is dominant in midtown Memphis.
    
Around the turn of the 20th century, the view towards fencing began to change. The City Beautiful movement ushered in an appreciation of wide, manicured expanses of lawn. Ford attributes this appreciation to an association with the “English landed gentry and their grazing sheep.” “Even in modest residential areas,” he writes, there was the feeling that “a variety of fencing styles, materials, and heights distributed somewhat randomly through a neighborhood would add considerably to the clutter of the landscape. Relatively uniform fencing for the length of the street, such as the wrought-iron fences found in some older townhouse neighborhoods, was not often seen as a suburban option either. Better to have no fences at all.” The majority of Memphis’ now-historic neighborhoods developed during this aesthetic, and it is this reason that the Evergreen and Central Gardens neighborhood associations, among others, have discouraged the use of front-yard fencing.
    
Green lawns were seen as complementing the architectural styles of the day, including Craftsman bungalows, English Tudors, Dutch Revival farmhouses, and even Spanish Colonial styles. At the height of suburban Memphis development in the 1920s, many American communities mandated an open front lawn and disallowed any type of fencing. As the century progressed, the image of a “lawn” gained popularity. Ford points out that there are more than 150 communities in the U.S. with “lawn” in their name.
    
In Memphis, mid-20th century neighborhoods such as Red Acres, Green Meadows and even High Point Terrace also contribute to this image and show the continued popularity of open front yards through the 1950s. Ford writes, “By the early decades of the 20th century, the manicured lawn was second only to the single family house as an emblem of the suburban ideal. The lawn was time-consuming, expensive, nonfunctional, but for most people it was an aesthetic and symbolic necessity.” Indeed, Thorsten Veblen argued in The Theory of the Leisure Class that Americans desired lawns precisely because they were nonfunctional. As a pure status symbol, the lawn demonstrated that the owner had the time and money to enjoy nonproductive pursuits.
    
Ultimately, fencing is relatively impermanent. Wood rots and, unless well-maintained, even metal fencing has a life span only a fraction as long as a well-built house. But there is no question in this author’s mind that the fences we erect will continue to shape our society and our neighborhoods, and maybe not always for the better.
    
Sure, people have security concerns, and the theft of property from one’s yard—whether fenced or not—shouldn’t have to be tolerated. But doesn’t erecting a fence that is taller than the average adult or hiding the façade of a beautiful home behind the curtain of a concrete wall diminish the value of our interactions with our neighbors and our community? Robert Frost thought so. I think that, even back in 1914, when “Mending Wall” was first published, he was onto something.

Erin Hanafin Berg is an assistant preservation planner at the Memphis Landmarks Commission. The book cited in the article is The Spaces between Buildings by Larry R. Ford, published by  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.  For information or guidelines for fences in Landmarks districts, call the Landmarks Commission at (901) 576-7191.