Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 234, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 October 1917 — CEDAR FENCES ARE PASSING [ARTICLE]

CEDAR FENCES ARE PASSING

Wood Rapidly Being Bought"U|TfOr Use in the Manufacture of Lead Pencils. Today, through many sections of Tennessee, Virginia and other states where cedar used to thrive, it is difficult to find any of the old-time zig-zag fences where rattlesnakes used to hide and woodchucks burrow and bobwhites make their nests. Modern, clean woven-wlre fences, with metal posts, take their places. The war boosted the price of steel and woven wire, but not enough to prevent making It profitable to exchange new fences for old and the work is still going on. Probably In another five years there won’t be a foot of cedar rail fence left In America. When General Andrew Johnson moved to. Tennessee, in 1815, the central part of the state was overgrown with cedars. They were cut to clear the land and burned to get rid of them. Millions of feet of them were split Into rails, the sort Lincoln split when a boy, and used for fenclng-off plantations, boundary lines, fields and pastures. These rails are sliced into six-inch lengths on the ground, before shipping to the factories, to facilitate handling. A two-inch strip, a rod long, WIU make 1,500 pencils, and as the fences have from six to nine rails and crossposts, . one section will make enough two-lnch I strips for more than 1,500 pencil sticks. A rod of farm fence will retail for nearly $750 —provided it Is good cedar —and the woven wire fences cost no more than S2O a rod, generally less. —Philadelphia Press.