Vintage Cedar Rail Fences Tell the Story of Hope

Updated on June 26th, 2024

By: Steve Maxwell

Maintaining rail fences is mostly about replacing rotted and broken rails with new ones. Here you can see one section of my fence with replacement rails yet to shed their bark, while other rails in the same sections are more than a hundred years old.

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Each spring since 1987, I’ve maintained a nearly forgotten part of Canadian heritage that’s still a working feature of the rural landscape where I live on Manitoulin Island.

Nestled along the shore of Lake Huron in Ontario, Canada, you’ll find Manitoulin. People call it the “island that time forgot”. This is where I live, and as far as I’ve been able to tell, this place has the highest concentration of working cedar rail farm fences in the world. While this kind of fence has disappeared almost entirely from every other place where they once flourished, Manitoulin still boasts thousands of miles of rail fences spread over its 130 km length. And not all of these aren’t tumbled down relics of yesteryear, either. Plenty of them are working fences that are both beautiful and useful.

My 90-acre patch of farmland and forest (tiny by Manitoulin standards) has two miles worth of cedar fences in all, and I try to make them a little better each year. They contain a small herd of Angus and Shorhorn cattle that we raise for grass-fed beef that gets sold to a small group of loyal customers. Dealing with my rail fences isn’t a typical home improvement challenge, but there is a lesson to be learned from the work just the same.

The oldest parts of my fences were built in the 1890s, by a pioneering family named Taylor. They held the first deed from the Crown, clearing the land and bringing it under cultivation in exchange for ownership. As I replace rotted rails and push leaning sections of fence upright again, I see evidence of two kinds of human emotions preserved in the wood: “fear” and “hope”.

Simple, but effective, the corner of this rail fence shows the traditional “stake and wire” reinforcement used across Manitoulin Island. The only metal used in this design is a little bit of fence wire at the top and bottom of each pair of vertical stakes.

Sometime before settlers began partnering with the land to grow food, new diseases preceded them, bringing strange illnesses to the Native people. Fear led the Natives here to set fire to Manitoulin, leveling the massive stands of old-growth cedar trees in an effort to drive away the evil spirits killing them. I know these trees were huge because blackened cedar stumps can still be found here and there all across the Island, even now, a couple of centuries after fear and despair consumed them.

The ever-frugal early farmers made use of Manitoulin’s burned cedars, and it’s not unusual to find the oldest rails at the bottom of my fences still showing charred wood, not yet erased by two centuries of weathering. From the ashes of disaster rose the fences of success.

This brand new section of Manitoulin cedar rail fence is one of the best examples of the tradition. Called a snake rail fence, it’s made of rails that are 12 to 13-feet long, zigging and zagging back and forth about 6 feet.

Fear may have had something to do with some of the materials that make up my fences, but hope is the reason these fences were built in the first place. And hope keeps them up today. Hope and hard work. Whenever I get to thinking that I work hard, I look around at my fields and my humility is restored. It took pioneers an entire lifetime to clear a field that takes me 3 minutes to drive across with my four-wheeler. The efforts of these pioneers are still part of the reason Canada produces abundant food today. How can I let their fences fall into disrepair?

This is our youngest, Ellie, standing next to one of the rail fences she’s grown up with.

When I look at the people who keep Manitoulin’s rail fence heritage alive today, I don’t see a lot of youth. I do see some of the toughest, hardest driving, gnarly-fingered, fast-paced old guys anywhere on the planet. Few that I can think of are younger than 45. Most are well into their 60s and 70s. Some 80 year old farmers still rise early, fix fences all day, then come home for supper in the house they were born in. Cattle prices may be decent now, but on balance these people are not motivated by money.

Is all this fence fixing, cattle raising crazy? Yes, on some level it is. But for what it’s worth, every spring I’ll keep wrestling new rails into place as I partner with people dead for decades before I was born. And, as the old timers say, keeping my ancient cedar rail fences “horse-high, bull-strong and pig-tight”.

Click below to for a quick video visit to some of the cedar rails fences I’ve worked on at my place.

Video Feature

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