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lent. Or maybe the cows just liked the view better.
As Robert Frost observed, good fences sometimes make good neighbors. In earlier times, good fences were a necessary ‘protection’ for non-cattle areas. For you see, Virginia was originally ‘open-pasture’, meaning cattle could graze wherever they might meander. ‘Earmarks’, the precursors of the cute ear jtags sometimes - used today, helped owners to keep track of the wandering ¥ Angus’ at roundup time, but j unless one took precaution, ; Elsie and Elmer and their ‘ bovine brothers and sisters ¥ were free to chomp your petu- 1 nias and anything else they 1 could reach. The portions of the 1 Blue Ridge that were not in 1 pasture helped out with this ¥ problem; there is nothing like 1 some good old-fashioned chest- j nut rail-splittin’ to work up a . powerful appetite and thirst, is 1 there? Considering the area of some of the cattle-free zones, it ¥ may have taken a good many j chops (to say nothing of trees) ¥ to make a reasonably long 1 split-rail fence. So the pas- 1 ture/forest ratio was perhaps in ¥ some sort of ecological balance, j Ah, the natural order of things, 1 beautiful isn’t it? (
As one might imagine, with 1 the state being the numero-uno 1 beef boutique and all, the care, 1 maintenance, and movement of ¥ cattle were dramatically inter- * twined with every aspect of *
society. Nowhere were the J entapglements more fascinat- * ing then in the practices relat- * ed to land ownership and use. £
You may recall that the 6 King (Charles I of Meny Old 1 England) had given most of *
Eastern North America to a ] handful of courtly buddies in ‘ the 1600s. Descendants of sev- * eral of these lucky fellows, such 1 as Thomas, Lord Fairfax and ( others thus inherited owner- . ship of Rappahannock, the 1 Blue Ridge, and all the envi- 1 rons through the seventeen ' and early eighteen hundreds; ( nice, legal, and simple. By the * 1840s however when cow , punching was the new ‘king’ of , Virginia, many of those huge tracts of land had been divided , and sold (sometimes more than | once simultaneously) to an odd £ mix of lowland resident farm- j era, mountain-folk, and absen- , tee landlords (three guesses ( which had the largest hold- < ings). j
Over the preceding two , centuries, when nearly all the ] owners of the vast tracts were , absentees, much of the Blue j Ridge had been treated as com- , mon ground. The earliest local \ residents used the resources of \ these ‘common’ areas as they ] needed and no one much ( seemed to mind. This was fron- j tier then, a fact that was prob- ( ably a residual rationale for the > ‘open-range’ concept for cattle, t As the ranch spreads gradually t decreased from millions to t hundreds and, in some cases, c tens of acres, this all changed, g however. There were, of course, J ownership disputes; some folks even today have issues with t family property going back for l generations. Many descen- 1
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