Visitors to the Edgartown Historic District have much eye candy to savor. In the neighborhoods north and south of Main Street, they gaze across steadfast borders of low wooden fences to admire the English-style cottages, Federal manors, and Greek Revival homes within. In season, they coo over the ‘New Dawn’ roses and fluffy hydrangeas that spill over these fences. Hardly do they look down and consider: the fences! Attention, visitors. Locals, too. It’s high time to zero in on these ubiquitous gems of history, craftsmanship, and community character.

The wooden fences of Edgartown owe their genesis in part to the track of the Ice Age. Early down-Islanders were deprived of the glacial rubble strewn about the Chilmark hills for the unwitting convenience of building fences of stone. By the mid-1800s, wooden-fence architecture evolved in downtown Edgartown like nowhere else on the Vineyard. It was the height of the whaling boom, when newly moneyed ship owners and captains turned the streets near the harbor into a district of trophy houses. Their ubiquitous street-front fences were for show, not for animals, and they ranged in style from plain and righteous to ornate and downright quirky.

“Get out of the car and walk around,” implores Vineyard architect Joe Eldredge. “Look at the details in the fences – the dimensions of the bottom rails, the
artistic fillips [embellishments] between the posts.” In the historic district, where house fronts closely address the street, fences are among the elements that visually hold the properties together. If those posts and pickets were ever to grow feet and tiptoe away in the night, Edgartown wouldn’t quite be Edgartown anymore.

Who designed and built these town icons? Are these fences as old as their houses? Do their various styles typify New England? Old England? The whims of individual carpenters? The Island’s history tomes and splashy architecture books are short on details about fence origins, even as they hold details aplenty about the buildings those fences surround. The experts are perhaps more uncertain than uncaring.

Fences 101

“The purpose of all fences is not entirely clear. Sometimes they are meant to keep things in, and sometimes they are meant to keep things out. Sometimes they are to tell your neighbor that from here on things belong to you, and sometimes they are built as a screen and sometimes as a shield. More times than not, they are built simply as a border, to keep the owner from feeling he’s going to fall off his own land, and sometimes they are there to be purely decorative.”

– Edith Blake, Doorways, Lanterns and Fences of Martha’s Vineyard (Vineyard Press, 1969).

In American trading towns along the Atlantic seaboard, stylish home and fence building began to take off in the late 1700s on account of two growing categories of human resources: a wealthy and discriminating merchant class and a pool of highly skilled ship carpenters. Architectural inspiration came largely from pattern books imported from England. Plans for wooden fences included popular Georgian flourishes of the day, like turned balusters, curved rails, and posts topped with carved finial urns. The ratio of fence height to the width of its sections was nearly a science. After the Revolution, many fence makers turned to a new American slant on British designs by Massachusetts architect Asher Benjamin, which was detailed in his 1797 pattern book Country Builder’s Assistant.

Among Britons during this period, the preferred fence-building material happened to be iron rather than wood. However, ornamental cast-iron production had yet to take off on this side of the Atlantic, and imports were costly, slow, and perhaps unseemly to early Americans with their pride in frugality and patriotism. Maybe Vineyarders, in particular, had already learned their environment was an incomparable breeding ground for rust.

“Even notables who could otherwise afford iron apparently preferred to patronize carpenters who worked in wood,” wrote George Nash in Wooden Fences (Taunton Press, 1999), an examination of American fence styles, origins, and construction. “Proof that these artisans were capable of building wood fences of a perfection and beauty that rivaled if not surpassed the most elaborate ironwork can be found in the surviving fences and historic re-creations that grace the historic districts of old New England seaports . . .”

In historic Edgartown, the function of a fence fell into two categories: ornament and boundary. It is not a foreboding boundary, but rather a low, open, and
unthreatening one that invites pedestrians to peer into the well-appointed parlors of the home – from a polite distance.

As ornament, a fence embellishes its house, as a brooch might adorn an evening gown. In Edgartown, a fence is often painted white to match the house or its trim. (The unpainted fence at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum is a notable exception.) In the right proportions, a fence balances the visual relationship between a house, its grounds, and the public street. It can lend delicacy to an imposing edifice. It tricks the eye into deepening a shallow front yard. It reins in a vast lawn like that of the Dr. Daniel Fisher House. To a long and otherwise monotonous fence, finials or varied picket heights add rhythm. A gate or an arbor adds charm.

Pales, rails, and spindles

“The famed ‘Edgartown fence’ . . . is just right for keeping small dogs and children in or out, and perfect for climbing over by the next age and size group. Since it has a molding on top, it is comfortable for leaning on while borrowing a cup of sugar or collecting back fence gossip. It is also easy on the bottoms of fence-sitters.”

– Edith Blake, Doorways, Lanterns and Fences of Martha’s Vineyard.

Fence fads in Edgartown came and went over the years, but only a handful of them dominate.

The influence of ornamental cast iron is most evident in the neighborhood’s wooden mortise-and-tenon fences. Inch-thick spindles, or balusters, fit with astonishing precision through holes cut into horizontal rails. Some spindles are turned, in keeping with the trendy Georgian flourishes of the 1700s. Other spindles are squared, with pyramid-shaped tips and the visual authority of a spear. Mortise-and-tenon fences are arguably Edgartown’s most distinguished-looking – even if one recent observer found a likeness between a certain style of spindle and a part of the male anatomy.

Edgartown also has numerous pretenders – the not-exactly mortise-and-tenon fences. Simpler and probably cheaper to build, they are reasonably handsome alternatives to the real deal, featuring spindles sandwiched between double rails. No mortise-cutting or tenon-inserting required.

The local fence style for the ages – from Colonial times to the present – is the waist-high picket. Picket fences are consummately emblematic of New England simplicity, order, and restraint. If they’ve got posts, they’re topped with simple caps, not preening urns. The closest things to whimsy picket fences offer are subtle variations in the tops of the pickets, or pales. They may be pointed, squared-off, diamond-topped, or flame-topped.

Two fences in Edgartown say “look at me” like no others. One fronts the otherwise unassuming Cottle House on Cooke Street with a rakish, diagonal bricklayer’s motif. The other, at the Rufus Pease House on South Water Street, sports a lineup of curious, carved “rooftops” on its posts. “[It] suggests that ‘something’ lives a snug, dry life under each sound, peaked little roof,” wrote Edith Blake in Doorways, Lanterns and Fences of Martha’s Vineyard.
Though the Pease House was built around 1838, might the fence have been added later? Fanciful design in America is more typical of the Victorian period of the late 1800s, after downtown Edgartown was more or less “done” and when new advances in woodworking machinery enabled craftsmen to go wild. The Pease House fence would likely look more at home in front of a Victorian gingerbread cottage in Oak Bluffs.

More often than not, the picket fence of historic Edgartown is capped with a molded rail – usually painted white, but molding details vary from one
carpenter’s vision to the next. Many locals proudly refer to the capped picket as “the Edgartown fence,” and they might as well. It is hardly universal. Here and there, capped pickets front properties in other Vineyard towns. Slightly taller versions are found on Nantucket. Sightings have been reported in Provincetown. But that’s about it. It seems that in no single location is the Edgartown fence as pervasive as it is in Edgartown.

Who built the first Edgartown fence is a mystery. “One carpenter did it; then others followed,” surmises contemporary fence painter John Chapman. Why it was built may be more obvious: Railings protect the rough cuts of the picket tops from damage from wind, rain, snow, and – worst of all – the intrepid salt air of the waterfront. To protect the railings themselves, a few of today’s “neighborly” Edgartown fences wear please-do-not-sit-on-the-fence signs.

Preservation and paint

“Fence maintenance is a labor of love. Some people don’t want to put the work into them. Then they rot after a certain number of years and have to be rebuilt.”

– John Chapman, fence painter

By 1900, Edgartown had morphed from whaling town to tourist destination. Wrote historian Arthur Railton in Walking Tour of Historic Edgartown (Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society, 1998): “Gradually, the huge Captains’ houses began to be bought by wealthy summer visitors and, to the benefit of all, have been kept from decline, preserving the flavor of an earlier period.” Ditto for the fences.

Just in case homeowners were ever inclined to stray, the Edgartown Historic District Commission has a set of architectural dos and don’ts aimed at saving the community’s look and feel of yore. Among the biggest don’ts for fences – right up there with plastic coating – is high, stockade privacy walls that are clearly visible from the street. The few existing offenders predated the rule. On Nantucket, historic district guidelines flatly denounce them as “spite” fences.

“People buy houses that are close to the street and then complain that everyone who walks by can see inside,” says Ursula Prada, secretary and member of the Edgartown Historic District Commission.

An historic wooden fence in a waterfront location is about as authentic as an historic wooden ship: So many parts have been replaced over the years that hardly any of it is original. Though many of today’s fences in Edgartown are made of hardy red cedar, they are nonetheless skinny structures that suffer more punishment from the environment – and the weed whacker – than buildings do.

John Chapman, who paints or repairs about fourteen fences a year, recommends a few preemptive strikes: Keep picket bottoms at least an inch off the ground, dig shallow trenches underneath, and even lay strips of plastic weed barrier.

Chapman says he may be the only Island painter who paints only fences. “I like to stay on the ground and leave ladders to the young,” says the sixty-year-old retired teacher. He also finds good therapy in being outdoors, just meditating or meeting passersby. People seem to like to watch him work. Physically, however, it is not therapeutic to bend, crouch, or kneel at a three-foot fence for hours at a time – especially if a painter is so thorough as to paint the undersides of pickets and bottom rails.

Despite the influx of new immigrants into the local labor pool of painters, the demand for services is hungry enough to draw some off-Islanders like Dennis Halloran of Mansfield. A specialist in restorations, Halloran painted the Mayflower II and most of the historic buildings in Plymouth a few years back. On the Vineyard, he does five or six paint jobs a year.

Most painters in Edgartown get new business by word of mouth, truck, or – in Halloran’s case – shirt. Promotional signs on lawns or sidewalks are prohibited. “The town doesn’t want the clutter,” says the commuter. “I can understand that.”

“I love the culture here,” says Halloran. “It’s a whole different breed. Customers will say, ‘I’m going to be gone for three months. Take the key to the house.’ There’s a lot of loyalty and trust.”

Halloran, incidentally, has worked throughout coastal Massachusetts, all the way from Gloucester to the Cape. Only on Martha’s Vineyard has he ever seen the Edgartown fence.

Breaking Tradition with a Stone Fence

Relocating from the quiet Vineyard countryside to the urban jungle of Edgartown has its drawbacks – especially when the new home sits on a busy speedway.

In 2004, within months of buying the sweet 1840 cottage at 10 Pease’s Point Way, Don Bidwell got a call at his off-Island home in Connecticut from the Edgartown police, around 11:30 one night. Apparently a vehicle had crashed through the picket fence on his property. Moreover, the vehicle had crossed the yard, pierced the front of the house, and pushed in the kitchen wall.

“I understand a big fishing tournament was winding up at the time,” says Bidwell. “I think there might have been some imbibing involved.”

Fortunately, no one was in residence at the time.

However, neither the culprit nor the vehicle was ever apprehended. From the carpenters who fixed the house, Bidwell learned what locals already knew: This was not the first time the wooden fence at the deep, precarious bend in the road had been smashed by wayward motorists.

Next time will be different: With a sympathetic nod from the town’s Historic District Commission, Bidwell built his new fence in stone “rather than put up another tempting target.” That same year, a newly built home across the curve added a stone fence of its own.

“The stone fence is okay,” says Bidwell, who aimed to complement the character of his property. “I would have preferred the look of another white picket fence, but I didn’t want to be vulnerable again.”

To observers aware of the back-story, the charming stone fence has a subtle go-ahead-make-my-day swagger. However, Bidwell insists he isn’t being spiteful. “I’m not trying to get back at anybody; I don’t even know who to get back with. And frankly, there are lots of light poles and other things they can run into.”

Fence Care Basics

In Colonial times, painting fences and homes was a luxury only the rich could afford, and the rich in Edgartown were scarce. That was then. Many of today’s Edgartonians, like the old whaling gentry, have the wherewithal. Of course, some fences are deliberately unpainted, including the one surrounding the Martha’s Vineyard Museum, the bastion of Island tradition. And, truth be told, other fences are just plain neglected. Most homeowners, however, seem intent upon keeping up with the Joneses.

To maintain their clean, white complexions, fences in this environment ought to get repainted every two to three years. Hence the annual springtime rush, when sightings of fence painters around the historic district seem to outnumber sightings of robins. Painters can postpone work on houses and rear fences until summer, if seasonal residents don’t mind them underfoot. But at busy street fronts, painting fences during the pedestrian high season is a must to avoid.

Fence owners shouldn’t expect their paint jobs to move rapidly. Shortcuts can hasten peeling, mildew, and the need for the next paint job. Rose vines may have to be gently detached. A few nails may need to be re-sunk; a rotted picket may need replacing. And with their multiple rails, spindles, or pickets, even little fences are fraught with surfaces and contours, all of which must undergo cleaning, scraping, sanding, priming, painting, and timeouts for drying. Days are inevitably lost on account of rain and dry-out time there-after. Early mornings and late afternoons are off-limits on account of dew – and perhaps the running of stripers at Wasque.

Even a breezy day can be a lost day, especially on North Water Street. “The paint will fly,” explains painter John Chapman. “And I don’t want to have to pay to repaint somebody’s car.”

At least a couple of new-fangled interventions have merit: Some fence replacements are now being built in detachable sections. That means no matter the season, weather, or time of day, those sections can get their future face lifts in dry, comfy indoor workshops. And many painters have ditched exterior oil-based paints, the age-old standard, in favor of premium products in (shudder) synthetic latex. With the removal of environmentally unfriendly minerals from their formulations, oil paints have literally lost their luster as well as their staying power, while premium latex has vastly improved. Oil primers, on the other hand, still rule.