The Eaton Democrat. (Eaton, Ohio) 1875-1903, 1880-04-08
Abeut Highway Fences.

This subject, says the Rural Neao |
Yorker, is attracting considerable atten-
ton. What is justice to landowners
and what to the travelling public? Are
existing laws and usages just, or did
they grow up under circumstances that
seemed to justify them, but what have
changed? Do their changes require or
justify change in the laws? IF 30,
what7 If the farmer does not himself
need road fences, has society right to
make him build them? If he ch oses
to "soil" his own cattle, or use his fields
that border on the highway for grain
fields or meadows, can the public re-
quire him to fence such fields along the
highway TO keep out their cattle? Be-
tween himself and his neighbor each
farmer builds half the line fence. Can
you ask him to build more than half be-
tween himself and the public? Can you
require him to build any? Has the
public any cattle and sheep? If so,
should it not own a farm? Or is the
highway the farm of the public3 Each
farmer buys Tin most States) the high
way bordering his farm. If his farm
lies on both sides, he buys and owns
the whole road. The public, for good
and sufficient reasons, reserves the right
to travel on it. Does it reserve any other
right2 Has it any other that it can re-
serve? Each farmer not only owns his
highway land, but, in most States, pays
taxes on it, just as on the rest OF his
land. Not only that, but part of his
whole tax goes for road improvement.
If he s'works out" his road tax, it is de.
Quoted from his tax total.
For his owning, tax-paying and work
ing of his own highways, he receives a
part of his equivalent every time he
drivesy to town or city over the roads
similarly owned and kept in repair by
other farmers and property-owners, and
in year he receives his full quivalent.
But if the public claims the right to use
the highway as pig-pen or cow-pasture.
or for any other purpose than for travel
and the necessary driving of stock, how
can the individual farmer get his pay
for this use of his land.
Take another aspect: In general, the
highways are now fenced. Most of the
fences are now made so as to harbor
huge snow-drifts in windy stretches of
land, that often completely block the
highway. Has the public right to
object to this?
Has it a right, as one correspondent,
himself a farmer, suggests, to compel
landowners to build wire fences that
will not harber drifts? or, to give him
right, as another correspondent suggests,
and as the New York law actually does,
to lay his road fences fiat each fall, re-
build in spring, and commute to the
amount of the actual cost, for his next
years road taxi Has it right to COM
! pei fhis7 But thus to level and rebuild
stone-wall or board fence would cost, in
labor and damage, ten times the annual
troad tax, and to level hedge is to de-
stroy it.
Take still another aspect: Suppose
all road fences removed, as our CORES
pondent suggests, and the ground culti-
| waited on each side to the ditch that
marks the line of actual necessary travel:
Can law keep the travelling public with
in those lines in muddy weather, or will
men ride and drive on the less muddy
turf of the adjoining meadows? Or, in
summer, can cattle be driven on the
| highway without rushing through the
grain fields and meadows that tempt
them on either sideH .....
These and similar questions are doubt
less more easily asked than answered.
One thing is certain The burden of
roadside fencing, and the waste of un-
titled, uncropped roadside land, are
immense. They amount to millions of
dollars each year. Has the law a
right to perpetuate this burden and
this waste, unless both are absolute
necessities?