Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

[Baker, John]

        There seems to be a remarkably widespread misapprehension that
this proverb was invented by Robert Frost, who quoted it in his 1914
poem, Mending Wall.  But it's a real proverb - one used by real-life
farmers, including my own father - and older than Frost.  The relevant
portion of Frost's poem, which is about the effort by the narrator and
his neighbor to mend a stone wall:

<<He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'_Why_ do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' . . .
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'>>


        As Frost himself recognizes, it is an old saying and of
incontestable accuracy where there are cows or other animals that can
damage crops.  Here's an 1859 example, from Transactions of the State
Agricultural Society of Michigan; With Reports of County Agricultural
Societies, for the Year 1859, Vol. XI, at 342 (1861) (via Making of
America):

        <<Good fences make good neighbors, and enable the farmer when he
retires to bed at night, to awake in the morning conscious that his
crops are secure, and that the labor of weeks are not destroyed in an
hour by his neighbor's or his own stock.>>



John Baker

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