Gardens in Friendfield and other African-American villages on Hobcaw Barony were surrounded by wattle fences. Rather than being corralled in pens, farm animals roamed freely, and fences kept them out of the gardens. Wattle fences are among the oldest and most universal forms of construction, found around the world from Africa to Europe and the Americas.
In the antebellum South, these fences became an integral part of the landscape, and the job of building them often fell to enslaved people. Those they built for their masters might have used new wooden planks, whereas the fences they built for their own use were more likely constructed from available materials such as fallen tree branches or recycled wood. This 1905 photograph depicts a cabin in one of Hobcaw's villages with a wattle fence on either side.
