2 episodes · 48 min
Fence Line
Forty years of boundary disputes in one county, told by the woman who kept the plat books first and ruled on them later.
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A boundary is a line two people agree on until the day one of them measures it.
She was county clerk before she was county judge, which means she spent twenty years handing people the deed that did not say what they were certain it said, and then twenty more deciding what to do about it. Each episode is one line on the ground: a hedge, a half rod, a creek that moved, a fence somebody built in good faith in the wrong place in nineteen thirty.
Almost none of these are about land. They are about what two neighbours are willing to say out loud to each other, and what they will pay a lawyer to say for them instead.