Hi, Maureen and everybody: I was talking with my mom this evening, and asked her about grampa's fence viewing. She said that he didn't have a lot to do as a fence viewer, but that the job involved a lot more than just inspecting the condition of fences. A little background. Midwesterners, for example, are accustomed to land boundaries being defined by survey: so many feet or rods or whatever from a surveyed baseline to the north or south, and likewise from a baseline to the east or west. The significant markers were set by the surveyors, and their locations are well known. In New England, land boundaries are much more likely to be along a brook, or "from the large pine tree north 13 yards to the granite boulder, thence due east to the roadway," or such like. Mom told me that she was talking once with grampa about a stone wall that was set out in the middle of the woods, probably on Mount Ephraim. She used the same phrase that Frost did in "Mending Wall," that the wall seemed unnecessary because "there weren't any cows there." He explained that the custom and the law was that, for quarter-sections at least, the lot lines had to be marked by stone walls, even where they didn't seem to have any practical use (as fences, that is)! ! ! . Mom told me one story about grampa and fence viewing. Someone who lived on the Brockways Mills Road decided that he wanted a certain spring to be on his land. Since it was out in the woods only a few feet from his property line, and nobody was using it at the time, he didn't think it mattered. He rebuilt the stone wall so it passed on the other side of the spring from his land. It was just a few yards . . . He got in a lot of trouble when it was found out. Mom didn't know how it came to light, but when it did, grampa was responsible to re-establish the property line and to assure that the stone wall was properly rebuilt. These are the moments that make genealogy worthwhile. On the one hand, that grampa was a fence viewer is a primary genealogical fact that establishes his residence in Springfield, Vermont as of a certain date. On the other hand, the reason for the existence of a stone wall in the forest sheds light on a poem that is a favorite of mine: "Mending Wall" by Robert Frost. But third and even more important, I suddenly saw my mother (now 71 years old and living in Michigan) in a completely different light; as a young girl growing up on a dairy farm, asking her father about a stone wall in the middle of the Vermont woods. Darrell Darrell A. Martin formerly of the Dutton District, Springfield, Vermont currently in exile in Addison, Illinois darrellm@sprynet.com