A fence is a structure that encloses or protects an area, usually outdoors, and is usually built with posts that are connected by boards, wires, rails, or nets. A fence differs from a wall in that it does not have a solid base along its entire length. The original fencing laws on the East Coast were based on the British common law system, and the rapid increase in population quickly gave rise to laws requiring livestock to be fenced. In the eastern and western United States, clearly different patterns of land ownership and fencing emerged.
You'll need to make sure that the housing limit on your policy reflects not only the value of your home, but also that of the fence. If the fence surrounding your property isn't attached to your house at any time, it would be considered an “other structure” and would be covered by that part of your homeowners policy. However, the remaining vast tracts of unstable land were often used as common goods or, in the western United States, as open fields as habitat degradation developed due to overgrazing and a tragic commonwealth situation emerged. Common areas began to be assigned to individual owners through mechanisms such as the Homestead Act and the Desert Lands Act and to be fenced off or, if kept in public hands, to be leased to individual users for limited purposes, with constructions to separate tracts of public and private land.
States, including Texas, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina, have enacted laws that state that purple paint marks on fences (or trees) are the legal equivalent of signs prohibiting unauthorized entry. The value of fences and the metaphorical meaning of a fence, both positive and negative, have been used extensively throughout Western culture. A fence can be made of any material, such as wood, iron, or other material intended to prevent intrusion from the outside or deflection from the inside. However, if the fence is attached to your house, it will be considered part of the building and will be covered by the “housing” section of your policy. Conversely, in the case of communal land, the owners of surrounding land have an obligation to fence off common livestock, as in large parts of the New Forest.
More recently, fences are generally built on the inspected property line as accurately as possible. A balustrade or railing is a fence to prevent people from falling over an edge, most often found on a staircase, landing, or balcony. Otherwise, it tends to be on the side of the non-owner, so the fence owner could access the posts when they need to be repaired, but this isn't a legal requirement. The open-field tradition of forcing landowners to fence off unwanted livestock dominated most rural areas of the West until the late 20th century, and even today, some isolated regions of the West still have open field laws in place.
In many cases, for both rural and urban property owners, laws were designed to require the owners of adjacent land to share the responsibility of maintaining a common border fence.
