The Post Rock Fence Post of Russell County

The limestone fence post stands in Russell County, Kansas, in the post-rock country of north-central Kansas. It is a single squared slab of pale gray stone, set on end in a long line of similar slabs that runs straight through the pasture. Its face is weathered smooth, with the faint horizontal streaks of the quarry still visible, and a rusted strand of barbed wire crosses it at the height of a cow's chest. The top has split along a natural crack into a shallow U that catches rain. At the base, the grass is worn in a small circle where every passing animal has scuffed against the same spot.

The stone is the Greenhorn limestone, a formation laid down during the Cretaceous as the shell and mud of an inland sea that covered the middle of the continent. After the sea withdrew, the land rose, and the limestone layer came to lie just under the topsoil of north-central Kansas. Where it surfaces, it is hard, fine-grained, and split into flat plates by horizontal cracks. The settlers who took up this section found the prairie almost treeless. For fence posts, they did not import wood. They quarried the ground under them. A man could split along the cracks with a hammer and wedges and pull out a slab as long as his own height, heavier than a feed sack. Hauled by wagon to the fence line, set upright in a hand-dug hole, it made a post that did not rot, warp, splinter, or burn.

This post came out of such a quarry, rode in a wagon, and was set in the ground with the wider end down, in a hole a man dug with a posthole digger. The dirt was packed around it in layers, stamped firm with the flat of a shovel. The fence was built later, strand by strand, and fastened to the stone at a point just below the top. In the years since, the post has not moved except for the slow lean of the earth under it, which tilts it a few degrees east of vertical. The surrounding posts lean in different directions, each according to the ground it stands in.

Weather has worked on it. Rain runs off the top, down the face, carrying a little of the stone with it, so the surface is slightly rougher than the day it was split. The winter cold drives into the crack at the top, expanding it a hair each year, and slender moss grows along the damp line of it. The sun has faded the stone from fresh gray to a dry bone color. The barbed wire, stretched tight at one time, has rusted to a scale the color of the soil. Where the cattle push against it, the wire has worn a shallow groove across the post, no deeper than a fingernail.

A steel fence post stands a few feet away, driven in at a later time to brace a sagging line. The limestone post carries its own load without it. The old iron staples in its face have turned to lumps of rust, but the wire is still attached.