Trufant's fences made of pine stumps

When the loggers were done around Trufant, they left the worst part behind: the stumps. Cutting down a giant white pine is one thing. Getting its root ball out of the ground is another, and the early farmers here faced thousands of them across land they wanted to plow. Burning a stump that size could take days. So they did something cleverer.

Trufant was settled in 1871 by Emory Trufant, who put up a sawmill to work the heavy stands of pine all around — some of the richest timber in Michigan. As the cutting moved through, Danish immigrant families bought up the cleared land and went after the stumps with teams of horses and stump pullers. Instead of hauling the monsters off, they tipped each one on its side and lined them up root-to-root in a long row, the gnarled root systems facing out like a wall of grasping fingers.

That was the fence. A stump fence cost nothing but labor, used up the very thing the farmer needed gone, and turned out to be nearly indestructible. Pine heartwood and dense roots shrug off rot for generations. Many of these fences outlasted the people who built them, the wood gone silver-gray and rock-hard, holding a line drawn in the 1880s.

You don’t see them much anymore — most were bulldozed as farms got bigger and machinery got stronger — but weathered stretches still survive in the Trufant country, looking less like a fence than a row of frozen sea creatures. The little village is better known today for its giant Saturday flea market, drawing crowds to a town of a few hundred. But the older monument is out in the fields: a tidy farm idea, made from the mess the lumber boom left behind.