Trufant's fences made of pine stumps

When settlers cleared white pine around Trufant, the trees left a second job behind: getting the stumps out of fields meant for farming. White pines have shallow roots, so their stumps were easier to dislodge than the deep-rooted hardwoods farther south.

Danish farmers in Montcalm County turned that clearing problem into a fence. They tipped the stumps and packed the roots close together. The interlocking wall was hard for livestock to push aside or jump over, and it put the unwanted wood to work right where it had been pulled.

The state’s agricultural-landscape study says some fences were already more than a century old when they could still be seen between Sidney, Gowen, and Trufant in the 1970s. It also says the fences were disappearing as larger machinery changed the shape of farm fields. Montcalm Community College’s trail guide preserves the same lesson in miniature: white-pine stumps resisted decay and served as fences for decades.