Perforated fences in Beaufort

You need to walk all over the Historic District, to discover where all the perforated walls are. I really didn’t know what to call them, but when I first moved to Beaufort and rented a house on Wilmington St., a block off Bay St., I lived next door to a perforated wall. The perforations allowed me to peek into a large yard, tended every few weeks by a crew of Mexican gardeners and grass-cutters. I started thinking about that wall, because I had never seen one like it. It was only one brick thick, and the bricks were ingeniously laid to support one another but to leave a checkerboard of openings. Our cats went through the interstices.

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Were the masons saving bricks? Were they creating a peekaboo vista into the gardens? Were they perhaps creating a flow-through system for high water during a storm surge caused by a hurricane? Or were they allowing the breeze from Beaufort Bay to filter through the yard, curtailing some of the mugginess and mildew of summer?



Many of the houses on Bay St. have perforated fences, of varying heights, from about two feet on up to six feet high. All have a base substantial enough to hold the weight of the bricks above, and one solid course of bricks across the top to stabilize from corner post to corner post.



The Oldest House Fools You



What is said to be the oldest house in Beaufort, on New Street on the Old Point–the house what are said to be musket-slits in one basement wall–has a perforated wall beneath its side facing New Street. "Aha," I thought: "that proves that perforated walls are very old, and that all the other houses in Beaufort copied the older house and put in perforated walls." Then I talked to the present owners of the 1719 house (the date is questioned), and they told me that the perforated wall is new. Besides, it is not an exterior wall surrounding a garden, like all the other perforated walls in town: it is a new wall which seems to have been put in to ventilate the basement area. The owners also told me that the oldest house was built not on a tabby foundation but on a phosphate rock foundation (phosphate rock looks like something that came down with a meteor, but it is very hard and dense and makes a good foundation material as well as a necessary component of commercial fertilizer). Also, the musket-slits were suspicious because they were at ground level, underneath the floor of the house, and who would want to shoot at attacking Yemassee Indians from underneath one’s house?



So, perforated fences are not a sign of antiquity in the Historic District of Beaufort. Scratch that theory. I found out later, talking to one antique dealer and one expert on real estate, that perforated fences are a comparatively new addition to older houses in Beaufort, and that they began to be put around houses probably in the late nineteenth century. Though they are what might be a unique characteristic of Beaufort architecture, they are not old, compared to the houses. Perforated walls are banned in historic Charleston, because they are not old enough! But in Beaufort they are still being put around houses. I know a family from New York, for instance, with a house on Bay Street, who just installed a perforated fence, in order to conform to local customs.



That New Old Look



It turns out that you have to find a mason who will do perforated fences (it took the New Yorkers three tries to find someone who would both start and finish the job), then you have to design your fence so that your fence will not look odd next to another perforated fence on Bay St. That means you have to go to Savannah and either find a stash of impossibly expensive old brick that someone has cleaned, or you buy a kind of brick called "Old Savannah Brick" that has been manufactured to look old and decrepit while maintaining its structural integrity. We are probably talking about a $12,000 wall here, if it has any length.



Then you have to determine the height of your new but old-looking perforated brick wall. Here you have leeway, since the existing perforated fences in Beaufort come in such varying heights, from two feet on up to six or seven feet. Do you want to keep your dogs in? Or do you just want to discourage the occasional visiting toddler from straying into Bay Street? Do you want privacy from tourists, or do you want to see over the wall to the Bay view? Do you want pineapples (sign of hospitality in the South) or no pineapples, as finials on the corner posts?




And what do you want on top of your perforated wall, once it is standing? In mossy, humid Beaufort, you have some choices. On one solid wall, at St. Helena’s Church cemetery, a very fuzzy species of fern, religiously interpreted as "Resurrection fern," is protruding from the top course of bricks. "Resurrection" in this case means that the fern dies down in dry weather but miraculously returns from dead-looking to vivid green after a rain. Some people paint buttermilk or liquid manure on the tops of their brick walks or walls, to age them quickly by giving moss or lichen or mold a growth medium. And some other people with perforated walls grow hedges on top of them (yes, seriously, though I don’t know how the little hedge roots itself). The prickly hedge on top makes the fence look even more like part of the garden, and so do the various kinds of moss.

To my knowledge, there are only two types of brick walls in the Historic District–the perforated wall and the kind of solid wall around St. Helena’s Church. The wall around St. Helena’s might well have been part of a fortification at one time, because it seems too tall for a Yemassee Indian to jump. The wall is a falling-down wall, and it must be buttressed and repaired yearly, with outlying props of more bricks and with re-mortaring, to keep the rain out. It has come to resemble an American Notre Dame, with flying buttresses to keep it upright. The St. Helena wall probably is the oldest wall in town, and, like the perforated walls, it seems to do something neat: it seems to pray, because two of the three top courses come up on either side like praying hands joined at the top by the course that keeps the rain out. If the wall is symbolically Christian, perhaps the three courses on top are supposed to represent the Trinity.