[fintstone]

Great work! That is a really nice fence. I put one in like that in my first house, but the posts were set professionally (relatively cheaply) by a company that would do it if you bought your materials from them (it cost about the same as just buying the materials at Home Depot). But there were no trees in that subdivision yet.

My dad and I did a barbed wire fence about that long when I was in my early teens. We did it much as his dad did. We had no truck and did it with hand tools. Over the winter, we cleared the land and burned off any stumps and removed large rocks. That summer, we cut black locust trees as nearby as possible with a crosscut saw and axe so that we would not have to carry the posts as far. Sawed each tree into 8ft lengths and then used wedges to split each section into fence posts. Sharpened one end with an axe and then dug starter holes with a post hole digger and a long bar. I held the posts while my father drove them about 3 feet in with a huge mallet. We did not use concrete as it was never necessary as the soil was still compacted and like concrete (especially with the high clay content). It seems like it took most of the summer (when not doing other farm work). That winter, we strung barbed wire. The next spring, every day after school and weekends, my father and I spaded up the land by hand and hauled in tons of manure and rotted sawdust by wheelbarrow to mix with the clay soil. We planted there later that spring. While those power tools are certainly efficient, I would not trade that time with my dad for money. I guess you cold say, we always worked harder, not smarter. Of course we could never afford anything more than the old hand tools we had.