What Lies Behind That ‘No Trespass’ Sign

I always pined for the wide open, though I grew up in suburban Maryland, hemmed in by private land and no trespass signs. Even as a boy, one with his nose in books, I knew that the East had not always been so parceled into private fiefdoms. In fact, it had once been a place where anyone could roam, more open than the West is today.

It was not until years later, though, when researching a scholarly article, that I learned a clue as to why America had abandoned a centuries-long tradition and given landowners the power to close off access to so much of the country. I kept running across the same date: 1865.

As obviously significant as that date is in U.S. history, the Civil War was not a conflict between ranchers and farmers. Evidently, something else was at work. Only when I dug into the records of South Carolina did an answer begin to take shape.

Before 1865, from the colonial period onward, the only case of pure