So the title of this is a bit strange but I wanted to post this to see if I'm not the only one that has encountered this.
I bought Renedra's weatherboard church and their generic wooden plank farmhouse (The one that Perry Miniatures sells as being loosely based on Meade's Headquarters or just as a generic /ACW/AWI farmhouse).
All of these kits come with the same generic Renedra fencing, their five-rail fences and their picket fences.
Now here's the weird thing. I started gluing together all the picket fencing pieces and quickly realized that they are all oriented BACKWARDS. What I mean is that when you go to glue a corner to make a 90 degree turn, the slots are ALWAYS arranged in a way that wants you to have the "interior" of the fence turned outwards! That is, the side of the fence that has the horizontal supports which is the side typically facing into the yard.
Now I thought I was losing my mind so I went to look at some typical historical as well as some modern photos of classic picket fencing:
I've never personally seen modern or historical picket fencing where the horizontal supports were turned outward (in relation to the property they were enclosing).
The gate is a bit more of a mystery as some photos do seem to show the "interior diagonal wood" of the gate faced outward, while the rest of the fence is the opposite.
Curiously, the front box cover of the Perry/Renedra farmhouse show the gate in this "backwards" fashion with the interior wood turned outward:
So as I said the entire sprue of picket fencing as well as the gates that come with the kits are all oriented facing what seems to be the wrong way.
However – then I went and looked just for ha has at pictures of Meade's Headquarters at Gettysburg and all the restored fencing they built:
And wouldn't you know it all of the fencing around the headquarters has the interior of the fence facing outwards in relation to how it surrounds the actual house!! I have to believe that the people who worked on the restoration project had historical references and information that instructed them to put the fences in that way.
So now I'm really confused. Was it a typical thing historically to just install picket fencing facing both ways, depending on the personal preference of the property owner? It would seem then that the Perry brothers had some type of specific information about the fencing around that house to actually make the kit designed to face backwards.
In any event it's not the biggest problem in the world, I was just curious as to your thoughts on this topic. Historical fencing and modeling it accurately is something that comes up fairly frequently in wargaming circles. And there definitely ARE some types of miniature fencing that are quite incorrect for the 18th/19th Centuries and some types that we know are correct.
But this one is a bit more nuanced as it's a type of fencing that was so common, so universal that how it's used and how it was used back then appears to have some surprising variations!
