AUGUSTA — Do-it-yourselfers looking to make their own personal palisade wall to ward off pesky neighbors can do so out of former, though not original, pieces of Old Fort Western.
Fort officials are selling off 1,027 cedar posts that have formed the historic 1754 fort’s palisade walls since 1988.
The palisades have been replaced with cedar posts as part of an improvement project at the fort that began last year and is expected to be done by May 15.
Rather than haul the old posts off to the Hatch Hill landfill or chip them up into compost, the city is putting them up for sale from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. this coming Saturday at the fort. If there are any left after that, they will be available for sale May 14 as well.
“They’re 26 years old, but they’ve still got a lot of good wood left in them,” Linda Novak, director and curator of the fort, said of the cedar posts that previously stood guard around the city-owned Old Fort Western site overlooking the Kennebec River. “A lot of people have been calling, asking what we were going to do with them, saying they’d like to have some of them.”
Novak said people have expressed interest in using them to build raised garden beds or split-rail fences.
Many of the posts have some rot on them, particularly on the parts that were underground, but many are also intact and most appear to have plenty of solid wood left in them.
The fort itself used some of the posts to make a three-tiered split-rail fence around the garden at the fort.
Novak said one parent said she planned to use the wood to cut it into smaller pieces to make a miniature replica of Fort Western for her kids.
Dan Nichols, associate development director for Augusta, hopes to get 100 of them to build his wife a 300-foot “forever fence” along their driveway.
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