APAD: Pull up stakes

Meaning:

   To move home. Sometimes also given as `pull up sticks'.

 

Background:

   The first thing that the English settlers to America did after landing in

   Jamestown in 1607 was to set about building a palisade to protect the

   settlement. In less than a month they had erected a triangular wooden fort,

   bounded by a palisade of wooden stakes.

 

   The habit was continued by the Pilgrim Fathers who constructed a similar

   palisade around their settlement in Plymouth, Massachusetts. This is recorded

   in a letter by John Pory to the Earl of Southampton, in 1623:

 

     "Now concerning the quality of the people ... their industry as well

     appeareth by their building, as by a substantial palisado about their

     [town]."

 

   The fear of attack by native Americans or, where there was no such fear, the

   need to mark a boundary, caused all early dwellings to be surrounded by

   paling fences. Gathering the timber and building the fences involved

   significant effort and if settlers later decided to move they would take

   their palisade with them. This was a well-enough established practice by 1640

 

   for the phrase `pull up stakes' to have been used figuratively to mean `move

   house'. That is shown in this example, from a 1640 letter by a Thomas

   Lechford, who was planning a move from New England:

 

     "I am loth to hear of a stay, but am plucking up stakes with as much speed

     as I may."

 

   The setting out and pulling up of stakes continued in a literal sense into

   the 18th century.

   ...

 

- www.phrases.org.uk [edited]

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Raising and trundling off palisades might be back-breaking work, but at least

the early settlers didn't have to apply, kowtow, or otherwise kiss anybody's ass

to move home. Until hukou, the Chinese seemed to have the same freedom. A great

uncle, I was told, pulled up stakes in the 1930s, headed north, and settled in

Manchuria. I never met him but nowadays, I wouldn't mind following his fabled

example. Only my north would be Canada.