The New England Village
Author: Joseph S. Wood
Publisher: JHU Press
Published: 2002-09-24
Total Pages: 254
ISBN-13: 9780801866135
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNew England colonists, Wood argues, brought with them a cultural predisposition toward dispersed settlements within agricultural spaces called "towns" and "villages." Rarely compact in form, these communities did, however, encourage individual landholding. By the early nineteenth century, town centers, where meetinghouses stood, began to develop into the center villages we recognize today. Just as rural New England began its economic decline, Wood shows, romantics associated these proto-urban places with idealized colonial village communities as the source of both village form and commercial success.