As someone who frequently blames car-dependence for many of the USA's social problems, this passage really stood out:
The large size of the townships and the long distances
between dwellings have had much to do with making social
coherence difficult. A single township may embrace four or
five communities two or three miles apart, with no common
rallying-point but the annual townmeeting. Not only do
these detached sections get nothing socially from the
township as a whole, but they are not, as a rule, populous
or compact enough to have any appreciable social activity
of their own. In this respect our farming communities are
at a distinct disadvantage as compared with those of
France and most of the other countries of the Old World.
There the tillers of the soil live closely together, in
almost crowded villages, from which they go forth to their
work in the outlying fields.
I wonder why even early in the USA's history, before cars, before railroads, we distributed housing so widely as to inhibit socialization? I guess it's because towns grew up around separate farmsteads, instead of a bunch of non-owners living in town, working fields around town for an estate owner? I usually assume that this USA-specific "missing middle" of dense housing is a result of car culture and the suburban nightmare we've created across the country. In fact, I specifically chose to live in a small, dense New England town because I like that kind of socialization and walkability. It is curious to hear someone complaining about the same issue, over 100 years ago, for entirely different reasons.
I know double-commenting is frowned upon, but this quote also stood out to me as a bike nerd:
The least important, perhaps, and yet to some of
us the saddest thing about the decay of New England
country life has been the disappearance of the
hospitable wayside tavern. Something similar, it is
hoped, may be brought in by the bicycle. It is much
to be feared, however, that the new bicycle road-house
will be nothing more hospitable than a mammoth stand-up
lunch-counter.
I wonder what these wayside taverns were like. Nowadays, I find myself happy enough with "stand-up lunch-counters" when I bicycle tour (ride self-supported long distances by bicycle). I also find myself greatly appreciating the dirt roads present in Vermont and much of New England, since they slow down car traffic and are honestly much more pleasant to bike on than poorly maintained pavement roads. Meanwhile, this author laments the poor state of (presumably dirt) carriage roads across rural New England. It's interesting how I seem to agree with the base thoughts and preferences of the author, but we have inverted preferences on these things (for similar reasons).
I wonder what this author thought about the automobile.
It's much easier to appreciate the dirt roads when you're a tourist. Having grown up on a dirt road in New England, I can say that I'd much rather it were paved.
Hm, I live one a farm in the Swedish countryside where part the road was paved a number of years ago and I can't say I appreciate the "improvement". Cars speed by faster, it is harder on horses' hooves, frost damage is harder to repair. Since it is too hilly here to skate and the pavement type - oil-drenched gravel - is too coarse for it anyway that argument doesn't hold either. I can bike, ride my motorbike and tractor just as well on the gravel so... where's the upside?
As a New England resident, I agree. The dirt roads are nice because it's really hard for cars to exceed 35MPH or so. I find bicycling on dirt roads is actually better than pavement (smoother, better grip) when the roads are well constructed and well taken care of. Except for our annual 2-3 weeks of "peanut butter season."
It's relatively easier to have a pint or two and ride a horse or drive a wagon than it is to do the same and ride an old bicycle. I would assume you could also water, feed, and rest your horse at the tavern, which a bicycle did not require.
Presumably they mean creating a daughter comment to their own top-level comment? Though I'm not personally aware of any particular convention against it.
> I wonder why even early in the USA's history, before cars, before railroads, we distributed housing so widely as to inhibit socialization?
It might seem strange but there's a lot of people out there who don't hate you but also don't want to hear from you unless it's on their own terms.
> I usually assume that this USA-specific "missing middle" of dense housing is a result of car culture and the suburban nightmare we've created across the country.
The south and Midwest were built before cars. I don't think this hypothesis tracks. It seems like it's just a popular topic on HN that exists among a younger, city-living crowd who are searching for answers. Answers which they'd like to use to influence national policy, whether it fits or not.
Edit: that's not to say we can't have more spaces that have less or no cars, but folks here use "car-free" a lot, and not just with respect to their locality.
>The south and Midwest were built before cars. I don't think this hypothesis tracks
Reread the portion you quoted and misinterpreted, with its context. They are responding to a specific passage from the article, which predates the automobile, about said sprawl.
I may be wrong but I'm guessing it's because in europe the peasants didn't own the land. The hub and spoke design of old world villages was beneficial to the landlords, not the workers.
I think this is kind of true, but not fully. It's not that the peasants didn't own the land, though certainly many didn't, it's that they didn't farm contiguous rectangular fields like is common in America. In older farming there would be two or three fields for crop rotation, and then different parts of the field would be owned by different people. So you might have a bit over here, a bit over there, etc. You would grow different crops on different areas of the field, and then have a vegetable garden near your house. In America, relatively early on, instead we ended up with farmers who had a single contiguous piece of land where they primarily farmed a single crop.
Seeing like a state covers this - it could be that in the interest of making ownership legible (while dispossessing the Native Americans), people could only buy contiguous land.
In particular, I'm reminded of the piece on how the tsar and soviets both tried to get rid of the strip system that the peasants liked because it was easy to farm and manage from their level.
> I usually assume that this USA-specific "missing middle" of dense housing is a result of car culture and the suburban nightmare we've created across the country.
The rural areas are just that, rural. But cities are where the problem of the suburban nightmare take hold and they weren’t an issue for most of American history because a city was a city and the countryside was the countryside.
This changed with the highway infrastructure, gutting of city transit like existing streetcars, etc. and trying to sell the idyllic countryside at mass scale that was for a brief period “achievable” via personal automobile.
Socialization doesn’t have to be because of density. It can be between homesteaders who pass each other by once in awhile or meet up at the market place that exists in the town. The problem with suburbs is that they don’t reproduce any of the benefits of city life or productive rural life.
This article contrasts two different modes of rural areas.
There is the US-style rural, where the homesteads are widely separated. The house is on the farm, and far from the neighbors.
Then there is the European (and really most of the rest of the world) style of rural, where there is a dense little village and the farmers travel to their fields, rather than live in the middle of the fields.
Almost by definition the Europeans coming to the US weren't happy with their living arrangements in Europe, so it's not surprising they came up with different arrangements. And establishing a homestead on what was wildland didn't leave much time for social events anyway, so also not surprising socialization wasn't a priority.
> I wonder why even early in the USA's history, before cars, before railroads, we distributed housing so widely as to inhibit socialization?
Lack of endemic warfare after the initial period of settlement and being settled from the least communalist culture on Earth at the time. Farmers clustered in towns far from their fields because they were more defensible from raiders. This wasn’t a problem in the US once the local area had killed all the local Indians. With cheap land you can have large farmsteads, large enough that the nearest settlement is quite far away.
Those arrivals in 1600s were, eg, landing in Boston then going out any buying a plot of land to work and build their future. So there were these larger parcels available, and you'd cut some trees to a) clear some land for farming and b) build your new house.
Folk weren't necessarily able to acquire an existing home then some land out of town.
>I usually assume that this USA-specific "missing middle" of dense housing is a result of car culture and the suburban nightmare we've created across the country
I suspect the layout of European farming communities is a holdover from feudalism, when serfs worked the land on behalf of the lord of the manor, who owned all the land.
They probably found conditions in the New World much more desirable, where they could own their own farm. And when they owned their own farm, they probably found it much more convenient to live close to the fields and barns and livestock that they also owned.
I live in an old New England farm town in a house from the early 1800s. (The town was founded in 1653.)
Looking at maps from the 1800s, it was always pretty spread out. There is a small town green with a couple old churches, library, cemetery, and town hall. And there used to be some mills along the river. But it was mostly fairly spread out farming.
As you suggest, in England and I assume other areas of Europe there would be a more distinct village with a place dating to that time.
From my dim recollections of a long-ago history book - back around that time, rural New England was a pretty dire "agricultural rust belt" - because none of the climate, geography, or typical size of farms there could compete with "newer" farms in parts of the country further west. And railroads were bringing the cheaper products of those farms east, to directly compete with New England's small, old, rocky farms.
This is accurate. The soil in the Midwest is unbelievably fertile especially compared to the Northeast. Also, you have a longer growing cycle and transportation is significantly cheaper. I believe that Vermont agriculture was at its peak in the 1700s and shrank every decade since.
Amazing how little attitudes change over the years. This reads just like a modern Bostonian complaining about the ways and inhabitants of places like Springfield or Fall River.
That said, much to the credit of Mr. Sandborn, unlike many, perhaps most, of his modern counterparts he does not implicitly assume superiority to the people about who's plight he writes nor does he proclaim that fixing his favorite pet issues using his favorite pet solutions will suddenly fix everyone's problems.
The first few paragraphs of the article read like the intro of an H.P. Lovecraft novel. Certainly explains why he often chose the New England farms and small towns as the setting for unspeakable horrors!
" The same influences that caused the depletion and the decay of Dickerman — the rush to the gold-fields, the civil war, the emigration to the prairies, the large cities, and the manufacturing towns, and the feeling of isolation and lack of opportunity resulting from this emigration — have been operative throughout all rural New England with more or less disastrous results.
Another influence, just as generally operative, has been an exaggerated notion of the luxury and gentility of city life. To hail from Boston or from New York is to be both wealthy and aristocratic, according to the typical rural mind, which groups city people together in a single social stratum, without question as to where they live or how they live, and assigns farmers, whatever their individual qualities, to a social stratum lower by many degrees.
This absurd notion has not only driven country people away from the country, but has also demoralized those whom it has not driven away. Hence has come the pathetic desire of such as find themselves doomed to live elsewhere than in cities to imitate, as nearly as their imperfect knowledge permits, the manner of life of city folk. They endeavor to dress as city people dress, to furnish their rooms as city people do, even to readjust their houses to the city mode. They remodel a fine, sensible old homestead into something that is neither a farmhouse nor a town-house, but an ugly nondescript, with the disadvantages of both and the advantages of neither; or they demolish a house honestly built to stand for generations to make way for a gingerbread sham of a villa, as much out of place in the midst of farm surroundings as bric-àbrac would be in a stable. They discard their heirlooms — handsome, heavy, antique furniture, and rare china—for upto-date gewgaws, with neither durability, usefulness, nor beauty to recommend them.
The women waste no end of time and money, and fret and fuss their lives out into the bargain, in a vain and ludicrous attempt to keep pace, from season to season, with the changing fashions in dresses and hats. Furthermore, this grotesque exaltation of city conduct has bred a contempt not only for the healthy outdoor work that women formerly did, but also for menial labor of every sort even within doors."
And
"
It is a trite saying, and only partially true, but true enough to bear repeating, that if the average farmer did his work with the same intelligence that the average business man uses, he would succeed as well as the latter. The farmer, instead of studying markets systematically, makes wild hits at them. Because peas brought a good price a previous season, owing to their scarcity, he plants ten times as many peas as usual; forgetting that everybody else has planted peas for the same reason. If he lives near enough to a city to make dairying and market-gardening profitable, he is likely to become possessed with the desire to raise only one or two vegetables ; or he ignores the proper rotation of crops; or he is constantly sacrificing permanent profit for ready cash, taking everything out of the land, and putting nothing into it. After leaving his wagons, tools, and machines exposed to all the elements, he is amazed and angry that he so often has to buy new ones, curses them for being poorly made, and inveighs boisterously against the dishonesty of the time.
Such a farmer seems never to learn that clubs and families in cities are willing to pay a high price for thoroughly honest products ; for when he finds persons who might easily be made permanent buyers from him, he estranges them by inflicting upon them dishonest things. Doing little to make his produce attractive, he nevertheless devotes a great deal of ingenunity to arranging it dishonestly, — “ deaconing it,” to use the significant country phrase. He " deacons ” his fruit, his vegetables, everything in fact, even his eggs, — selling as fresh eggs that have been packed all winter, and taking it as a sort of personal affront that the men who stamp and guarantee their eggs can command a fancy price all the year. Although the farmer is perhaps not more dishonest than other men, it is probable that he suffers more from his dishonesty than most others : partly because he deals so largely with perishable materials, in which fraud is easily and quickly detected ; and partly because he is less subtle in his deceits, and less apt in defending himself against the consequences of detection. One year when the best apples were hard to dispose of, a certain district Grange offered its members a chance to send apples to Liverpool. Some took advantage of the situation to get rid of their poor fruit. The Liverpool agents very naturally felt aggrieved, and the Liverpool market was closed to the farmers of that district for the rest of the season, during which many barrels of good fruit rotted.
"
