The Massachusetts Settlement Landscape: The development of Towns (and Villages), Outline

Michael Steinitz, Massachusetts Historical Commission

 

 

1)       Towns, parishes, precincts and plantations -

        the framework of settlement
 

2)      The domestic landscape –

                    - dividing the land

  - creating farms and farmsteads

 

3)      The public landscape –

                     - town centers

                     - meeting house, common and burial ground

 

4)      The commercial landscape

          - roads and turnpikes

          - the growth of villages and hamlets

 

5)      The urban landscape

                      - the seaport towns and the maritime world

 

6)      The legacy of the landscape

                            - myths and images that reshape the past

                            - preserving the landscape

 

 

Notes on the Massachusetts Settlement Landscape by Michael Steinitz

 

I. Introduction.

 

Physical landscape—native peoples and their organization of places and the landscape.
What did the English settlers find when they settled on lands of the native peoples? How did they change the land?

 

The coming of European settlers transformed the human landscape – through the organization of towns and the creation of villages.

 

What is the distinct aspect of the Massachusetts political landscape? – the fact that it is organized entirely into 351 towns and cities. The Power Point slide show looks at some aspects of the geographic development of these towns.

 

What are the distinctly Massachusetts historic architectural landscapes ? 

Diners? Three-deckers? What else?

 

Villages  They are perhaps the most widely recognized category of historic place in  Massachusetts – perhaps the most character defining landscape feature for the state as a whole – think of Lexington and Concord and “every Middlesex village and town” through which Paul Revere rode. Or Historic Deerfield, or the Stockbridge of Norman Rockwell’s paintings.  

 

Villages very much bring people to Massachusetts as visitors and to live. Many villages are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and in many towns their architectural and visual character is protected by local historic district ordinances. But what is it exactly that is so admired and so anxiously protected from incursions by new Walgreens and McMansions?

 

 

I’d like to quote the words of John Carver, writing in 1842:

 

“No one who has ever lived or traveled at the North, can forget a New England village. In many respects it is unlike every other place where human beings congregate. Its broad streets; its graveled side-walks; its neat white houses, with their green Venetians [he means shutters] and pretty porticos; its fine old elms at the corners, and shrubbery in the court-yards, and rich meadows all about it; make it worthy of the fame it has acquired, the world over. Take the pleasantest country town elsewhere, and it lacks something of coming up to the standard of a New England village. There may be more elegance and more wealth in many a hamlet at the South, and the Middle States boast numbers of towns of great taste and beauty; yet there is wanting that air of neatness, and that true independence…, which the mountain breezes give to the population of her valleys, which associates with a New England village, all that we love in nature, with all that we admire in humanity.”

 

It’s a powerful evocation of a distinctive regional landscape; and it is indisputable that in the 1840s the Massachusetts countryside, largely deforested pastures and cultivated fields, was very much distinguished by its village centers. The New England village—the Massachusetts Village—is one of the great American place icons. It’s a great symbol for our notions of the history of communities and individualism and of the distinctiveness of New England and Massachusetts within American history. They’re part of what makes us different.  In the popular imagination what this has come to mean is that we think of Massachusetts towns as having been originally settled and organized as communal Puritan villages composed of 2-story houses surrounding common pastures or decorative greens. Prosperous farmers inhabited villages of substantial houses set clustered on dramatic hilltop settings. 

 

It's not true. It’s a tradition that has been invented.

 

Many myths and misconceptions on the origins and development of the New England Towns and Villages abound — from the view that they began with compact Puritan religious settlements built for defense and proximity to the meetinghouse— to the view that villages in New England directly replicated compact agricultural villages that existed in Britian.

 

While towns took their names from the English places the early settlers knew, the historic villages we know in Massachusetts do not derive in any direct way from English precedents. They were a new invention, emerging out of regional circumstances.

 

Towns- the mechanism of land division and real estate speculation

Inland settlement, with some early exceptions, was overwhelmingly dispersed across towns in the late 17th and 18th centuries, not clustered

 

The development of villages came later on – in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as a result of commercial development. What we call today the Massachusetts Village represents the development of towns and villages up to the early decades of the 19th century - say the 1830s – arguably the peak years of the village landscape.

 

What were the physical characteristics of the villages?

Look at the slide show maps (many from the Historical Atlas of Massachusetts) and illustrations from a series of engravings from the 1830s by the Connecticut artist, printmaker, author and publisher, John Warner Barber. His book of that period, Historical Collections of Massachusetts, provide town by town portraits in word and image.

 

II. The Development of Towns

 

Unlike other regions of the country, in New England the term town refers to a tract of incorporated municipal land, a unit of territory that has been granted powers of self-government, that in other parts of the country is usually called a township.  If you’ve grown up in New England this is pretty clear, but it’s often a source of confusion for outsiders for whom a town is something that’s bigger than a village, and smaller than a city, but not necessarily a unit of local government. In New England a town is the municipal unit in which one or more villages might be found.

 

From the start towns were a means by which the legislature—the colonial General Court—organized land ownership and settlement. Usually a grant of a tract of land was made to a group of individuals—the proprietors of the grant—who might or might not actually settle the land, but who were in charge of subdividing the land, and getting it settled by sufficient families to meet the threshold to petition the legislature to be recognized as a Town.

 

(See Dedham MAP) It’s important to realize the extent to which town boundaries changed over time. Many of the early land grants and towns were quite large. The original 1637 Dedham town grant, for example, ultimately over time was subdivided into an additional dozen towns(!), including Norwood, Walpole, Norfolk, Wrentham, Bellingham, Franklin, Medfield, Dover, Needham, Natick, Wellesley (in 1881) and Westwood (in 1897), It’s a process that’s called “hiving” off.

 

As settlement spread through these large towns, controversies frequently arose between the older settled areas and new settled areas within the town, often relating to the distance that people had to walk to get to the meetinghouse. Once people started living more than say 5 miles from the existing meetinghouse, the inconvenience of the distance and time necessary to travel back and forth began to be an issue. Meetinghouses were sometimes moved or new ones built at locations that would be more convenient to all, but more typically residents of an outlying area would petition to be separated, either as a separate parish, with its own meetinghouse within the existing town, or as an entirely separate new town.  These divisions of towns were almost always long, stressful undertakings that often took years of debate and dispute at town meetings to accomplish. 

 

By the early 18th century, after a couple generations of experimentation, it had become clear that establishing new towns of smaller initial size was a more sensible approach, and the Massachusetts General Court began granting petitions for towns that were more typically 30 - 40 square miles, that is roughly 6 miles on each side, with a meetinghouse lot located in the geographic center – which would include land not only for the meeting house, but for a burial ground and sometimes for a training ground. The settlers themselves lived in farmsteads that were dispersed throughout the town.

 

Dividing the land: house lots, upland lots, meadow. Lots were large – house lots were 30 acres, sometimes 50 acres, sometimes 100 acres.  Again the size of these lots precluded there being any clustering of settlement. 

 

War-Service Towns: See Worcester County Maps on slides: Narragansett Grants (from King Philip's War service), Canada Expedition Grants (French & Indian Wars) In the colonial era these towns were composed of loosely gathered neighborhoods of farmers. These dispersed settlements had few commercial places. There were meetinghouse centers with a training field and burial ground, perhaps a tavern and a farmhouse or two, and a system of local roads that led to the meetinghouse from the outlying farms.

 

III. THE DEVELOPMENT OF VILLAGES

 

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in the 50 years or so from 1780 to 1830, what is often called the Federal Period, there was a dramatic change in social and economic life that transformed the landscapes of these towns.

 

The rise of a commercial economy:

Improvements in farm productivity and marketing of agricultural products,

Increase in manufacturing,

Improvements in transportation and communication, - turnpikes

Greater prosperity – It was an age of improvement. Economic activity increased and became more complex.

 

As a result, all sorts of new activities began to cluster in the existing town centers. What had been the civic and religious centers of these towns, now also became commercial places. All sorts of non-farmers, village businessmen, artisans and entrepreneurs began to locate in the town centers: storekeepers, lawyers, doctors, blacksmiths, cordwainers (shoemakers), tanners, hatters, saddlemakers, harnessmakers, coopers, tinsmiths, printers. Here could be found workshops and stores, residences of non-farmers, academies, banks.

 

The meetinghouse lot often would become the town “common”, not part of colonial agricultural common pasturage or cultivation, but open space in the town center at cross roads that was “improved” in the nineteenth century.

 

THE VILLAGE FORM

 

1)      Land values around the meetinghouse center rose – and there was subdivision of the land around the meetinghouse into smaller lots to accommodate a higher density of businesses and dwellings

 

2)      Construction of substantial, new stylish residences that lined the streets leading and from the meeting house centers and framed the meetinghouse lots.

 

3)      By the 1830s the average non-industrial center village in inland Massachusetts had over two-dozen houses on small lots that also contained stables or barns, woodsheds, privies, and often gardens.

 

4)      Architecturally, many of the houses that were built in these central villages were of a stylish, urbane form meant to impress and signal the prestige of the villagers, to show enterprise and good taste. The symmetrical, classical revival architectural forms of the early 19th century included elaborate porticos, low hip roofs with balustrades, and later, temple front Greek Revival buildings.

 

5)      The meetinghouses themselves, often old and dilapidated colonial-era buildings were replaced or substantially rebuilt in this era – the classically proportioned, meetinghouse with its ornamentation and spire is a product of this early federal period of prosperity.

 

6)      Open spaces remained in the village centers in the meetinghouse lots, and with the separation of church and town in 1833, parts of these open space became town land. As part of the “improvement” of the center village, villagers sometimes fenced off these areas, and seeded them with grass – making them greens – but the movement to create an aesthetic, park-like, town commons landscape usually came later in the 19th century, when village improvement societies flourished. Following the Civil War, these areas often became the setting for commemorative monuments, tree plantings (particularly of elms), gazebos, bandstands, and flower beds.

 

 

IV: LEGACY OF THE LANDSCAPE

 

There is an Invented tradition of the New England Village.

 

The era of village development peaked in the second quarter of the 19th century.

Decline in agriculture.

Development of industrial centers elsewhere.

Railroads and rerouting of economic development to cities.

Rural depopulation.

Village centers stabilized or declined.

 

Their power as symbolic PLACES remained strong, and they became a focus of an intense romanticized, nostalgic view local and regional history in the era of the nation’s first centennial in the 1870s, a time when New England’s influence on national culture appeared to be waning. 

 

So at a time when interest in the preservation of historic homes and places was first emerging, the village, common, and substantial houses were among the first historic landmarks that served as symbols of people’s imaginative conceptions of the colonial era.

The real colonial era of Massachusetts towns with shabby, and dispersed farm houses and isolated meetinghouse centers, had largely been forgotten.