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July 1897 Issue
Explore
July 1897 Cover
This magazine has been fully digitized as a part of The Atlantic's
archive. Each article originally printed in this magazine is
available here, complete and unedited from the historical print. Read
more from this magazine, or explore the full archive.

  *  
    The Making of the Nation

    Woodrow Wilson
  *  
    The Juggler

    Charles Egbert Craddock
  *  
    The Stony Pathway to the Woods

    Olive Thorne Miller
  *  
    A Day in June

    Alice Choate Perkins
  *  
    A Life Tenant

    Ellen Mackubin
  *  
    Neg Creol

    Kate Chopin

The Future of Rural New England


By Alvan F. Sanborn
July 1897 Issue
Share

THE township of Dickerman, in the interior of one of the New England
States, has a large area, with a scattered population of about
fifteen hundred souls. Farming is the only industry of the people.
The roads, bad at all seasons, and in the spring almost impassable,
are so encroached upon by untrimmed brush that wagons have much ado
to pass one another. Such guide-boards as are not prone and crumbling
are battered and illegible. The mail-boxes at the crossroads are as
untrustworthy as worn-out pockets. The orchards are exceptionally
picturesque, but they owe their picturesqueness to the unpruned,
scraggly, hollow-trunked condition of the trees. The fields wear a
disappointed, discouraged air, and the stone walls and rail fences
which outline them ---- they cannot by any stretch of the imagination
be said to inclose them -- sag at all possible angles, uncertain in
their courses as drunken men without guides. Piles of magnificent
logs, valuable even where lumber is cheap, are rotting by the
roadsides, and stacks of cord-wood, long ready to be transported,
stand in the forests.

Many of the farmhouses have been tenantless for years. Many of the
occupied houses are so gray, moss-grown, and dilapidated that they
are only a trifle less ghastly than the tenantless ones. They are so
weather-beaten as to retain only the faintest traces of the paint
that once brightened them. Their windows have the traditional stuffed
panes, and the blinds -- when there are any -- have broken slats. The
chimneys, ragged of outline and almost mortarless, threaten to topple
over in the first high wind. The outbuildings are flanked by
fencerail buttresses, lest they fall over or break apart. The
door-yards are overgrown with rank weeds and overrun with pigs and
poultry ; the few flowers, which fidelity to country tradition has
planted there, being forced to seek refuge behind screens of rusty
wire netting or palisades of unsightly sticks. The barn-yards are
littered, miry, and foul-smelling, and the stock within them -- with
the exception of the pigs, which thrive -- are lean and hungry.

Even the few houses that have not been allowed to fall into disrepair
have a sullen, forbidding appearance. The blinds are closed or the
curtains are drawn at all but the kitchen windows. Seen for the first
time, they suggest a recent death and an approaching funeral. Every
day, however, year in and year out, it is the same with them ; they
are perpetually funereal. Spick-and-spanness they have, but without
brightness, and thrift, but without hospitality.

Dickerman is traversed by a railway, with a station at the "
Corners," as that section of the township is called which contains
the post-office, the town-house, two stores, two churches, and a
squalid hotel, and which therefore comes a little nearer than any
other part to being the village proper. Here are also a deserted
store, abandoned saw and grist mills, a long-disused academy, a
neglected cemetery, and rather more than a due proportion of empty
and dilapidated dwellings. The deserted store has never been deprived
of its fittings ; the dustcoated shelves, counters, anil glass
showcases, the rust-incrusted scales, the centre stove and the circle
of armchairs about it, all remaining in their places, as any one may
see who takes the pains to clean a spot for peering through one of
the bedaubed windows.

It is more than twenty years since the wheel of the village mill
stopped because of the death of its owner, who left no children. The
mill is a sad ruin now, almost roofless, two of its side-walls prone
on the ground, its machinery oxidizing and falling to pieces, and the
piles of sawed and unsawed lumber decomposing around it. It is longer
still -- more than thirty years -- since the academy closed its doors
to pupils. The academy building was used for a variety of purposes
afterwards -- even as a dwelling -- before the ultimate and complete
desertion that is now its lot. Its sign has remained in place through
all its vicissitudes, and, though badly weather-beaten, would still
be legible to an expert decipherer of in scriptions.

There are Catholic communities, both in America and in the Old World,
where an extreme wretchedness in the dwellings is at once partially
explained by the richness and beauty of the churches. But not so in
Dickerman. On the contrary, both the Dickerman churches are of a
piece with their surroundings. The Congregational Church, more than a
century old (" Orthodox " is the name it still goes by), was a worthy
structure in its day, and would be so yet had it been kept in good
repair. Alas, it is only the ghost of its former pretentious self!
Its sills are badly rotted. Its spire and belfry have been shattered
by lightning, and imperfectly restored. Its roof is leaky, the
clapboards of its walls are warped and blistered, and its heavy bell,
once sweet of tone, is cracked and dissonant. The Baptist Church,
built only a few years ago, mainly at the expense of a church
building society, is one of the shoddily constructed, many-gabled
atrocities due to the malign influence of the so-called Queen Anne
restoration. Its original coat of paint of many colors has mostly
soaked into the surrounding soil. Its panes of stained glass, as they
have been broken from time to time, have been replaced by ordinary
window-glass, with piebald, uncanny results. The present town-house
(the original town-house was burned several years ago), the only
public building in the place, comports well with the churches, being
a square, squat, unpainted thing, with so striking a resemblance to a
barn that it would surely be taken for one, were it not for its lack
of barn doors, its isolated and honorable position in the centre of
the village common, and its adornment by a bulletin-board thickly
plastered with lists of voters, town-meeting warrants, and legal
notices in large variety.

In a word, a stranger entering Dickerman for the first time could not
fail to be astounded by the marks of desolation and decay on every
hand. To him, the most conspicuous evidence that it was or had been a
populated town would be the closeness of the gravestones in the
graveyard ; the best evidence of business enterprise, a freshly
painted undertaker's sign, bearing the brisk announcement that
coffins, caskets, and burial-robes are always ready ; the one touch
of beauty, a magnificent double row of aged elms leading up to the
forsaken academy ; and the one patch of warm color visible, the
flaming circus posters with which both the outside and the inside of
the Orthodox Church sheds perennially bloom.

When first I saw the crumbling crofters' huts of the Scottish
Highlands, I felt that I could never see anything sadder. I had not
then seen the deserted farms of my own New England hills. When I
visited them, I recognized instantly a sadder sight than the
crofters' huts ; decay in a new country being as much more appalling
than decay in an old country as the loss of faculties in youth is
more appalling than the loss of them in age.

What Dickerman is in appearance, a desolate, destitute community,
that, it is in reality. To begin with homely and material conditions,
even at the risk of seeming pettiness, a word must be said regarding
the food of its inhabitants. The Dickerman diet is the most
unwholesome possible. Pork in one form or another is its staple, -- "
meat " and pork, " hearty food " and pork, are used as synonyms; and
pork is supplemented mainly with hot cream-of-tartar and saleratus
biscuit, doughnuts, and pies. The sanitary, not to mention the
epicurean possibilities of the meats, vegetables, mushrooms, and
fruits within easy reach, either are not known or are ignored. The
results are just what might be expected. The men are listless,
sullen, stolid. Chronic dyspepsia and other internal disorders are
common. That their constitutions are not completely undermined is due
largely to the power of resistance that life in the open air gives
them. The women, who have not the advantage of outdoor living, who
indeed are by necessity or choice quite as much confined within doors
as their sisters of the cities, suffer frightfully. They take refuge
(as men would turn to drink) in floods of unwholesome patent
medicine, and in the nostrums of quacks who appear at regular
intervals in the village, only to make a bad state of health a worse
one. Small wonder that as a class they are pale, haggard, prematurely
old, shrill, ill-tempered, untidy, and inefficient in their
housekeeping. To the physical and sensuous delights of the country --
a little fishing and hunting on the part of the men excepted -- one
sex is as indifferent as the other.

The social life is pinched and bare. The only organizations are the
churches and a moribund lodge of Good Templars. Of neighborliness
there is little, and that little consumes itself so entirely in the
retailing of petty scandal that there is nothing left for
beneficence. To the sights and sounds of nature -- the spring flowers,
the summer insects, the autumn foliage, the winter chiaroscuro, the
chants of birds, brooks, and woodlands-- the people are deaf and
blind. The freshness of the morning and the glowing colors of the
sunset stir no more emotion in them than in their kine.

The schools are held in poorly equipped buildings, taught by girls
without training or enthusiasm, and attended by children devoid of
ambition. One might almost say they are as bad as they could be. The
Sunday-schools are even worse. Except the two Sunday-school
libraries, which are little better than nothing, there is no
circulating library in the whole township. Memoirs of martyr
missionaries and antiquated books of devotion are among the heirlooms
of many families ; they are held in profound respect, but are never
read. Such other hooks as appear on the tables are those the owners
have been wheedled into purchasing by clever book agents, --
subscription books all: campaign Lives of candidates for the
presidency, county histories, cookbooks. sermons of evangelists and
emotional preachers, Home Treasuries of prose and poetry ; above all,
books of etiquette. The denominational religious weeklies, the
cheaper fashion and housekeeping periodicals, the fifty-cent story
papers (whose real business is a traffic in notions by post), and the
stanch old party organs (daily, semi-weekly, and weekly) enter some
of the households. But the real, the typical reading of Dickerman,
the reading of men and women, young and old, is the sensational
newspaper of the worst kind, especially the Sunday edition, which is
sold at every cross-roads in New England, even where the railway has
not yet penetrated.

One is not surprised to find a dearth of public spirit. The civic
sense of Dickerman manifests itself once a year only, at
town-meeting, chiefly in reducing the regular and necessary
appropriations to the lowest possible limit, in protesting against
innovations on the ground of burdensome taxes, and in quarreling over
trifles. In fact, were it not for the fears of each of the several
sections of the township that it would get less than its share of the
public moneys, and for the widespread desire to hold office, which
finds profit, in encouraging these petty sectional jealousies, there
would hardly be any public appropriations whatever in Dickerman.
Civic honesty, naturally enough, is at the same low ebb as civic
spirit. The buying and selling of votes has been in vogue for years,
and has not been as much lessened by the introduction of the secret
ballot as in larger communities, where secrecy of any sort is more
practicable. Only lately, the chairman of the board of selectmen was
kept from foreclosing a mortgage solely by the threat of his
mortgagee to make public the amounts that he and others had received
from the official for their votes in the preceding election.
Liquorselling under a state prohibitory law is condoned by the
selectmen for pecuniary considerations, these being tacitly
understood to be legitimate perquisites of the office of selectman.

The two churches of Dickerman are not the dispensing centres of
sweetness and light that we would fain believe all religious
organizations to be. The Orthodox Church, as immutable in its methods
as in its doctrines, is cold, unaggressive, self-righteous, and
contemptuous of everything religious or anti-religious that is not
part and parcel of its tradition. The Baptist Church, equally
conservative in matters of doctrine, is nevertheless committed to
sensationalism of method, and it is a poor year indeed when it does
not manage to produce at least one genuine excitement. It indulges in
fierce and frequent tirades against free-thinking, worldly
amusements, and Sabbath-breaking, and, for purposes of edification,
imports evangelists, Bible readers, leaders of praying bands, total
abstinence apostles, refugee Armenians, anti-Catholic agitators,
educated freedmen. and converted Jews. The churchgoers, while they
are sadly lacking in the positive virtues of honesty, generosity, and
brotherly love, are as a class fairly faithful to the code of a
conventional negative morality that makes it incumbent upon them to
be temperate and orderly, at least in public. The churches are thus a
valuable restraining force. Furthermore, they discharge an important
social function in bringing together, regularly, people who would
otherwise not be brought together at all in an organized way. Barren,
then, as the life of Dickerman is with its churches, it would be
still more barren without them. The social immorality of rural New
England is a subject that does not fall directly in our way, but it
ought to be said that the good people who take it for granted that
country life develops social purity probably do not know the true
condition of country life anywhere ; certainly they do not know it in
New England. If the whole truth were told about the people of
Dickerman in this respect, it would be sad truth. An eminent American
has recently been urging the protection of the morals of the city
against the country. Novel as the argument seems, it is none the less
a sound one.

The foregoing description of life in Dickerman is not exaggerated.
Its outward dilapidation and the emptiness of its inner life could
not be exaggerated. But there are, of course, individuals who are
intelligent, honest, large-hearted. And things have not always been
at such a pass there. The very dilapidation, destitution, and decay
are eloquent, as tombstones are eloquent, of a life that has been, of
a bygone golden age. Sixty years ago Dickerman was one of the most
flourishing farming communities in its State. It was an important
coaching station on a main road, with a roomy and hospitable
road-house, whose tap-room flip, jollity, and repartee enjoyed an
interstate reputation. Then, as now, except that the sawmill and
gristmill were always buzzing, farming was its only industry. The
farms were well tilled without the assistance of machinery, and the
farmbuildings were kept in good repair. The farmers were
hard-working, thrifty, and alert; the farmers' wives were efficient
out of doors and within doors, and as well able as the men to
withstand a pork diet, if that was then the fashion. Sons and
daughters alike were expected to do their share towards the family's
maintenance during the busy season, in recompense for which they were
allowed to devote themselves heartily to the winter school. This
winter school was invariably taught by a man, usually a college
student; the work of the colleges then being arranged to make
teaching in winter possible. The relation of the teacher to his
pupils was a highly personal one ; hence the ready transmission of
enthusiasm and the development of individuality. Dickerman Academy
was the pride not only of the township, but of a large rural district
from which it drew boarding-pupils. Even to this day a few of the
older citizens who still hold to the Dickerman tradition will name to
you the eminent judges, members of Congress, Senators, and clergymen
to whom Dickerman Academy was an alma mater. A weekly lyceum was held
in the academy building during the winters months, and a
singing-school in the schoolhouse. Neighborhood social events were
frequent, hearty, and wholesome. The church (there was only one then)
wras so conducted as to afford, indirectly, large opportunities for
the interchange of courtesies, news, and ideas. It was generously
supported, and so close was the union of its interests with those of
the town that fidelity to the one meant practically fidelity to the
other. Altogether it was a healthy, homogeneous life, a little slow,
perhaps, but far from lethargic, and productive of much that was
worth while, especially of the thing the best worth while of all
things, -- character.

What has brought about the change in Dickerman ? First, there was the
discovery of gold in California, with its promises of large fortunes
to all who were enterprising enough to go across the plains. Some
went from Dickerman, -- the most ardent and adventurous of those whose
careers were not mapped out for them, a few even of those to whom a
fair success in life was already assured. Those who were left behind
had to be philosophers to remain serene under the fabulous stories
that came to them, through the mails, from those who had gone among
the first; and not all stood this test.

Later, the railway came to Dickerman, establishing quick connection
with the manufacturing towns and cities, just then entering on a
period of extraordinary activity, and with the New England
metropolis. The reports of the high and steady wages to be earned in
the shoeshops and in the cotton and woolen mills made the young
people even more restless than the reports from the gold-fields had
made them, -- the shops and the mills were so much nearer, -- and many
young women, as well as young men, went forth to try their fortunes.

The civil war called a number away. Of these, some of course were
killed in battle ; others, after their discharge, yielded to the
enticements of the cities, and never went back to the farms. Of those
who returned to Dickerman to live, a part were physically disabled,
or were demoralized by dissipated habits contracted during their camp
life.

Finally, the emigration which set in from New England to the Western
prairies, and which brought the relatively small and barren home
farms into an illdeserved contempt, took a large part of those who
were left and were worth taking. By these successive losses of
population the town was at last so far impoverished that no great
attraction from without was necessary to keep up the drain, for the
very deadness and dullness within exerted a strong expulsive force ;
depletion itself being a sufficient reason for further depletion.
There was once a saying current to the effect that as soon as a boy
was able to walk, he walked away from Maine. So it came to be at
Dickerman, and has been ever since: as soon as a boy has become able
to walk, he has walked away from Dickerman. And, pray, why not ? What
inducement could he have to remain ? Instead of leaving a good place
to live in for one that might or might not be better, as the first
emigrants did, he was merely leaving a bad place to live in for a
place that could not possibly be worse.

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-abrac 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.

If these attempts to put away old country fashions were genuine
reachings out towards a higher life, there would be no good reason
for deploring them; but they are so plainly mere affectations that
they are thoroughly pernicious. The standards they are based upon are
ready-made importations, not the natural and healthy outgrowth of
rustic conditions. The result is glaring incongruity; and incongruity
is invariably either ludicrous or pathetic, never constructive. A
farmer might as well try to plough in a dress suit as a farming
community try to ape the manners of a metropolis. The undermining of
character necessarily involved in such a proceeding is its worst
consequence. Wasteful expenditure is an immediate result, for
peddlers and sharp-dealing tradespeople know this rural weakness and
take advantage of it. The country people, being hopelessly under the
spell of the notion that they must have things exactly as city people
have them, are easily beguiled by cleverly exaggerated advertisements
and voluble chatter into believing that many unnecessary things are
necessary, and that it costs nothing to buy on the accursed
installment plan. They purchase pianos and organs on which they never
learn to play; reclining - chairs whose mechanism is so defective
that they refuse to recline except at highly inopportune moments;
hanging - lamps, rarely lighted, which, when lighted, are unfit to
read, to write, or to sew by ; smart sets of parlor furniture, whose
stuffing of Spanish moss takes impressions and keeps them, as putty
does ; plush albums that will not hold color even in the dim light of
the best room; spectacles and eyeglasses that do the eyes positive
harm; ear-drums that give no aid to the deaf; and folding-beds and
bed-lounges whose only possible excuse for existence is the lack of
space in a city flat, -- space, so dull is perversity, being the one
thing above all others in which country people are privileged not to
economize. It is surprising how much these foolish purchases cost.
Only one who is familiar with living on a small margin can know how
far the exchequer of the average country family is demoralized by
them. A sixty-five-dollar cooking-stove that was not needed, whatever
its merits, the organ that is never played, or the unlovely plush
album may be the very thing that precludes the possibility of closing
the year out of debt.

When a young man, with only his hands or his untrained brain to
depend upon for a living, deliberately refuses to accept an average
farm from his father as a gift, subject to the condition that he
shall live on it and work it, -- a thing that is constantly occurring
in New England, -- the natural conclusion is that the young man sees
no profit in farming; and though in exceptional eases his refusal may
have other than financial reasons, the conclusion is generally a
sound one. The fact that farming as ordinarily carried on does not
pay is a highly important factor in the present situation. Most New
England farmers are up to their eyes in debt ; overburdened with real
estate and chattel mortgages which they can never hope to pay ;
constantly harassed by the insistence of a dozen other obligations
which they can never hope to meet; more than satisfied if they are
able to keep up the interest on their mortgages, keep the town
waiting for their taxes, and get extension of time on their notes.
But it would be instructive to know whether the actual profits on
capital and labor invested in New England farming are any smaller
to-day than they were formerly, or whether it is the foolhardy
attempt to lead a city life in a country environment that makes them
appear to be reduced. The farmers themselves believe the profits to
be much smaller, but their belief is hardly conclusive, inasmuch as
in the first place they are prejudiced observers, and in the second
place, for what reason I know not, they are the most incorrigible
grumblers in the world. The proverbial discontent of the laboring man
is as nothing to theirs. Besides the government, which we all decry
on occasion as a matter of habit, and which may therefore be left out
of the account, the farmer has three favorite objects of abuse, -- the
railroads, the speculating capitalists, and the middlemen.

That the speculating capitalists play with farm products as they
would with cards is notorious. That railroads sometimes impose
exorbitant freights and bribe legislatures, to their own advantage
and the farmers' confusion, is well known. That the middlemen get
more than their proper share of the profit, though not entirely clear
in view of the risks they run, is not unlikely. If we grant that the
farmer is right in believing himself the victim of these men. we see
only the more clearly his own inferiority. In truth, the failure of
the average New England farmer to make a good living is probably due
quite as much to his incapacity as to the extravagance of his
imitations of city life, on the one hand, and the impositions of his
economic masters, on the other hand. This incapacity is made up of
unintelligence, shiftlessness. and dishonesty in about equal parts.

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.

The prime cause of the impoverishment of the social life of rural New
England has been, of course, the impairment of vital force by the
loss of great numbers of worthy people, but this cause alone does not
entirely explain the decline. 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. There is nothing in their situation to prevent their life
from being as highly organized as if they were not tillers of the
soil at all.

In Dickerman and Indian Ridge (as I described the latter in The
Atlantic Monthly for May) two true if extreme types of contemporary
New England rural life have been presented ; one showing progress at
its best, the other showing decay at its worst. There are few
Dickermans, there are still fewer Indian Ridges. Most New England
farming towns range themselves between these two types in point of
character; they are not so dead as Dickerman, and not so energetic as
Indian Ridge. That the country in general, however, has slipped back,
no one who knows it can doubt. But several influences which in a
measure counteract the general tendency to decay must be mentioned.
Village Improvement Societies, though varying greatly in their
efficiency, have brought much benefit to many localities. The Grange,
while doing little enough of the sort of service that was expected of
it in the reform of economic conditions, is working social and
intellectual miracles. The Home Culture Clubs and the Chautauqua
Circles and Assemblies must be admitted to have given an intellectual
stimulus to country life. An educational unity, productive of better
schools in towns of scattered population, has been effected by the
simple device of free transportation to and from a centrally located
school. Public libraries have increased in number, and the
Sunday-school libraries of some of the towns not yet provided with
public libraries have been so far liberalized as to prove not
unworthy substitutes. The beauty of the memorial library buildings
and churches erected here and there by wealthy individuals, and the
improvement that has taken place in the architecture of the railway
stations, are doing something for the development of taste.

I venture a few words, then, at the risk of blundering badly, as to
the future. Farming communities which like Indian Ridge have held out
successfully against the powerful disintegrating forces of the last
half - century have thereby proved themselves possessed of so much
inherent virility that their life may be depended upon to continue
vigorous, whatever transformations it may undergo. Then the trolley
roads are rapidly covering Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and
Connecticut with a network that is slowly and surely redistributing
the population ; it seems almost inevitable that a great part of the
present rural area of these three States will ultimately be included
in the suburbs of their numerous and widely scattered industrial
centres and of their dozen or more larger cities. When this condition
arrives, if it does arrive, rural life will have become suburban, and
farming, aside from market-gardening, will have practically
disappeared. The bicycle and good roads are exerting a minor but
considerable influence in the same direction.^1

Equally important is the fact that large areas in all sections of New
England are in process of transformation from farms to sites of
country-seats. Residents of the cities are coming move and more to
make their real homes in the country. They are building their country
houses with more comfort and more solidity, and are living in them a
much larger part of the year than formerly. The country season
extends already from the first of May to the first of November, and
is still lengthening. Improved railway and steamboat transportation,
the multiplication of large fortunes, greater leisure, above all a
growing appreciation of the sports and resources of country life,
have contributed to this result. It looks very much as if our urban
society were attaching itself primarily to the land,--living on the
land, and leaving it for the city only in the festive season. Whether
this tendency will produce again a landed aristocracy instead of an
aristocracy of other forms of wealth, who can say ? One thing only is
sure, -- it would produce thereby a new New England. During the
hunting and fishing seasons of the last few years, northern Maine,
the wildest and most remote section of New England, has been visited
by such numbers of sportsmen that the income to the residents has
been prodigious. If this region is not permanently reserved to sport
(as it ought to be), its magnificent lake, mountain, and river
districts will be crowded with summer hotels, as soon as they become
a little more accessible by rail. From the summer hotel to the summer
cottage is but a step, and from the summer cottage to the solid
country house is but another step. Considerable sections of Vermont,
New Hampshire, and western Massachusetts, and of the New England
coast from Eastport to the New York line, have already been
transfigured by this remarkable return to the soil. Curious indeed it
would be if rural New England, which has been largely depopulated and
impoverished by a movement of country people to the city, should be
repopulated and enriched, should have its economic and social
equilibrium restored, by a counter-movement of city people to the
country.

Finally, there is some hope for the New England farms as farms, -- for
farms, although apparently destined to play a less important part
than they formerly played, will hardly disappear from such sections
as are neither adjacent to the cities and industrial centres nor
specially attractive for residence, -- and this hope seems to rest
with our immigrants. They alone are willing and able to lead simple
farm lives, such as the pioneers of the West or the original New
England settlers lived. The native Americans are now too impatient,
too extravagant, too proud, under the changed conditions, to be
successful farmers* In many sections, this occupation and
rehabilitation of the soil by foreigners has actually begun. Many of
the abandoned farms which come into the market are bought by them at
very low prices. Most of these newcomers prosper, just as the
American settlers of a former period prospered when they held to the
plain life of pioneers. If these immigrant farmers were crowding
native Americans off the land, as immigrant laborers have from time
to time crowded them out of the labor market, their advent would be
ominous ; but since they step in to fill a vacuum, to do what others
have failed to do, there is no good reason why they should not have a
hearty welcome.

The old New England, the New England of the farms, seems destined to
disappear, if indeed it has not disappeared already. The people who
gave it its character have long been away from the farms, building up
and enriching the West, the Northwest, the Southwest, the interior,
and the large cities and manufacturing towns of the Atlantic coast
States. The primitive, rugged, wholesome life of the fathers is gone
forever. Nothing can bring it back. I have ventured to predict a new
New England, composed of large cities and manufacturing towns of
greatly expanded suburbs, districts of country - seats, and a remnant
of farms worked by immigrant farmers. The prophecy seems fair enough
in the light of the most conspicuous present conditions; but so
seemed the prophecy, before the day of railways, that New Orleans
would he one of the great cities of the world. As the railways
prevented the development of New Orleans and created Chicago, so such
a simple and probable event as the derivation from the New England
watercourses of electrical power, and its transmission for long
distances, may of itself be sufficient to change the life and aspect
of all New England within a very brief period.

The typical New England community of to-day, however, is neither the
decayed farming town nor the prosperous farming town, but the
manufacturing town. Such a community will be the subject of the next
and final chapter of these studies.

Alvan F. Sanborn.

 1. 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.
    -