Since we are accustomed to look upon the village as a quaint primitive
relic of a bygone age, we do not readily see that its form was dictated
by social and economic conditions. Where the village had to defend
itself against Indians, it was necessary to lay it out completely,
so that it might be surrounded by a stockade, and so that the
meeting-house might be such a rallying center as the bell-tower or the
castle was in Europe, or as the high temple site was in classic times.
But in the eighteenth century the Indian figured less in the scheme of
colonial life, and along the seacoast and river--as at Wells Beach in
Maine or Litchfield in Connecticut--the village became a long strip
upon a highroad, and the arable land stretched in narrow plots from the
house to the water, so that the farmer might better protect his crops
and his livestock from the fox, the wolf, the woodchuck, the hawk, the
skunk, and the deer.
I emphasize these points of structure because of the silly notion
superficial observers sometimes carry away from the villages of
Europe or New England; namely, that their irregularity is altogether
capricious and uneconomical, associated only with the vagaries of the
straying cow. It would be more correct to say that the precise reverse
was true. The inequality in size and shape of plots shows always that
attention was paid to the function the land was to perform, rather
than to the mere possession of property. Thus, there was a difference
in size between home lots, which were always seated in the village,
and purely agricultural tracts of land, which were usually on the
outskirts; and in Dedham, for example, married men had home lots of
twelve acres, while bachelors received only eight. Another reason
for the compactness of the village was a decree of the General Court
in Massachusetts, in 1635, that no dwelling should be placed more
than half a mile from the meeting-house in any new plantation. Even
irregularities in the layout and placement of houses, which cannot
be referred to such obvious points as these, very often derive from
an attempt to break the path of the wind, to get a good exposure in
summer, or to profit by a view.
All this was genuine community planning. It did not go by this name,
perhaps, but it achieved the result.