Kontextmaschine

20th August 2017

Post reblogged from Mai la dreapta with 357,541 notes

chippingthegoalkeeper:
thegoldengals:
chippingthegoalkeeper:
I have a lot of pet peeves but I think the biggest one is when people say things like “oh it’s such a small town, only 35,000 people” like bitch my town has 200 people, you need to pick a new adjective
According to Wikipedia, a small town is 1,000-20,000 people. So although you are correct in stating that 35,000 people is not a small town (it is a large town), you are incorrect in thinking that you live in a town. You live in a village. You are a villager.
I…… don’t know what to do with that information……a villager…
Why is it that America doesn’t have villages? Seriously.

Settlement patterns, mostly. We have villages in areas that were developed in a premechanized age and not redeveloped since, in New England and parts of the South. In other areas like the mid-Atlantic states and the Great Lakes midwest, villages grew into towns or suburban sheets.

Also, villages have to be carting distance from a city or town with transportation access, which before railroads meant coasts and navigable rivers. And no inherited Roman or even royal roads, just native foot-tracks that were too narrow and steep for carts or pack animals, if they weren’t overrun or forgotten by the time settlers settled.

And “navigable” was the extensive Mississippi system and not much else, though there were a lot of locks and canals built for a while, those were the “internal improvements” you hear about. So that means a lot of pretty land was practically speaking useless until after the transportation revolution obsoleted villages. Unlike Europe, which was bottlenecked on land and crammed people and farms into every inch, America was traditionally bottlenecked on laboring population.

The railroads did render more land accessible and development did radiate from depot towns but there were other issues. Newly viable resource-extraction settlements clustered by their resource and tended to import staples, though they might get bulky raw (construction?) materials and perishable food locally. (Milk is actually peak village – dairy is the low-density agriculture that needs to be closest to settlements, but railroads, pasteurization, refrigeration, and automobiles kept pushing this minimum distance out)

Meanwhile some of the plains states were settled by whole towns, organized by town promoters or frequently Protestant denominations who bought whole parcels from land speculators.

Others were settled by homesteading but the requirement to live on and improve the land (intended to keep this land out of the hands of the speculators who rendered it unaffordable to poor normies) dictated a spread out farmhouse pattern rather than clustered villages with outlying fields.

This dispersion provoked a lot of problems with the community services (provincial ignorance, lack of retail, isolation, solo drinking and family abuse) but also clever responses (bookmobiles, catalog merchandising and rural free delivery, high school sports and barn dances, temperance movements)

Tagged: amhist