The New England village, with its white-painted, black-shuttered,
classical-revival buildings surrounding a tree-shaded green, is one of
the enduring icons of the American historical imagination. Associated in
the popular mind with a time of strong community values, discipline, and
economic stability, the village of New England is for many the
archetypal "city on a hill." Yet in The New England Village, Joseph S.
Wood argues that this village is a nineteenth-century place and its
association with the colonial past a nineteenth-century romantic
invention.
New England colonists brought with them a cultural predisposition toward
dispersed settlements within agricultural spaces called "towns" and
"villages." Rarely compact in form, these communities did, however,
encourage individual landholding. By the early nineteenth century, town
centers, where meetinghouses stood, began to develop into the center
villages we recognize today. Just as rural New England began its
economic decline, romantics associated these proto-urban places with
idealized colonial village communities as the source of both village
form and commercial success.
This provocative assessment of the New England village encourages
critical thinking about landscape origins and meanings ascribed to them
by different people in different periods. We invent the past, Wood
concludes, in our own image--as nineteenth-century villagers did quite
literally and as suburban developers do today.