Village Improvements And Farm Villages Part 5

It would be a necessary condition precedent, that the whole property taken for the village should be set apart for the purpose. This requirement and the cost of moving buildings from the farms to the village would doubtless be an serious obstacle to the immediate carrying out of the plan. And thus the theory must long remain a theory only. No sudden change of the sort could be made in practice.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 15.--THE RHODE ISLAND TRACT, WITH ITS BUILDINGS GATHERED INTO A COMPACT VILLAGE.]

It would not be impossible, however, to bring about the end in time, if a few of the larger proprietors could secure possession of the village tract by exchange, and would dedicate it to the purpose, agreeing at any future time to sell small lots for building at a fixed low rate. In the instance under consideration, the village tract is thinly settled, and so situated as to be available at moderate cost. If a church, a schoolhouse, and a store could be established as a nucleus of the village, the young couples of the neighborhood might incline to settle there; and in time the settlement could be made so attractive--as compared with the outlying farmhouses--as to lead to the concentration of the whole population.

This part of the subject is, however, foreign to the present purpose. If the _desirability_ of village life for farmers can be established, the ways and means may safely be left to those interested in securing it.

The influences now at work to make the farmers' children seek a better social condition, together with the necessity which confines them to some form of agricultural work, must be depended on to secure the relief suggested, unless some better relief can be found.

In this case, as in every other of village construction, the original plan should include some quality or feature, which, while appropriate to the modest end in view, will give character to the place.

Every village has in its situation, its uses, or its origin, some characteristic which may be developed into a leading and an attractive feature. Especially when the work is to be begun from the foundation, and when there are no buildings to be torn down or removed, a consistent and dignified result may be planned for at the outset.

The characteristic feature of the village we are now considering is that it is to consist of a single long, straight street cut off at each end by other roads. After removing one unimportant house, there remains no obstacle to the laying-out of one straight street two hundred feet wide, with either two or four rows of spreading elms. This street, two thousand feet long, mainly in well-kept gra.s.s, with only the necessary width of road and the requisite paths,--having perhaps a well-kept and home-like private place opposite each of its ends,--would stamp the village at once with an attraction which would have a constant civilizing effect on those living under its influence.

Such a village street, entirely without costly ornamentation, and requiring only the simplest care, would soon take on a look of appropriate neatness and freshness; and, as the trees grew, it would acquire a dignity and beauty which could in no other way be so well secured.

The church and the schoolhouse, being placed in broad recesses opposite the central point of the street, would gain importance from their position; and, these main features being attended to, the _character_ of the village would be fixed, and it would be difficult to make any arrangement of its private places which would spoil its beauty. Neatness and a reasonable care in the matter of house-gardening, the planting of flower-beds, vines, etc., are all that would be needed.

With so wide a street, it would be as well to bring all house-fronts to the street line, completing this line with simple fences, and paying some attention to the ornamentation of the enclosed yards.

In this village, as in the other, all meretricious ornamentation should be avoided, whether public or private. All money available for such improvement should be spent in securing perfect neatness. In fact, the two radical requirements of good taste in all such cases are an absence of obvious money-spending, and the evidence of constant care and attention. "Showiness" is common in every trumpery village in the land.

What we should seek in our farm-villages is the most modest simplicity, s.h.i.+ning with the polish of an affectionate care. Every spot should breathe of homely influences and moral peacefulness.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 16.--PROPOSED ARRANGEMENT OF THE RHODE ISLAND FARM VILLAGE.]

Figure 16 shows the general plan of the village. If other public buildings are needed, they might very well be placed opposite the ends of the main street.

It is not possible, in remodelling an old farming district, where boundaries and roads are irregular, to apportion the division of land among the population with especial reference to its distance from the village; so, for example, that the small farmers, who have little team-force, shall not have so far to go as the larger ones who are better equipped; but, even in this case, the most distant farm will be rarely a mile from the village, where all the farmers, their families, and their work-people, and their flocks and herds, would be gathered together, under the best circ.u.mstances for getting out of their lives as much good as the need for earning a living by arduous work will allow them to get anywhere,--more than they could hope to get in the isolation of the distant farmhouse.

Having now considered the methods by which farmers may congregate their homes and their farm-buildings, and live in villages, let us take up the more important question of policy.

Which would be better for a young man, just starting in life with a young wife,--to go to a distant farmhouse to found his home, or to settle in a well-ordered farm-village under substantially the conditions described above?

There is much more to be said, on both sides of this question, than there is room to say here; but certain points are worthy of consideration.

There is no doubt that in a strictly money-making aspect there is an advantage in having the animals on the land from which they are fed, and the men on the farm which they are to work. It is certain, also, that the men and the women must be near the stables, that the early and late work of feeding and milking may be promptly and regularly performed. If the family is to live in the village, the cattle must live in the village too. This involves the hauling home of all the hay and grain, and the hauling out again of all manure,--no slight task. If the work is all concentrated on the farm, under the immediate supervision of the farmer, there will be a certain convenience and economy of time.

The same principle holds true in all other relations. The merchant would find a certain advantage in living at his warehouse, the engine-builder at his factory, the cotton-spinner at his mill, the carpenter at his shop, and the grocer at his store. All of these have found that, so far as may be, they get certain other and greater advantages in living away from their business. One and all carry to their homes, at least occasionally, books, papers, and plans for work that needs attention out of the regular business hours.

The farmer alone--and in this country especially--disregards the benefits of living away from his shop, and pa.s.ses his whole life--day and night--in close contact with his field of operations. He might, if he chose, make his home nearer to other homes, taking with him so much of his work as is not necessarily confined to the farm.

For his own sake, it does not make so much difference; but for the sake of his wife and children it makes all the difference between life and stagnation. The business needs which call him to town, and the habit he has of pa.s.sing his evenings at "the store," give him a certain amount--and a certain kind--of social intercourse which keeps him from absolute rust. The amount of society available for his family is not usually great, and the dulness and confinement of farmhouse life need no description.

The main reason for preferring village life is princ.i.p.ally because it is better for the women and children; but there are reasons, in the same direction, why better social conditions would give the farmer himself decided benefits. The life, too, would be more _attractive_ for both boys and girls, and would be divested of that naked and dismal gloom and dryness which now drive so much of the best farmer blood of the whole country to work-benches and counters,--to any position, in fact, which promises relief from the stifling isolation of the country.

While conceding that, just as a cabinet-maker would make more money if he lived in his back shop, and had little thought from early dawn until late evening except for his work, so the farmer may make more money if he lives on his farm than if he lives at a distance, still it must be said that the difference in profit is by no means so great as would be supposed.

It may be fairly a.s.sumed, that, at least in the more thickly settled farming regions at the East, the average distance at which farmers live from the nearest centre of population that supplies their "shopping,"

and from church, is not less than three miles. The visiting acquaintance of the family is nearly or quite as remote; and there is, altogether, so much driving to be done, as to make it necessary to keep a decent carriage and horses, and to supply a certain amount of extra horse service. Indeed, among those who are tolerably well off it would be moderate to set down the total services of one good horse as needed to supply the family's demand for transportation.

Then, too, the need of the farmer himself to go to town to sell and to buy, to get repairs and information, and (a much more generally gratified taste than he would always care to confess to his wife) to satisfy his craving after intercourse with his kind,--who shall estimate the aggregate of all this travel, or even of that part of it which, under the pretext of business, is really only an habitual going for gossip? All of this driving is confined to no season; it is perennial,--in good weather and in bad,--and it costs an amount of time and money that few farmers would like to put down in black and white, and charge to their expense accounts. It would form one of the most serious items of their budget.

Did the farmer live in a pleasant and attractive village, among neighbors and friends, nearly all of this driving would be saved. The appliances for the family's pleasure-driving might be entirely done away with, for the wife and daughters would gladly exchange the means for occasional visiting and for distant shopping, for an agreeable circle of friends near at hand and a good village store and post-office within five minutes' walk. In such a settlement as is contemplated, most of the business needs of the farmer would be amply supplied, and he would find the companions.h.i.+p at hand even more satisfactory, because more familiar, than that which he now finds in the town.

It is not worth while to calculate the cash saving that would come of this reduction of road-*work. It is enough to consider it as an important offset to the cost of carrying men and manure to the field and of bringing crops to the village.

Under the present system the women have the worst of it. They have the confinement and seclusion and dulness. Under the village system the men would have the discomfort, and this is why it will be less easy to secure its adoption; for the men control, and prefer _not_ to have the heavy end of life's log to carry.

Under either of the plans given herewith, the greatest--not the average--distance from the house to the farm would be about one mile, and it would have to be travelled only during the working weather of the warmer months, and during the good wheeling of winter. In summer, all hands would have to set off early, and come home late, often carrying their dinner with them as mechanics do; but when field-work did not call them out, as during rains, or when the ground is too wet to be disturbed, their barn-work and shop-work would be at home; and, all the winter through, the only road-work to be done would be to send the teams to haul out the manure, and to bring home the hay, which would be best stored under "Dutch hay-barracks" in the fields when it was made. This work would be systematic and simple; and it may fairly be questioned whether it would not, in many cases, amount to _less_ than the cost of the "driving" that is now done, and which in the village might be foregone. Especially would this be the case when all the heavy farm-work is done by oxen, which when idle, instead of eating their heads off like horses, are acc.u.mulating valuable flesh. With sufficient ox-power to do the work easily, the whole transportation of tools and men, and all the hay-tedding and hay-raking, would be easily done by one horse, with leeway enough to allow for a fair amount of business or pleasure travel.

So far as the presence of the farmer himself is concerned, it is to be considered that if his farm and cattle are near his house in the village, he will be within easy reach of them very often at times when his visits to the distant town would take him away from them if they were on the farm. In the village, during the whole winter, and in bad weather at other seasons, he would have little necessity or temptation to absent himself from home. Indeed, those who have had an opportunity to watch the life of the exceptional farmers whose houses and barns and stables are in a village cannot have failed to notice how much more home-like and engaging is the whole farm establishment than it usually is in the country. It is hardly too much to say that the few instances that we have, as in the farm-villages of New England, show that these village-living farmers are apparently more attentive to their home duties than are their isolated brethren, at least in the matter of tidiness.

To complete the comparison with the merchant or manufacturer, who takes his papers or plans home with him for work out of regular hours, one might say that the farmer who lives at a distance from his land, with his flocks and herds gathered about his homestead, has such of his work as needs early and late attention close at hand, while his regular workshop, the farm, calls him away for certain regular hours and regular duties.

It is not worth while here to enter into the details of the question.

They are of serious moment, and involve among other things the driving of animals to and from pasture, _versus_ the raising of soiling crops to be fed in the stall or yard. All of these questions have been satisfactorily solved in the experience of many exceptional cases in this country, and of the almost universal conditions obtaining in Europe. They present no practical difficulty, and need const.i.tute no serious objection to the general plan.

The items of economical working and money-making being fully weighed, the more serious considerations of the mode of life, and the good to be got from it, demand even greater attention. It may seem a strange doctrine to be advanced by a somewhat enthusiastic farmer, but it is a doctrine that has been slowly accepted after many years' observation, a conviction that has taken possession of an unwilling mind, that the young man who takes his young wife to an isolated farmhouse dooms her and himself and their children to an unwholesome, unsatisfactory, and vacant existence,--an existence marked by the absence of those more satisfying and more cultivating influences which the best development of character and intelligence demand. It is a common experience of farmers'

wives to pa.s.s week after week without exchanging a word or a look with a single person outside of their own family circles.

The young couple start bravely, and with a determination to struggle against the habit of isolation which marks their cla.s.s. But this habit has grown from the necessity of the situation; and the necessities of their own situation bring them sooner or later within its bonds. During the first few years they adhere to their resolution, and go regularly to church, to the lecture, and to the social gatherings of their friends; but home duties increase with time, and the eagerness for society grows dull with neglect. Those who have started out with the firmest determination to avoid the rock on which their fathers have split, give up the struggle at last, and settle down to a humdrum, uninteresting, and uninterested performance of daily tasks.

In saying all this,--and I speak from experience, for I have led the dismal life myself,--it is hardly necessary to disclaim the least want of appreciation of the sterling qualities which have been developed in the American farm household. But it may be safely insisted that these qualities have been developed, not because of the American mode of farm life, but in spite of it; and, as I think over the long list of admirable men and women whose acquaintance I have formed on distant and solitary farms, I am more and more impressed with certain shortcomings which would have been avoided under better social conditions. If any of these is disposed to question the justice of this conclusion, I am satisfied to leave the final decision with his own judgment, formed after a fair consideration of what is herein suggested.

If American agriculture has an unsatisfied need, it is surely the need for more intelligence and more enterprising interest on the part of its working men and women. From one end of the land to the other, its crying defect--recognized by all--is, that its best blood, or, in other words, its best brains and its best energy, is leaving it to seek other fields of labor. The influence which leads these best of the farmers' sons to other occupations is not so much the desire to make more money, or to find a less laborious occupation, as it is the desire to lead a more satisfactory life,--a life where that part of us which has been developed by the better education and better civilization for which in this century we have worked so hard and so well, may find responsive companions.h.i.+p and encouraging intercourse with others.

It so happens that the few farm villages to which we can refer--such as Farmington, Hadley, and Deerfield--have become so attractive by means of their full-grown beauty, or have been so encroached upon by the wealth that has come over the district to which they belong, that they are no longer to be taken as types of pure country villages; nor do I recall a single village in the land which is precisely what I have now in mind.

a.s.suming that a farming neighborhood--two miles, or at the utmost three miles, square--had been so arranged as to have all of its buildings (with the exception of hay-barracks in the fields, and cattle-shelters in the pastures) in a village, let us consider what would be the advantages in the manner of living which it would have to offer.

The social benefits, and the facilities for frequent neighborly and informal intercourse, are obvious. To say nothing of the companions.h.i.+ps and intimacies among the young people, their fathers and mothers would be kept from growing old and glum by constant friction with their kind; and, in so far as a more satisfactory social relation with one's fellow-men gives cheerfulness and the richness of a wider human interest, in that proportion would the village life have a wholesome, mellowing effect that is not to be found in the remote farmhouse, nor even in the sort of neighborhood we sometimes find in the country where several farmhouses are within a quarter of a mile of each other. The habit of "running in" for a moment's chat with a neighbor is a good one, and it gets but scant development among American farmers. This view of the case will suggest itself quite naturally on the first consideration of the subject.

If the first need of the rising generation--the men and women of the future--is education, then the village beats the farm by long odds. The country school-district, spa.r.s.ely settled and chary of its taxes, is apt to obey the law in the scantiest way possible. Three months school in winter and three months more in summer, under the supervision--it can hardly be called the instruction--of a young miss who is by no means well educated herself, and who is entirely often without training as a teacher, gathers together all of the school-going children of a wide neighborhood. Big and little, boys and girls, are huddled together in a sort of mental jumble, where the best that the most skilful manager can hope for is to regulate the instruction and the discipline to suit the average of the scholars. The best result attainable is to secure a good amount of _schooling_: the word "education" would be quite misapplied here.

In the village, the number of scholars would be sufficiently large to warrant the establishment and to bear the maintenance of one good school, with one, if not more, teachers, regularly employed, and worthy to be called teachers rather than "school-marms." Pupils would be graded according to their ages and acquirements, and a due use could be made of the stimulus of compet.i.tion. A real school, a real instrument of education, would take the place of the noisy congregation of uncontrolled boys and girls, who, in the country district-school, are apt to acquire less of valuable learning than of the minor viciousness that prevails among country children.

In this connection, I was forcibly struck with the announcement of a German farmer once in my employ, whose reason for leaving me, after his children had reached the ages of seven and eleven, to return to his little village in Germany, was that it was impossible in this country--and this, be it remembered, was in New England--to secure satisfactory instruction for them. He thought that in their experience at school here they had gained little beyond a familiarity with English, and with a large admixture of "bad words" at that. At home they would have, within the elementary range of a primary-school education, a thorough training and a severe drilling which he could not hope for here, and without which he was unwilling that they should grow up. I have seen his village school in Germany, and the cloud of tow-headed children who fill it; and I am prepared to believe that his preference was not without foundation. Of course we have all the material for as good or better schools in this country. What we need is longer terms, better trained and educated teachers, graded cla.s.ses, and better books and appliances. These cannot be afforded in the small country school-district. They can be had in their perfection in even a small village; and this consideration alone, even if this were all, should be a controlling argument in favor of village life.

But this is by no means all. Another great benefit is to be found in the post-office near at hand, with its daily mail as an encouragement to correspondence and to interest in the affairs of the outside world. A village, such as is here pictured, could afford its weekly or semi-monthly public lecture, furnis.h.i.+ng a means for instruction and entertainment, and for frequent gatherings. The church, too, would probably be conducted in a more satisfactory way than is usual in the country; and the conditions would be the best suited for fostering that interest in the collateral branches of the church, the Bible-cla.s.s, the Sunday school, and the Dorcas society, by which the women of the community get, aside from the other good that they receive and do, advantages of a character somewhat corresponding to those which men get from their clubs.

I should hope further, as an outgrowth from the community of living, for a modest village library and reading-room. Indeed, if I could have my own way, I should not confine the attraction and entertainment of the village to strictly "moral" appliances. It would probably be wiser to recognize the fact that young men find an attraction in amus.e.m.e.nts which our sterner ancestors regarded as dangerous; and I would not eschew billiards, nor even, "by rigorous enactment," the milder vice of social tobacco. Better have a little _harmless_ wickedness near home and under the eye of parents than to encounter the risk that boys, after a certain age, would seek a pretext for more uncontrolled indulgences in the neighboring town.

One might go on through the long range of incidental arguments--such as lighted streets, well-kept sidewalks, winter snow-ploughs, and good drainage, and a wholesome pride in a tidy, cosey village, until even the most close-fisted of all our cla.s.s would confess that the extra cost would bring full value in return, and until he would recognize the fact that the attractions of such a home as the village would make possible would be likely to insure his being succeeded in his wholesome trade by the brightest and best of his sons,--a result that would surely be worth more than all it would cost.

But my purpose has been only to suggest a scheme which seems to me entirely, even though remotely, practicable, and in which I hope for the sympathy and help of the country-bound farmers' wives and daughters,--a scheme which promises what seems the easiest, if not the only, relief for the dulness and desolation of living which make American farming loathsome to so many who ought to glory in its pursuit, but who now are only bound to it by commanding necessity.