Population
Hill Towns of Northern New England
03/08/10 09:27
Started Harold Fisher Wilson’s The Hill Country of Northern New England. It’s beginning as expected, with a description of Thomas Nixon Carver’s five stages of New England agriculture. Wilson uses a seasonal metaphor for his narrative, beginning with Summer, 1790-1830. This is the age of self-sufficiency, which is followed by a fall attributed to the railroads and “external causes of unrest.” It’s interesting that in 1936, Wilson seems to be turning a corner from a Progressive/New Deal sort of optimistic elitism to a new social history concern with “those who stayed at home.” (4)
This will probably be fairly interesting, since Wilson is supposed to be a lifelong New Englander with deep knowledge of the place and people. The early pages reiterate a lot of the standard structure. The soil is thin and rocky, so “tillage is not profitable under modern conditions.” (5) But does this mean farmers were actually trying to compete head-on with western staples? Why do we generally assume they weren’t astute enough to recognize their disadvantages and choose to do something they were more competitive at? The later chapters seem to talk a lot about sheep and dairying -- we’ll see if the farmers get to be agents of this change, or if it’s just something that happens to them.
Wilson introduces the population question by remarking on the beginning of a trend in population loss as early as the decade from 1790 to 1800 (first two census decades), but accelerating in the 1820s-30s. My question, after looking at the Ashfield census is, did these towns have a loss in households? Or just in total population? Once these townships were fully occupied (all the viable farmland divided and distributed), it seems almost inevitable that a homestead farming community was going to produce too many sons within a generation or so. At that point, net outmigration is virtually guaranteed, until the “pioneer generation” stops having kids. Wilson mentions that although people in the 1790s believed many farms had been abandoned, they were in fact “unoccupied,” they “continued to be held by actual owners who paid taxes on them.” (9) Does this imply a different attitude toward these properties on the part of their owners, from the declension story we see?
This will probably be fairly interesting, since Wilson is supposed to be a lifelong New Englander with deep knowledge of the place and people. The early pages reiterate a lot of the standard structure. The soil is thin and rocky, so “tillage is not profitable under modern conditions.” (5) But does this mean farmers were actually trying to compete head-on with western staples? Why do we generally assume they weren’t astute enough to recognize their disadvantages and choose to do something they were more competitive at? The later chapters seem to talk a lot about sheep and dairying -- we’ll see if the farmers get to be agents of this change, or if it’s just something that happens to them.
Wilson introduces the population question by remarking on the beginning of a trend in population loss as early as the decade from 1790 to 1800 (first two census decades), but accelerating in the 1820s-30s. My question, after looking at the Ashfield census is, did these towns have a loss in households? Or just in total population? Once these townships were fully occupied (all the viable farmland divided and distributed), it seems almost inevitable that a homestead farming community was going to produce too many sons within a generation or so. At that point, net outmigration is virtually guaranteed, until the “pioneer generation” stops having kids. Wilson mentions that although people in the 1790s believed many farms had been abandoned, they were in fact “unoccupied,” they “continued to be held by actual owners who paid taxes on them.” (9) Does this imply a different attitude toward these properties on the part of their owners, from the declension story we see?
