A Study of Population Regions in New England on a New Basis

Abstract

The history of the United States reveals a restless people moving out to settle new frontiers and surging back to repopulate abandoned areas and to swell the numbers of urban residents in the older settlements. Since it may be taken as an axiom in the study of the cultural landscape that demographic changes induce cultural changes, it becomes desirable to study the flow and ebb of population as the basis of a fuller understanding of the associated alterations in the cultural landscape, and to show cartographically the quality of the varied changes in population, so that the areas affected may be delimited, in the rough at least. Furthermore, a cartographical analysis of the dates of critical changes in population numbers is desirable because rather large areas are usually affected simultaneously throughout. This suggests a single pivotal economic alteration, as when the increase of population in an area of timber cutting is accompanied by a corresponding increase in population in adjacent areas of lumber milling and paper mnanufacture. The paragraphs which follow enlarge these ideas with respect to New England, and develop certain areas of demographic and consequently cultural change, in which the similarity of the behavior of the growth and decline of population, expressed as a curve, suggests identity of concurrent economic data. A method of delimiting, in a general way, regions of the cultural landscape, is developed from this study; and from a closer analysis of the population figures there is evolved a way of initiating the study of the evolution of that landscape.