A world we have gained: house, common, and village in New England

Abstract

The New England tradition of large colonial houses encircling town commons to form Puritan villages was invented in the nineteenth century. Colonial ministers had formed an image of hardbitten Puritans shaping garden out of wilderness, which nineteenth-century Romantic elites elaborated upon to form a myth of Puritan antecedence, democratic society, and patriotic fervor. The contemporary village ensemble, whose substantial houses and village greens a nineteenth-century elite had constructed, became the historical tableau upon which the Romantic myth was played out. Village-improvement, architectural-preservation, and local historical societies self-consciously carved out a landscape of relict features to stand for the whole. Colonial Revival architects reinterpreted colonial form to contrive a historical landscape. Scholars of town origins and of the roots of vernacular building traditions assumed the tradition and converted it to conventional scholarly wisdom. The landscape conceit was a counterpoise for modernity. It provided symbolic attachment to a landscape that justified the past and that legitimized the present.