Antiques

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2004 by Wendell Garrett

She's one of the two best states in the Union. Vermont's the other. And
the two have been Yoke-fellows in the sap-yoke from of old In many
Marches. And they lie like wedges, Thick end to thin end and thin end to
thick end, And are a figure of the way the strong Of mind and strong of
arm should fit together, One thick where one is thin and vice versa.
Robert Frost, "New Hampshire," 1923

From New England the American small town spread across the nation. White-painted frame buildings abutting a tree shaded green--this is the object of an enduring collective memory. Thorstein Veblen wrote: "The country town is one of the great American institutions; perhaps the greatest, in the sense that it has had and continues to have a greater part than any other in shaping public sentiment and giving character to American culture."

The small town, modeled on its English counterpart, became the ideal social organization for the Puritans who, in the seventeenth century, immigrated to establish covenanted communities united to serve God's purpose. It was God's intention, wrote the Puritan leader John Winthrop in 1630, that "every man might have need of other, and from hence they might be all knitt more nearly together in the Bond of brotherly affeccion." This sense of a common purpose was quite different from the organic communal life of the English village, and proved to be the galvanizing force that allowed the framers to draft a much broader secular covenant for the new nation, the federal Constitution. Yet this too, in time, took on the character of holy writ. Every assault on the Constitution was at once interpreted as a blow at the life of the covenanted community.

Not only did most Americans live in small towns until the end of the nineteenth century, but most of the books they read were concerned with small-town life. In Oldtown Folks of 1869 Harriet Beecher Stowe described the perfect small town as a place of pleasant intimacy centered on the general store and post office. There gossip was traded, and while the men talked politics or religion their womenfolk shopped for dress goods and ribbons. It was the sort of place that, when you left it, assumed a mythic dimension as the haven of youth, the lost home.

In the end, however, despite the secular national covenant, the church remained the center of the small town. Weddings, baptisms, funerals, and town meetings brought the community together in ritual acts. Sustained by "the mystic chords of memory," the Puritans' covenanted communities serving God still resonated centuries later.