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Agri-Culture T. J. A. LE GOFF James T. Lemon. The Best Poor Man's Country. A Geographical Study ofEarly Southeastern Pennsylvania . Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1972. $12.00. 295 pp. Dr. Lemon has put together an important contribution to the social history of eighteenth-century North America. His book is a complex study which, despite its subtitle, goes well beyond the limits of an ordinary geographical study in examining some of the basic social and economic origins of that amorphous conglomerate, American civilization, within a defined region and a limited period of time. Lemon has a particular view of the basic values of American civilization which he uses to illuminate the human geography of southeastern Pennsylvania. This view, and the way he arrives at it, deserve some careful discussion. Before tackling the general theory, it is best to look at the human geography of southeastern Pennsylvania in the period 1680-1800. Coming from England, Ulster and the Rhineland, Mennonites, other German sectarians, and members of the Presbyterian, German Lutheran and German Reformed churches, settled in William Penn's Quaker colony to seek salvation and worldly improvement. By 1790, these groups formed a rural society of some 320,000 souls in Lemon's region, the area running back eastward from the immediate hinterland of Philadelphia to the Blue Ridge Mountains, bounded on the northeast and the southwest by the upper reaches of the Lehigh and Conococheague Rivers. Different areas of settlement preserved a particular stamp, ethnic or sectarian: Germans tended to settle toward the north, Ulstermen toward the west, Mennonites in the northwest and northeast, Quakers along the Delaware, but it was difficult to say whether people were grouped by ethnic origin, religion, or a combination of all these, especially since religious and ethnic minority groups were sprinkled through most of these areas where, apparently, they coexisted with the British majority without much friction. Immigrant groups lost no time in picking up English, anglicizing their names, and writing their records in English, which further tended to make the Pennsylvanians look more and more alike, despite their diverse origins. Like the French regime in Canada before 1759, the original granting agency - in this case, the Penn family - had some ideas about how the THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. V, NO, 1., SPRING 1.974 landshould be divided up; like the French regime in Canada, their designs werelargely frustrated or warped by the decisions of the settlers themselves .The Penns laid up "manors" of reserve land for themselves on the saleof which they hoped to profit when land values had risen. They controlledthe awarding of survey warrants, issued deeds when occupation wasestablished, and imposed seigneurial obligations and procedures in theform of quitrents and escheat. Much as in New France, the colonists avoideddues, squatted on the manors, evaded quitrents, and failed to confirmtheir tenures by taking out deeds. But the most significant feature of the settlers' insubordination, for Lemon,is the way that - again, we might note, as in New France - they refused to follow Penn's design for planned settlement. They took the bestor most available land and then moved inland gradually, completely rejectingPenn's scheme for villages grouped around a quadrangular field withthe meetinghouse nearby. Dispersed habitat, not concentrated farmingvillages , was the rule. Partly as a consequence of this, partly because of the mix of religious denominations and their heterodoxy, parishes nevermeant much as territorial units. The peculiar organization of goverrunent in Pennsylvania, in which counties, rather than villages or parishes, were the basic units of government further undermined the establishment of a tightly-knit local community. There were towns, of course- Philadelphia and a dozen or so county towns of 1,000 to 2.,000 inhabitants, often less, by the 1780's, and a handful of other major centres,but the countryside itself remained free of agglomerations with significantcombinations of economic, administrative., or social functions. Lemon is less interested, and with reason, in the towns than the countryside. Vastly more people lived there, and the colonial economy depended on rural production. Farming in southeastern Pennsylvania meantmixed farming, as the eighteenth century understood it: a halfdozenhead of cattle and a couple of horses on each farm...

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