In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

122 four “Rural New England Is in a State of Transition” Immigrants and Yankees on the Land In the period after the Civil War, rural New England was notorious as a place that had seen better days. While some diehards strenuously denied that there was anything wrong with the region’s countryside, most commentators , both inside and outside New England, believed otherwise. The author of a controversial attack on the villages of the region’s hill country—the area widely seen as the epicenter of rural decay—assembled an ominous catalog of epithets about the place from his supporters: “‘a catastrophe,’ ‘a decline in civilization,’ ‘a sickly condition,’ ‘degeneration,’ ‘demoralization,’ ‘decay.’”1 The doomsayers pointed to various signs of rural decline, including dying villages, crumbling farmhouses, impassable roads, and dropping birthrates. Many believed that the region’s agriculturalists were abandoning their farms in droves, unable to compete with the vast, fertile fields of the West. Some observers claimed that rural New England’s morals were also decaying. They wrote lurid articles in the national press about hill towns where couples cohabited without marriage, babies were born with birth defects caused by inbreeding, and young people lacked ambition and hope.2 A few commentators even warned that the physical and moral degeneracy of the rural Yankees was beginning to approach that of the poor whites of the South.3 It was a terrible comedown for a countryside that had long thought of itself as the nation’s standard-bearer for republican values and moral probity. In recent decades scholars have refuted the idea that rural New England suffered a catastrophic decline in the Gilded Age. Some even maintain that the region’s farm economy was quite healthy. Michael Bell contends that “Rural New England Is in a State of Transition” • 123 New England farms were more productive and profitable than those in other regions, and Paul Munyon argues that, for the farmers of New Hampshire, the late nineteenth century was a time of “growing prosperity.”4 Others characterize the era as one of stagnancy, or at best slow growth, for the region’s farmers. John Black shows that, despite the widespread talk of abandoned farms, the period saw no significant change in the region’s aggregate farmland and only a slight decline in its total number of farms.5 In his study of Chelsea, Vermont, Hal Barron finds the local economy “slowed down and stabilized,” with the number of farms and their average size holding steady throughout the period.6 Barron argues that a similar stability characterized Chelsea society, which “was much more stable, much less subject to the constant turnover and flux that characterized nineteenth-century society.”7 Chelsea’s population had grown older and more homogeneous as younger people moved away, antebellum conflicts over politics and religion faded into the distance, and a consensus of “settled rural respectability” took hold.8 Yet, for all of its apparent stability, the New England countryside in the late nineteenth century was also undergoing a series of wrenching changes. As one observer put it, “Rural New England is in a state of transition.”9 The primary engine of change was the growth of urban America, which exerted an escalating influence over the nation’s countryside. This trend was particularly pronounced in New England, where rampant suburbanization and a modernizing transportation network literally brought the city to the farmer’s doorstep, dictating the crops he grew, the clothes he wore, and the ambitions of his children. Along with urbanization, the New England farmer also had to adjust to an agricultural economy strained by chronic labor shortages, dwindling production of cereals, declining wool prices, and high taxes. True, the years also brought new economic opportunities for the farmer, particularly in the form of urban consumers’ seemingly insatiable demand for milk, butter, eggs, poultry, fruits, and vegetables, but to supply any of those products the agriculturalist had to solve his labor problem. Finally there was the challenge of depopulation. Since the antebellum years, many communities in rural New England had been losing population, as Yankees, mostly the young and unpropertied, left for the city or the West, to be replaced by far smaller numbers of immigrants. While the region’s farm economy adjusted remarkably well to depopulation, cultural and political institutions suffered . Schools lost students, church attendance dwindled, and public spirit declined. Local farmers’ clubs and Granges provided much needed sociability , cultural enrichment, and activism, but, by the end of the nineteenth century, the slow and...

Share