Building Towns and Myths

David Jaffee. People of the Wachusett: Greater New England in History and Memory, 1630-1860. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. 320pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliographical essay, and index. $39.95.

Walpole, New Hampshire, is a "picture perfect" New England town. White buildings surround a quiet green where brass bands perform summer concerts and notices caution traffic to proceed one-way on Sundays, church-goers creating the community's only rush hour of the week. Beautiful old homes line the streets and newer houses dot the hillside behind the town, affording an expansive view of the Connecticut River below and the hills of Vermont beyond. Walking around Walpole (people still walk there), one hears the engines of individual automobiles, not the constant drone of traffic. Route 12 and Interstate 91 pass by the town, taking people where they are going without taking them through Walpole. Sheltered from the hurry of modern life, the town seems a vestige of New England past, when life was simpler and more peaceful.

But things were not always that way. Few people driving along Route 12 take any notice of a gray stone roadside marker that commemorates a skirmish between the town's first settler, John Kilburn, and an Indian raiding party. Walpole in the 1750s was at the northern edge of English colonial settlement, a place where men plowed with their muskets close to hand. Fifty years or so later, Walpole was a very different place from what it had been in Kilburn's day and from what it is today. It was a bustling commercial and business community with stores and shops, merchants, a bakery, a hattery, a tailor's shop, a tannery, blacksmiths, printers, stores, a post office. Artisans, lawyers, and doctors plied their trades. Travel then did not pass by Walpole; it passed through it along "the great river road" that hugged the Connecticut Valley. Just north at the Great Falls (later Bellows Falls, Vermont), a rope bridge spanned the Connecticut, and river traffic bypassed the falls via a navigation canal. The Third New Hampshire Turnpike passed through town and stagecoaches stopped there en route between Boston and Hanover, New Hampshire. Walpole's several taverns became meeting places for the exchange of news, information, and ideas. The poems and prose of local literati known as the "Walpole Wits" made the weekly newspaper--The Farmer's Museum and the New Hampshire and Vermont Journal--the leading periodical of its day. Once an "outpost," Walpole had become a center of political, cultural, and economic life in the region.

How Walpole and towns like it came into being, and how they came to occupy such a strong symbolic place in regional and national history and identity is the subject of David Jaffee's book. New Englanders colonized their region by establishing towns. In the rest of the country, Euro-American settlement generally pushed west; in New England it pushed north and, in the case of Maine, northeast. Out-migration occurred as families ran out of land and moved elsewhere to provide homes and opportunities for new generations, or as conflicts divided existing communities. People of the Wachusett traces the process of town development that began in the region of northern Worcester County, Massachusetts, and was replicated through inland New England. Jaffee shows where people went, how the process of town founding worked, and what the experience came to mean in the historical memory of New England.

The New England town has always received plenty of scholarly attention. The shelves of New England town libraries bow under hefty tomes written in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Modern scholars have written many fine books--some of them commonly designated "classic studies"--about New England towns, either tracing change over time or examining the events of a particular time through the lens of a particular community. ¹ People of the Wachusett looks beyond the founding of individual towns and traces serial town settlement. It adds to some excellent "northern...