Rural Economy In New England At The Beginning Of The Nineteenth Century (1916) (Hardcover)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. The Coast And River Towns. A glance at the map of southern New England as it was in 1810 will reveal the fact that all of the largest towns in these states were at that time to be found either on the seacoast or on the largest of the navigable rivers, the Connecticut. Has this fact any significance? Were the occupations of the bulk of the inhabitants of these towns different from those of the inland towns? Had maritime industries, such as fishing, trading, and shipbuilding developed to such an extent as to lead to a clear-cut separation of occupations? Is it possible that there was in these towns a concentrated population who furnished a market for the products of inland farmers? If so, what effect did the existence of such a market have on the agricultural population? These are the questions confronting us in this chapter. Four Groups of Commercial Towns. For purposes of analysis we may divide the commercial towns into four groups: (1) The towns along the north shore of Massachusetts Bay from Boston to Newburyport; (2) those on the south coast of Massachusetts, on NarragansettBay and in Connecticut along the shore of Long Island Sound, including all the ports from New Bedford to New York; (3) the towns on Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket; and (4) the river towns of the Connecticut Valley. (j) On Massachusetts Bay. The most important of these groups of towns was the first mentioned. Here were seven towns, not including Boston, ranging in population from 4,600 to 12,000, making a total altogether of 46,000 people. Add to this 34,000 for Boston and 5,000 for Charlestown, (at that time practically a part of the larger city) and we have a total of 85,000 persons living on a narrow strip of sea-coast some 50 miles in extent. It might well be expecte...