Village Improvements and Farm Villages

BOSTON: JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, (Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co.) 1877.
Copyright, 1877, By GEO. E. WARING, Jr. Franklin Press: Rand, Avery, & Co., Boston.
The following papers on Village Improvements and Farm Villages are reprinted, with some amendments, from Scribners Monthly. These constitute the more practical part of the book, so far as villages are concerned.
It has, however, been judged appropriate to add to them a paper on Eastern Farming, which originally appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, and which continues the discussion of the question of village residence as a means for mitigating some of the hardships which beset the lives of isolated country families.
The wide-spread and growing interest in the topics considered makes it seem worth while to give these short essays a more permanent form.
G. E. W., Jr.
Newport, R.I., June, 1877.

It may be because the newness of our country and the fragile character of our early structures have prevented the accumulation of inferior, ugly, and uncomfortable houses, as the nucleus around which later building has crystallized; it may be from circumstances which have prevented the isolated residence of the better classes of our people; or it may be the result of accident. Whatever the reason, it is beyond dispute that the United States is par excellence a land of beautiful villages. North, south, east, and west, there are plenty of hideous conglomerations of poor-looking houses, with an absence of every element of beauty; but there are thousands of other villages scattered all over the land, which are full of the evidences of good taste in their regulation and in their management.
As a rule, these more attractive features are very much modified by the presence of badly-kept private places or neglected public buildings, and by a general air of untidiness. Still, the foundation of attractiveness is there; and nothing is needed beyond a well-organized and well-guided control of public sentiment, to remove or to hide the more objectionable features, and to permit such beauty as the village may possess to manifest itself.