Next to the house on both sides will be plots or gardens about the width of the house, and probably partitioned from the neighbor’s by trellises of vines or hedges of shrubbery. These plots will be of sufficient depth to give ample privacy to one’s doors and windows. These front yards—there are no back yards or back alleys in Roadtown—are but the outdoor part of private homes, and will perhaps be devoted to shade trees and lawn on one side, and to garden stuff on the other. Though these yards in Roadtown etiquette will be strictly private as far as an outsider’s presence is concerned, they will still be within easy view of promenaders on the roof, and for the same reason one is not allowed to dump rubbish on the front stoop in the city, the Roadtown yard will be under the general oversight and supervision of the Roadtown landscape gardener.
Beyond the private gardens will be vegetable gardens, then chicken yards, greenhouses or pigeon flies. Beyond these in larger plots will be berry patches and coarser vegetables, and then orchards and dairy barns and pastures, and farther still, grain fields, and beyond that, forests.
The distance back which land will eventually be tilled by farmers living in the Roadtown, is a matter on which I hesitate to express my opinion for fear it will discredit the worth of my judgment in the minds of those who have given the matter no thought, but I think I can carry the points by examples: Imagine yourself to be a farmer of the future, and accustomed to the luxury of civilization; suppose you wish to raise flax as a main crop, and breed pigeons and grow dew berries as side issues. The pigeons and berries you could have at a few minutes’ walk from your Roadtown home. The flax would require your attention, plowing and seeding a couple of weeks in the spring, and harvesting again a week or so in the summer. Would you prefer to go five miles to that field every day for fifteen or twenty days, or even take a tent with you and go twenty miles and camp there, and for the rest of the year enjoy the coöperative and waste eliminating features of the Roadtown home life, or would you live in a frame house on the land and wash your face in cold water and get up winter mornings to start a fire and drink impure water from a polluted well and make your wife a kitchen scullion, isolated and lonely, and send your children two miles through the storm to an inefficient country school?
Two of the most immediate advantages of the Roadtown for agriculture are heat and water for lawns, greenhouses and gardens. How far this water service can be extended from the Roadtown main will of course depend upon the nature of the supply. But it has been abundantly proven that water for irrigation, even in the most moist sections of the United States, was a wonderfully profitable investment. Sewage will find a special use as fertilizer as before mentioned, and the Roadtown garbage disposal works will doubtlessly have a residue for the land.
Horse manure as a fertilizer is gradually vanishing from industrial life, and the Roadtown will eventually depend upon the chemical fertilizers, “green manure” crops, and from the animals upon the land for fertilizer.
The distribution of fertilizer as well as the receipt of heavy freight, will require a freight station located about every quarter or half mile. The opening of the ground for access to the tracks will disturb a yard or two which will lessen the rental value of the house above, just as the rental value of thousands of city houses have been diminished by the presence of elevated roads. In practice such locations in the house line will doubtless be used for some of the numerous non-residential purposes for which room will be occasionally planned to suit the local conditions.
Transportation will enable the better development of coöperative features, such as creameries, hatcheries and nurseries that now thrive under adverse conditions and will doubtlessly encourage the development of others not now anticipated.
Elimination of the Middleman.
The markets of Roadtown can hardly be compared to present conditions at all. Where the farmers of to-day go to the railroad station with their produce, Roadtown farmers will leave theirs in the warehouse of the food department. The 25 to 75 per cent of the price that now melts away between the producer and consumer will of necessity be divided between the producer and the consumer.
The Roadtown, either through its central coöperation or in the form of individual citizens will be a great consuming market for the Roadtown farmer. Certain products, however, for which the locality is especially adapted must necessarily be sold outside the Roadtown. For such, salesmanship coöperation as is now carried on in the Ontario and California fruit belts and in the creameries of the Middle West and trucking districts of the South will be brought into play, and with the Roadtown transportation system and storage warehouses its farmers will surely not fail where the former have succeeded.