Rural Economy in New England 371 



Agriculture was not a Means of Making Money. 



Equality in distribution would, under the circumstances, naturally 

 be expected. The lack of a market meant production by each 

 family or village unit simply for its own consumption. "The house 

 was a factory on the farm, the farm a grower and producer for the 

 house. "^ Except in especially favored regions, agriculture was not 

 a commercial business; there was practically nothing raised for sale. 

 Hence the opportunities for business profits, for the accumulation 

 and investment of capital, all of which are necessary steps in the 

 development of inequalities in wealth, were lacking. 



The conditions of land tenure and the uniformity in the size of the 

 farms are both proofs of this contention. It is well known that 

 almost every farmer owned his own land, tenancy being found in 

 only a few localities.'' The farms varied in size from 80-100 to 250- 

 300 acres, few having less than 100 acres and few more than 200.'^ 

 Occasionally we find instances of families in the older inland towns 

 distinguished from their neighbors by the possession of considerable 

 estates in land,* enabling them to have more of the refinements and 

 comforts of life and even some of its luxuries. Such instances, 

 however, were exceptions to the general rule of plainness and frugality. 



' Bushnell, The Age of Homespun, p. 392. 



^ Dwight found some tenancy on the Connecticut coast, east of New London. 

 In Stonington, for instance, he found about half of the farms cultivated by tenants, 

 who were, however, in that position only until they could obtain enough capital 

 to purchase land for themselves. Travels, III. 16. See also Tudor, Letters 

 from the Eastern States, p. 406. 



The practice of holding land in common, at least pasture lands, which was 

 often introduced at the settlement of a new town, seems to have died out in most 

 iocahties before the Revolution. In Ridgefield, for instance, the common lands 

 were divided in 1760. Goodrich, Statistical Account, p. 9. See also Doyle, J. A., 

 English Colonies in America. 5 vols. New York. 1882-1907. Vol. V. p. 16. 

 The practice seems to have survived longest, in the Island of Nantucket and in 

 Plymouth and Barnstable Counties in Massachusetts. See Kendall, Travels, II. 

 208-210; also Adams, H. B., The Germanic Origin of New England Towns, Ch. 

 II.; and Village Communities of Cape Anne and Salem, Chs. IX. and X.; both 

 in Vol. I. of Johns Hopkins University Studies in History and Political Science. 



' For a fuller discussion of this point and authorities see supra pp. 321-322. 



* The author of American Husbandry writes. Vol. I. p. 62, as if the English 

 system of cultivation by tenant farmers of land of large proprietors was not an 

 uncommon thing in southern New England before the Revolution. Such a system 

 may have prevailed occasionally in regions of active internal trade (as in Windham 

 County, Conn., see Earned, History of Windham County, II. 270, and Kendall, 

 Travels, I. 315), but there is no evidence that it existed throughout isolated rural 

 communities. 



