THE LAND 7 



To most of them the future looked bright. They did not know 

 that the decay which was soon to reduce this community largely 

 to empty cellar holes and stone walls rambling through scrub 

 timber had already set in. 



However, it was not long before this decay was plain to 

 everyone. The factory towns springing up on the fall line of 

 New England rivers were drawing the young men and women 

 away from the land. Those who wanted to work with the land 

 found that the declining soil could not bring in as much money 

 as a job in town. 



And then there was the West, square miles of fertile black 

 earth waiting only for the plow. As one man put it in 1817, 

 "Old America seems to be breaking up and moving westward." 4 

 A man in Newburg, New York, noticed in a single July day 

 six wagons with seventy persons, all from Massachusetts, on 

 their way to a village in Ohio. 5 By 1838 the people who re" 

 mained in Petersham did not think it at all unusual that Lewis 

 Bigelow, who had been born and bred in the town, should die 

 in such a far-off place as Peoria, Illinois. At this time a resident 

 of Petersham could have found childhood neighbors in many 

 western counties. 



After the Civil War the United States grew like a young 

 cat in a creamery. Men began to build factories, cut down 

 forests, and break the virgin prairie sod in earnest. In Peter 

 sham, the old farms had nearly all grown up to second growth 

 timber. The factories and the cities that oprang up around them 

 were the market for this second growth. And when that was 

 cut, about all that was left on many former farms was a bristle 

 of alder, blueberry, and hardwood sprouts that would never be 

 anything better than firewood. 



The demand for lumber had brought a few people back to 



4 Harold Underwood Faulkner, American Economic History, Harper # Brothers, 

 New York, 1935, p. 204. 

 6 Loc. cit. 



