8 OUR USE OF THE LAND 



the land. But the real energy of the country went into building 

 cities and fortunes in the East and taming the West. Forgotten 

 towns of colonial days remained forgotten. 



As the men who owned the factories accumulated their 

 profits, they began to look for places in the country in which 

 to spend their leisure. In those days, most Americans, re 

 gardless of where they were or what they did, liked to think 

 of themselves as country boys at heart. And indeed, most of 

 them were. They had sentimental memories of the colonial 

 town sleeping in the elm shade, the white church with its tall 

 spire presiding over the green common, the neat white houses 

 with their clean lines, instead of the jig-saw frills of the houses 

 men built in the cities to display their prosperity. Thus the 

 little towns like Petersham that had sent its young men to the 

 cities got back prosperous city men looking for a rest. 



Petersham became a sort of open-air museum. The main 

 purpose of the town was to be looked at. Here and there a stand 

 of timber that had somehow escaped the axe when a third cut 

 was made in the early 1900's was maturing into valuable saw 

 logs. Occasional well-cared-for fields and a neat house marked 

 the farm of some successful dairyman who sold milk to the sur 

 rounding towns. 



But most of the farms were down at the heel, and most of 

 the fields were barely holding their own, or growing up in 

 scrub timber. Those who had no land could find a job in one 

 of the factories in nearby Athol, or earn a few months' pay by 

 doing odd jobs for "summer people." 



The World War caused prices to go up a little in Petersham. 

 A few people began to prepare land for farming again. How 

 ever, the crash in farm prices that followed the War soon 

 drove all but a few of these back to the work benches in the 

 factories. 



After the World War, towns like Petersham were in full 

 retreat. Cash incomes shrank. Brush continued to crowd into 



