and a church and a store and a home and a public road. It is a unified 

 group building for itself these various institutions in the spirit and 

 practice of cooperation. 



In this county the country communities are not individual; they are 

 distinctly dividual. They come apart into well-defined sections, cor- 

 responding to their various activities. There are unfortunate and 

 artificial divisions between educational, religious, commercial and social 

 activities, and between parts or strata of the same neighborhoods. In 

 fact, they are hardly communities at all — they are voting districts. 



If a map could be made locating every church, school and store with 

 a line drawn from each home to the particular church, school and store 

 with which it had connection, this lack of centralization would be very 

 clear. A condition would be depicted which could best be described as 

 "scrambled." In a community so organized there is constant duplica- 

 tion of effort along many lines and the resultant waste is very great. 

 Prosperity in greatest measure will only come to these communities when 

 each effort of the scientific farmer to make many grains of wheat grow 

 where but one grew before is supplemented by the effort of the scientific 

 community builder to make but one store, church or school grow where 

 many grew before. 



Our proposal is a definite one. We will state it as a theory, conscious 

 that local conditions will necessitate modification at various points when 

 applied to a particular community. Montgomery County would divide 

 itself naturally into from twenty to twenty-five communities within which 

 all the people could easily be grouped about some common centre. 

 There would then be no family in the county more than a few miles from 

 one such point. Here all neighborhood activities should centre. Here 

 there would be a community church, a community consolidated school, 

 a community store and all needed community enterprises. In coming 

 years farmers will inevitably adopt the principle of cooperation in their 

 banking and farm business. The value of this is becoming continually 

 clearer. There should be a common point in each community for the 

 carrying on of such community efforts. The social and the recreational 

 life will also centre here. If such a diagram as we mentioned above were 

 then made, the result would look less like a dish of spaghetti and more 

 like a circle with its radii leading from every home to the common center. 



The effect of this plan of organization upon the working efficiency of 

 the community could not help but be tremendous. There would be a 

 gain in social solidarity, in compactness and simplicity of social machin- 

 ery and in directness and definiteness of effort. 



This is not an impossible ideal. In this very county there is one 

 community which has developed this form of organization beyond the 

 experimental stage. 



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