CHAPTER XVI 

 THE VILLAGE 



THE HISTORY OF VILLAGE IMPROVEMENT 

 IN THE UNITED STATES 1 



WARREN H. MANNING 



THE precursor of the American village improvement was the 

 early New England village Common, the people's forum, the 

 center of their social and industrial life, a place of recreation, 

 and on it, at Lexington, was t*he opening act of that great drama 

 that led to the American independence. Early, especially Eng- 

 lish, colonists set apart liberal portions of land to be used by 

 householders in common for public landings, pasturage, and from 

 which to secure timber, sedges, and the like, all under restric- 

 tions imposed by the citizens in town meeting. This Common 

 was at first an irregular plot or a very wide street, around or 

 along which the village grew. Many are still retained, sometimes 

 little, sometimes much, diminished by unauthorized encroach- 

 ments of adjacent property owners or by the town's permitting 

 public or semi-public buildings to be placed upon them. Public 

 landings have suffered even more from private appropriation, 

 and most of the "common lands" lying away from the villages 

 became * ' proprietary land, ' ' at an early date, by such acts as the 

 following: Maiden, Massachusetts, in 1694, voted: "Yt ye 

 Common be divided; bottom and top yt is land and wood," and 

 it ordered that commissioners making the division "employ an 

 artist to lay out ye lots." While such acts were legitimate, they 

 were not always wise, for often the same land has been re-pur- 

 chased for public use at large expense. 



The extent of the illegitimate encroachment of private indi- 

 viduals upon lands reserved for the common good was not realized 

 in Massachusetts until Mr. J. B. Harrison investigated for The 



i Adapted from the Art World and Craftsman, V: 423-432, Feb., 1904. 



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