456 RURAL SOCIOLOGY 



Trustees of Public Reservations the status of such lands in the 

 sea-shore towns. A typical example of his findings will suffice : 



"Marshfield formerly had a Common. In earliest times it was 

 the training field. The town gave a religious society a perpetual 

 lease of a part of it as a site for its chapel, and then ran a public 

 road curving diagonally through what remained. During 

 recent years various persons have obtained permission to build 

 sheds on the remnants of the Common, and there is not much of it 

 left for future appropriation. ' ' 



That street trees were appreciated in the earliest days is evi- 

 denced by the action of a town meeting in Watertown, Massa- 

 chusetts, in 1637, which passed a vote "to mark the shade trees 

 by the roadside with a 'W and fineing any person who shall fell 

 one of the trees thus marked 18 shillings." That this interest 

 was continuous is made evident by the age of existing homestead 

 and roadside trees, very many of which are between one hundred 

 and two hundred years old. This appreciation did not, however, 

 extend far beyond the residential districts, for lumbermen and 

 farmers very generally appropriated to their own use all valuable 

 trees on the public ways unless close to their houses. Notwith- 

 standing this, there were always agreeable, if not always stately, 

 woodland drives, for it required from thirty to fifty years for a 

 crop to grow. 



To the village common outlying roads rambled in by graceful 

 curves over lines of least resistance as established by Indians, by 

 cows, and by men of good sense. Later, that man of ''much 

 skill" and less sense, the turnpike engineer, by projecting his 

 roads on straight lines, regardless of hill, dale, or water, managed, 

 at great cost, to ruin much of beauty and convenience, just as the 

 road-builders of the West are following section lines with, how- 

 ever, the frequent additional disadvantage of the zig-zag course 

 along two sides of each section. Such engineers and the sur- 

 veyor who made his plans of streets and lots on paper from 

 plotted property-lines and angles without levels and with little 

 regard to existing surface conditions or existing streets, were then 

 and are now destroying great beauty at unnecessary cost. In the 

 early days these outlying roads were of liberal width, usually 

 four, often ten, and sometimes more, rods wide. Such roads 

 have also been encroached upon by adjacent property-owners. 



