CHAPTER VI. 



Home and Community Life in the Inland Town. 



At the conclusion of the survey of economic conditions in southern 

 New England in 1810 which occupied the first four chapters of this 

 essay, we ventured the statement that the most important circum- 

 stance determining the life of the inhabitants of inland towns was 

 the lack of a market. In the preceding chapter the assertion has 

 been partially justified by an examination of the effect of this cir- 

 cumstance, this commercial isolation of the inland town, on the 

 agricultural industry carried on by its inhabitants. It remains for 

 this chapter to consider to what extent the peculiar characteristics 

 of home and community life in these towns were also dependent on 

 the same cause. The best place to look for the influence of a market, 

 or the effects of a lack of it, is in the everyday life of the farmer him- 

 self. If our reasoning up to the present has been accurate, we should 

 expect to find him unable to sell more than a trifling amount, if any, 

 of the produce of his land, and consequently unable to purchase 

 goods to any considerable extent from the outside world. He and 

 his family must have constituted very nearly an economic microcosm, 

 a self-sufficient household economy, supplying their wants almost 

 entirely by their own labor, except for occasional neighborly coopera- 

 tion, and relying hardly at all on the exchange of products or serv- 

 ices with outside communities. 



The Self-sufficiency of New England Farms. 



The facts, as far as they can be learned, give ample support to 

 this deduction. It would naturally be expected that, given the soil 

 and climate of New England which lend themselves to the cultiva- 

 tion of a variety of food products, the farmer would be able to provi- 

 sion his family from his own land, but the extent of this self-suffi- 

 ciency is somewhat surprising. Dwight tells us^ that flesh and fish 

 were the principal food of the inhabitants of New England. A 

 more concrete description of their fare is that given by Felt: "For 

 more than a century and a half {i.e., up until almost 1800) the most 



» Travels, IV. 341. 



354 



