The purpose of this study of the idea of the New England village is to account for the nineteenth-century invention of the village tradition and its associated settlement ideal. Interpretation of landscapes and texts builds on existing work on the morphogenesis of the material village in the early nineteenth century. I assess the role of nineteenth-century elites-writers, travelers, lithographers, landscape architects, social reformers, and social scientists-in inventing a geographical past that never existed, with special emphasis on Concord, Massachusetts and Litchfield, Connecticut, elite places then as now. I then discuss the intertwining of the invention of the village tradition with the creation of an appealing settlement ideal within the context of Romanticism and economic change. The tradition both justified the past and legitimated the present. The settlement ideal emerged from a relationship between Jeffersonian agrarianism in counterpoise with industrial urbanism in the context of an urban conception of country-"having both" in Emerson's terms. The conclusion that nineteenth-century Romantics invented the New England village tradition, and in so doing created an enduring settlement ideal, exemplifies how we create our own geographies, those in our minds approximations of those on the ground, and vice versa.
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