Landscape and Material Life in Franklin County, Massachusetts, 1770-1860

by Garrison, J. Ritchie

• ISBN13: 9781572332065
• ISBN10: 1572332069
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-06-01
• Publisher: Univ of Tennessee Pr

Summary

Originally published in hardcover in 1991, this innovative study draws on anthropology, archaeology, art history, folklore, and history to illuminate the rich texture of a historic landscape and the complex process by which it changed over a ninety-year period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Focusing on Franklin County in the upper Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts, a landscape that shares many characteristics with greater New England and with the rural North, Garrison describes the region's town plans, agricultural patterns, dwellings, barns, outbuildings, fences, and transportation networks--and how they changed. He demonstrates that the transformation of this rural landscape was a dynamic process, a complex interaction between tradition and innovation, driven by people's shifting expectations about material life. Garrison's carefully researched narrative begins with the lives of individual inhabitants and from them generates a larger picture: Who lived in Franklin County, what they though and wrote about, what choices they made and by wh

Author Biography

J. Ritchie Garrison is associate director of the Museum Studies Program at the University of Delaware.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Paperback Edition	p. xvii
Preface to the First Edition	p. xxvii
Introduction	p. 1
The Past	p. 8
Change	p. 36
Lowlands	p. 65
Uplands	p. 94
Farmsteads	p. 115
Dwellings	p. 150
Community	p. 205
Conclusion	p. 244
Plants in Williams Herbarium	p. 263
Glossary	p. 267
Notes	p. 269
Bibliography	p. 293
Index	p. 309
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