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American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' by Julian Street
page 45 of 607 (07%)
each side of and behynde their houses, by which it happens that in most
places there are not fifty houses in the space of thirty myles."[1]

[1] From "Historic Towns of the Southern States."

The difficulty experienced by the Barons Baltimore, Lords Proprietary of
Maryland, in building up communities in their demesne was not a local
problem, but one which confronted those interested in the development of
the entire portion of this continent now occupied by the Southern
States. Generally speaking, towns came into being more slowly in the
South than in the North, and it seems probable that one of the principal
reasons for this may be found in the fact that settlers throughout the
South lived generally at peace with the Indians, whereas the northern
settlers were obliged to congregate in towns for mutual protection.
Thus, in colonial days, while the many cities of New York and New
England were coming into being, the South was developing its vast and
isolated plantations. Farms on the St. Lawrence River and on the
Detroit River, where the French were settling, were very narrow and very
deep, the idea being to range the houses close together on the river
front; but on such rivers as the Potomac, the Rappahannock and the
James, no element of early fear is to be traced in the form of the broad
baronial plantations.

Nevertheless, when Baltimore began at last to grow, she became a
prodigy, not only among American cities, but among the cities of the
world. Her first town directory was published in 1796, and she began the
next year as an incorporated city, with a mayor, a population of about
twenty thousand, and a curiously assorted early history containing such
odd items as that the first umbrella carried in the United States was
brought from India and unfurled in Baltimore in 1772; that the town had
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