American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' by Julian Street
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page 45 of 607 (07%)
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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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