Antiques.(American small town culture)

 
She's one of the two best states in the Union. Vermont's the other. And 
the two have been Yoke-fellows in the sap-yoke from of old In many 
Marches. And they lie like wedges, Thick end to thin end and thin end to 
thick end, And are a figure of the way the strong Of mind and strong of 
arm should fit together, One thick where one is thin and vice versa. 
Robert Frost, "New Hampshire," 1923 

From New England the American small town spread across the nation. White-painted frame buildings abutting a tree shaded green--this is the object of an enduring collective memory. Thorstein Veblen wrote: "The country town is one of the great American institutions; perhaps the greatest, in the sense that it has had and continues to have a greater part than any other in shaping public sentiment and giving character to American culture."

The small town, modeled on its English counterpart, became the ideal social organization for the Puritans who, in the seventeenth century, immigrated to establish covenanted communities united to serve God's purpose. It was God's intention, wrote the Puritan leader John Winthrop in 1630, that "every man might have need of other, and from hence they might be all knitt more nearly together in the Bond of brotherly affeccion." This sense of a common purpose was quite different from ...