lements in them
compared with the tracts yet unsettled. . . .

I should further observe that these tracts have since the
peace [_i. e._, 1763], been settling pretty fast: farms on the
river Connecticut are every day extending beyond the old fort
Dummer, for near thirty miles; and will in a few years reach
to Kohasser which is nearly two hundred miles; not that such
an extent will be one-tenth settled, but the new-comers do not
fix near their neighbors, and go on regularly, but take spots
that please them best, though twenty or thirty miles beyond
any others. This to people of a sociable disposition in Europe
would appear very strange, but the Americans do not regard the
near neighborhood of other farmers; twenty or thirty miles by
water they esteem no distance in matters of this sort; besides
in a country that promises well the intermediate space is not
long in filling up. Between Connecticut river and Lake
Champlain upon Otter Creek, and all along Lake Sacrament
[George] and the rivers that fall into it, and the whole
length of Wood Creek, are numerous settlements made since the
peace.[73:1]

For nearly a hundred years, therefore, New England communities had been
pushed out to new frontiers in the intervals between the almost
continuous wars with the French and Indians. Probably the most
distinctive feature in this frontier was the importance of the community
type of settlement; in other words, of the towns, with their Puritan
ideals in education, morals, and religion. This has always been a matter
of pride to the statesmen and annalists of New England, as is
illustrated by these words of Holland in his "Western Massachusetts,"
commenting on the settlement of the Connecticut Valley in villages,
whereby in his judgment morality, education, and urbanity were
preserved:

The influence of this policy can only be fully appreciated
when standing by the side of the solitary settler's hut in the
West, where even an Eastern man has degenerated to a boor in
manners, where his children have grown up uneducated, and
where the Sabbath has become an unknown day, and religion and
its obligations have ceased to exercise control upon the heart
and life.

Whatever may be the real value of the community type of settlement, its
establishment in New England was intimately connected both with the
Congregat