biggest streamlined hill for miles around. This was the only type of hill that was both large enough to support an entire town and had sufficiently rich and thick soils for productive farming. A true drumlin or a bedrock hill without a thick till covering just would not do; bedrock hills don't have enough soil and true drumlins are too small. Thus, bedrock prominences like the Housatonic Highlands or the Bolton Range had few colonial towns, while streamlined hills in the Southwest Hills and Windham Hills regions were extensively put to the plow. The towns were laid out on a wheel-and-spokes plan. At the hub, on or near the top of the hill, were the meeting house and town green. Houses lined the green, and fields stretched out down the hillsides. Additional houses and farms also were strung along the main roads leading up the hill and into town.

Obviously, there was a limit to the number of farms that could be easily squeezed into this radiating setup, and periodically an entirely new town was established around a meeting house on top of some other big streamlined hill. Towns originally built on this colonial plan are scattered on streamlined hilltops throughout the Uplands; some of the best examples are Lebanon, Franklin, Sterling Hill, Brooklyn, Hampton, Hebron, Gilead, Columbia, Colchester, Washington, Norfolk, Newtown, and Greenfield Hill. This pattern of land use had no better development than in the Goshen Hills, a patch of streamlined hills pasted across Cameron's Line and including the town centers of Goshen, West Goshen, and Litchfield.

In these little hilltop towns the Puritans lived the life of religious purity that they sought in the New World. Part of the Puritan mission was to set an example of a true, holy lifestyle for all the world to see. John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, articulated this aspiration in a sermon delivered on board the Arbella, flagship of the seventeen vessels that carried the colonists from Holland to establish Boston in 1630. for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us."⁸ By siting towns on streamlined hills, the colonists lived their own metaphor.

It was an isolated and sometimes monotonous life. Travel to and from these hilltop communities was difficult, and news and goods travelled slowly. A wagon either could roll patiently along the base of the

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