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The 20th-Century Landscape

As the preceding chapters show, the intricate landscapes of Connecticut have yielded a complex history of land use. Town settlement, farming, forestry, canals, railroads, highways, mining, gristmills, factory mills, and the growth of cities - all have been controlled or influenced by the land. Land controls land use just as the size, shape, and construction material of a box dictates the objects that may be sensibly placed within it. The more complex the land, the more complex the lives built upon it. In Connecticut, land and land use play elaborate counterpoint to each other - a veritable Brandenburg Concerto of relationships between soil and farm, river and city, bedrock and mine, land and life.

The complex forms of Connecticut's landscape have, in combination with its large population and early settlement, led to a bewildering array of place-names. And not just names of hills, valleys, and streams. There are also a huge number of cities, towns, villages, hamlets, and would-be-hamlets. Today, hardly a five-mile stretch of highway exists anywhere in the state that doesn't run through at least one small village. The rest of southern New England is similar. In the western United States, however, there are areas where one still can go a hundred miles and not have an opportunity to refill the tank. Western landscapes are bigger and consequently land use is more spread out. Perhaps this partly explains why easterners are so often characterized as busy, impatient, and

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