The landscape we make by being there and making a living

By BILL CHAISSON
More and more Americans grow up in designed landscapes rather than  vernacular landscapes. This means that more and more of us get used to the idea that building designs are all about aesthetics and where buildings are placed are mostly about getting the best view of … whatever.

But once upon a time the appearance of a building had more to do with its function and its location on the landscape had more to do with maximizing the efficiency of the use to which that building was put.

Why, for example, is Claremont several miles up the Sugar River from its mouth at the Connecticut? Because Claremont was founded as a mill town and it needed to be on the part of the river where you found the biggest falls, which were needed for their power to drive the mills.

There are string of “fall line” cities along the East Coast that are not port cities, but are instead located several miles inland where a river falls off the bedrock of the Piedmont and onto the soft sediments of the coastal plain. August, Georgia is on the Savannah River; Rocky Mount, North Carolina is on the Tar River; Trenton, New Jersey is on the Delaware River. Closer to home Pawtucket, Rhode Island, is on the Blackstone River; Lowell is on the Merrimack River, and Watertown is on the Charles River.

J.B. Jackson, a writer, publisher, and instructor, is largely responsible for promulgating and explaining the idea of the vernacular landscape. He was brought up in France, Switzerland and New Mexico, attended a series of elite preparatory school, the Experimental College of the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Harvard.

Jackson absorbed the French tradition of evaluating the culture of a region as a function of the natural resources that are present, but he also spent summers working on his uncle’s ranch in the Southwest. These disparate experiences combined to make him aware that for most of our history, the landscape around us has been extensively altered by the uses we require of it. In turn the uses are determined by the resources that are available. His collection of essays “A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time” is a good place to start.

Think of the difference between the street plans of Boston and New York City. Boston was famously “laid out by cows.” The city, including Cambridge, Somerville, consists of a network of “squares” (that are in no way square) connected by long roads with shorter streets reaching between the longer ones.

Once you get above Canal Street in Manhattan, the whole island is a merciless numbered grid. It is the ultimate expression of design on the landscape and the opposite of Boston, which is “organized” as a network of watering holes for cattle.

Since returning to northern New England this spring, I have been reminded of the density of vernacular landscapes in this region. I spend 25 years in upstate New York, one of the first regions of the young country that was surveyed in a grid (forerunner of the township and range system that orders the Midwest).

Much of what tourists find charming about New England is the mysterious way that things seem to be laid out. The uses that caused towns to be built next to waterfalls are now largely gone and it now seems like a merely picturesque choice. There may be a bit of romance in the Yankee mind, but mostly there is idiosyncratic reason.