Cottage industry

“ Altogether too little attention has been paid in our country to these most useful appendages to the farm, both in their construction and appearance. Nothing adds more to the feeling of comfort, convenience, and home expression in the farm, than the snug-built laborers' cottage upon it. The cottage also gives the farm an air of respectability and dignity. The laborer should, if not so sumptuously, be as comfortably housed and sheltered as his employer. ”

“ Rare and costly plants are not required, and indeed, are hardly in place in the grounds of an ordinary cottage, unless occupied by the professional gardener. They denote expense, which the laboring cottager cannot afford; and besides that, they detract from the simplicity of the life and purpose which not only the cottage itself, but everything around it, should express. ”

“ The fullest account that I know of, and on the largest scale, of the cost and rent of cottages, is contained in the Report of the Poor-law Commissioners on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Classes, in 1842. The date is rather old; but such change as has taken place in the last seventeen years is in favour of cottage-building, as a speculation, as well as in the quality of the dwellings. The economy, as well as the sanitary condition, is better understood. ”

“ A fire sheds its cheerful influence over the scene; the kettle never wants hot water; and the honest, frugal housewife is ever discharging some household duty in a spirit of placid contentment, attending to her partner when present, or preparing his meals against his return from the fields.
“The external economy of the houses of the hinds is on the whole very good. The ground in front of the cottages is kept clean and free of impurities. The little garden, which is almost invariably connected with the cottage, is kept in good order, and is in general well cultivated.” ”

“ I was astonished at the strings of dwellings, side by side, stript, more or less, of the commonest household utensils—the poor little bare houses, often crowded with lodgers, whose homes had been broken up elsewhere; sometimes crowded, three or four families of decent working people in a cottage of half-a-crown a-week rental; sleeping anywhere, on benches or on straw, and afraid to doff their clothes at night time because they had no other covering. ”

“ He observes that owing to the increased value of land, large masses of the population are removed from contact with nature, and at this period it is important that every family should learn that they possess a resource in the cultivation of flowers both in their cottages and windows, and at every point where contact with the open air may be obtained. He hopes that with the needful improvements in the dwellings of the poor, some means may be devised for fostering cottage horticulture and cottage floriculture. ”

“ Still, such fancies are contagious, and we have occasionally seen the ambitious cottage, with its covert expression of humility, insinuating itself on to the farm, and for the farmer's own family occupation, too, which at once spoiled, to the eye, the substantial reality of the whole establishment. A farmer should discard all such things as ornamental cottages. They do not belong to the farm. If he live in a cottage himself, it should be a plain one ”

“ The cottages or houses in villages for labourers are in general the property of the owners of the large estates in the neighbourhood, as well as those that are built on the patches of land for the use of those who are married; some of the latter, however, are built at the joint expense of the farmer and labourer. A cottage or cottages in a detached place from a village, or a house in such a situation, with a little plot of ground for a garden for each apartment, lets for about 20 to 30 francs a year per room, whether the building consists of one or of four rooms. ”

“ Summer came on apace. The Cooking Club took a vacation, or rather turned into a gardening club, and studied the sensible part of botany and floriculture. People began to look at the waste land lying about, with envious eyes. Here and there some one started a garden, or indulged in a flock of chickens. The Webbers traded their snug cottage for a place on the outskirts of the town, with two acres of ground, which they improved rapidly. Men who had sold farms, and spent the money in vain business speculations, looked back regretfully, and in some instances hired where they had been proprietors. ”

“ Farm and garden supplies are purchased for what seems to the Northern mind an absurdly low price, and dairy products are never high. Besides, in all the rural mill communities, which are now counted by the score to every one in a city, a garden patch always and often pasturage for one cow can be counted on with every cottage.
House rent is not a considerable item. The mill cottages rent by the month on the basis of 60 cents to $1 per room, and the houses range in size from three to eight rooms, four, however, being the rule. ”

“ Some were hedgers, ditchers, ploughmen, reapers, shepherds, and herdsmen. The cottagers' typical earnings of about 1s. a day amounted to about 200 shillings a year, which was almost subsistence level. Accordingly they also farmed a little on their four acres of land with garden. Some also had a few animals. They lived in a one or two room cottage of clay and branches of trees or wood, sometimes with a brick fireplace and chimney, and few windows. They ate bread, cheese, lard, soup, and greens. If a laborer was unmarried, he lived with the farmer. ”

“ Craftsmen still helped farmers at harvest time.
Much of the rural population was now dispersed over the countryside instead of being concentrated in villages because so many small holders had sold out due to enclosures of farm land, especially of common land and waste land. The rural working class lived in two room cottages, with low ceilings, small windows, and an earth floor. Patience was required for those willing to wait for an existing cottage in a village to be vacated. Most laborers did not marry unless and until they found a cottage. ”

“ Good cottages and large gardens with fruit trees, or allotment, which will go far to pay the rent for the cottage, and improve the quality of the workman by teaching him to work on his own account: "good homes are more than high wages," says Lord Sydney Godolphin Osborne, in the Times, and practical experience entirely bears him out. ”

“ But it is not in money wholly that the farm labourer pays for the improved cottage, if it forms part of the farm on which he works, or is so connected with it that the farmer has command of the services of the cottager. A farmer having good cottages at his disposal can select the best workmen as his daily labourers. ”

“ It is on the point, and mainly short of its wooded extremity, that the cottages of our settlement are dropped, as near the ocean as may be, and with as little order as birds' nests in the grass, among the sweet-fern, laurel, bay, wild raspberries, and dog-roses, which it is the ideal to leave as untouched as possible. Wheel-worn lanes that twist about among the hollows find the cottages from the highway, but foot-paths approach one cottage from another, and people walk rather than drive to each other's doors. ”

“ If the girl at eighteen or twenty—in most agricultural marriages the girls are very young—is fortunate enough to have placed her faith in a man who redeems his word, then comes the difficulty of the cottage and the furniture to fill it. Cottages are often difficult to find, especially anywhere near a man's work, which is the great object. The furniture required is not much, but there must be some. The labourer does not deal much with the town furniture-dealer. A great deal of the furniture in cottages has been picked up at the sales of farmers on quitting their tenancies. ”

“ First, to a more general substitution of good cottages for bad ones—cottages which will secure health and comfort in the ordinary living department, and provide separate bedrooms for the parents and children of different sexes, so as to secure comfort and decency, which have hitherto been incompatible with the dwellings of the farm labourer. These advantages may be gained not only by building new cottages, but by alterations of and additions to existing ones. ”

“ It, and it alone provides, or if one must be cautious, appears to provide the way to turn an old dream of mine and of many other people into a reality. My connection with the problem of housing, and especially of rural housing, i.e. cottage housing, now nearly a quarter of a century old, has been on the side of cheap material. Rightly or wrongly (I know that many great experts in building matters think quite wrongly) , I have had the simplicity to believe that if you are to get cheap housing you must get it by the use of cheap material. It has always seemed to me that there is no other way. ”

“ There can be no question that a fitly designed cottage, conveniently arranged, adds, independently of its own cost, a large per centage to the value of the acres which surround it, and is the point which arrests the eye and secures the purchaser. ”

“ Wright, of London, proposes, in an English paper, to institute a cottage society, in shares of ten pounds sterling each, for the purpose of procuring lands, either waste or by purchase, to be divided into lots, from four to twelve acres each, whereon to erect cottages, for the accommodation of the poor. ”

“ Cottages so healthy as these new ones pay well. Good rents are offered for them,—to save doctors’ bills and loss of time from sickness;—and, when once a system of house-drainage is set a-going, it costs scarcely more in adding a cottage to a group, to make it all right, than to run it up upon solid clay as used to be the way here. Well, I have a good mind to write to Harry to-day. ”

“ The cottagers always attend sales like this, and occasionally get hold of good bargains, and so it is that really good substantial furniture may often be found in the possession of the better class of labourers. The old people accumulate these things, and when their sons or daughters marry, can generally spare a few chairs, a bedstead and bed, and with a little crockery from other relations, and a few utensils bought in the adjacent town, the cottage is furnished sufficiently well for a couple whose habits are necessarily simple. ”

“ Building is so cheap in America, that the difference in cost between a snugly-finished cottage, and a rickety, open tenement, is hardly to be taken into consideration, as compared with the higher health, and increased enjoyment of the laborer and his family; while every considerate employer knows that cheerfulness and contentment of disposition, which are perhaps more promoted by good home accommodations for the workingman than by any other influence, are strong incentives to increased labor on his part, and more fidelity in its application. ”

“ The cottage-farms consist of house inclosures—the houses being built in pairs and fitted with conveniences—of about half a rood of garden-land each, with a tract attached, including pasture, of about three acres, and are leased at a fixed rent of fifty dollars a year, for twenty-one years. ”

“ Well, he would just have to be on the continual lookout. For one thing he would stop at a store on the way back and purchase a couple of big steamer rugs and a long warm cloak. He could smuggle them into the cottage somehow and have the servants bring them out for common use as if they belonged to the house. ”

“ On their deaths the cottages were to become the property of the lord of the manor. One man received £40 for his cottage, the other £20, which sums forty years ago represented relatively a far higher value than now, and demonstrate conclusively that the labourer, if he is a steady, hard-working man, can build a cottage. ”

“ And first by way of garden allotments—In some parts of England it is the custom to attach to every cottage, a considerable and sufficient garden of say one-quarter or one-third of an acre. This is chiefly the case where the cottages are scattered and not grouped together in villages; but there are many more districts where the garden attached to a cottage is miserably insufficient. Now it is in the power of every landlord and every farmer to remedy this state of things, at no perceptible loss to himself by letting off in portions, of say one-quarter of an acre, some field or part of a field. ”

“ Farmers are invariably anxious to have good cottages. There is a reluctance to destroy the existing ones, both from the inconvenience and the uncertainty sometimes of others being erected. Often, too, the poor have the strongest attachment to the cabin in which they were born and bred, and would strongly resent its destruction, though obviously for their good. Farmers never build bad cottages now. When a tenement falls in, either from decay or the death of the tenant, the cottage which is erected on its site is invariably a good one. ”

“ A picturesquely built house, its adobe walls hidden by much climbing vinery, has its porch turned into a thickly-leaved bower by masses upon masses of clematis, whose white, thistly puffs of seed-down, each as large as a snow ball, are strung upon the green stem like monstrous beads. The garden, of which this cottage is the center, abounds in apple trees, pears, quince, plum, and peach trees, through whose spring blossoms thousands of bees go to and fro bearing burdens of honey to the neat store-houses under the shade. ”

“ It should take a subordinate position of ground. This adds to its expression as subordinate in rank, among the lesser farm buildings. A cottage cannot, and should not aspire to be chief in either position or character. Such should be the farm house proper; although unpretending, still, in style, above the cottage; and if the latter, in addition, be required on the farm, it should so appear, both in construction and finish; just what it is intended for—a tenement for economical purposes. ”