Model village

“ As the tenants of the cottages will doubtless be amateur gardeners who will probably add manure to the soil each year, the damp course is likely to get covered over; it is therefore essential that this should be at least six inches above the ground when the cottages are built.
Stock Articles.—Economy may always be exercised by using what are worthy stock articles of building, and in the case of a model village, where large orders will be given, the architect should make it his business to introduce new lines—moulds, doors, grates, mantels, etc.—the quality of which is first well proved. ”

“ Desolate row upon row of ugly and cramped villas, ever multiplying to meet the demands of a quickly increasing population, where no open spaces are reserved, where trees and other natural beauties are sacrificed to the desire to crowd upon the land as many dwellings as possible, and where gardens cannot be said to exist—such are the suburbs which threaten to engulf our cities. ”

“ Every day I walk up this hill—every day I pause at the top to admire the broad winding road with the green waste on each side, uniting it with the thickly timbered hedgerows; the two pretty cottages at unequal distances, placed so as to mark the bends; the village beyond, with its mass of roofs and clustered chimneys peeping through the trees; and the rich distance, where cottages, mansions, churches, towns, seem embowered in some wide forest, and shut in by blue shadowy hills. Every day I admire this most beautiful landscape ”

“ O'er this wild romantic hill-side
Wildly blow the winds of winter,
Softly sigh the summer zephyrs;
Sad and lonely seems the forest,
Watching o'er the empty cellars.
On a boulder by the roadside,
Is a worn inscription telling
Briefly of the ancient village.
Ever flowing, winding southward,
Still the Tunxis River murmurs
Of the Light House on the hill-side
And the people of the village.
Standing there beside the river
Echoes of the past come floating,
On the sighing breezes floating,
Voices of the Light House people,
From the lonely mountain shadows,
Home of ageless Molly Barber. ”

“ From time to time you rumble through the one street of a village, or rather of a small town of historic antiquity, grown rusty with too much sunshine, the houses crowded closely together and connected by dark archways, a network of covered lanes which climb the sheer cliff with snatches of light from above, openings like the mouths of mines affording glimpses of broods of children with curly hair like a halo about their heads, baskets of luscious fruit, a woman descending the rough pavements with a pitcher on her head or a distaff in her hand. ”

“ It is borne in upon the senses in the shape of sights and sounds proclaiming across the valley that the village is an altered place, that the modern world is submerging it, that the old comfortable seclusion is gone. Even the obscurity of winter nights does not veil that truth; for where, but a few years ago, the quiet depths of darkness were but emphasized by a few glimmering cottage lights, there is now a more brilliant sparkling of lit-up villa windows, while northwards the sky has a dull glare from new road-lamps which line the ridge on its town side. ”

“ Each of these villages, as seen from a little distance, is a cluster of châlets, without any visible internal spaces, and without any apparent differences in their dimensions, or structure. They have no suburbs; there is no shading off; the bright green meadow is not gradually lost in the dark brown village. ”

“ Great beeches coil their roots about its edge—younger than the road if ever oasthouses stood by it.
Compton looks like a village presided over by a single mind. The cottages which add themselves to whatever is old in neighbouring buildings are designed to fit with a scheme; the cottage gardens are challenges of roses and phloxes, which shall be brightest. The black beams and jutting stories of an ancient timbered house stand above the road, an example and a guardian; the whole aspect of the village is of the quietest country. ”

“ Never did the eye of man dwell upon a more smiling village. A village? No; it rather resembles a large borough. From at least six to seven hundred houses are scattered on the slope of that hill, without counting the vast thatched structures that are situated below on the meadow, which is watered by a river that rises to the north of the valley, crosses it and forms its boundary far away where the horizon dips. ”

“ These villages are as different as it is possible to conceive from the ordinary European cluster of unattractive cottages, lining both sides of a street which is filled for one-half of its width with manure-heaps. It may be naturally assumed that any adaptation of the village system among us would be governed by the same refining influences which have made our few existing agricultural villages so beautiful and attractive. ”

“ What I like in a village is the mixture of architectural styles, the very irregularity of the buildings, which is such a pleasant change from the monotony of the streets of a capital. What I like to see in a village is the farmhouse and all its outbuildings, the pond in which ducks are splashing, the dung-heap with the hens pecking about it; and then the cottage of the well-to-do peasant, who has had his shutters painted green, and who allows the vines to climb all about the windows; the thatched roof of a laborer not far from the fine house of a wealthy bourgeois ”

“ As the great stone door moved slowly into place, 'Aunt Twaddles' and the children stepped from the mouth of the cave with a merry bound into the sunlight.
"Before them lay a broad, beautiful, green valley, that, at a first glance, seemed to be shut in by tall mountains on all sides; while in the centre of a blue-grass lawn rose a village of tiny play-houses, each as perfectly and as carefully built as the home of some boasted citizen of wealth and fame. ”

“ I came at last to a village straggling along each side of the road; to the right, a fantastic-looking white villa, with many bow-windows, and an orchard behind it. Then on the left, a great row of beeches on the edge of a pasture; and then, over the barns and ricks of a farm, rose the clustered chimneys of an old house; and soon we drew up at a big iron gate between tall red-brick gateposts; beyond it a paling, with a row of high lime trees bordering a garden lawn, and on beyond that the irregular village street. ”

“ If any doorway opens on the highway, it is protected from the evil influences which might else result, by a screen wall, preventing any observation of what goes on within. A village is thus a city in miniature, having all the evils of over-crowding, though it may be situated in the midst of a wide [Pg 22] and comparatively uninhabited plain. Whether land is dear or cheap, a village always has the same crowded appearance, and there is in either case the same indifference to the requirements of future growth. ”

“ It was of this home that Jean François now asked the history. Every child in the village knew it, for, was it not, with its mystery, its ghosts, its inviting splendor, the heart's desire of Nance and me ever since, for us, time began?
It stands in an ample yard, amid old pines, locust trees, and lilac bushes, overlooking the river. It is a great square house of the colonial type, with low wings to the right and left. The windows are large, deep-seated, and many-paned. ”

“ After removing one unimportant house, there remains no obstacle to the laying-out of one straight street two hundred feet wide, with either two or four rows of spreading elms. This street, two thousand feet long, mainly in well-kept grass, with only the necessary width of road and the requisite paths,—having perhaps a well-kept and home-like private place opposite each of its ends,—would stamp the village at once with an attraction which would have a constant civilizing effect on those living under its influence. ”

“ The steep climb from the river and railway has kept off those modern influences which have made Sleights and Grosmont architecturally depressing, and thus we find a simple village on the edge of the heather, with picturesque stone cottages and pretty gardens, free from companionship with the painfully ugly modern stone house, with its thin slate roof. The big house of the village stands on the very edge of the descent, surrounded by high trees now swept bare of leaves. ”

“ And sometimes, of course, you rattle through a village, with its crumbling, stained, and faded yellow-stuccoed houses, its dazzling white canvas awnings, its church and campanile, and its life that seems to pass entirely in the street: men in their shirt sleeves, lounging, smoking, spitting (else the land were not Italy!) , or perhaps playing cards at a table under the leafless bush of the wine-shop; women gossiping over their needlework, or, gathered in sociable knots, combing and binding up their sleek black hair; children sprawling in the kindly dirt ”

“ The villages are straggling, queer, old-fashioned places, the houses being dropped down without the least regularity, in nooks and out-of-the-way corners by the sides of shadowy lanes and footpaths, each with its patch of garden. They are built chiefly of good gray stone, and thatched; though I see that within the last year or two the red-brick cottages are multiplying, for the vale is beginning to manufacture largely both brick and tiles. There are lots of waste ground by the side of the roads in every village, amounting often to village-greens, where feed the pigs and ganders of the people ”

“ Amid such native richness stands the village,—a small collection of nondescript houses, with overhanging roofs, wide porticos, or sheds which answer for piazzas, mammoth chimneys, built outside the edifice, as if they were afterthoughts when the houses were constructed. The streets are narrow, and the dwellings are huddled together as if there were but one corner lot, and all were trying to get as close to it as possible, reminding one of a crowd of boys round the old-fashioned fireplace of a country school-house on a winter's morning. There is not a new house in the place. ”

“ But none of these things will teach them to prize the country, rather the reverse, for many of the films they see show them uglification at its worst—in the ricketty shacks of Western America. It might be possible to teach them to admire their own heritage by occasional lectures at the village institutes on town-planning and architecture; not the architecture of great cathedrals and [92] of foreign buildings like the Parthenon, but the simple homely architecture of the village church, the village barn, and the village cottage. ”

“ It rises, massive and perpendicular, out of the centre of the village to which it gives its name, and which it entirely dominates; so that, as you stand before it, in the crooked and empty street, there is no resource for you but to stare up at its heavy overhanging cornice and at the huge towers surmounted with extinguishers of slate. If you follow this street to the end, however, you encounter in abundance the usual embellishments of a French village: little ponds or tanks, with women on their knees on the brink, pounding and thumping a lump of saturated linen ”

“ The real elements of beauty in a village are not fine houses, costly fences, paved roadways, geometrical lines, mathematical grading, nor any obviously costly improvements. They are, rather, cosiness, neatness, simplicity, and that homely air that grows from these and from the presence of a home-loving people. ”

“ Whenever there is a river or stream available for such purposes, and the surrounding country is fertile, the village rapidly rises to be a considerable town. Frame-houses are so quickly erected, and the materials are so easily procured near a saw-mill, that, in the first instance, no other description of houses is to be found in our incipient towns. But as the town increases, brick and stone houses rapidly supplant these less substantial edifices, which seldom remain good for more than thirty or forty years. ”

“ One comfortable house and the parsonage are distinguishable; but the township is a large one,—about two hundred scattered houses in all, those of the village forming as it were the capital. The roads are lined with fruit-trees, and numerous little gardens are strewn here and there,—true country gardens with everything in them; flowers, onions, cabbages and grapevines, currants, and a great deal of manure. The village has a primitive air; it is rustic, and has that decorative simplicity which we artists are forever seeking. ”

“ A village often entirely covers one of the small hills, not a house venturing forward to form an outskirt, but all clustered and compact. Steep, perfectly straight streets of sharp narrow cobbles, without side pavements, run up to the church at the top through rows of low, whitewashed houses, of a single storey and of a dazzling whiteness. At evening the labourers come in from the far distant fields in a continuous line, on foot or on mules and donkeys, and children go out to meet them and are given a ride back into the village. ”

“ The village is, like all Tyrolean villages, built without apparent plan,—no two houses on a line, no two streets at right angles, everybody's house slanting across or 386 against somebody else's house, the confusion really attaining the dignity of a fine art. If a child were to set out a toy village on the floor, decide hastily to put it back in its box, sweep it all together between his two hands, then change his mind, and let the houses remain exactly as they had fallen, with no change except to set them right side up, I think it would make a good map of Oberammergau. ”

“ The ruder nature of woods and villages, of sturdy ploughmen and the healthy though soiled and ragged children in rural neighbourhoods, affords a by no means unpleasing contrast and introduction to the trim trees and smoothly undulating lawns, and curved walks, and gay parterres, and fine ladies and well dressed and graceful children on some old ancestral estate. We look for rusticity in the village, and for elegance in the park. ”