Rural district

“ Under this clause half the rural districts of England have acquired urban powers which, being exercised by persons having for the most part an interest in urbanizing the district—jobbers in residential land ripe for development, tradesmen, contractors and local builders—have been used as an instrument to prevent the erection of dwellings suitable for agricultural laborers and to tie the hands of landowners willing to provide such dwellings. ”

“ Where the population of any rural district is less than four thousand and its rateable value is less than twenty thousand pounds the Local Government Board shall, if it is conveniently possible, amalgamate the district with an adjoining rural district in the same county, and for that purpose subsection (5) of section sixty-eight of the Local Government (Ireland) Act, 1898, shall apply whether the Board have or have not amalgamated the unions comprised in the rural districts. ”

“ In Minnesota, towns and cities average nearly three times the rate paid by rural districts. In Ohio, towns and cities are more than ten per cent higher than rural districts, even where the rural district maintains a full elementary and high school course. In Nebraska and Iowa, the town and city rate is about double that of country districts. ”

“ Under the Local Government Act of 1894 counties are divided for the purposes of the act into urban and rural districts. In British India the word is used to represent the zillah, an administrative subdivision of a province or presidency. In the United States of America the word has many administrative, judicial and other applications. ”

“ The local representation of rural districts will naturally be determined by geographical considerations, with due regard to those sympathies of feeling by which human beings are so much aided to act in concert, and which partly follow historical boundaries, such as those of counties or provinces, and partly community of interest and occupation, as in agriculture, maritime, manufacturing, or mining districts. ”

“ In the East Riding there are eight groups of townships to which the name 314‘Urban District’ is given; these have for their respective centres Cottingham, Driffield, Filey, Hessle, Hornsea, Pocklington, Norton, and Withernsea. There are also twelve groups of townships which we know as ‘Rural Districts.’
LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREAS IN THE EAST RIDING
As you will see from the map on this page, the difference between an Urban and a Rural District is that 315in the latter the people are spread over a much wider area than in the former. ”

“ The new regulations, under which the Surveyor-General received the title of Commissioner of Crown Lands, divided the colony into four districts—the Central, the Northern, the Central Eastern, and the South-Eastern—in which the lands were classified as town, suburban, rural, and mineral. All rural lands in the central district were open for sale in sections of not less than forty acres, at 10s. ”

“ In such compact communities cooperation becomes necessary to provide for needs that are not felt in more rural districts, such as paved streets, sewers, public water supply, fire and police protection, and so on. A separate government becomes necessary. The people of such communities may appeal to the authorities of township, county, or state, for incorporation as a village, borough, town, or city. ”

“ It ought to be evident what a tremendous advantage it is to farmers in a district to have such organizations, what a lever they can pull and control. I have tried to indicate the difference between a rural population and a rural community, between a people loosely knit together by the vague ties of a common latitude and longitude, and people who are closely knit together in an association and who form a true social organism, a true rural community, where the general will can find expression and society is malleable to the general will. ”

“ The homestead laws, which are passed not by the state legislature but by the federal government, are directed rather towards encouraging the closer settlement of rural districts by means of grants of the public land made upon easy terms. ”

“ It is an illusion, therefore, to say that a great deal is done for the rural districts in thus adding members to the261 counties, and this will be the more easily understood if you have not forgotten the opinion of Lord Russell, who says how materially the small boroughs assist the counties in maintaining the balance of power. ”

“ The person with a fixed income who settles in a district wishes the district to remain picturesque, rural, and quiet, and, above all, he desires that the 'rates' may be kept down. He naturally objects to be taxed for the sewering of country roads in order that the fields may be covered with courts and alleys of jerry-built houses, and equally he objects to be taxed in order that every railway station in the country may display a large invitation to trippers to invade his solitude and make his life a burden. ”

“ It is a curious fact that there are poaching villages and non-poaching villages. Out of a dozen or more parishes forming a petty sessional district one or two will become notorious for this propensity. ”

“ Even among patients drawn from urban districts, there are few to whom the operations of rural life present no features of interest; while to those drawn from rural districts the horses, the oxen, the sheep, and the crops are unfailing sources of attraction. ”

“ To put the community work in the rural districts on an organized and permanent basis the writer recommends that a community board be created in each county as a unit operating under a state law for the purpose of directing and developing rural community work, similar to that which the writer recommends for the development of rural libraries. ”

“ To be sure depleted rural districts, drained of their best blood, have not kept pace. But suburban sections in close partnership with cities have shared the speed and the privileges of urban progress, and meanwhile healthy, self-sustaining rural counties, scorning any dependence upon cities except for market, have developed great prosperity of their own and a remarkably efficient and satisfying life, even though population may have somewhat declined. ”

“ Where the township government is strong, as in New England, it takes the place of county government. Where people live in cities, they look to the city government to serve them rather than to the county government. In rural districts the people have come more and more to look to the state and national governments for such service as they expect government to give. ”

“ And wild as are many parts of the county to-day, it is difficult to conceive its condition a century or two ago, when much of the land was16 not only uncultivated, but was, for at least a portion of the year, covered by sheets of water, the highways being little more than bridle roads, or, if wider than usual, very sloughs of despond, the carts in several of the rural districts being laid aside in winter as utterly useless, and grain and other commodities, even in summer time, being conveyed from place to place on the backs of long strings of pack-horses. ”

“ In the rural districts, cattle rearing, both in Westmeath and Roscommon, and the pursuit of general agriculture is principally followed, and the inhabitants of these rural districts are generally comfortable and fairly well-to-do. ”

“ The paramount influence of the agrarian class over the destinies of the kingdom may be judged by the circumstances that the rural districts are permanently represented in the Storthing by two-thirds of the total number of members, limited by the Constitution to 114 ”

“ It is not possible, in remodelling an old farming district, where boundaries and roads are irregular, to apportion the division of land among the population with especial reference to its distance from the village; so, for example, that the small farmers, who have little team-force, shall not have so far to go as the larger ones who are better equipped ”

“ By § 1 of the Act of 1934, the Secretary of the Interior is authorized to establish grazing districts not exceeding in the aggregate an area of 80,000,000 acres out of certain unappropriated and unreserved public lands of the United States [4] if the lands, in his opinion, are chiefly valuable for grazing and raising forage crops. Before any district is created a hearing is to be held after notice at which officials and persons interested are to be heard. ”

“ Besides this plow land, there was a definite area of grazing land, known as the commons. With the coming of enclosures this open field system was abolished. (By the term ‘enclosure’ is meant that all the strips of any one man scattered throughout the holdings of the village were given to him in equivalent in a single, consolidated acreage, which he had to fence, ditch, etc. Or again, the term applies to a large district, as very frequently the commons, that was fenced in for the wealthy landowner’s sheep-pens.) ”

“ As long as farm life was on the neighborhood basis, its interests largely centering in the district school and the country church, its roads maintained by the labor of its citizens under a local road supervisor, and trips to the village were made only once or twice a week for mail and supplies, farmers did not feel the need for a unit of local government other than the township. ”

“ The Farmer in Politics.—Add to all the foregoing considerations the fact that, in every state legislature and in Congress, the number of rural representatives is constantly increasing, and we see clearly that the country districts are awakening to a realization not only of their needs but of their rights. ”

“ I have dwelt at length upon the growth of the county agent and farm bureau movement, because there is probably no one agency which has done more in the last decade toward the integration of rural communities throughout the United States or which has had a larger educational influence on all aspects of country life. The farm bureau usually organizes its local work by communities and in large numbers of counties the community areas have been defined for the first time by the county agents. The value of this organization by communities was repeatedly shown during the war. ”

“ All the everyday crockery used in the kingdom is made in the Five Towns—all, and much besides. A district capable of such gigantic manufacture, of such a perfect monopoly—and which finds energy also to produce coal and iron and great men—may be an insignificant stain on a county, considered geographically, but it is surely well justified in treating the county as its back garden once a week, and in blindly ignoring it the rest of the time. ”

“ In regard to its natural history, the northern district is by far the most important. Strange as it may seem to those who are accustomed to hear only of the wealth, the refinement, and the advanced civilization of the “Empire State,” there is embraced in this northern district a great tract of a thousand square miles, lying in loneliness, fresh as it came from the hand of God, untouched, and almost unvisited by man. ”

“ That the country intended to be settled should be previously surveyed and laid out in districts, subdivided into farms of such sizes as are most usually granted, and that with reference to the localities of the country and its natural divisions, each district should not contain more than thirty-six square miles, and that the farms should form squares in similar proportions. ”

“ They have always existed, and are as much more intense as the communications between district and district were formerly more difficult. They are due to physical conditions special to each village, to the prevailing winds, the form and character of the mountains, the extent of cultivable lands, and the supply of water. ”

“ It teaches us the most important lessons. It shows how the prosperity of a district may he blighted, and half a million of its inhabitants reduced to absolute destitution, in the shortest period of time. It tells us how a single collector may ruin, not only the condition but the prospects of a district, depopulate its villages, and convert its smiling fields into barren wastes. ”

“ The Territory has been divided into 26 districts, each district containing an average of 12 villages. To each district a district headman has been appointed who receives a small salary from the Government, and who is able to help the magistrates and district officer in the discharge of their duties by acting, when necessary, as an intermediary between them and the village headman, and by keeping them informed generally regarding the affairs of the Territory." This system saves labour and is inexpensive—a matter of the first importance in the case of a Colony that is not yet self-supporting. ”

“ This applies no less to county or baronial boundaries than to those of parishes or other divisions. The principle which has governed the formation of the English unions, whenever the commissioners have not been driven from it by local circumstances, has been to fix upon some market-town conveniently situated as a centre, and to attach to it the whole surrounding district, of which it may be considered the capital, and in which the general business of the district, both public and private, for the most part centres. The roads of a district always converge upon the market-town. ”

“ A school district is one machine, a township another, a county [Pg 191] another, and a state another—all independent organizations, yet every community must work its own organization. They are not operated afar off by some great central power, over the heads of the people; but they are worked by the people themselves, for themselves. ”

“ Village maps and village fields have yet to be seriously studied. We may in the meanwhile doubt whether in some districts to which the largest acres are ascribed, such acres are normal or are drawn in the oldest villages. We may suspect them of being ‘forest acres.’ If once a good many of these abnormal units are distributed in a district, they will by their very peculiarity attract more than their fair share of attention and will be spoken of as characteristic of that district. ”