Abstract
In this chapter, I focus on yards. Yards are social-spatial formations that have been discussed many times in archaeological contexts, but rarely from the perspective of Improvement. However, an examination of the Improvement literature on yards reveals them to be key sites of social and material production, in the eyes of Massachusetts early nineteenth century agriculturalists. I survey the literature on yard organization in New England, paying particular attention to the social and economic roles of the front yard, dooryard, and barnyard in eighteenth and nineteenth century farm houses. I then show how, following their acquisition of the house in 1816, the Williamses substantially modified the yard. They terraced the south lawn, covering a work and disposal area with an aesthetic landscape. They also re-located work areas to the back of the house, in ways that made this work invisible from the street. In this, they were enacting contradictory principles of improvement that simultaneously advocated increased work and productivity and sought to make the evidence of that productivity invisible.
… the moment came when a different kind of observer felt he must divide these observations into ‘practical’ and ‘aesthetic’ and if he did this with sufficient confidence he could deny to all his predecessors what he then described, in himself, as ‘elevated sensibility’. The point is not so much that he made this decision. It is that he needed and was in a position to do it, and that this need and position are parts of a social history, in the separation of production and consumption.
—Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973, p. 121)
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Notes
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The alternative, Hubka notes, is the creation of a picturesque lawn, which locates the yard-scape within a larger naturalized landscape (Hubka 2004, p. 75). Hubka gives few examples of this, but argues that it became more popular at mid-century, eventually eclipsing the rationalized front yard as agriculture declined in importance in rural New England (Hubka 2004, p. 76).
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William Flynt, architectural historian and conservator at Historic Deerfield suspects that Williams was responsible for this, but there is no evidence to conclusively state that one or the other was responsible (Flynt, personal communication 5/7/2012).
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Lewis, Q.P. (2016). The Logic of Improvement in the Williams’ Yard. In: An Archaeology of Improvement in Rural Massachusetts. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22105-2_7
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