Rurban Outfitters: Cinema and Rural Cultural Development in New Hampshire’s North Country, 1896–1917

Abstract

This chapter examines the early history of cinema in relation to rural cultural development in upper Coös County, New Hampshire. Built on a remote landscape, the culture of Coös in the nineteenth century was one of stable property, settled community, and self-sufficiency. As the century turned, residents sought to sustain traditions while adapting to a modern regional economy that imported finished goods, while exporting staples, tourism, and, increasingly, youth. Cinema participated in these changes, producing new social and spatial networks that modernized cultural provisioning services to buffer population loss and stimulate fresh flows of people, ideas, and commerce. These networks mediated cinema’s relation to existing practices, regulating the timing, speed, and direction of cinema’s development as it was transformed around feature films and purpose-built movie venues.

It is no exaggeration to say, ‘Every farm family has a member as a reporting correspondent in some city, and every farm neighborhood has a family from some city recently come to farming.’ (Galpin 1930: 1011)

We are all, in our heads, several different audiences at once, and can be constituted as such by different programmes.(Hall 1986: vii)