Population density of the United States.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
The overall impression of the settled portion of the American landscape, rural or urban, is one of disorder and incoherence, even in areas of strict geometric survey. The individual landscape unit is seldom in visual harmony with its neighbour, so that, however sound in design or construction the single structure may be, the general effect is untidy. These attributes have been intensified by the acute individualism of the American, vigorous speculation in land and other commodities, a strongly utilitarian attitude toward the land and the treasures above and below it, and government policy and law. The landscape is also remarkable for its extensive transportation facilities, which have greatly influenced the configuration of the land.
United States: Urban-ruralEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Another special characteristic of American settlement, one that became obvious only by the mid-20th century, is the convergence of rural and urban modes of life. The farmsteads—and rural folk in general—have become increasingly urbanized, and agricultural operations have become more automated, while the metropolis grows more gelatinous, unfocused, and pseudo-bucolic along its margins.
Rural settlement
Patterns of rural settlement indicate much about the history, economy, society, and minds of those who created them as well as about the land itself. The essential design of rural activity in the United States bears a strong family resemblance to that of other neo-European lands, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, or tsarist Siberia—places that have undergone rapid occupation and exploitation by immigrants intent upon short-term development and enrichment. In all such areas, under novel social and political conditions and with a relative abundance of territory and physical resources, ideas and institutions derived from a relatively stable medieval or early modern Europe have undergone major transformation. Further, these are nonpeasant countrysides, alike in having failed to achieve the intimate symbiosis of people and habitat, the humanized rural landscapes characteristic of many relatively dense, stable, earthbound communities in parts of Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America.
Early models of land allocation
From the beginning the prevalent official policy of the British (except between 1763 and 1776) and then of the U.S. government was to promote agricultural and other settlement—to push the frontier westward as fast as physical and economic conditions permitted. The British crown’s grants of large, often vaguely specified tracts to individual proprietors or companies enabled the grantees to draw settlers by the sale or lease of land at attractive prices or even by outright gift.
Of the numerous attempts at group colonization, the most notable effort was the theocratic and collectivist New England town that flourished, especially in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, during the first century of settlement. The town, the basic unit of government and comparable in area to townships in other states, allotted both rural and village parcels to single families by group decision. Contrary to earlier scholarly belief, in all but a few cases settlement was spatially dispersed in the socially cohesive towns, at least until about 1800. The relatively concentrated latter-day villages persist today as amoeba-like entities straggling along converging roads, neither fully rural nor agglomerated in form. The only latter-day settlement experiment of notable magnitude to achieve enduring success was a series of Mormon settlements in the Great Basin region of Utah and adjacent states, with their tightly concentrated farm villages reminiscent of the New England model. Other efforts have been made along ethnic, religious, or political lines, but success has been at best brief and fragile.
Creating the national domain
With the coming of independence and after complex negotiations, the original 13 states surrendered to the new national government nearly all their claims to the unsettled western lands beyond their boundaries. Some tracts, however, were reserved for disposal to particular groups. Thus, the Western Reserve of northeastern Ohio gave preferential treatment to natives of Connecticut, while the military tracts in Ohio and Indiana were used as bonus payments to veterans of the American Revolution.
A federally administered national domain was created, to which the great bulk of the territory acquired in 1803 in the Louisiana Purchase and later beyond the Mississippi and in 1819 in Florida was consigned. The only major exceptions were the public lands of Texas, which were left within that state’s jurisdiction; such earlier French and Spanish land grants as were confirmed, often after tortuous litigation; and some Indian lands. In sharp contrast to the slipshod methods of colonial land survey and disposal, the federal land managers expeditiously surveyed, numbered, and mapped their territory in advance of settlement, beginning with Ohio in the 1780s, then sold or deeded it to settlers under inviting terms at a number of regional land offices.
The design universally followed in the new survey system (except within the French, Spanish, and Indian grants) was a simple, efficient rectangular scheme. Townships were laid out as blocks, each six by six miles in size, oriented with the compass directions. Thirty-six sections, each one square mile, or 640 acres (260 hectares), in size, were designated within each township; and public roads were established along section lines and, where needed, along half-section lines. At irregular intervals, offsets in survey lines and roads were introduced to allow for the Earth’s curvature. Individual property lines were coincident with, or parallel to, survey lines, and this pervasive rectangularity generally carried over into the geometry of fields and fences or into the townsites later superimposed upon the basic rural survey.
This all-encompassing checkerboard pattern is best appreciated from an airplane window over Iowa or Kansas. There one sees few streams or other natural features and few diagonal highways or railroads interrupting the overwhelming squareness of the landscape. A systematic rectangular layout, rather less rigorous in form, also appears in much of Texas and in those portions of Maine, western New York and Pennsylvania, and southern Georgia that were settled after the 1780s.
Distribution of rural lands
Since its formation, Congress has enacted a series of complex schemes for distribution of the national domain. The most famous of these plans was the Homestead Act of 1862, which offered title to 160 acres to individual settlers, subject only to residence for a certain period of time and to the making of minimal improvements to the land thus acquired. The legal provisions of such acts have varied with time as the nature of farming technology and of the remaining lands have changed, but their general effect has been to perpetuate the Jeffersonian ideal of a republic in which yeoman farmers own and till self-sufficient properties.
The program was successful in providing private owners with relatively choice lands, aside from parcels reserved for schools and various township and municipal uses. More than one-third of the national territory, however, is still owned by federal and state governments, with much of this land in forest and wildlife preserves. A large proportion of this land is in the West and is unsuited for intensive agriculture or grazing because of the roughness, dryness, or salinity of the terrain; much of it is leased out for light grazing or for timber cutting.