The colonial houses of New England with large living-room, dominated by the huge fireplace with its outfit of cooking utensils, with groups of buildings for different uses clustered about them, giving protection to the varied industries of the homestead, illustrate the most perfect type of family life.  Each member had a share in the day’s work, therefore to each it was home.  To the old homestead many a successful business man returns to show his grandchildren the attic with its disused loom and spinning-wheel; the shop where farm-implements were made, in the days of long winter storms, to the accompaniment of legend and gossip; the dairy, no longer redolent of cream.  These are reminders of a time past and gone, before the greed of gain had robbed even these houses of their peace.  The backward glance of this generation is too apt to stop at the transition period, when the factory had taken the interesting manufactures out of the hands of the housewife and left the homestead bereft of its best, when the struggle to make it a modern money-making plant, for which it was never designed, drove the young people away to less arduous days and more exciting evenings.

This stage of farm life was altogether unlovely, not wholly of necessity, but because the adjustment was most painful to the feelings and most difficult to the muscles of the elders.

Because the family ideal was the ruling motive, the house-building of the colonial period shows a more perfect adaptation to family life than any other age has developed.

Where is the boasted adaptability of the American?  He should be ready to see the effect of the inevitable mechanical changes and modify his ideas to suit.  For it cannot be too often reiterated that it is a case of ideas, not of wood and stone and law.

This homestead has passed into history as completely as has the Southern colonial type, differing only in arrangement.  Climate, as well as domestic conditions, demanded a more complete separation of the manufacturing processes, including cooking, laundry, etc., otherwise the ideal was the same.  “The house” meant a family life, a gracious hospitality, a busy hive of industry, a refuge indeed from social as well as physical storms.  Work and play, sorrow and pleasure, all were connected with its outward presentment as with the thought.  For its preservation men fought and women toiled, but, alas! machinery has swept away the last vestige of this life and, try as the philanthropist may to bring it back, it will never return.  The very essence of that life was the making of things, the preparation for winter while it was yet summer, the furnishing of the bridal chest years before marriage.  Fancy a bride to-day wearing or using in the house anything five years old!

There are no more pioneer and colonial communities on this continent.  Railroads and steamboats and electric power have made this rural life a thing of the past.  Let us not waste tears on its vanishing, but address ourselves to the future.