The Minutemen and Their World

From the earliest pages of the book, the author takes care to demonstrate how the environment influenced the life of Concord. Naturally, the proximity of a river “rich in shad, salmon and alewives” and the “thick pine woods” made the area an especially good one for a town (4). The author demonstrates how well-established the town already was by the start of his book by describing how, by the point where his narrative starts, earlier generations had already depleted some of the area’s most attractive resources, and attempts had been made to preserve what was left:

If a ne’er-do-well woodsman could still trap an occasional fox for its fur or shoot a rare wolf for the bounty, the ordinary farmer found little but squirrels, woodchucks, and raccoons for target practice. The salmon had long ago stopped running; as a conservation measure, the town made a monopoly of the shad fishery(5).

The town’s reliance on agriculture as a primary source of income up until the end of the war made favorable environmental conditions a still more important prerequisite for prosperity. One of the primary drivers of the land crisis that spanned the 18th century was the depletion of nutrients from the soil by overfarming, making it even harder to earn a living from smaller and smaller plots that men received as part of their inheritances.