The industry of making straw hats began at Hatboro', as many other
industries have begun in New England, with no great local advantages, but
simply because its founder happened to live there, and to believe that it
would pay. There was a railroad, and labour of the sort he wanted was cheap
and abundant in the village and the outlying farms. In time the work came
to be done more and more by machinery, and to be gathered into large shops.
The buildings increased in size and number; the single line of the railroad
was multiplied into four, and in the region of the tracks several large,
ugly, windowy wooden bulks grew up for shoe shops; a stocking factory
followed; yet this business activity did not warp the old village from its
picturesqueness or quiet. The railroad tracks crossed its main street; but
the shops were all on one side of them, with the work-people's cottages
and boarding-houses, and on the other were the simple, square, roomy old
mansions, with their white paint and their green blinds, varied by the
modern colour and carpentry of French-roofed villas. The old houses stood
quite close to the street, with a strip of narrow door-yard before them;
the new ones affected a certain depth of lawn, over which their owners
personally pushed a clucking hand-mower in the summer evenings after tea.
The fences had been taken away from the new houses, in the taste of some
of the Boston suburbs; they generally remained before the old ones, whose
inmates resented the ragged effect that their absence gave the street. The
irregularity had hitherto been of an orderly and harmonious kind, such as
naturally follows the growth of a country road into a village thoroughfare.
The dwellings were placed nearer or further from the sidewalk as their
builders fancied, and the elms that met in a low arch above the street had
an illusive symmetry in the perspective; they were really set at uneven
intervals, and in a line that wavered capriciously in and out. The street
itself lounged and curved along, widening and contracting like a river,
and then suddenly lost itself over the brow of an upland which formed a
natural boundary of the village. Beyond this was South Hatboro', a group of
cottages built by city people who had lately come in--idlers and invalids,
the former for the cool summer, and the latter for the dry winter. At
chance intervals in the old village new side streets branched from the
thoroughfare to the right and the left, and here and there a Queen Anne
cottage showed its chimneys and gables on them. The roadway under the
elms that kept it dark and cool with their hovering shade, and swept the
wagon-tops with their pendulous boughs at places, was unpaved; but the
sidewalks were asphalted to the last dwelling in every direction, and they
were promptly broken out in winter by the public snow-plough.