Annie Kilburn

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.