Suburban Land Development in Antebellum Boston

Abstract

Historians generally agree that American suburbanization began in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, brought on by a combination of technological innovation (particularly in transportation), economic restructuring, and changing tastes of the urban middle classes. Essential to this process was the rise of a suburban real estate industry, which converted agricultural land into a consumer commodity. Using a microhistorical study of a single farm in the Boston suburb of Brookline, Massachusetts, the origins of the process of suburban land development are examined from 1770 to 1850. Land records, local history, and genealogical information were used to reconstruct the process by which farm land became the site of suburban neighborhoods. Before 1840, when nearly all land transactions were between individuals who knew each other personally, there was no infrastructure of real estate professionals and developers to facilitate suburban growth. During the 1840s, sales between strangers, facilitated by agents or auctioneers, quickly became the norm, and residential subdivisions aimed at varying income levels appeared, accompanied by developers and builders. Land went from being the essential component of family farming to a general commodity freely bought and sold, part of the broader evolution of the American economy into one dominated by market-based industrial and financial capitalism.