Yankee Land

A PAIR of shoes, a hat, or an automobile we should not call “New” if they were a year old, but there is a corner of our country which is 300 years old and yet we call it “New.” About 300 years ago people from England, across the ocean, came to the northeast corner of the United States and made their homes there. So the six States north of New York, where they settled, we call New England. The Indians tried to call the white people “English,” but the best they could say was “Yenghees” or “Yankees,” just as a child in trying to say “brother” might say “buddy”—so the people of New England we still call “Yankees.” We could put all six States of New England in any one of several States out West; but though the New England States are small in size, they are big in many other things.

The largest and most important city of New England is Boston, named after a town in old England. Many people call Boston “the Hub,” by which they mean to say that the rest of the World turns round Boston, for the hub of a wheel you know is the center, around which the rest of the wheel turns. Of course, the World really turns around the North and South Poles and these Poles are the real hubs of the World; so people are only joking when they say the World turns round Boston.

Rocks and cold weather are bad for farming. New England in winter is very cold and it also is very rocky, so rocky that men make their fences of stones gathered off the fields. The cold and the rocks make it very hard to grow things there, but there are many, many waterfalls in New England, and waterfalls can be used to turn the wheels of factories to make things, so what people chiefly do in New England is to make things for the rest of the United States—thousands of different kinds of things—not big things such as railroad tracks and bridges that they make in Pittsburgh, but small things for a person’s use, such as needles and pins, watches and clocks, boots and shoes. If the wheels of the factories are turned by waterfalls they are called mills. Nowadays, most of the waterfalls are used to make electricity, and the electricity is used to run the machinery, but the factories are still called “mills.”

When-I-was-a-boy my idea of perfect happiness was to go barefoot. In some countries rich and poor alike go barefoot all the time, but in America almost everyone wears shoes all the time. One of the chief things they make in these New England mills is shoes. In New England they make enough shoes for every pair of feet in the United States. Shoes wear out, so we can understand why the mills should keep on, year after year, making so many shoes. But in one of the States—the one with the Indian name, Connecticut—they make pins—enough for every man, woman and child in the United States to use 100every year. What becomes of so many pins, do you suppose? They don’t wear out like shoes, and yet they disappear—billions of pins every year.