Town Planning

I think virtually all examples of cities having a single, known “founder” would refer to American cities—though a parallel history might well have played out in Australia. The typical way this would happen would be for an entrepreneur to gain control of a large amount of land that could be both productive farmland and included a harbor where a port city might thrive. Colonial-era examples would be the royal grants to William Penn, and what became Philadelphia; and to James Oglethorpe, and what became Savannah. Later in American history, similar stories would play out on navigable rivers like the Ohio or Missouri, and even some small rivers of Texas or New Mexico that were more important as water sources than ports.

The pivotal event is the platting of a townsite: filing a public legal document called a plat that makes the sale of small houselots much more convenient, by allowing them to be designated by block and lot number rather than with the metes and bounds (or Public Land Survey System aliquot) descriptions that are used for larger farms or woodlots. Since houselots generally must have access to a public road, platting also occasioned the laying out (and usually the naming) of streets.

The 19th century in America saw many hundreds of entrepreneurs who were convinced that their town, on their land, was destined to be the next great commercial city of the world, and the American landscape is littered with paper towns where few or no houselots were ever sold, no street improvements survived the first winter, and a cartographer eventually excised the name from the map. Some never came off the map, and can be found in the GNIS database, meaning they sometimes pop up on computer-generated maps like MapQuest, Google, or Bing. Some modern cities, like Denver or Dallas, encompass two or even three such townsites that were established in close proximity to each other.

By the mid-19th century, in the Plains and Mountain states, railroads were the primary force behind town creation. They’d establish a town every few miles, on land they’d been granted as inducement to build the line, selling houselots for immediate cash and anticipating future business from mills and stores that would be established there. What was built first? Typically the railroad depot, and a modest “hotel” with a tavern, where potential settlers could stay a few days to look over the town's site and its situation.

These railroad towns were platted by the dozens, usually by clerks and draftsmen who’d never laid eyes on the terrain, and often featured gridirons of streets that improbably crossed arroyos or extended up the sides of cliffs. Names were chosen by contest, or by whim, or to honor railroad officials and their wives. I’ve always been charmed by the series of towns the Chicago Burlington & Quincy established in alphabetic order at 12-mile intervals in Nebraska as if they were throwing them from the rear of a moving train: Crete, Dorchester, Exeter, Fairmont, Grafton, Harvard, Inland, Juniata. The Canadian Pacific did similar alphabetic sequences in Canada’s Prairie Provinces.

The founding of towns didn’t end with the settlement of the frontier. As modern cities grew, farmland near them often became attractive for bedroom suburbs or industrial satellite cities. Some conversions were small “additions” to the existing city, while others were more ambitious, planned from the beginning as independent places. This was big business by the 1920s, and “land and improvement” companies established a number of independent, planned suburban towns around growing cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, and all along the Florida coasts.

Several books by John W. Reps, notably The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States,give more insight into the process of town platting.