town meetings

Examples of town meetings in the following topics:

• Colonial Cities

  • Every male citizen had a voice in the town meeting.
  • The town meeting levied taxes, built roads, and elected officials who managed town affairs.
  • The towns did not have courts—that was a function of a larger unit, the county, whose officials were appointed by the state government.
  • Each city, and most towns, had private academies for the children of affluent families.

• Colonies in Crisis

  • Andros, commissioned governor of New England in 1686, had earned the enmity of the local populace by enforcing the restrictive Navigation Acts, denying the validity of existing land titles, restricting town meetings, and appointing unpopular regular officers to lead colonial militia, among other actions that were part of an attempt to bring the colonies under the closer control of the crown.

• Early New England Society

  • The town meeting levied taxes, built roads, and elected officials who managed town affairs, and every male citizen had a voice in the town meeting.
  • The towns did not have courts; courts were instead a function of a larger unit, the county, and court officials were appointed by the colony government.
  • These local goods were shipped to towns and cities all along the Atlantic Coast, and enterprising men set up stables and taverns along wagon roads to service these trade routes.
  • All of the provinces and many towns tried to foster economic growth by subsidizing projects that improved the infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, inns, and ferries.
  • In the towns and cities, there was strong entrepreneurship and a steady increase in the specialization of labor.

• The Dominion of New England

  • He disregarded local representation, denied the validity of existing land titles in Massachusetts (which had been dependent on the old charter), restricted town meetings, and actively promoted the Church of England in largely Puritan regions.
  • Several towns refused to choose commissioners to assess the town population and estates, and officials from a number of them were consequently arrested and brought to Boston.
  • Andros, responding to the tax protests, sought to restrict town meetings, since these were where that protest had begun.
  • He introduced a law that limited meetings to a single annual meeting, solely for the purpose of electing officials and explicitly banned meetings at other times for any reason.
  • Protests were made that the town meeting and tax laws were violations of the Magna Carta, which guaranteed taxation by representatives of the people.

• The Rise of the Assemblies

  • New England towns held annual town meetings where all free men could voice their opinion.
  • Members were annually elected by the propertied citizens of the towns or counties, and usually sat for a single, brief session, although the council or governor could (and sometimes did) call for a special session.

• Mill Towns and Company Towns

  • One of the first company towns in the United States was Pullman, Chicago, developed in the 1880s just outside the Chicago city limits.
  • The town, entirely company-owned, provided housing, markets, a library, churches, and entertainment for the 6,000 company employees and an equal number of dependents.
  • In 1898 the Illinois Supreme Court required Pullman to dissolve their ownership of the town.
  • At their peak there were more than 2,500 company towns, housing 3% of the US population.
  • Mill towns, sometimes planned, built, and owned as a company town, grew in the shadow of the industries.

• Lexington and Concord

  • Tensions continued to rise throughout the colonies, and especially in New England, after the Boston Tea Party and the meeting of the First Continental Congress.
  • As in 1768, the British again occupied the town.
  • General Gage stationed 3,500 troops in Boston, and from there he ordered periodic raids on towns where guns and gunpowder were stockpiled, hoping to impose law and order by seizing them.
  • He persuaded the town's selectmen to surrender all private weapons in return for promising that any inhabitant could leave town.

• Women in the West

  • While some women could find employment in the newly settled towns as teachers, cooks, or seamstresses, they originally were deprived of many rights.
  • For the vast majority of women, work was not in towns for money, but on the farm.
  • People living in rural areas created rich social lives for themselves, often sponsoring activities that combined work, food, and entertainment, such as barn raising, corn husking, quilting bees, Grange meetings, church activities, and school functions.
  • In 1860, in the Comstock Lode region of Nevada, for example, there were reportedly only 30 women in a town with some 2,500 men.
  • Even fewer arrived to support their husbands or operate stores in the mining towns.

• Pioneer Women

  • They often sponsored activities that combined work, food, and entertainment such as barn raisings, corn huskings, quilting bees, Grange meetings, and church and school functions.
  • The common depiction of the openness of bordellos in western towns shown in films is somewhat realistic, allowing for fantasy elements such as the casting of Hollywood starlets.
  • Gambling and prostitution were central to life in many western towns.
  • After a decade or so, the mining towns attracted respectable women who ran boarding houses, organized church societies, worked as laundresses and seamstresses, and strove for independent status.

• The Homestead Strike

  • Picket lines were thrown up around the plant and the town, and 24-hour shifts established.
  • O'Donnell, a heater in the plant and head of the union's strike committee, guaranteed them safe passage out of town.
  • The steelworkers resolved to meet the militia with open arms, hoping to establish good relations with the troops.
  • But the militia managed to keep its arrival in the town a secret almost to the last moment.
  • On July 18, the town was placed under martial law, further disheartening many of the strikers.