Public Debates : No Growth, Cute Growth, Growth-As-Punishment, and
Pro-Growth

In our era, the New England town is copied in theme parks, new subdivisions, and shopping malls. Guilford is a real town, unique and irreplaceable. It is not simply a local historic resource, it is important to the region and the nation as a fine example of a New England town with a traditional village green, and a second center in the northern part of town. Public interpretation--creating public contexts to explain what is being preserved, and why--is therefore essential to Guilford's future. It is the key to citizen support, and also to reaching outside audiences for Guilford's historic cultural landscape. There will be heated debates about land use and the town's future. (After all, there were three branches of the Congregational church by 1844, one of them Abolitionist, illustrating a healthy tradition of dissent.) In time, every citizen, including all students in the schools, should be able to access and analyze detailed information about where the town's historic resources are located and how they are used.

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Public planning needs to be controversial, needs to be acted out, to be really engaging. A couple of extreme positions on preservation will probably be proposed. One is no-growth, forbidding all new construction in the hope of turning the whole town into a museum. Another is what we might call cute growth, requiring that all new development be in historicist styles. New Englanders should be particularly careful not to mimic historic buildings and landscapes in the routine creation of commercial real estate as pastiche. New buildings that are compatible with historic ones are always in scale. They are usually compatible in proportions, and in quality of construction and of materials. They are not necessarily designed in neo-colonial styles, or decked out with reproduction details from the local lumberyard.

Another extreme position is growth-as-punishment, to be against all preservation, to dismiss the unique historic landscape of Guilford as unworthy of preservation because of the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite who established the town, and groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) who help sustain the memory of the founders. The town has its roots in a Puritan culture, and the Congregational Church remains important. Towns of this kind were often small ethnic enclaves, resistant to outsiders. Guilford is more inclusive now of Catholics and Jews, of citizens from Irish and German and Italian backgrounds, than at its start. A high school history project found 23 different ethnic groups settled in the town as it grew. One strategy that has worked in other places to gather broad support for preservation is to interpret the lives and work of Irish carpenters and ditch diggers, Italian stonemasons and quarry workers , and Latino horticultural workers as part of a broader presentation of a town's legacy.(16) In a town that is 96 percent white, this would be a small beginning.

Another variation of the pro-growth, anti-preservation stance is to insist that Guilford is no longer a small town but part of a metropolitan area that has remained isolated too long, and therefore should accept all new urban-scale development as a part of an automobile-oriented economy in the region and the nation. This is a passive stance that tends to leave the town vulnerable in the face of developers and international franchise chains and businesses such as McDonalds (already present) or Wal-Mart. This position, however, points up the problems of preservationists relying on the lack of public transportation, a sewer avoidance policy, and the high cost of housing to keep Guilford's densities low. These are old-fashioned and ineffective measures in the face of determined commercial developers. "Smart growth" strategies suggest that up-to-date zoning, stiffer requirements for design quality, and strict limits on size of roadside buildings tend to make developers either spend more or go elsewhere. The planning solutions are beyond the scope of this paper, but the debates sketched are typical, and suggest how no-growth or pro-growth strategies relate to debates about preservation and public history.

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