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John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1982, £21.00). Pp. xii, 430.

Carl Sauer stands at the head of this book, Leo Marx at its tail. Sauer's groundbreaking 1925 essay "The Morphology of Landscape" emphasized the human agency in transforming land into landscape, the last word being used in the sense of shaped terrain. John Stilgoe begins the body of his book with those Spanish that settled in the Santa Cruz Valley in the wake of the conquistadores. He is interested in colonists, not in explorers. Marx's The Machine in the Garden (following Henry Adams) gave 1844 as the year in which technology transformed the humanized land into an ash-heap. Stilgoe's book closes at roughly the same date, when (he says) the railroad began to erode " the stability that characterized the synthesis of agricultural and artificial spaces and structures called landscape" (p. 341). He is interested in men, not in machines. He is, moreover, interested in ordinary men. There is no room in his book for the professional planners. He deals instead with those who brought from Europe an inherited agricultural folklore and applied it to their new environment, innovating only when forced by circumstances. He discusses Finnish log cabins, Dutch barns, and fields of English grass. He concentrates initially on three forms of landscape organization: heirarchical Spanish, theocratic New English, and Southern mercantile, built respectively around the grid pattern, the meeting house, and the crossroads store. In the eighteenth century a fourth form emerged. The farmers of Pennsylvania had outdistanced the planning of the Penn family, and the result was a landscape apparently haphazard yet organized around the barnyard and expressing an "individualistic, market-oriented agriculture" (p. 79). It was this last landscape that became the model for the new Republic, a politically and economically liberal landscape that was (unlike its Spanish counterpart) facilitated by Jefferson's 1785 continental grid. But the liberal landscape was soon subject to the predations of the machine. (Stilgoe refines upon Kolodny's Lay of the Land when he suggests that whereas husbandry caressed the land, technology raped it.) Starting with alchemy and mining, the inevitable advance of the machine is traced through the despised yet needed blacksmiths and millers to the development (much to Melville's horror) of factories. The scene is set for the decline of landscape as defined by Stilgoe, and his final example is an ironic application of the grid pattern to an Albuquerque trailer park.