TIDEWATER TOWNS: CITY PLANNING IN COLONIAL VIRGINIA AND MARYLAND.

By John W. Reps '43. Published by The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.Distributed by the University Press of Virginia.1972. 345 pp. 206 illustrations. $15.

John Reps, Professor of City and Regional Planning at Cornell, has written a learned book for the specialist and professional with interests in town planning in colonial Virginia and Maryland. Based on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, it is a fully documented, detailed study of how towns grew, particularly Annapolis, Md.; Williamsburg, Va.; and Washington, D.C. It is also a continuation of work begun by the same author in The Making of Urban America: AHistory of City Planning in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1965). TidewaterTowns is the first of a number of regional studies aimed at outlining in detail, supplementing, extending, and correcting the conclusions reached by Mr. Reps, in the earlier work.

The reason why this is an especially valuable addition to the literature of colonial America and town planning is to be explained partly by the author's painstaking methods of research. A great variety of sources was scrutinized: (1) acts of colonial assemblies; (2) town plans as discussed and described in city archives; (3) archaeological diggings; (4) ideas for towns as spelled out in public and private correspondence of key governors, officials, and land owners; (5) visits to the city sites and field locations as they exist today; and (6) careful consideration of local and regional geographic features significant at various stages of town development. Meticulous documentation and on-site search have been blended together with other primary sources such as letters and diaries, written by participants and travelers to reconstruct how these towns came to be. Although some people believe that towns arose spontaneously and that urban planning is of recent vintage, Mr. Reps emphasizes that from the first day of settlement planning played an important role in colonization. Towns grew slowly, he points out, but they took the forms determined consciously by individuals or groups. The pattern of how they grew goes back to 12th-century England, and even further to Roman castrametation in which the grid street pattern of the medieval European city first took shape. The town square, so characteristic in European and American cities, is an "unbuilt-upon" block, but nonetheless part of the normal grid pattern. This grid-like street design, with its "mustering ground" in the center, was the most characteristic pattern of town layout in colonial America: it was the easiest to devise, given the lack of persons skilled in the art of town planning. In all the cases Reps traces, the early inhabitants gave some thought to how their town should be laid out. Public ownership of the entire site was an advantage in this - and those towns which departed from the traditional grid pattern, such as Annapolis, Williamsburg, and Washington, were unique and attractive mainly because talented individuals added to or subtracted various things from the fundamental pattern.

The author is at his best in meticulously recreating the genesis and evolution of two of the best-planned towns in colonial America: Annapolis and Williamsburg. Their baroque design and radial street patterns make them special in the history of colonial town layout. By comparing numerous and diverse maps made in the 17th and 18th centuries, boundary surveys, city plans of the time, aerial photographs and a variety of written primary sources, the author achieves an almost brick-by-brick description. He is aided in this by many "conjectural" plans and views, mock-ups by the author himself, showing how a no-longer existent segment of the town might have looked according to available evidence. The very even and objective narrative and analysis are often broken by well chosen quotations from the pen of eyewitnesses or otherwise acute observers of the town development Reps seeks to delineate. In describing the efforts of colonial legislatures to create towns in unfavorable geographic circumstances, Mr. Reps quotes Thomas Jefferson: "There are other places at which ... the laws have said there shall be towns, but nature has said there shall not." (p. 116) As much as anything, this statement also summarizes the author's own sensitivity to geographic and economic considerations of town location and planning.

Mr. Bucholz is in the Department of History,State University of New York, Brockport.