This is a continuation of the Dayton Subsistence Homesteads thread. 

 

The subsistence homestead concept was a big flop due to the idea that people would live in genteel poverty as subsistence farmers and part time factory workers on a quasi-commune where they wouldn’t own the land and be subject to eviction by majority vote.

 

Instead there was another suburban model that provided the same quasi-rural experience as subsistence homesteads,  but with land ownership and without all the theoretical socioeconomic apparatus.

 

The discovery of this was via working with plat maps of the very early 1930s, which lists property owners but also the names of subdivisions. 

 

As one would expect subdivision activity followed the old interurban lines out of the city, along highways.  But with widespread adoption of the automobile in the 1920s plats didn’t have to follow interurban lines.  And lots didn’t have to be small to maximize density, thus repeating the same urban conditions of one found in the city, of houses close together.

 

Instead one could purchase a farm and subdivide it into large lots, creating essentially farmettes that could be put under cultivation as gardens or left as lawns or forest.  For people wanting to escape from the city, but still needing to work there, this kind of development would provide the best of both worlds, rural living and city jobs.

 

Here are two very early examples of this new form of development from Butler Township, north of Dayton and just south of I-70.  These both predate the Great Depression,  but were mostly built-out after WWII.

 

Pleasant View Acres

 

This was located near the crossroads location or settlement of Spanker.  From the 1931 plat map….

 

 

Today

 

 

…and one can see the start of another early form of development that would become widespread in SW Ohio, the country road ribbon development.  As one can see this type of ribbon development pretty much expanded to cover the entire area in the pix.

 

So two typical ways of doing sprawl, already making their appearances by the 1930s.

 

In the summer, one can see the resultant landscape form, the suburban savanna, mimicking the historic Midwest prairie/deciduous forest savanna.

 

 

One of the few older houses on the plat

 

 

Little York Acres

 

This plat adjoins the 19th century village of Little York, and pretty much follows the same model as Pleasant View Acres (which is just down the road to the east).  One can also see the surrounding land ending up developed as large-lot ribbon development.

 

 

 

Some of the older houses on the plat, providing the vision of this semi-rural large lot (or mini-farm) landscape. A model for postwar suburbia without the smallish “subdivision” lots and cookie-cutter uniformity. 

 

 

The Flight From the City, but this time via a workable model:

 

 

 

 

I think these various versions are more common than the dominant narrative of what suburbanization was supposed to be like. In fact, in terms of the actual number of developments I think you could argue that this sort of development to varying degrees was far more common across America than the tract housing of the Levittown model - Levittowns may have provided bigger numbers but these very localized models were a dime a dozen and were often carried out in far smaller cities than the tract housing suburban model.

From what I can see tract housing was pretty common, though not at the huge Levittown scale. Just a few streets in smaller places.

 

Howerver, I think the type of low density development in this thread is difficult to "see" or "read" since it's almost background noise.  Just driving around one can see how it's nearly ubiquitous around here.  In some ways this is as much a contributor to population growth as stereotypical subdivision sprawl.  It was interesting, though, to see the early appearance.  I've been seeing this in some research I'm doing on Butler & Warren County, too.

 

 

These farmettes were evident on many throughfares leading from cities in the 1930s and 1940s, popularized by say... the move of Lucille Ball from the city to the country.

 

The OH 125 corridor reminded me of that a lot, but much has been redeveloped in recent years into strip malls and typical suburban tracts.

^

Yes, especially highway frontage being recycled into commercial use. I recall that road as being a real grind to drive with stop and go traffic.

KY17 which runs due south out of Cincinnati connecting Covington with the county seat in Independence has a string of these settlements. All of the small subdivisions had enough land to get plenty of food for canning and a couple fruit trees, maybe even some chickens.