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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

This is sort of sad, because - 350 years!

I think the other side of the coin is the places stagnation and outright decay have set in, like many inner cities or rustbelt regions that have not thrived. The opposite would be places like tokyo where everything is turned over rapidly and the new is ousted to be almost immediately replaced by the newer and newest.

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It's interesting to see that the same thing has been happening on the other side of the Atlantic. I grew up in a farming community in County Clare, Ireland (~1980 - 1999) and many farms there have been abandoned due to the low returns from agriculture.

The same thing has been happening pretty much everywhere in the world for a century.

The length of its existence is interesting, but by todays standards, the farm may have been just as unsustainable as it was at its onset.

Notably, the Smithsonian article only asks about recent changes affecting the farm.

Slavery was common in Massachusetts through 1700s.

If the farm was made sustainable through slave labor in its first 100 years, it would have avoided the same concerns that the article says are doing it in now: dependable and low cost labor.

My Scottish male ancestors were forcibly shipped to Massachusetts and made to do forced labour when they lost the civil war to the English. Because they were prisoners of war they were not allowed to bring their families with them.

Thanks for introducing me to that concept, enjoyed that.

We need a new New Deal w/ UBI and just invest in ourselves.

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