> I wonder why even early in the USA's history, before cars, before railroads, we distributed housing so widely as to inhibit socialization? Lack of endemic wa

> I wonder why even early in the USA's history, before cars, before railroads, we distributed housing so widely as to inhibit socialization? Lack of endemic warfare after the initial period of settlement and being settled from the least communalist culture on Earth at the time. Farmers clustered in towns far from their fields because they were more defensible from raiders. This wasn’t a problem in the US once the local area had killed all the local Indians. With cheap land you can have large farmsteads, large enough that the nearest settlement is quite far away.