What a town is

The town hall in tiny Conway, Mass., a “Hill Town’’ that was home base for Archibald MacLeish for much of his adult life

“A town is not land, nor even landscape. A town is people living on the land. And whether it will survive or perish depends not on the land but on the people; it depends on what the people think they are….If they think of themselves as living a good and useful and satisfying life, if they put their lives first and the real estate business after, then there is nothing inevitable about the spreading ruin of the countryside.’’

— Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), in “A Lay Sermon on {western Massachusetts) Hill Towns’’. MacLeish was a playwright, poet, government official and lawyer.