Reflections on the Cultural Landscape: Conflicting Results in the American Production of Space‪.‬

What we enjoy about the early-nineteenth-century American landscape is the ease with which it can be read and interpreted. The farm stands in the midst of its fields and clearly reveals its degree of prosperity and contentment. Each church has a white steeple; each public square has a monument; each field its fence; each straight road its destination. It is a landscape of rectangular fields, green woodlands, white houses, and red brick towns. It is like a luminous painting: vivid, carefully composed, appealing to the emotions, and reassuringly stable. Yet it did not last for long. --John B. Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (1984)