Greystone Way

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For two hundred years homes in Easton were built close to roads unless you were a hermit or had something to hide. More exactly for many years if you built a house, a road would come as you and your cows walked back and forth to get some place else. Initially, outside North Easton, Furnace Village, and Eastondale homes were few and far apart since most folks were farmers and early farms were self-sufficient meaning they were large with acres for pastures, crops, and wood. Later in the 18th and throughout the 19th century, farm were subdivided among family members. These later farms could be smaller as they became more specialized with a market economy supplying more of the needs once derived at home. Still, into the first three decades of the 20th century new homes were built close to existing streets except in North Easton where small lots developed on new shorter streets.

This began to change right before World War II with the first modern subdivisions being approved off Central Street. The development of Hollis and Tyson Roads stopped during the war so the true age of subdivisions begins in the 1950s. Originally lots were small, but sometime in the 1970s or early 1980s lot sizes were increased to an acre-I was there for that town meeting, but don't expect me to remember my own life!  This set Easton up to become a typical sprawling suburb except that at the same time a conservation ethos was developing in town fostered by people like John Grant and, in his role as chair of the Planning Board, Fred Clark. Subsequently, there have been several change to zoning laws that have purported to be pro-conservation. It remains to be seen whether, ultimately, these turn out to be pro-developer. Now the smart growthers would tell you that suburbs are environmentally bad first due to their dependence on cars and second because single family homes burn up open space. How accurate is their analysis? Hard to argue that cars and suburbs go together just don't forget that the market seems to be fostering increased efficiency in cars if not in the roads needed to support them-are potholes a liberal plot to get us to use mass transit?

Let's take Greystone Way as a typical subdivision. It's located right across Allen Road from Borderland State Park and runs through to Bay Road. Take a look at the contrast in this Google Map picture.

Park on the left, housing development on the right. Typical of modern subdivisions Greystone Way is a road run through an old farm, the Thomas Shepherd place,  in order to add homes in old fields. This map shows the property in 1855.

The scrumbly lines show trees. Things didn't change very much for over 100 years as you can see in this 1971 aerial photo from historicaerials.com.

Note the Shepherd house and farm buildings and the open fields. Greystone Way came along in the mid-1980s and the old farm turned into a suburban wasteland right? Not quite. Here's a contemporary aerial from Google.

Yup, there are actually more trees in the Greystone Way area than there were in 1855. Stepping up a little further you can actually see even more greenery. Now trees alone might not necessarily be a measure of environmental health and open fields are actually an endangered habitat in Massachusetts, but clearly this area is not an environmental waste land.

Of course before we draw conclusions about 1980s subdivisions and their impact on the environment we should look at every single one, something that is outside the scope of this blog; but the other thing we can do is take a closer look at Greystone Way and its impact on the land-something we'll undertake tomorrow.