Why did the founders of many New England towns apparently lean toward the open-field model of mixed farming, avoiding enclosed individual farms while allotting multiple strips in common fields? The “town studies” of the 1960s and 1970s addressed the issue. Sumner Powell argued that Sudbury implemented common fields because “almost half “ of its residents came from open-field areas of England, begging the question of why the majority of settlers would reject their ancestral models. Kenneth Lockridge astutely suggested that Puritan ideology had something to do with the settlers’ preference, but reduced this ideology to nostalgia for an “imaginary golden past”; T. H. Breen and Stephen Foster drew a similar conclusion.

This viewpoint provided a welcome antidote to the Turnerian and Whig interpretations of New England towns as progressive proto-democracies, but it failed to do justice to the Puritan ideology. Implying that open-field farming resulted from a knee-jerk reaction against incipient modernity, the authors of the town studies relegated Puritans to the realms of mystical obscurantism caricatured by Vernon Parrington and H. L. Mencken. Furthermore, the nostalgia thesis could not withstand the evidence provided by Stephen Innes and John Frederick Martin that land entrepreneurs, sometimes acting as absentee landlords, played a major role in New England town founding.

While this issue was in dispute, geographical determinism continued to provide a popular explanation for land use patterns in New England, even for those towns which were less committed to the open-field model. Chapter 5 of David Grayson Allen's In English Ways represents a brave attempt to trace the English origins of settlers in Ipswich and Watertown as a way of explaining the patterns of land use that developed in those towns. Focusing on Allen's analysis of Ipswich will give us a sense of the difficulties besetting this approach. Allen argues that most of the settlers in Ipswich came from the East Anglian counties of Suffolk and Essex, where enclosure of land was reputedly far advanced, and as a result they avoided the open-field arrangement and set up “an active and thriving market in land,” as proprietors sought to consolidate their holdings even more, just like enclosing English landlords.

Other historians have taken up this line of argument, frequently citing Allen's analysis of Ipswich land patterns.