Main Street rolled through its center, paralleling the creek, where flat-bottom boats set out with loads of tomatoes from the farm country. The tallest structures were the white church spires, which rose up over the shops and the fine houses that marched down the length of Main under elms and sycamores before thinning to barns and long gray fences that angled over brown fields and the vegetable rows beyond. Matawan had long been a crossroads of the north-central New Jersey colonial breadbasket. The air was still clear and quiet but for the smoke from the beehive tile kilns along the creek and the percussive rhythm of the train making for New York City with tiles for the Eighth Avenue subway. More of the outside world was coming and going through towns in the new century, but little of it stayed or altered the people of Matawan, Scotch-Irish families of farmers and merchants and old self-reliant blood. These were the years small towns dug in against change and began to die slowly and with a long, sweet wistfulness, the years that spawned Norman Rockwell, then twenty years old and producing his first Saturday Evening Post cover, and Thornton Wilder, nineteen and gestating the bittersweet American fate of Our Town.
