Title: United States - Settlement patterns | Britannica
Headings: Settlement patterns
Settlement patterns
Rural settlement
Early models of land allocation
Creating the national domain
Distribution of rural lands
Patterns of farm life
Regional small-town patterns
Study how American Indians and buffalo were driven westward from the Midwest by European settlers
The rural–urban transition
Weakening of the agrarian ideal

Content: Urban-rural Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Another special characteristic of American settlement, one that became obvious only by the mid-20th century, is the convergence of rural and urban modes of life. The farmsteads—and rural folk in general—have become increasingly urbanized, and agricultural operations have become more automated, while the metropolis grows more gelatinous, unfocused, and pseudo-bucolic along its margins. Rural settlement
Patterns of rural settlement indicate much about the history, economy, society, and minds of those who created them as well as about the land itself. The essential design of rural activity in the United States bears a strong family resemblance to that of other neo-European lands, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, or tsarist Siberia —places that have undergone rapid occupation and exploitation by immigrants intent upon short-term development and enrichment. In all such areas, under novel social and political conditions and with a relative abundance of territory and physical resources, ideas and institutions derived from a relatively stable medieval or early modern Europe have undergone major transformation. Further, these are nonpeasant countrysides, alike in having failed to achieve the intimate symbiosis of people and habitat, the humanized rural landscapes characteristic of many relatively dense, stable, earthbound communities in parts of Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Early models of land allocation
From the beginning the prevalent official policy of the British (except between 1763 and 1776) and then of the U.S. government was to promote agricultural and other settlement—to push the frontier westward as fast as physical and economic conditions permitted. The British crown’s grants of large, often vaguely specified tracts to individual proprietors or companies enabled the grantees to draw settlers by the sale or lease of land at attractive prices or even by outright gift. Of the numerous attempts at group colonization, the most notable effort was the theocratic and collectivist New England town that flourished, especially in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, during the first century of settlement. The town, the basic unit of government and comparable in area to townships in other states, allotted both rural and village parcels to single families by group decision.