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In contrast to the New England village-community was the trading post. Of this nature were the little towns in the New Netherlands which were planted there by the Dutch West India Company: the settlers were for the most part either harassed individuals who were lured to the New World by the prospects of a good living, or people of established rank who were tempted to leave the walks of commerce for the dignities and affluences that were attached to the feudal tenure of the large estates that lined the Hudson.

The germs of town life came over with these people, and sheer necessity turned part of their energies to agriculture, but they did not develop the close village-community we find in New England; and though New Amsterdam was a replica of the Old World port, with its gabled brick houses, and its well-banked canals and fine gardens, it left no decided pattern on the American scene. It is only the country architecture of the Dutch which survives as either a relic or a memory. These trading posts like Manhattan and Fort Orange were, as Messrs. Petersen and Edwards have shown in their study of New York as an Eighteenth Century Municipality, medieval in their economy: numerous guild and civic regulations which provided for honest weight and measure and workmanship continued in force within the town. In their external dealings, on the other hand, the practice of the traders was sharp, and every man was for himself. Beginning its life by bargaining in necessities, the trading post ends by making a necessity of bargaining; and it was the impetus from its original commercial habits which determined the characteristics of the abortive city plan that was laid down for Manhattan Island in 1811. Rich as the Dutch precedent is in individual farmhouses, it brings us no pattern, such as we find in New England, for the community as a whole.