ABSTRACT
Potter Addition sits on the rural-urban fringe of Grand Prairie, the administrative seat of Clay County. A city of some one hundred thousand people, Grand Prairie is located in the heart of America's Corn Belt, at the northern focus of a fertile ellipse whose major axis runs some two hundred miles in a southwest to northeast direction. Grand Prairie was surviving by servicing the local university and its transient population. Potter Addition's first residents arrived in 1927, and from the beginning, the pace of the community's social life has been tied to the economic and ecological rhythms of Grand Prairie. The new economic order was marked by a growing separation of the farmer from a key element of the agrarian means of production. A community's appearance can communicate more than the ecological and economic processes that determine its physical layout. Properly interpreted, its physical configurations can yield fruitful insights into the cultural premises that undergird a community.
