I

WANT you to visit with me the little farming village of Vitrimont in the Vosges, which was wiped out in the German onslaught in 1914. Perhaps it deserved to be for it showed no more sign of having ever heard of sanitation than many another French village that our army knew too well. Manure piles lining the street; houses and barns five rooms deep all under one roof with no light or air except from the front, foul privies, flies everywhere, such was the type destroyed. Today you leave the

*An address delivered at the Annual Convention of the American Civic Association, Amherst, Massachusetts, October 14-16.

main road and turn down California street and you find spotless towns. Trees and grass borders replace the manure piles in front of the houses. The latter are painted gay colors. We enter and find the houses charmingly decorated and never more than two rooms deep. The rear opens on an ample courtyard behind which are the farm buildings behind which again are the manure piles.

It was two California women, Mrs. Crocker and Miss Daisy Polls, who waved this magic wand but it was a French engineer and architect that evolved the rejuvenation. Naturally at

first the conservative French farmer rebelled at the changes but the architect tells me that now those same conservatives are the best advertisers of the improvement.

Hattonchâtel in the Meuse, a fascinating stage town which dominates from its height the valley where the pinchers come together behind St. Mihiel, was largely wiped out. Then Miss Skinner, Then Miss Skinner, of Holyoke, Mass., adopted it. Now it has a water supply with water pumped up from the valley. It is going to have a public wash house and bath house, a fire engine house, schools, a new town hall and several sightly little parks looking down on the valley. The bad angles and grades in the street we are trying to improve but without destroying their charm. The town is becoming self-respecting again.

Embermenil in the Vosges was too crowded. Lots were far too narrow so that the houses were often one room

wide and five rooms deep. Now they are profiting by the complete destruction. to reparcel the whole town on a more practical and more sanitary basis and at the cross roads a charming civic center is being created.

Halloville in the Vosges, down in a foggy bottom, was so unsanitary and so inaccessible that they abandoned the old site entirely and have now laid out a new town on the upland with wide lots and streets and with their public buildings grouped around a picturesque square in the center.

Apremont in the Meuse which used to be such a thriving village, now only knee high, is receiving a community center building from the school children of Holyoke, Mass. We had to provide an adequate setting for it and so we created a civic center where the three main roads meet so as to make a group of the town hall, the school, the church and the community center.