The factors that threatened the freeholder ideal in midcentury New England were that the rise in population resulted into less land that were available, parents also could only provide one child which must be with adequate inheritance.
The strategies used by farming families to preserve this ideal were the use of birth control on order to have smaller families, improved productivity of farms by using maize and potatoes to replace English crops, hacking of new farms from the forests of Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts.
