These old houses, emblems of faded glory, line the streets with a quiet, forgotten dignity. To passersby with the ears to hear, the old mansions murmur of a different way of life. Conspicuous on most of them is a central architectural feature: the front porch.

In the time when these venerable old houses were built, America was a nation of front porches—which is a statement more significant than it at first appears. A nation of front porches is a nation knit together by a highly localized social structure, bulwarked by neighborliness and sustained by the bonds of small-scale community.

The front porch stood for and enabled the kind of everyday interaction among neighbors and community members that wove together a strong social fabric—and it’s worth recovering for that very reason.

The social climate of the porch was defined by rootedness in place and familiarity with the people of that place—as opposed to contemporary mobility and the anonymity of the modern town or city.

As Richard H. Thomas wrote many years ago in his study of society’s shift from front porches to backyard patios, “Part of the sense of community that often characterized the nineteenth-century village resulted from the forms of social interaction that the porch facilitated.”

The front porch provided an intermediate space between the privacy of the home and publicity of the street; it incarnated the connection between home life and community life, helping to strengthen the bond between the family and the world (without losing all sense of privacy or autonomy), and also the bond between families.