Maggie's Farm

At the same, there is a necessity to build on coasts or floodplains. You can’t build a ocean port in Dubuque, and you can’t load a river barge from an elevator on a bluff above the river. The people who operate such facilities cannot live an inconvenient distance from them. That is, a city such as New Orleans must exist, at the point where ocean shipping cannot go any farther inland, and riverine shipping cannot go any farther to sea. Those cities grow (I’m guessing the picture is a Boston suburb, maybe Scituate), and a port town will expand up and down the coast. Scituate itself was, at one time, an important port for fishing and ship building; fishermen and shipwrights, by necessity, live near the water.