Why New England Is Sitting On The Most Valuable Land In Human History

The farmland is terrible. The growing season is short. The winters are severe. There is no coal, no oil, and no metal worth mining at scale. By every measure that made other American regions rich, New England was handed essentially nothing. And it produced the American Industrial Revolution, the oldest universities in the country, and a concentration of research institutions with few equals anywhere on Earth. None of that was luck. It's a direct consequence of having no other option. This is 25 facts about how a wrecked mountain range scraped bare by ice became one of the wealthiest regions on the planet — the Iapetus collision, the Scottish Highlands connection, the stone walls, the reforestation, Georges Bank and the cod, Slater Mill, Lowell, the Barre granite quarries, the Boston ice trade, Route 128, and Kendall Square. Fact 1 explains why every other fact on this list exists. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 A mountain range that came apart 0:57 25. New England is a collision zone 1:42 24. Mountains that rivalled the Himalayas 2:16 23. How the collision made the granite 2:52 22. The other half of these mountains is in Scotland 3:28 21. The ice took the soil — and where it went 4:19 20. 200,000 miles of stone wall 5:12 19. The farms that lost to the prairie 5:54 18. The forest is younger than the buildings 6:37 17. Drowned valleys became the harbours 6:58 16. Why Georges Bank had so much fish 7:38 15. The Sacred Cod, and who really came first 8:10 14. The collapse of a 500-year fishery 8:38 13. The ice built the water power 9:14 12. Slater Mill, 1793 9:44 11. Lowell — a city built around a river drop 10:21 A question for people who live there 11:13 10. Barre granite and Vermont marble 11:50 9. The winter they sold to Calcutta 12:32 8. When the mills went south 13:10 7. Universities before there was an economy 13:53 6. Why MIT was founded here 14:16 5. Route 128, before Silicon Valley 14:51 4. Kendall Square 15:26 3. The final inversion 15:59 2. The abandonment created the