However, after the Industrial Revolution, farms began disappearing. Many rural people started working in factories and in the cities and towns that were springing up along railroads and rivers. Commercial farmers moved to other regions, with longer growing seasons and big open tracts of land. There, large-scale farming was more possible and more profitable.

As New England became more industrialized, farmland started to be swallowed up by spreading urban and suburban areas. Farming communities began dwindling. Some vanished completely. Today, travelers through New England still see empty stone cellar holes and dilapidated buildings that mark places where thriving agricultural communities once bloomed.