Jonathan Beecher Field is an associate professor in the department of English at Clemson University.There are few social formations from early America as beloved as the New England town. It can represent nostalgic innocence, often represented by departures from innocence like The Scarlet Letter or Peyton Place. At the same time, the New England town persists as a template for a fantasy of idealized democracy, embodied in the New England town meeting. One vestige of this fantasy is the ritual of the dozen or so citizens of Dixville Notch, NH, exercising their privilege to cast the first votes for the President of the United States each election cycle. There is, it appears, something special about this small town in New Hampshire that makes it an exceptionally pure manifestation of democracy. The 17th century Puritan founders of these New England towns did not treat the form with the same regard it enjoys today. Texts like John Winthrop’s “Essay on the Ordering of Towns,” and Edward Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence suggest that these settlers were not at all about theformation of towns, and conceived of them as abstract structures intended to occupy the wilderness and displace Indians. In “The Ordering of Towns,” Winthrop conjures not a city on a hill, but a grid of nameless, abstract towns, extending indefinitely toward the horizon.This disjunction between social formations and physical forms is what animates this paper. The scholarship on the early New England town, a staple of the New SocialHistory that was a focus for New England historians working during the Cold War, suggests a kind of atavistic celebration of a purer kind of democracy. Many of these towns, however, are less towns than frontier garrisons. In a different context, Giorgio Agamben argues that the camp, not the polis, is the nomos of modernity. In the backwoods of New England, there is evidence for this claim. We also see echoes of this tension in our current moment. Dixville Notch is not far from dozens of towns in Maine with names like “T4 R5 NBKP,” forming grids of nameless, uninhabited towns, or networks of nothing. I contend that rereading early American literature for tension between the exceptional town and the abstract town has the potential to unsettle our understanding of this cherished symbol of American democracy.