penturbia

— The exodus to penturbia will be the fifth (“pent” comes from the Greek word for five) great migration since the Revolutionary War, Lessinger says. The first came between 1760 and 1789 when vast numbers of folks left the more established colonies—Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania—for the unrefined open spaces of places such as North Carolina, Vermont, New Hampshire. Economic depression fostered the second migration (1817-1846), when Americans pushed west. In the late 19th Century the great industrial cities, Chicago in particular, grew and attracted people from the countryside. Then they left. Lessinger dates the fourth great migration—the one to the suburbs—from 1929 to 1958.