Move to the next exhibit and you will see a page from Auguste Beaune's diary, with the entry in a large hand: "I shall build a town".
With demand strong for the Beaune Valve, Auguste knew that his small group of craftsmen working in a crowded workshop would not be able to keep up. So he decided to build a factory. But a factory would require workers, and workers would require homes, and there were only a few homes in Cidertown.
So he decided to build a town. And, since Auguste Beaune did not like messy things, it would be a nicely organized town, with perfectly straight streets and rectangular blocks based on classical models.
He laid out the streets of the town on a large piece of paper (which you can see next to the page from his diary), using drafting tools and a big, sharp pencil.
The first problem he encountered was the Cidertown Road, which ambled haphazardly past the mill. With quick strokes of his pencil, Auguste transformed the crooked road to Main Street, straight as a ruler and precisely aligned to the East-West dimension. In so doing, Auguste shifted the center of the town North, to the center of his square tract of land. That is why the oldest buildings in town today, including the Old Cider Mill, are not in the center of town. It's also why the Beaune Estate has such a huge front lawn.
Next, he laid out the streets. He decided that each lot should be two hundred feet deep and one hundred feet wide, with ten lots on each side of the block. Dividing the tract into equal blocks, he determined that there should be twenty-six streets running East and West. He named these streets alphabetically for trees and shrubs, starting with Apple Street on the North side of town. The last street was a bit of a puzzler -- he had to do some research to find a tree name starting with "Z", and finally settled on Zelkova, an elm tree native to Europe. Since this street was never actually developed -- it abuts the town dump -- most people just call it "Z Street".
Since the newly aligned and straightened Cidertown Road ran through the middle of town, it lined up with "M" street, so Beaune renamed it Main Street. However, many people still call it the Cidertown Road, and others think it should be named Maple Street, in keeping with the tree theme. This is confusing to outsiders. Fortunately, there aren't many outsiders in Beauneville.
Names of the remaining East-West streets followed logically: Birch, Cherry, Dogwood, Elm, Fig, Ginkgo, Hickory, Ivy, Juniper, Kalopanax, Larch; and below Main Street, Nutmeg, Olive, Pear, Quince, Rose (subsequently renamed Railroad), Sassafras, Teak, Ulmus, Viburnum, Willow, Xanthum and Yew.
When it came to naming the North-South streets, Auguste had exhausted his creativity, so he just numbered them from First Street on the Eastern boundary, to Twentieth Street on the Western boundary.
In laying out the town, there was a singular way that Beaune treated topographic features: he ignored them, except for the Mill Pond, which he couldn't ignore. Fortunately, the Beaune tract is largely flat, except for the gentle slope downhill towards the Mill Pond in the Southwest corner of town. Where the Mill Pond interrupts the street grid, the streets end rather abruptly, in dead ends.
When the town plan was complete, Auguste Beaune proudly wrote "Beauneville" in large letters across the top of the map. The name stuck, mainly because as the owner and builder of the town, Beaune could call it whatever he liked. If anyone objected to renaming the town, their objections were not recorded.
