The demographer traced the settlement pattern from founding to collapse. The colony had started as a single household at the center of the grid and grown outward, one ring of new homesteads each generation. By the census of 1847 the entire grid was occupied. Then the cholera came. It hit the oldest, densest quarter hardest — the original center, three rows by three columns, where the wells were shallow and the streets narrow. The outer ring, with its deeper wells and wider lots, was spared. The 1848 census showed the hollow at the heart of the town. Resettlement filled it within a decade.