There is a wide-spread misconception that the colonists on reaching New
England proceeded immediately to build log houses in which to live.
Historians have described these log houses as chinked with moss and
clay and as having earth floors, precisely the type of house built
on the frontier and in the logging camps at a much later period. A
well-known picture of Leyden street, at Plymouth, shows a double row of
log houses reaching up the hillside, which the Pilgrims are supposed
to have constructed. In point of fact, no contemporary evidence has
been found that supports the present-day theory. The early accounts of
what took place in the days following the settlements along the coast
are full of interesting details relating to day-by-day happenings but
nowhere do we find allusion to a log house such as modern historians
assume existed at that time.[3]
What happened at the Plymouth Colony after the _Mayflower_ came
to anchor? The wind blew very hard for two days and the next day,
Saturday, December 23, 1620, as many as could went ashore: “felled and
carried timber, to provide themselves stuff for building,” and the
following Monday “we went on shore, some to fell timber, some to saw,
some to rive, and some to carry; so no man rested all that day.”[4]
Bradford writes “that they builte a forte with good timber” which Isaac
de Rasieres described in 1627 as “a large square house, made of thick
sawn planks, stayed with oak beams.” The oldest existing houses in the
Plymouth Colony are built in the same manner and some half dozen or
more seventeenth-century plank houses may yet be seen north of Boston.
Moreover, when the ship _Fortune_ sailed from Plymouth in the summer
of 1621 part of her lading consisted of “clapboards and wainscott,”
showing clearly that the colonists soon after landing had dug saw pits
and produced boards in quantity suitable for the construction of houses
and for exportation.
In the summer of 1623 Bradford mentions the “building of great houses
in pleasant situations” and when a fire broke out in November of the
following year it began in “a shed yt was joyned to ye end of ye
storehouse, which was wattled up with bowes.” It will be seen that this
shed was not crudely built of logs or slabs but that its walls were
wattled and perhaps also daubed with clay, in precisely the same manner
with which these colonists were familiar in their former homes across
the sea. An original outer wall in the old Fairbanks house at Dedham,
Massachusetts, still has its “wattle and daub” constructed in 1637.
What can be more natural and humanly probable than to find English
housewrights who had learned their trade overseas, building houses and
outbuildings on this side of the Atlantic in the same manner they had
been taught through a long apprenticeship in their former homes? Can we
of today assume that they, upon the spur of the moment, invented a new
type of building--a log house--a construction they had never seen in
England--a building also unknown to the Indians?
The houses of the Indians were “verie little and homely, being made
with small Poles pricked into the ground, and so bended and fastened at
the tops, and on the side they are matted with Boughes and covered with
Sedge and old mats.”[5] These were called “wigwams” and as they were
easily constructed and the materials were readily at hand many of the
poorer colonists built for themselves imitations of these rude huts of
the Indians. Governor Winthrop records in his “Journal,” in September,
1630, that one Fitch of Watertown had his wigwam burnt down with all
his goods, and two months later John Firman, also of Watertown, lost
his wigwam by fire.
[Illustration: PARSON CAPEN HOUSE, TOPSFIELD