chapter 9
The Growth of the Colonies
F
or us it takes a leap of imagination to see and feel what it was
like to live in the American colonies in the half century
before the Revolution. The past truly is another country, hard to visit and
harder to understand. Consider first the vast cities we know today: New
York with its millions was a village of 11,000 people in 1743 and did not
reach 25,000 until 1775. During the same years, Boston actually fell from a
recorded 16,382 inhabitants to 16,000 while Philadelphia, the American
giant, rose from 13,000 to 40,000.
The very landscape would be shockingly alien to a modern American.
Much of today’s downtown Boston was under water. New York City hung
like an overripe fig at the southern tip of the leafy branch that was
Manhattan Island. The island was mostly a wild tangle of brambles and for-
est sliced by gullies and blocked by imposing, now mainly leveled, heights.
Washington, D.C., did not exist. Huge areas of America were undrained
swamp or virgin forest. The villages and towns that had begun to dot the
map were far apart and isolated from one another by vast spaces.
As the colonists grew in number, they began to imprint the land with
styles they remembered from the mother country in language, dress, diet,
mores, legal systems, and religious organizations. The ways are many and
subtle, but one that I personally have found fascinating was how the early
settlers built their houses. I learned this as I worked to restore a “center
chimney” house, built in Harvard, Massachusetts, about 1692 by a ship-
wright. The builder had no cement, plaster, or paint—none was then avail-
able in colonial America—so, to make the rooms of his house look as much
as possible like the rooms he remembered in the England of his childhood,
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