where ceilings were customarily coated with white plaster and partitioned
by supporting wooden beams, he whitewashed the floorboards of the sec-
ond story between the beams. Many of the adaptations of early America
were, like that ceiling, almost English.
As David Freeman Hawke wrote, each itinerant master builder
arrived on the scene with a blueprint in his head, a two-foot folding rule
in his pocket, and only an experienced eye to judge whether beams were
plumb and level.... The tools he carried had changed little since the
days of the Roman empire—crosscut and rip saws, hammers, chisels,
mallets, augers, gimlets, planes, hatchets and axes. He favored huge tim-
bers for the frame—a ton or more of wood went into even a small house.In fact, so much oak, chestnut, and pine was used that the Massachu-
setts colonists began as early as 1636 the first serious attempt at conser-
vation. Having been in England when the depletion of forests was already
recognized as a serious problem, the colonists appointed overseers to pre-
vent unnecessary felling of large trees, particularly on common land. As
each town was incorporated, it took on the responsibility of regulating the
use of nearby timber.
In setting forth his thesis on the role of the frontier in American history,
Frederick Jackson Turner mentions that as early as 1645, the General
Court of Massachusetts forbade settlers to quit towns on the frontier—
those frontier towns are now suburbs of Boston. A few years later, between
1669 and 1675, fearing attack by the Indians, Bostonians considered build-
ing a wall of wooden poles or stones to enclose the entire hinterland of the
city, “which meanes that whole tract will [be] environed, for the security &
safty (vnder God) of the people, their houses, goods & cattel; from the rage
& fury of the enimy.” As the frontier was pushed outward, additional towns
were added to the protected area.
The house I renovated was one of the results: it was made proof against
arrows and musket balls by being sheathed in oak planks, each about 2
inches thick. Thus it became a “garrison house” for the little settlement of
Harvard. The walls outside the sheathing were overlapping “clapboard,”
just as the shipwright-builder made ships waterproof. Climbing up to the
The Growth of the Colonies 145