[14] _Essex Co. (Mass.) Quarterly Court Records_, Vol. VI, p. 363.
[15] _Essex County Deeds_, Book V, leaf 107.
When Governor Winthrop arrived at Charlestown in 1630 with the first great emigration, he found a house or two and several wigwams--rude shelters patterned after the huts built by the Indians--and until houses could be erected in Boston many lived in tents and wigwams, "their meeting-place being abroad under a Tree."
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.
Thomas Dudley writing to the Countess of Lincoln, in March, 1631, relates: "Wee have ordered that noe man shall build his chimney with wood nor cover his house with thatch, which was readily assented unto, for that divers houses have been burned since our arrival (the fire always beginning in the wooden chimneys) and some English wigwams which have taken fire in the roofes with thatch or boughs."[16] It was Dudley who was taken to task by the Governor in May, 1632, "for bestowing so much cost on wainscotting his house and otherwise adorning it," as it was not a good example for others in the beginning of a plantation. Dudley replied that he had done it for warmth and that it was but clapboards nailed to the walls. A few months later this house caught fire "the hearth of the Hall chimney burning all night upon the principal beam."
In 1631, John Winthrop entered in his _Journal_ that the chimney of Mr. Sharp's house in Boston took fire "the splinters being not clayed at the top" and from it the thatch caught fire and the house was burnt down.
The first meetinghouse built in Salem had a "catted" chimney, that is, the chimney was built with sticks laid cobhouse fashion and the whole daubed with clay inside and out.