Architecture of New England Towns

Recent scholarship has challenged some of the prevailing notions about the village settlement and architectural makeup of New England towns. Joseph Wood's studies of settlement patterns have demonstrated that the notion that the villages of New England were primarily strongly nucleated settlements is incorrect. The conventional view had been that the New England colonists "formed compact villages gathered around a central meetinghouse" (Wood 54). The prevailing spatial view, "based on theoretical rings of decreasing intensity of land use with increasing distance from the center," had reinforced this idea (Wood 53). This idea of a village, based largely on assumptions about the villages of the settlers' homeland, is, however, inaccurate. This is partly because the term "village," which was an official designation, like "town," was actually used in the seventeenth century to refer to communities that

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lling c.1670, but additions made in 1689, 1700, 1750 and 1832 brought it to the status of a 17 room house with 3 floors (Brown, "Part II," 90). Certainly additions to the single room, 1- or 2-story plan were very common. But, while this may have been the case with the first Thomas' house, none of the surviving Fuller houses followed this procedure. Though all the houses had additions of one kind or another, all of them began as 2-story houses with more than one room per story. This is true even of the earliest of the Fuller houses, dated c. 1680, that survives today. Thomas Fuller had 5 sons; Thomas Jr., John, Jacob, Joseph and Benjamin. The houses discussed here are usually called after the individuals who built them, or caused them to be built. The oldest remaining house in Middleton, however, is called the Lieutenant Thomas Fuller house. This Thomas Fuller was the son of Thomas Fuller Jr., who is believed to have lived in this house by 1684. This date, and the architectural evidence, have resulted in a date of c.1680 for the building (Watkins 154). The house, on Old South Main Street, abutted the Fuller family burial ground. It is a two-story, center-chimney house to which a saltbox lean-to was added at a later dat
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Approximate Word count = 3204
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)

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