e Massachusetts 1798 Direct Tax Census demonstrates, for most of Massachusetts the two-story house was, by far, the exception. By 1798, in Worcester County in central Massachusetts, 38% of all dwellings were small 1-or 2-room buildings of 600 square feet or less, and the majority of the remaining houses had only a single story (Wood 78-79). Garvan too found that the conventional view, based on Kelly's ideas, while it "appeared reasonable by virtue of its appeal to a sense of progress" did not even bear up with close examination of extant Connecticut houses (118).
The exception to the newly discovered rule was, of course, Essex County. Only there, in "one of the oldest, wealthiest, and most densely populated agricultural regions of the entire east coast, can a general case be made for the widespread existence of larger, more substantial houses at the end of the eighteenth century" (Wood 83). Essex County benefited from the economic success of coastal Salem and came to provide "relatively more unity and stability than its counterparts" (Pinkham 185)
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