The rapid, steady development of Essex County, Massachusetts led to the creation of an architectural landscape that, by the end of the colonial period, differed considerably from those of other rural regions of New England. The Fuller houses of Middleton demonstrate the type of house that predominated in Middleton and similar Essex communities. The history of the family displays a common pattern for the region as the economically advanced Fullers moved into an outlying area and, building on their advantage, became leading citizens of the township that grew up around them.
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 were subordinate to towns, regardless of their shape or type. Indeed, "the modal form of settlement was dispersed from the 1630s on and even many nucleated settlements were short-lived" (Woods 54).
As Wood shows, this type of dispersed village predominated in Essex County. In the area around the future village of Middleton, for example, the places that were called villages in the colonial records, displayed the dispersed settlement form far more often than...