What happened at the Plymouth Colony after the _Mayflower_ came to anchor? The wind blew very hard for two days and the next day, Saturday, December 23, 1620, as many as could went ashore: “felled and carried timber, to provide themselves stuff for building,” and the following Monday “we went on shore, some to fell timber, some to saw, some to rive, and some to carry; so no man rested all that day.”[4] Bradford writes “that they builte a forte with good timber” which Isaac de Rasieres described in 1627 as “a large square house, made of thick sawn planks, stayed with oak beams.” The oldest existing houses in the Plymouth Colony are built in the same manner and some half dozen or more seventeenth-century plank houses may yet be seen north of Boston. Moreover, when the ship _Fortune_ sailed from Plymouth in the summer of 1621 part of her lading consisted of “clapboards and wainscott,” showing clearly that the colonists soon after landing had dug saw pits and produced boards in quantity suitable for the construction of houses and for exportation. 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. What can be more natural and humanly probable than to find English housewrights who had learned their trade overseas, building houses and outbuildings on this side of the Atlantic in the same manner they had been taught through a long apprenticeship in their former homes? Can we of today assume that they, upon the spur of the moment, invented a new type of building--a log house--a construction they had never seen in England--a building also unknown to the Indians? The houses of the Indians were “verie little and homely, being made with small Poles pricked into the ground, and so bended and fastened at the tops, and on the side they are matted with Boughes and covered with Sedge and old mats.”[5] These were called “wigwams” and as they were easily constructed and the materials were readily at hand many of the poorer colonists built for themselves imitations of these rude huts of the Indians. Governor Winthrop records in his “Journal,” in September, 1630, that one Fitch of Watertown had his wigwam burnt down with all his goods, and two months later John Firman, also of Watertown, lost his wigwam by fire. [Illustration: PARSON CAPEN HOUSE, TOPSFIELD Front entry and stairs]