Alonzo Lewis, the historian of Lynn, writing a century ago, states that some of the first settlers in that town made shelters for themselves and families by digging caves into the hillsides. On the bank of the Connecticut River above Hartford, is the Loomis Institute, on the grounds of which is the site where the men from Dorchester, Mass., in 1635, constructed their first dwellings, which were dug into the river bank. The bank itself composed three walls of the shelter and the front was a framing of boards with a door and a window. The roof was thatched with river sedge. The last of these long abandoned dugouts was filled in as recently as 1926. At Concord, Mass., the early settlers dug cellars in the earth which they spanned with wooden spars and then covered with turf. A more detailed description of such shelters is found in a report made in 1650, by the Secretary of the Province of New Netherlands: "Those in New Netherlands and especially in New England who have no means to build farmhouses at first, according to their wishes, dig a square pit in the ground, cellar fashion, 6 or 7 feet deep, as long and as broad as they think proper, case the earth inside with wood all round the wall, and line the wood with bark of trees or something else to prevent the caving in of the earth, floor this cellar with plank and wainscott it overhead for a ceiling, raise a roof of spars clear up and cover the spars with the bark or green sods, so that they can live dry and warm in these houses with their entire families for two, three or four years, it being understood that partitions are run through those cellars which are adapted to the size of the family. The wealthy and principal men of New England, in the beginning of the Colonies, commenced their first dwelling houses in this fashion."[13] [13] _Documentary History of New York_ (_1850_), Vol. I. The frequent references to the English wigwam seem to indicate that some such temporary construction was usual among many of the colonists at the outset. Settlers were living at Salem as early as 1626 and Endecott, with a considerable immigration, arrived in 1628. Marblehead, just across the harbor, was settled early and yet when John Goyt came there in 1637, he "first built a wigwam and lived thar till he got a house."[14] The rude buildings also put up by planters at Salem must have been looked upon at the time as temporary structures for they had all disappeared before 1661.[15] [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."