The first house built by Thomas Whittier, the three-hundred-pound ancestor of the poet Whittier, and first representative of the family in America, was a little log cabin. There he took his wife, Ruth Flint, and there ten children were born. Five of them were boys, and each of them was more than six feet tall. No wonder the log house grew too small for the family. So, probably in 1688, he built a house whose massive hewn beams were fifteen inches square, whose kitchen was thirty feet long, with a fireplace eight feet wide. The rooms clustered about a central chimney. In this house the poet was born December 17, 1807, and here he spent the formative years of his life. When he was twenty-seven years old he wrote for _The Little Pilgrim_ of Philadelphia a paper on "The Fish I Didn't Catch." In this he described the home of his boyhood: "Our old homestead nestled under a long range of hills which stretched off to the west. It was surrounded by woods in all directions save to the southeast, where a break in the leafy wall revealed a vista of low, green meadows, picturesque with wooded islands and jutting capes of upland. Through these, a small brook, noisy enough as it foamed, rippled and laughed down its rocky falls by our garden-side, wound, silently and scarcely visible, to a still larger stream, known as the Country Brook. This brook in its time, after doing duty at two or three saw and grist mills, the clack of which we could hear across the intervening woodlands, found its way to the great river, and the river took it up and bore it down to the great sea." Whittier's poems are full of references to the life on the farm; many of his best verses had their inspiration in memories of the past. For instance, the description of the building of the fire in "Snow-Bound," a poem which describes the life at the farm when he was twelve years old, is a faithful picture of what took place in the old kitchen every night of the long New England winter, when "We piled, with care, our nightly stack Of wood against the chimney back-- The oaken log, green, huge and thick, And on its top the thick back-stick; The knotty fore-stick laid apart, And filled between with curious art. The ragged brush; then, hovering near, We watched the first red blaze appear, Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam On whitewashed wall and sagging beam, Until the old, rude-fashioned room Burst, flower-like, into rosy bloom."