Book Description

Excerpt from Old Colonial Brick Houses of New England On the other hand, the American architects and builders of the period, when they encountered unfamiliar problems, were able to solve them with great ingenuity. The abundance of wood and its ease of working produced a remarkable growth of wooden houses entirely different from any European type. But besides these wooden houses, brick houses were also built, though they were always less numerous, because of their greater cost. The oldest examples were built with bricks imported from England and Holland, but at a rather early period a flourishing brick-making industry grew up, particularly in the neighborhood of the larger cities. In general it may be stated that the brick houses in America follow European tradition more closely than those of wood due to the importation of much of their material, the fact that they were built in many cases by European workmen, and their location in centers of trade, usually in or near seaports where contact with Europe was more general and intimate. Salem, Newbury port, and Portsmouth, all flourishing ports in the days of the clipper ships, Show many houses of this type, while in such centers as Boston and New York they were formerly very numerous, but have largely been demolished to make way for later types of building. Of the houses here illustrated, two belong to the earlier or Jacobean type, while the others follow more or less closely Georgian models. The Cradock house at Medford, known also as the Peter Tufts house, is probably the oldest brick house standing in New England, although its traditional date, 1634, is certainly erroneous. It is definitely known that Matthew Cradock, first Gover nor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, had established a farm at Medford before this date, although he himself never visited it. But the contemporary maps, while they show a group of buildings at Medford, Show nothing on the site of the particular house in question. It seems certain, therefore, that the Cradock house was really of later date than that of tradition, and it may be stated with reasonable probability that it was built nearly half a century later. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.