Table of Contents

1. Overview
2. Wampanoag Style Houses
3. Puritan Style Houses
4. Fences
5. Furniture
6. Material Possessions
7. Food
8. Clothing

Fences

Robert Frost would say that fences made good neighbors, but for the Puritans, fences made good people.  Fences not only divided public from private space, but also order from “disorder”:  fences distinguished cultivated space from the wild forests and woodlands that surrounded Puritan settlements.  These forests were often associated with the devil;  fences, on the other hand, appealed to the Puritan desire for making both the landscape and soul upright and orderly.  Regulating and enforcing boundaries was a Puritan passion.  On a less metaphysical level, fences kept farm animals from marauding through crops.  As early as 1633 laws were enacted that required that cornfields be fenced (Dow  100).   Although some fences were made from wood, on Martha’s Vineyard many of the fences were made of stone (see image at right).  As Jonathan Scott points out, “Much of the up-Island region was blessed, or cursed (depending on your point of view) with an abundance of glacially deposited stone” (Scott II.9).  As fields were cleared of stone and prepared for planting, the stones were piled up to create protective enclosures (Scott II.9, Dow 100). 

Fences also initially marked the divide between Puritan and Wampanoag settlements:  while Puritans valued private property and fence making, Wampanoags originally did not.   The very spaces that colonists perceived to be disorderly were carefully maintained and organized:  although settlers often remarked that New England’s forests were open and park-like, they did not always know that this was most likely due to the Algonquian practice of controlled burning (O’Brien  14).  Controlled burning increased game, berries, and decreased pests (O’Brien 15; Cronon48-51).  In addition although Algonquians did not  fence areas, Roger Williams noted that they “are very exact and punctuall in the bounds of their Lands, belonging to this or that Prince or People” (A Key Into the Language  167; O’Brien 16).  Evens lands that were used only seasonally clearly belonged to a particular community.   Trail systems connected villages, the coast, and resources (O’Brien 15).  

Even so, the lack of fences on the part of Wampanoags was often used against them by colonists:  Governor John Winthrop suggested in Reasons to be Considered for...the Intended Plantation in New England (1629) that New England Algonquians did not "own" the land they lived on because they lacked fences, permanent residences, and cattle (Winthrop 73;  Vaughn 110-111).  In order to establish both legal and spiritual privileges in Praying Towns, John Eliot insisted that inhabitants establish private property and fence it.   Ironically, on the island it was often unfenced white farm animals that raided Wampanoag fields (Silverman 212; DCCR 1:19). White laws were less easily enforced on the island, however:  white settlers quickly learned that “buying” property and fencing it did not keep Wampanoags who had used the grounds for generations from continuing to hunt there in appropriate seasons because  Wampanoags often did not recognize the rights of individual Wampanoags to sell communal land (Silverman 179).  Throughout the colonial era Wampanoags and settlers continued to dispute the definition and significance of bounded space.