First Period

The first century of English building in America

First Period covers the houses the first English colonists built, from the 1620s landings through about 1725. These are the oldest dwellings in the country, and Massachusetts holds nearly all of them. Fewer than 250 First Period structures survive nationally. The bulk stand in Essex County, in Ipswich, Salem, Saugus, and Topsfield, with a smaller cluster on the South Shore and in the Dedham area.

The builders worked from memory of the English West Country and East Anglia they had left. They framed in heavy oak, raised steep roofs to shed snow, and anchored each house to a central chimney that heated every room off one masonry core. Almost none of this is visible from the street today, since three centuries of clapboard, additions, and sash replacement have buried the original fabric. A First Period house usually announces itself by its proportions and its chimney.

Who built in this period

This is a single cohort, not a spread of competing styles, and the whole period predates professional architecture in America. Houses were put up by their owners and by local housewrights following inherited rules of thumb. What later eras express through ornament, the First Period expresses through structure: the summer beam, the chamfer on a post, the framing of the roof. The First Period style page documents those features and the survivor inventory.

What ownership means here

A First Period house is a museum-grade artifact that someone has to live in. Original framing cannot be altered without losing the thing that makes the house matter, so kitchens and baths get worked around the structure. Many of these houses carry National Register or local-district protection, and the most significant are documented in the Historic American Buildings Survey, which settles questions of date and authenticity that would otherwise hang over a sale. These houses almost never come to market. When one does, it draws a national pool of preservation-minded buyers, and price tracks rarity and condition far more than square footage. An automated valuation model has nothing useful to say about a 1690 house, which is one reason a tailored comparable analysis matters more here than anywhere else in the catalog.

Browse First Period homes

Listings below are placed in this period by year built and confirmed architectural features. Many also carry a style tag and a town tag, so you can move from the period into a specific town or into the related Georgian cohort that followed.