Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
November 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 7
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
November 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 7
When Joseph Capen moved to Topsfield, Massachusetts, in 1682 to become minister of the Congregational church there, his prospects did not seem bright. Two of the last three preachers had difficulties collecting their salaries, and another went on trial for intemperance. These conflicts degenerated into charges and countercharges of slander and drunkenness. Most of Topsfield’s population lived in one- or two-room houses that offered little protection from a New England winter—or from Indians, if they decided to resume the wars that had recently raged through the colony. Boundary disputes regularly set neighbor against neighbor and town against town, and, often enough, community gatherings such as militia drills would deteriorate into drunken brawls that ended in gunfire. Wolves roamed the streets of the town at night, stalking the hogs and sheep.
By the time Capen died, in 1725, however, Topsfield had put most of its early problems behind it. The busy, prosperous community had come to serve, along with other Massachusetts towns, as a functioning cog in the machinery of England’s expanding colonial empire. And though Capen himself was far from solely responsible for this great transformation, his role as the town’s religious leader made him, like other New England Puritan ministers, a leading actor in the development of a stable and increasingly modern social order in the Massachusetts colony.
Standing on a small rise near the Topsfield common and built entirely from local oak, stone, and clay, the Capen house almost literally grew out of the ground in which it was planted, unlike the more formal dwellings of a slightly later period, which often copied foreign models. Of the surviving seventeenth-century houses in New England, only Capen’s can be dated precisely (day and year are carved into a beam on the second floor); the frame was raised on June 8, 1683.
As in most New England houses, life in the Capen residence centered on the hall and its wide hearth. Here fire gave heat and light to the family and guests throughout all but the warmest months of the year. The work of spinning, weaving, brewing, tanning, and shoemaking, both for home use and for market, was done by the light of the hearth.
This arrangement of undifferentiated, multipurpose space was typical of every aspect of the early olonists’ world. Tables formed by boards laid across trestles could be rearranged quickly and easily to serve a variety of needs. Chests had no drawers to separate and categorize their contents. On the town’s common lands, which at one time encompassed fully five hundred acres, all the citizens of Topsfield pastured their live stock and gathered timber for building or for burning.
Areas reserved for private activities were rare anywhere in Topsfield. One of these was the parlor of the Capen house, considered the “best room” of the house. In typical colonial-New England fashion it lay opposite the hall on