Salem, MA has about 18 First Period houses (built during the first century of English settlement, approximately 1620-1720. In his landmark studies, “Massachusetts and its First Period Buildings” (1979) and The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay, 1625-1725 (1979), architectural historian Abbott Lowell Cummings demonstrated that eastern Massachusetts contains the greatest concentration of First Period structures in the nation. By the first quarter of the eighteenth century, house-building transitioned from First Period to Georgian concepts of architecture.Examples of the most common two-room, central-chimney plan can be found in both early seventeenth-century East Anglia and in First Period Massachusetts Bay dwellings, and can be identified for by frame construction, roof design, and the use of materials and decorative features. In wealthier communities such as Salem, many of the early houses were replaced, but in Ipswich, which went through a long period of economic hardship, 59 houses...
