Our local deli is just above the Town Landing, and each morning I walk our golden retriever along the river to get the paper. Some days, I'll loop back along County Road, which is a block up the hill and roughly parallel to the river. When I go home that way, I walk past an unassuming, red-painted house. It was built in the seventeenth century, but there's nothing remarkable about that in Ipswich. What's remarkable about the house is that Thomas Dennis lived there. Dennis was one of the first generation of immigrant joiners that Rob Tarule talks about (see p. XX). Each time I walk past his house, I get a pleasurable nudge in my imagination. The dog doesn't, but he's only a dog.

We're lucky in Ipswich. The river was too small and silted up for the town to benefit from the post-Revolutionary boom in trade, so its early houses were not torn down to make way for grand Federal mansions as happened in Salem and Newburyport, just to the south and north. Ipswich remained modest, and still is. Dennis's house is still lived in by regular, working folk, just as it has been for the last three and a half centuries. With houses as with antiques, what turns me on is the persistence of the ordinary. The top of the market, whether it's a house or a highboy, fills me with admiration, but there's a distance to it, a touch of coldness. The ordinary, however, gets close to me - I feel a warmth from it.

County Road was one of the two main routes into the town, so it was wide enough for two wagons to pass with plenty of room to spare. People stepped out of their houses almost onto the street (front yards were a later fashion,) and sometimes the houses were so close that a broad-shouldered man could only just walk between them, and sometimes he could have driven a horse and cart through the gap. But they were always close. By our standards, County Road is narrow and the houses are crammed together.

Why, we might ask. It's not as though there was a shortage of space in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. In fact, exactly the opposite - and that's why the houses huddle closely together. People worked in the fields and forests of what seemed like an infinite wilderness, and they wanted to come home to a community where the neighbors were close, and they were surrounded by fellow humans, not by an empty, and vaguely threatening, wilderness.

Safety from attack had something to do with it as well, of course. And so did religion. It was much easier for the minister to keep an eye on the morality of his flock if they all lived on top of one another (don't take that literally). Living like this, everyone could keep an eye on everyone else, which made his job easier still. There was no privacy then, indoors or out. In fact, privacy was a concept that didn't yet exist. The minister was glad of this, too, for privacy is where people have space to think and do wicked, sinful things.

We don't know if Thomas Dennis thought sinful thoughts in his little house, but we do know that he was not a totally law-abiding citizen. In 1670, the board of selectmen fined him 50 shillings for felling 18 trees, when his "grant" from them had been for six. He was working far out in the forest and would probably have gotten away with it, had not his servant blown the whistle on him: "Thomas Denis went out into the woods and chose out eighteen trees, and commanded me Josias Lyndon who was then his servant for to falle them and accordingly I did it by his order." Dennis refused to pay, claiming someone else had felled the trees, so the town sent the marshal, Robert Lord, to distrain his cow and some pine boards equal in value to the fine. His wife Grace was so enraged by this that she "affronted" the marshal, for which she, too, was fined.

Eventually, however, it was all sorted out: Dennis admitted to the crime, whereupon the selectmen forgave him and canceled the fine. Small town life, nothing like it, then or now.