Mayflower

1630. Instead, he had shared his rights with those who had come to America during the first years of the colony. Ten years later, in 1640, Bradford and the other “Old Comers” turned the patent over to the colony’s freemen.
    He had come to America not to establish a great and powerful colony, but to create a tightly knit and godly community. For that to happen, everyone must live together and worship in the same church. But by the early 1630s it had become apparent that the soil around the original settlement was not the best; many inhabitants, moreover, claimed they needed more land to accommodate the growing herds of cattle. To the governor’s dismay, many of his closest associates, including Brewster, Winslow, Standish, and John Alden, left Plymouth to found communities to the north in Duxbury and Marshfield. Thomas Prence, one of the colony’s rising stars and who first served as governor in 1634, also moved to Duxbury, then helped found the town of Eastham on Cape Cod. Although he didn’t arrive in New England until the 1630s, John Brown was one of the colony’s wealthier inhabitants. He would probably have joined the Puritans in Massachusetts-Bay had not a meeting with John Robinson in Leiden in the 1620s caused him to choose Plymouth instead. In 1640, Brown helped found the town of Taunton; by 1645 he had moved to Wannamoisett (in the vicinity of modern Barrington, Rhode Island), which became a part of Swansea in 1667. By that time Brown had long since been joined by his son James and his son-in-law Thomas Willett, who established a prosperous trade with the Dutch in Manhattan.
    At the root of this trend toward town building was, Governor Bradford insisted, a growing hunger for land. For Bradford, land had been a way to create a community of Saints. For an increasing number of Pilgrims and especially for their children, land was a way to get rich. Bradford claimed that the formation of new towns was “not for want or necessity,” but “for the enriching of themselves,” and he predicted it would be “the ruin of New England.” Even Roger Williams, whose vision of an ideal community was very different from Bradford’s, shared his concern about land. Williams railed against the rise of “God Land” in New England and feared that it would become “as great with us English as God Gold was with the Spaniards.”
    It was difficult for Bradford not to take the exodus of Winslow, Brewster, and the others as a personal affront. For as the new towns prospered and grew, Plymouth, the village with which it had all begun, fell on hard times. “And thus was this poor church left,” Bradford wrote, “like an ancient mother grown old and forsaken of her children…. Thus, she that had made many rich became herself poor.”
    Despite Bradford’s lament, his vision of a compact, self-contained community of fellow worshippers remained the organizing principle behind each of the colony’s new towns. In 1652, Plymouth magistrates admonished one Joseph Ramsden for locating his house “remotely in the woods from his neighbors” and ordered him “to bring his wife and family with all convenient speed, near unto some neighborhood.”
    A settler in a typical town in Plymouth Colony in the 1650s received a house lot that ranged from just a single acre to as much as twenty, depending on his social standing. Instead of the tiny wattle-and-daub cottages constructed by the original Pilgrims, the subsequent generation built post-and-beam structures covered with clapboards and shingles and anchored by mammoth brick chimneys.
    It took a tremendous amount of lumber to build one of these houses—even a modest house required at least twelve tons of wood. Just as daunting were the heating requirements of the home’s open hearth. It’s been estimated that the average seventeenth-century New England house consumed fifteen cords, or 1,920 cubic feet, of wood per year, meaning that a town of two hundred homes depended on the deforestation of as many as seventy-five acres per year.
    As the number of towns grew, the character of the colony inevitably began to change, and from Governor Bradford’s perspective, it was not for the good. The influx of newcomers made it increasingly difficult to ensure the colony’s moral purity. Even worse than the cases of premarital sex and adultery were, according to Bradford, those of