17th Century Newport Buildings
17
The house of the average New Englander in the late seventeenth century was a wooden dwelling of two stories built around a brick chimney containing large fireplaces. In Rhode Island and in parts of Connecticut, where shale abounded, the chimney was built of stone and not infrequently the house, in whole or at one end, was also so constructed.
Source: George Francis Dow, Every Day Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Boston: The Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1935), 17.