When English colonists first crossed the Atlantic in the early seventeenth century, they directed their fragile vessels toward the southern reaches of North America, specifically the Chesapeake Bay. New England, the land north and east of the Hudson River, seemed much less inviting. Indeed, the first group of English migrants to arrive in New England landed at Plymouth in 1620 by mistake: they had intended to settle in Virginia. The landscape that greeted these hapless travelers was not encouraging: the New England coastline was rocky and austere; inland, as one colonist put it, “the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue.” All in all, wrote another, it was a “remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness.” The climate was equally inhospitable: long and harsh winters punctuated by short and humid summers. By the end of their first winter in New England, half the Plymouth settlers had perished.

Yet New England had its possibilities. The region was abundant in timber, fish, waterfowl, and other wildlife. The forests that dominated the landscape were not difficult to penetrate, since the native Americans set fire to the underbrush each spring in order to facilitate traveling and hunting. The English set about adapting the landscape to suit their own way of life. As they cleared vast tracts of woodland to make way for a network of settled agricultural communities, New England was transformed into a land of fields and fences.