The first house built by Thomas Whittier, the three hundred-pound ancestor of the poet Whittier, and first representative of the family in America, was a little log cabin. There he took his wife, Ruth Flint, and there ten children were born. Five of them were boys, and each of them was more than six feet tall.

No wonder the log house grew too small for the family. So, probably in 1688, he built a house whose massive hewn beams were fifteen inches square, whose kitchen was thirty feet long, with a fireplace eight feet wide. The rooms clustered about a central chimney.