What It Was Like Inside the Homes of the Pilgrims

The Pilgrims left England in pursuit of religious freedom, but they couldn't break free from their motherland’s preferred style of home design: the traditional English cottage. Though that very first winter in America was extremely difficult—more than half of the Pilgrims died of illness—in their second year they were finally able to build a few houses. These homes were all similar in style, with steeply pitched thatched roofs and hard-packed earth floors.

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Because there was no drywall in 17th-century America, early settlers wove together complex frameworks of small sticks and branches, called wattle, to create the inside walls of their homes. Once the wattle was complete, spaces in the woven wall were filled in with daub and smoothed over. As you can imagine, this was a time-consuming process; construction of a small house could take as much as two or three months. 

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A typical Pilgrim home wouldn’t have fared too well in today's real estate market, which demands bright and airy spaces. The few windows there were closed with wooden shutters, which made the interiors pretty dark. Without sunlight streaming in, they relied on a central hearth for light and warmth.

Although Pilgrims had spoons and knives, they did not have forks to spear their dinner, which meant that a lot of the time they ate with their fingers. Because things could get pretty messy at mealtime, the Pilgrims typically wore a napkin on their shoulder so they could easily dab their fingers off as they ate.

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When we think of Pilgrims we tend to think of turkey, but that particular meat probably wasn’t on the average Pilgrim’s dinner rotation. Instead, they ate local delicacies like waterfowl, which were in abundant supply in the Massachusetts Bay area, as well as mussels that they found on the shore.

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