Lesson 5
Map Fragment, circa 1686

Around 1686 a surveyor designed this plan for the new town of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Each houselot number on the main street (in the upper left-hand corner of the drawing) corresponds to numbers in the common fields. Each person owned both a lot for his house and several fields for cultivation and land as a source of wood to supply building materials and fuel.

More information:
The lower (southern) portion of the map is missing. The street contains 43 houselots. Find #2 on the main street and color it red. Now look for all the strips of land marked with #2 and color them the same color. This will give you an idea of the amount of land owned by the early Deerfield men.

Native people, who lived in the area for many thousands of years and who farmed the area for at least one thousand years before the Europeans arrived, used the land without individual ownership. Boundaries for the Natives' homelands were not defined by surveyors, but by mutual agreement.

Glossary:
Joshua Fisher
Surveyor
Links and chains
Homelots
Flood plain

For an interactive activity based on this map, please visit the following page at this web site and click on the Activity icon: Turns of the Centuries Exhibit > The Land > 1680 - 1720.

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