Life in Early America

It’s the seventeenth century in early America. I’m Peter Fuller, me and my family of four have come overseas from London, England to start a new life in the colony of Massachusetts. Back in London we were just your average middle class family who worked very hard to make money. We were not poor but we were far from wealthy. I worked as a shopkeeper and my wife was a school teacher. While we were content with our lives in England we wanted a chance to start over and have a chance to get wealthy quickly. We aren’t very young so we want to enjoy life and give our children a chance to be well off once my wife and I are gone. I have two children, one is a six-year-old boy named Jonathan and the other a four-year-old little girl named Adeline. When my family first arrived here, the area was quite different from London but we found the surrounding community to be a little similar to home. There were lots of other middle class families who were in their thirties and forties, and there were lots of farmers. When we first arrived we were amazed at how rich the land was but we soon learned that it required a great deal of work to farm it. Only people with an incredible work ethic and persistency could take on the task of farming the land here. One of the toughest parts of farming was clearing the land, this task proved to be almost as difficult as actually farming the land itself. In our area each farmer had their own private plots of land; as you can imagine there were often disputes about who owned what land. So we marked our territory with a post and rail fence. Making that post and rail fence required one to be handy with an ax and to be somewhat physically strong. Once we had the land cleared and tilled it was time to begin planting crops. This was a pretty arduous task to we needed as many hands as possible. My wife and my oldest son helped with the planting of crops and harvesting them. One of our main crops was tobacco, this was a crop that was very high in