The New England colonies granted lands to men who banded together as a corporate group to found a town.

To make farms, the colonists had to cut clearings in the forest, chop firewood, erect fences, build barns and houses, plow and plant fields, harvest crops, and construct mills—all from scratch by hand labor.

The New England farm family also tended a modest but critical herb of livestock—commonly two oxen, five other cattle, a horse, two sheep, and six pigs.

During the late 1630s, New England thrived primarily from the regular infusion of newcomers, who brought currency and other capital and consumed, at enhanced prices, the crops produced by the first-comers.

By developing the fishing trade, the Puritans rescued the region’s economy, but at the cost of accepting the presence, albeit limited, of the sort of rowdy and defiant folk whom they had hoped to leave behind in England.

Although important to the New England economy, the codfish never dominated the region in quite the way that tobacco determined prosperity or ruin in the Chesapeake.

Shipbuilding was a powerful engine of economic development and diversification.