The 80, 000 Puritans who founded Massachusetts Bay Colony were immigrants who arrived from England, where trees were scarce. They saw trees as God's abundance to be used without constraint to build their godly community.

The new Puritan settlers reveled in the flavors of the fruit of native cherry and the nuts of walnut trees and warmed themselves by oak and chestnut fires during the cold winter.

Whereas Native people practiced minor underbrush burning to make it easier to hunt deer and to travel easily along paths, the Puritan farmers clear-cut forests--sometimes burning whole tree lots down--to gain open land for farming.

The Puritan co-existed at first with the Massachusetts and other tribes, trading goods, buying or stealing land, and cutting down pine trees for masts for shipbuilding and houses.[1] But when the Puritans asserted legal jurisdiction and land deed rights trouble began.

[1] William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003. 21-30, 121.

In an era before environmental science existed, the inhabitants of the area that would later be named East Lexington, including members of the Winship, Harrington, and other farm families, had no way to know that deforestation would reduce their food sources for hunting and alter their local climate. The Bay Colony lost the protection from sun and wind that trees provided and the weather became harsher because of the lost canopy.

Profitable lumbering became a reason to emigrate to the American colonies and later to move west. One historian declared that: "No other country was populated because of its trees quite like the United States."[1]

The Puritans soon found themselves surrounded by strangers, new emigrants, and together they joined in the seductively profitable many-sided Atlantic trade between Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and New World colonies. Ship captains from England, France, Spain, the Dutch Republic. and the colonies bought or kidnapped West Africans and sold them to plantations in the Caribbean and across the New World--where they were forced to grow and process sugar, rice, indigo, and tobacco.

The Puritans cut down trees and sold wood to build British sugar plantations in the Caribbean and fished for cod to feed enslaved people. They cut down and sold white pines and cedar to neighbors eager to build homes and fences, and also developed a large timber trade with Spain, Portugal, the Canary Islands, the Azores, and Madeira.[2] English rulers did not worry about deforestation in their New England colonies, but they insisted that their colonies should never become trade rivals.

The major slave-trading European powers fought a series of almost world-wide wars for the dominance of territory and slave-trading, and English leaders expected their colonial subjects, including Native peoples, to help them fight these Wars for Empire. Labor shortages in the Massachusetts Bay Colony motivated its local leaders to seek more enslaved labor by fighting with Native people and by trading them for goods and African slaves in the Caribbean.[3]

[1] Thomas P. Sileo, Historical Guide to Open Space in Lexington( Privately printed, 1995), pp. 268-276; Eric Rutkow, American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Scribner, 2012) p.7.

[2] Rutkow, American Canopy, p. 24.

[3] Jared Hardesty, Black lives, native lands, white worlds : a history of slavery in New England (Amherst : Bright Leaf, an imprint of University of Massachusetts Press

[2019]); Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York : Viking, 2001).