By Peter F. Stevens

In December 1633, one young man among the Mary and John company literally established a personal foothold - or, more appropriately perhaps, a household - in Dorchester.

Twenty-four-year-old Roger Clap (later the family's name was spelled "Clapp") had just married Johanna Ford, who was about sixteen and a half. With new filial considerations, the bridegroom, having endured New England winter, realized that a rude lean-to or any other ramshackle shelter would no longer suffice. So he built his and Johanna's house in time to face the winter of 1633-34. Generations of the family would inhabit the site (on present-day Boston Street) for several centuries.

Roger and Johanna Clap's first dwelling in the New World was "probably a simple log cabin covered with thatch." Roger Clap, a young man who was determined to make a mark in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and whose ambition was matched by his ability, eventually raised a sturdy, wood-frame house proclaiming his emerging status. His home took its place among 1660's Dorchester's two hundred or so homes flanked by orchards, gardens, cornfields, and acreage for grazing cattle.

In the original Clapp house, 14 children were born to Roger and Johanna. They were given such sturdy Puritan names as Experience, Waitstill, Preserved, Hopestill, Wait, Thanks, Desire, Unite, and Supply. The couple raised their children well, Dorchester benefiting from the Clap brood's "more than ordinary ability and influence."

In the 1630s and 1640s, the sight of the children scampering across the family orchards and fields and helping Johanna in the garden was a common one.

The leaders of Dorchester often made their way to the wood-frame house to discuss important local matters with Roger Clap, whose skills as a soldier led to his appointment as a "Captain of Militia." As the local luminaries warmed themselves near the Claps' hearth or main fireplace, they found in him the same mix of decorum and personality as did Johanna and his children: "As to his natural Temper, it is said, He was of cheerful [sic.] & pleasant Disposition, courteous and kind in his Behaviour, free and familiar in his Conversation, yet attended with a proper Reservedness; he had a Gravity & Presence that commanded Respect from others."

According to Dorchester chronicler William D. Orcutt, Roger Clap and his family lived in their Dorchester house until 1665, more than three decades.

Only his appointment as Commander of the Castle [Boston] garrison prompted him to move from the house he had literally helped to build.

The house on the site was built anew in 1710, and in 1767, another Clapp, Lemuel, remodeled and enlarged the structure. He is described as hailing from Dorchester's fifth generation of Clapps, and his renovations in 1767 likely stemmed in large part from his impending marriage to Rebecca Dexter, the daughter of a Dedham minister.

The couple exchanged vows on November 3, 1768, and the bride quickly put her own design stamp upon her new home. A nineteenth-century owner of the house would later claim that the newlyweds were literally adding touches to some of the very walls and framework of Roger Clap's "ancient structure."

Orcutt notes that William B. Trask, who lived in the home for 17 years in the 1800s, "investigated the history [of the house]; and from the results of his search, it seems possible that a portion of this building is perhaps older than any other 'early home' in the town." That portion, Trask argued, dated back to the settlement's early days.

Among the new touches that Captain Lemuel Clapp and Rebecca Clapp added was paper for the walls of "the east, or best room in the house." Trask speculates in an old edition of the Dorchester Beacon that the couple spotted an advertisement in the April 20 or May 9, 1768, Boston Gazette, in which Ziphion Thayer trumpeted his "Large Assortment of Paper Hangings, Cheap for Cash, just imported from London."

The newlyweds headed to Thayer's Boston shop, the "Golden Lyon [sic.]."

Trask would see the Clapps' selection "up close and personal," for it would adorn the east room walls for 104 years.

"It [the wallpaper] proved a superior article," Trask writes, "in gay colors, having columns wreathed with flowers of a bright hue, with much ornamental work on the surface of the paper, making the room, when finished, presumably, one of the handsomest apartments at that time in the town of Dorchester."

Not until 1872, when Miss Catherine Clapp, "the last survivor of the family born in that house," was the paper, "some of it in fair condition," removed from the historic walls. Trask himself kept "some of this centennial paper…at the time we left the house, after a residence there of seventeen years."

His writings reflect that he viewed the Colonial paper as something of a Dorchester military memento, and not just because Lemuel Clapp had been - similar to his ancestor Roger Clap - a notable local soldier. The paper itself bore literal marks from the American Revolution.

Trask recorded: "The last mentioned Captain Clapp was a commander in the war of the Revolution. Some of the officers and soldiers were quartered at his house."

Showing little respect for their barracks, the soldiers "attempted, it is said, to tear off the paper from the walls to adorn their hats."

Ziphion Thayer's imported London wallpaper proved stronger even than the troops' blades, which tore at the "choice paper…but without success, it [the paper] being so adhesive." Trask notes: "The bayonet marks made by the soldiers are, or were, to be seen in the ceiling of the chamber above."

Lemuel Clapp, a Dorchester Patriot who invited George Washington's troops to encamp on his estate during the Siege of Boston, was, like the site's first English owner, Roger Clap, a man of pronounced Puritan tenets. One of those tenets was self-sufficiency, and from the time that Roger Clap erected his house, in winter of 1633, to the enlargements to the Clapp in 1767 and 1768 by Lemuel Clapp, the family ran a working farm.

Also a skilled tanner, Lemuel Clapp taught his son William the trade. William not only ran the tannery, but also improved the family's farming output. He was credited with developing the famous pear dubbed "Clapp's Favorite" around 1820.

In 1945, the Dorchester Historical acquired the Lemuel Clapp House, preserving not only the historic site, but also the legacy of the Clapp family. Their saga was, in many ways, the quintessential Colonial success story, attributable to the prosperity-through-hard-work Puritan ethic that became part and parcel of "the American Dream."

Rare pieces from the Society's collection fill the classic rooms of the Clapp House. A table that was once part of Lemuel and Rebecca Clapp's wedding furniture is both a marvelous relic and a tangible link to the couple's "home improvements" of 1768.

From the day in late 1633 that rasps of saws and thuds of axes announced that Roger Clap and his new bride were in Dorchester to stay, to the passing of Catherine Clapp in 1872, the story of the family reflected the early history of Dorchester. Thanks to the care and custodianship of the Dorchester Historical Society, the legacy of the Lemuel Clapp House and, indeed, of the very first - Roger and Johanna - of the family to plant roots in Dorchester comprises living history.

The Capt. Lemuel Clapp House (1710, 1767) -and two other historic homes owned by the Dorchester Historical Society- is open for viewing on the second and fourth Saturday of every month. For more information, call 265-7802.

(Journalist Peter F. Stevens is the author of The Rogue's March: John Riley and the St. Patrick's Battalion, 1846-48, Brassey's, and Notorious and Notable New Englanders, Down East Books.)