[A] It should be plainly stated that Mr. Chandler, in the course of his investigations and restorations, feels that he has discovered no evidence sufficiently convincing to warrant an assertion, positive beyond all peradventure, that clapboards were applied to the oldest houses at a date subsequent to their original construction and as a remedy for the structural shortcomings of half-timber methods when subjected to the rigours of the New England climate. Clapboards, it is true, were used at a very early date and may, perhaps, have been employed from the first as a coating over an underlying half-timber base. Of one thing, however, there can be no question—the existence of half-timber construction beneath the clapboards in many of the oldest buildings. In view of this assured fact and the early settlers’ habitual fidelity to traditional practices, it seems a not unwarrantable presumption that half-timber work antedated the use of clapboards by some years until the poor quality of the pugging and the warping of unseasoned timbers compelled the adoption of some satisfactory remedy.