The Alexander Knight House is a re-creation of an early Ipswich timber-frame house from 1567, built with traditional tools, materials, and construction methods of the First Period, 1625-1725. Its plans are based on notes from a 1657 Ipswich town meeting calling for a one-room house for Alexander Knight, whose dwelling at Meetinghouse Green represented the kind of modest home many ordinary people built in the town’s earliest colonial years. Knight, who likely came to Ipswich in 1635 with his wife Anne (Hannah) Tuttie and had owned an inn in Chelmsford, England, held significant land in Ipswich by 1636 but suffered a sharp decline in fortune around 1641. After disputes before the court and his indenture to Aron Pengry in 1656, the town granted him land and ordered a house built for him at what is now 2 Meetinghouse Green. Local historians have suggested that parts of the original house may survive within the John Kimball House. The modern project, hosted on the grounds of the Whipple House and later given to the Ipswich Museum in May 2015, began in 2009 as a live exhibition of traditional building techniques. White oak and white pine were shaped and milled by traditional methods, the frame was joined with English-style mortise-and-tenon construction and hand-shaved pegs, the foundation was laid in dry local fieldstone, the roof was thatched with marsh materials, and the chimney was formed in wattle and daub. The house’s fittings and furnishings, many made with old techniques, reflect the sparse possessions of a man living just above subsistence level and offer a glimpse into everyday life in seventeenth-century Ipswich.