USA > Massachusetts > The story of western Massachusetts, Volume I > Part 28
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Some of this story will stand analysis. Mr. Marsh certainly made no positive claim that a stockade ever existed on the Field-Rumrill lot. He recognized the fact that the stronghold on Fort Hill was the sallying point for the raid on the town. His statement that the Park
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promontory was the convening point for the allies bent on destroying the town, is quite possibly true. It is known that the local natives were reinforced by outsiders for the occasion. There must have been some predetermined meeting place, remote from the town, and this was as logical a one as any. If only he had omitted the name of Philip, and had merely suggested that the promontory would have been a pleasing place for a stockade, it would all have been fairly well within the truth.
There is no reason supported by fact for saying that there ever was an Indian village on the Park lot and there is even no old-time tradition that such was the case. Such examination as it has been possible to make on Park property, gives no evidence of a village or stockade at that point. It is quite possible, that during the thou- sands of years that the Indians inhabited the Valley, various roving bands may have had temporary encampments on such a sightly spot, so accessible to the River, but both documentary and physical evidence are lacking that any settled community ever occupied the spot. Occa- sionally a flint chip is seen, and frequently an arrow point, but no more than can be readily found on the average plowed field in that vicinity.
From an Indian standpoint, there is no comparison between the two sites, as actual observation on the spot makes manifest. The Park lot is on much lower ground, being at the memorial monument to the Indian, Totoe, but seventy-four feet above the River, while the Storrs' lot is one hundred thirty-six feet. It has a commanding, though rather intimate view, yet the slope is gradual and hard to defend.
Actually, the Park lot would be a most untenable location for a defensive work. A stockade placed at the brow of the slope down to the river, would be open to attack from the higher ground south of it. If placed on that higher ground, the landing of an enemy on the river shore could not be detected from it, and the sloping ground between any such stockade and the river bluff would provide a menace which the natives would never have ignored in selecting a defensive site.
The Storrs' lot is strategically unique. The ground there, before the modern fills were made, was of an unusual formation, being cut through with deep ravines, between which narrow headlands projected. On one of these jutting bluffs, with originally but a narrow neck connecting it with the plateau proper, stood the village. On three sides are precipitous slopes to the river level. The view up and down the River and to the western hills far exceeds, in extent, that from the Park lot. An added feature is the view up the Agawam; a native highway of great importance. One has but to view the scene from both points to realize why one is so superior to the other. To one versed in Indian lore there would never be the slightest question as to which site would have been chosen by the natives; either prehistoric or historic.
The English called a permanent stocked Indian village a "fort". In 1665 John Winthrop said, "There are two forts of Indians near
W. Mass .- I-18
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Springfield", in speaking of the community on Fort Hill, at Westfield and the one by the Agawam. In other words, an Indian village was always "forted" or surrounded by a stockade. Under no circum- stances would there have been two such villages, so closely adjacent. Both of these sites were in the territory which was the particular property of a single meager band under the leadership of Wequogan (alias Wrutherna or Wulluther), Menis and Napompenam. Neither their numbers nor known habits required two fortified villages in this limited area, though the proximity of the two sites is scarcely realized until one looks across from one to the other.
Furthermore, the story of King Philip's visit to Springfield is based on the most flimsy tradition, and even that limits his stay to a single night, which seems hardly sufficient reason for giving his name permanent local fame. Even this tradition is not supported by known facts, which are these:
The very name of Philip was a byword and terror to the colonists of southern New England. He was a well-known public character, in frequent enforced conference with the authorities. It is reasonable to suppose that if he had been present in person, he surely would have been recognized and mentioned in the correspondence and reports concerning the disaster. John Pynchon, leader of the local forces, was overwhelmed by the destruction of his town and asked the Rev. John Russell to notify Governor Leverett of the facts and appeal for help. Russell reported that "their old sachem, Wequogan, in whom as much confidence was put as in any of their Indians was ringleader in word and deed". Wequogan was a chief well known locally, from the time in 1636, when as Wrutherna, he sold his land to Pynchon. Shortly after that he removed to Hadley, and through marriage with Awonusk of the Nonotucks, he became chief of the Hadley Indians. He it was, and not Philip, who instigated, planned and led the raid on the town. The reports of Pastor Russell, Major Pynchon and Captain Appleton, and their repeated appeals for help, all paint the picture at its very blackest, and surely they would have included the menace of Philip's personality if he had been present. Yet, in none of the voluminous correspondence of the day is he so much as men- tioned in connection with the Springfield affair, while on the contrary, Wequogan's part is related in detail. Recorded history gives these facts. It is not a matter of "old wives' tales".
Yet, despite all this, on the Park Commissioners' map of 1899 was inscribed, "King Phillips (sic) Indian Stockade and Outlook, Oct. 4, 1675", and for more than twenty-five years thereafter, a map was annually issued with the same inscription, including the incorrect spelling and lack of the possessive apostrophe.
In 1922 a proposal to erect on the tract an erroneously conceived reproduction of the supposed stockade evoked a storm of protest. To this, Park Superintendent Charles M. Ladd was quoted as replying that he was not "much afraid of what the historians might say about the authenticity of the site. He had some historical matter some-
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where, he believed, that placed the fort on Pecousic hill, and if an Indian stockade never existed there before, it was a pretty good idea to put one there".
Of such stuff is "history" made.
It is quite obvious that Mr. Ladd's "historical matter" was related to the Marsh story of some twenty years earlier, which in the interim had grown as such stories do. Fortunately, a change of heart intervened and the stockade project was abandoned.
Turners Falls Dam, Turners Falls
It is a great pity that posterity should be misled by misconstruc- tion of known facts. The meager incontrovertible details of the old days that have been so laboriously garnered should be cherished and preserved. Incorrect history is worse than no history at all. It is a vicious thing and starts the weaving of a tangled web. If Henry Ford was right and all history is "bunk", then the whole matter is of little moment. But if history is worth recording at all, it should be accurately recorded for the benefit of generations yet unborn, that will have an even greater interest in the tales of the old happenings as they farther and farther recede.
Apparently the name of King Philip became inadvertently attached to the town of Springfield because the attack was an episode of King Philip's War. But there are names in plenty of local Indians that should be perpetuated rather than that of one from Rhode Island who probably never saw the town. The records have preserved euphonious local Indian names. The chief who was later known as Wequogan, was earlier called Wulluther and still earlier was known as Wrutherna. It would be most appropriate to speak of the Park
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headland as Wulluther's Lookout, or Wrutherna's Camp, or Wequo- gan's Rendezvous. A reproduction of an Algonquin stockade, wherever it might be located in Forest Park, would have great educational value, provided that it was not represented to be something it actually was not. But it should be an accurate representation of the stockades built by local Indians, and it is most certain that no local talent exists, having the knowledge requisite for designing one.
Any attempt to determine the location of the stockaded village or fort from which the Indians sallied to the burning of Springfield during King Philip's War must begin with the earliest records of the town. When, in 1635, William Pynchon's advance scouts selected the site for the future city, they chose the land about the junction of the Connecticut and Agawam rivers. There they found vast open fields, inundated by the spring floods and so annually fertilized by alluvial deposits. To the south and west was high ground sufficient to provide for a town of a size beyond their wildest dreams. On the bluff south of the Agawam River was the stockaded village of the little band of natives, with their planting grounds on the meadows below.
It was an ideal site for a pioneer colony, one of whose prime requisites was a cleared tract which would provide green food for summer use of horses and cattle and hay for the winter. Such a source of supply was absolutely necessary for the existence of the colony, until other land could be cleared, broken up and seeded to English grass and grain.
"Therefore be careful in the spring", wrote John Smith in his Advertisements for Unexperienced Planters, "to mow the swamps and low islands of Auguan, where you may have harsh sheere-grass to make hay of till you can clear ground to make pasture, which will have as good grasse as can grow anywhere".
This textbook of Advice for Inexperienced Settlers was undoubt- edly well known to Pynchon and made full use of by him.
It should be understood that the place name, Agawam, was, as Indian names always are, a descriptive appellation, meaning in this case "ground overflowed by water". It was a term in common use by the natives of the Atlantic seaboard, varying in form according to the dialect of the district. At Ipswich, Massachusetts, such ground was known as agawam. Elsewhere it was called augoam, aguwom and agaam, but the meaning was always the same.
In Pynchon's deed of 1636, which consummated his negotiations through Ahaughton, an Indian of the Massachusetts tribe, who acted as interpreter, it is called "Agaam alias Agawam". This suggests that Agawam was the Massachusetts and Agaam the local form of the same term, especially as many of Pynchon's letters were dated at "Agaam".
The exact location of the Indian "fort" at this place is not known. In 1662 there was "granted of the swamp land over Agawam river, over against the Indian Fort to Lawrence Bliss 7 acres, to Elizur Holyoke 3 acres, to Richard Sikes 4 acres and to Miles Morgan
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3 acres". Owing to many changes in the course of the Agawam River, whose banks were the bounds of many of these early grants, it is today impossible to determine their location, and so the location of the fort, "over against" which they lay, but they can be very closely approximated so that the general location of the fort is well known.
A tentative agreement having been made with the natives, perma- nent settlement was begun in the spring of 1636, which brought to the Indians a realization of the nuisances that the English were bringing in their train. Cattle trampled down their cornfields, while hogs rooted them up, and ravaged their underground pits, or "barns" in which they stored their corn. Ignorance of the local dialect made it hard for the settlers to argue with the natives or to explain that the purchasers of the land were entitled to its benefits. It was hopeless to attempt to confine such a vast area, especially with fences which would be swept away by flood waters and have to be replaced each spring.
In his dilemma, Pynchon decided to move across the River, plac- ing the Connecticut between his livestock and the Indian cornfields. The necessity for such a move was a great disappointment as the new location had little to recommend it. Here was a narrow strip of sand on which the town street was laid out, and along which the houses were built. On one side was the river, on the other a swamp, with high hills and pine barrens beyond. This swamp, extending from Mill River to beyond Round Hill, was a most valuable asset, providing at least partial pasturage and mowing. The timber on the hillside was of value, but the plains above were so sandy as to be almost worthless.
On Saturday, May 14, 1636, the location of the town plot was agreed upon and the following Monday the house lots were laid out and distributed to the pioneers. Thus the new town was born, under handicaps that threatened the success of the whole enterprise.
Almost in despair Pynchon went back to Boston early in June, in search of a competent interpreter who could reason with the obsti- nate natives. "The best ground at Agawam", he wrote Winthrop on June 2, "is so incombered with Indians that I shall lose half the benefit yearly, and am compelled to plant (i. e. settle) on the opposite side to avoid trespassing thereon".
He returned the following month with Ahaughton, an Indian interpreter, to assist in bargaining with the natives. Few concessions could be gained, however, and finally, with the idea that a definite understanding, however meager, was absolutely imperative, a formal conveyance was drawn up, to which the Indians set their marks on July 15, 1636.
By it they sold a tract on both sides of the Connecticut, the east side bounds being from Chicopee River to Longmeadow Brook. On the west side, the tract extended from a bit above the mouth of the Chicopee River to the bluff below the Agawam River. No land was sold south of the bluff below the Agawam, that being the site of the
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native village. Out of this tract the Indians specifically reserved their old planting grounds and about everything else that was of value to them, including the right to fish, hunt deer, gather acorns, walnuts, ground nuts and sasachiminesh, "or a kind of pease", readily identified as cranberries.
For this deed the settlers gave wampum, implements and cloth- ing that were priceless to the natives, and obligated themselves to pay for any corn damaged by cattle and to keep all swine on the east side of the river until after harvest time.
But these wild, free people had little comprehension of what they had done, and little realized that they were not free to roam the land at will and use it as they wished. Spurred by the industrious habits of the English and finding a ready market for the corn which they could grow so easily with the tools supplied them by the white men, they continuously enlarged their corn fields beyond the limits of the ground reserved by them. By 1640 these extensions had become so unreasonable that a committee was appointed "to restrayne ye Indians from breaking up any new ground or from planting any yt was broken up ye last year".
Such controversies continued through the years. The court records are replete with stories of contentions between the two races. Physical violence seems to have been seldom resorted to, and the Indian was given to understand that redress of wrongs could always be had through the courts. Suits were brought by English against Indians and vice versa, but the verdicts show extreme sympathy with the natives on the part of the juries. In every way, efforts were made to assimilate the natives; to make friends and neighbors of them. In their ignorance, the English expected to make house servants and field workers of them, but they were too indolent and unreliable to be of any use to themselves or others. "If you do your business by Indians", wrote William Pynchon in 1644, "you will find it much dearer than to send an Englishman".
After some thirty years of these annoyances, and after William Pynchon had returned permanently to England, his son John Pyn- chon decided to clear the west side of the natives. By this time a new generation had come into power among the Indians who realized that the old days and old ways had gone, never to return. With hand tools, their agricultural efforts were futile in comparison with those of the English with their oxen and plows. Their efforts could be expended with richer results as hunters and trappers, exchanging the products of the forest for those of the fields. Little argument. was needed to convince them of the wisdom of exchanging the drudgeries of husbandmen for the joys of communal life.
Possibly, a contributing factor to the desire to gather the natives into one compact mass was, that the previous year they had grown restive and menacing. John Pynchon and John Winthrop conferred as to means of keeping them in hand. Winthrop wrote to Roger Williams: "I have heard from Mr. Pynchon that they would make peace if they knew how, but none of them durst go to treat about it".
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It may have been thought that the prescribing of definite limits for the Indians and invoking the curfew law against them might act as a restraining influence.
For their fort and village site, together with their planting grounds south of the Agawam and a confirmation of the deed of 1636, they were given fifty fathams of wampum and a tract on the east side, on a bluff overlooking the river, and away from the town activi- ties. On June 20, 1666, Nessahegan alias Squomseat and Kepaquomp alias Squinnamok, for themselves and on behalf of an old woman called Potucksisqu, executed a conveyance to the town which included all the native lands there, except a few bits of planting ground in the "swamp", which individual Indian owners refused to sell.
As further compensation, a palisaded fort after the native style was built for them by the English on this new site, within which the Indians ruled supreme.
The settlers became quite adept at this native style of fortifica- tion, which was both cheap and effective. Eventually the church was protected by such a stockade, the specifications calling for some seven- teen rods of palisade of logs ten and a half feet long and ten to twelve inches in diameter.
Details are lacking as to the size of this enclosure for the Indians, but it is of record that Griffith Jones was paid £1 "for fence, viz, yt of ve Indian fort, 12 or 14 rods". Other workers probably contributed to it, as the area enclosed was undoubtedly far greater than these figures would indicate. If, in time, other John Pynchon account books are transcribed and indexed, similar items will probably be found.
Thus did John Pynchon pioneer in establishing one of the first Indian reservations in America.
Here was the home of the Indians until, except for a few strag- glers and trusties, they left the valley forever after their attempt to destroy the town on October 5, 1675. And this is the site which has been so appropriately marked by the Daughters of the American Revolution with a happily worded bronze tablet.
Confirmation of the traditional location of the fort is given in the record of the meeting of the selectmen on March 14, 1709-10, when "Nathaniel Sikes, Senr; Joseph Parsons; John Burt, Senr; and Ben- jamin Knowlton have liberty granted them of twelve years improve- ment of ten acres apiece up the Long Hill between the Old Fort and Long Dingle".
This raises the question of the identity of Long Hill and Long Dingle. Long Hill was so named as early as January 30, 1655-56, when a grant was made to Richard Sikes, "on ye further side of ve Mill river on ye east side of ye way yt goeth up the great hill, to run from ye Mill river and so to run back along by ye cart way yt goeth up ye Long Hill". In 1667, Benjamin Parsons was appointed over- seer "for ye way up ye Long Hill over the Mill River", and this "way" in time became the present Long Hill street. From similar records, Long Dingle is readily identified as the most northerly of the deep valleys of Forest Park.
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Thus it becomes evident that that which in 1710 was known as "the old fort" was on what is now known as Long Hill and some- where far enough north of Forest Park, so that there was at least
Main Street, South From Hampden, Springfield, 1861
forty acres of level ground between it and the slope down into Forest Park, which forty acres could have been only in the vicinity of Wash- ington Boulevard and Long Hill Street.
When the Indians decamped, title to their lands reverted to the town and was held as common property for nearly forty years. At a proprietor's meeting, February 10, 1713-14, it was "voted that the
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Fort, Hill as so-called be laid out in home lots, ten acres to a lot and a town road laid out to Pecowsuck Hill or Bridge". On March 22, 1713-14, Samuel Hitchcock was granted one of these lots, "ten acres at southerly end of the Town Plott in Springfield and situate on Fort Hill". Hitchcock sold this to Samuel Warner, October 28, 1718. Also on March 22, 1713-14, the ten acre lot next north of the Hitchcock lot was granted to Joseph Cooley, "lying on Fort Hill commonly so called". This lot was sold to Simon Smith, May 5, 1721, and the rec- ords show the transfers down to the present-day owner on Long Hill Street.
The committee "appointed to lay out the Fort Hill in lots, together with a road or street", reported on May 19, 1719, that they had "laid out a street or highway of six rods wide from the upper end of Fort Hill, down or running southerly to Pecowsick".
The elder men who were steering the ship of state in 1710 to 1719, when these reports were made, were at least mature lads when the town was burned in 1675. They must have known where "the old fort" was, thirty-five to forty-five years before. They described it as being at the lower end of the town, up the long hill, the plateau of which was known as Fort Hill and north of Pecousic Brook, with a sizeable area between it and the slope down to Long Dingle.
Dr. Philip Kilroy, who built the present home of the Vincentian Fathers, bought the lot in 1894 from Joseph W. Storrs. At that time there was nailed to a tree by the roadside an old signboard, worn and weather beaten, with a hand pointing to the property, designating it as Fort Pleasant.
This signboard had been put up by Chester Osborn, who sold the plot to Storrs in 1867, his deed describing it as "on Long Hill, known as the Fort Pleasant estate". Osborn bought it from Joseph Lombard, October 16, 1841, and during that interim he took great interest in its history. He was instrumental in the laying out of Fort Pleasant Avenue in 1871 and the naming of it. The deed from Lom- bard to Osborn describes the tract as "on Long Hill, the lot being called the Fort Hill Lot".
In Lombard's deed from Thomas Dwight in 1797, the description is, "commonly known by the name of Fort Lot on the county road on Long Hill".
So much for documentary evidence.
In the spring of 1895 the announcement that Dr. Kilroy was about to build on the property aroused considerable interest, and an appeal was made for an opportunity to examine relics previously taken from the lot. A study of these revealed that almost invariably they were of the crudest sort. While this was not so true of the smaller imple- ments and utensils, yet it was markedly so of the larger ones. Pestles were hardly more than water-worn natural stones. Mortars, pots and bowls were seldom found complete, and usually were but mere frag- ments. They indicated almost a contempt on the part of the owners, who for at least three decades had been able to acquire the superior wares of the English.
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Their very crudeness suggested that they might have been made by a later generation; one which from lack of experience, due to long use of European utensils, had lost the knack and skill of their fathers. Possibly they were made by those of a later generation, who, being the least fit were least able to acquire the products of the chase which the settlers demanded in exchange and so, by stern necessity, were forced to exercise their meager talents in attempts at fashioning these poor imitations of the clever handiwork of their ancestors.
Actual work on the site began the first week in April, 1895, and the operations incidental to excavating and grading, together with the interest and cooperation of the owner offered unusual opportunities for exploration. It happened to be the year when the American Asso- ciation for the Advancement of Science met in Springfield, and the city was host to well-known ethnologists and archeologists. Prof. F. W. Putnam of the Peabody Museum at Harvard, and Frank Hamil- ton Cushing of the Bureau of American Ethnology at Washington, spent considerable time in going over the ground.
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