THE HISTORY OF STRATFORD

Golden Hill Indians
The Housatonic
The Wepawaug
Cupheags and Pequannock
Weantinock
Goodyear's Island
Indian Slaves
Indian Remnants
Indian Troubles
New Indian Papers

THE HISTORY OF STRATFORD

Wm.Howard Wilcoxson

Stratford Indians

Trouble with the Indians

Establishing Title to the Land

Indian Deeds and Relics

White Hills Purchase

FORREST MORGAN

Lifestyles, Government, Religion and War

Indian Titles and Mohegan Land Troubles

Sowheag, Uncas, and Miantonomo

Owenoco, the Son of Uncas

THE HOUSATONIC

CHARD POWERS SMITH

The Promised Land
Heathen in the Land
The Lord's Scouts

The Land and The Lord

The Next Seven Tribes

ALEXANDER JOHNSTON

Connecticut Indian History

The Pequot War

Chard Powers Smith

The Land and the Lord

The First Two Tribes (1639-1657)

Sometime in the spring or early summer of 1639, an unknown vessel bearing an unknown number of Puritans, under the ministry of the forty-year-old Reverend Adam Blakeman, approached the entrance to Stratford Harbor. There could hardly have been over thirty families of them, and it is not known whence they came, beyond the fact that the Reverend Mr. Blakeman himself came directly from Old England, that part of his following was from his former flock there, and that another part was from Wethersfield in Connecticut Colony under whose auspices this plantation was being undertaken. Doubtless the Devil---with the authority of Calvinist doctrine---had whispered to some of the settlers of the chances of enhancing land values and of trade with he Indians But the effective cause, without which the plantation would not have been attempted, was their determination to risk their lives and their property in order to live in accordance with an idea and a faith.

Between the long, low natural seawall of Milford Point and the dunes of Stratford Point, the ship entered the mile-and-a-half diameter harbor. On the western, or Stratford, side, they dropped anchor in the mouth of a tidal inlet---later called Mac's Harbor----and put ashore on its northern beach. Undoubtedly their first act as a community was to kneel on the beach while the Reverend Mr. Blakeman gave thanks to the Lord who in his mercy had predestined them for a safe landing. The gulls wheeled and screamed overhead. From the near forest a few Cupheag Indians watched. On the outer points boomed the surf of three thousand miles of ocean, cutting them off from the homes they had left forever.

Six months later, in the late fall of 1639, the cold twilight of any dawn fell on the village--then called Pequannocks--in its first phase, at once a triumph of fanatical energy and an example of the havoc that civilization wreaks when it first touches the wilderness. Throughout the night, as through all the nights and days, there had been no silence, for the wolves never stopped their racket of hunting moose and deer in the forest, right up to the palisade round the settlement. In the first gray light, the high platform of the watch house stood in bleak outline on Watch House Hill--- modern Academy Hill---the cold sentry at his post with loaded musket, powder horn and shot bag, the frost crackling on the planks when he shifted his feet. In the lower shadow the rectangle of the clearing lay faintly visible under light snow, a quarter of a mile north and south and half as wide, the eastern side on the harbor and the other three sides palisaded with logs, the watch house standing against the northern wall that traversed its hill. Down there in the darkness, at the western and southern gates, at the platform at the corners of the stockade, and along the harbor, the other members of the watch kept their vigil. They took their turns by roster from Sergeant Nichols' Train Band, which was the male community between sixteen and sixty in its military aspect.

Descending from the watchtower on the hill, the twilight fell on the snow-whitened, thatched pyramid that was the roof of the little log meeting house, already built near the point where the congregation had landed six months before. Then rapidly the still unfleshed skeleton of the whole village came out of darkness.

Two parallel streets--modern Elm and Main--ran south from the little common around Watch House Hill, their frozen mud pitted from boots and hoof; and along these were ranged the twenty-five or so ugly, one-room, lean-to, log and clay huts with their big, squat, mud chimneys. Behind, in the long narrow homelots, the stumps of the ruined forest stood out of the snow, some of them blackened and still smoldering. Among the stumps were the split-rail cattle pens, the ricks of wild hay from the marshes outside the stockade, a few miniature log barns rising, the big woodpiles, some patches of corn stubble from last summer's first, meager planting that had been attempted only within the stockade.

From the huts came the mumble of morning prayers and the passage from God's Holy Word, then thumpings and voices. The oiled parchment windows glowed sallow from blown up hearth light and out of the chimneys bluish plumes rose and leaned westward together on he gray wind. Slab doors swung open on their leather hinges, and figures, with wooden or birchbark pails, tracked out to the cowpens. The cowkeepers drove a dozen, assembled cattle up to the common on Watch House Hill to eke out the last blades and shoots of freezing growth. Men in linen shirts and knee breeches of homespun from England or deer-hide already dried—the knee breeches baggy to permit being reversed when the seat was worn—men in homespun caps or broad “sugar loaf” hats, and wide-toed, big buckled shoes, congregated in the streets, carrying their tools, greeting each other as “your Honor” for high officials, “master” or “Goodman” for freeman, first names for servants. Under their communitarian socialism, most men were officeholders and the great majority property owners; universal, male democracy was founded in the assumption of universal, male propriety responsibility. The work of the day began, the rhythmed snarl of long saws over the sawpits, the slash of the adzes, the whack of mallets on pegs, the shouts to the oxen drawing in logs, the occasional musket shots from outside the palisade where the boys were foraging in the forest against starvation.

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