CONNECTICUT PAUGAUSSETT INDIANS

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

Chard Powers Smith - The Housatonic

The Land and the Lord

The First Two Tribes (1639-1657)

At sundown on Saturday, which was the beginning of the Sabbath, a hush fell over the village, as over the rest of New England. The cooking for the next day was done, the wood carried in. Nothing remained for Sabbath activity, but the guard and the animal chores. At eight o’clock on Sunday morning the drum rolled the first summons, and at ten the second and final one. Men in weekday attire with homespun capes added and women in capes and hoods came out of their hovel doors that seemed too small for them and walked solemnly over the frozen mud to the heatless, windowless meeting house. The women took their places on the slab benches on the right, the men on the left, the armed, Sabbath guard from the train band in the rear. For an hour they bowed to the Reverend Blakeman’s prayer, then listened with complete attention to the difficult, scholarly sermon, while he turned he hourglass twice, and, if it was Communion Sunday, the Lord’s body froze before the pulpit.

In the Interval between the afternoon service and the end of the Sabbath at sunset, each family sat on the benches and chests or on he hearth before the fire in its one-room hut, while the father reread he texts of the day, discoursed on the sermon and applied it, as might be, to each of them present.  At his signal, the mother set out the cold beans and corn bread and, after thanks to God for his blessings, they partook of it on wooden trenchers.  As the light of the sunset faded in the paper windows, they put the victuals away and each knelt on the dirt floor at his private prayers. The hearts of the young silently confess to God the multitude of their sinful thoughts that kept them unworthy of His grace whose attainment was all their ambitions.  The father and the mother, in their respective corners, likewise searched their hearts with agonized sincerity, and confessed in prayer what they found there of cupidity and vanity and licentiousness, of jealousy and malice toward their   neighbors, of every evil tendency that jeopardized the Covenant of Grace they had entered into with their God.

The darkness deepened and the dying fire hissed in the otherwise unlighted silence. Each heart felt, for the moment, unburdened of its sins and worthy to glorify the God of creation. From the surrounding cosmos, where He was enacting His stupendous drama, His peace gathered and entered that house, bringing it with it joy in His mercy that was the greatest of all joys and an immediate earthly reward and sufficient compensation for the discomfort and suffering of being there. Outside in the cold, the wolves howled and the watch stood round the little rectangle of the palisade, protecting their idea against the world. Down from unknown, forested distances to the north came the Great River. Westward for unknown thousands of miles stretched a continent.

Owing to the loss of Stratford's records before 1650, the exact time of their settlement in 1639 is not known, but it was probably a month or two ahead of that of Milford on the other side of the mouth of the Great river. Of all the Puritan plantations, Milford best exemplified that method of settlement by religious schism, imperial growth by ecclesiastical cell subdivision, which for at least the first century was a stronger force than economic greed in the expansion of New England. The truculent future Yankees of Milford went through three schisms before they put down roots. To begin with, they followed their Reverend Peter Prudden put of England to Boston in 1637, more or less in he company of another Puritan group under the Reverend John Davenport. Next, both groups found the then theocracy of Boston too confining for them, and in 1638 they moved to New Haven, recently discovered and recommended by Captain Underhill, who had noticed the harbor on the way to the Great Swamp Fight the year before. Then, in early 1639, Prudden's group fell into diver differences with the majority, or Davenport, group in New Haven, notably on the question of theocracy, the determination of the majority to limit the vote to church members. In the spring Mr. Prudden's followers bought a small tract of land ten miles to the west from Ansantawae, chief of the Wepawaugs, embracing the old sachem's former Council Fire where the little Wepawaug River flowed into its long, narrow harbor. The transfer was by a combination of English and Indian ritual; on the one hand, the delivery of a deed bearing the sachem's mark and, on the other hand, the twig and turf ceremony by which Ansantawae took up a sod, thrust a twig in it and handed it to the English.

Having bought their tract in the spring, the Wepawaugites did not move until August, thus probably letting Pequannocks—Stratford across the main harbor get the honor of being the first plantation on the Great River. But if they lost a race of which they were unaware, the Wepawaugites were for that the better prepared for their enterprise. They came with their church all organized, the Seven Pillars already chosen. And, perhaps uniquely among pioneer settlements anywhere, they brought them their combined dwelling, tabernacle and government house, all cut, notched, bored and ready to raise.  They sent it round from New Haven by water while most of the pioneers walked the ten miles, driving their cattle.  And their first act was to raise this common house and cover it with another unique distinction for a pioneer building, clapboards and shingles.  It was large enough to house the forty-four families of the original settlement while they were building their own huts and houses outside, at the same time functioning as a meetinghouse and a town hall.  It stood just west of where the Wepawaug spilled into the top of its narrow harbor.  The present Town Hall of Milford is set for the on the almost identical site.