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 Housatonic

Puritan River

The Middle or North, Branch of the Headwaters is immediately the outlet of big Pontusac Lake, just north of Pittsfield City, and back of that is its inlet, called Town Brook, coming down from New Ashford through Lanesboro. It assembles from three big springs on a hill called Brodie Mountain, and by the time it dives under near Route 7 it is a gay, racing stream. But in its gravelly bed under the concrete bridge it performs the remarkable feat of disappearing from the face of the earth into subterranean courses. About a hundred yards to the east a series of springs boiling up in a cow pasture suggest the return to the light of the lost river. From there it heads southward in a leisurely way.

The interest of the North Branch is less in the stream than in Pratt Hill, a spur of Greylock two miles southeast of the streams rising, that is the true head and beginning of the long chute of the Housatonic Valley. From Pratt Hill the great groove down though the highlands, scarcely ten miles wide in these upper reaches, is spectacularly visible southward over Pittsfield for about a third of ots entire length, the Massachusetts third which I call the Upper Valley. On the left another spur of Greylock runs south to merge, after it is penerated by the East Branch, into the eastern Rampart of the valley, at first long October Mountain, one of the biggest of the Hoosacs, and afterwards the Beartown Mountains, the Green Mountains, and other names that change in almost every new township.

On the right are the taller Taconics, visible even under normal haze for thirty miles down to 2,700 - foot Mt. Everest. Or “The Dome” just north of the Connecticut line. With Monument Mountain, jutting out from the Beartowns to overlap it, it forms a sort of titanic gateway through which the river spills southward into the Lower Valley, the crest of whose eastern wall, Canaan Mountain, is visible over Monument on clear days.

Besides the eastern and western walls, there are visible from Pratt Hill the remnants of a medial range that once ran down the center of he valley and still puts up respectable large hills down through Lenox. The one in the foreground is called Constitution Hill in commemoration of a famous bonfire and celebration which Lanesboro staged there in honor of its illiterate delegate whose speech before the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1787 is said to have carried the day for the Union. Ten miles farther southward, South Mountain pre-empts the middle of the panorama, then Yokun Seat and Baldhead running down into Lenox. There can be seen the first traverse horizon, the first abrupt drop in the central level of the valley, the first of the huge, geological steps by which it descends to the sea. Above this horizon extrude the heads of Monument and Everett, sloping down to watch other to form the gateway to the South.

For the most part the thirty three airline miles of the Upper Valley, especially the part south of Monument mountain are wide and flat, the mountains set far back on both sides, rising on the average about fifteen hundred feet above the valley floor. The river drops from a thousand foot elevation in Pittsfield to about six hundred in Canaan, Connecticut, but since most of this drop is taken in a few, brief reaches, especially those which turn the paper mills in Lee, Housatonic, and Rising, the stream for most of this drop is taken in a few, brief reaches, especially those which turn the paper mills in Lee, Housatonic and Rising, the stream for most of this phase is sluggish and meandering. Indeed it winds almost double the amount of its actual progress southward, frequently turning all the way back and biting into itself to make little islands. Here in the flatlands is one of the best agricultural sections of the valley, which means one of the best in New England.

The third part of the river and the valley, which I shall call the Lower River and the Lower Valley, begins at the Great Falls at Falls Village, in Canaan, Connecticut, about six miles south of the state line, and runs with only one major bend for some fifty-five crow flight miles down to Derby and Shelton, picking up many tributaries and increasing in width from about fifty to a hundred yards. Throughout this stretch the mountains stand in close to the river that here runs by their picturesque precipices and through their gorges with a uniformly rapid current flecked with white water, through with only four falls and one rapids that require carries by canoers and fold boaters in normal times. In rainey seasons, especially spring and fall, when the leaf covering is gone, the cliffs along the river, and along the distant mountains where they are visible, are draped with white bridal-veil falls of little streams and freshets, the nearer ones rustling high up the precipices like a forest wind. The drop at river level is from about six hundred feet at Falls Village to the tide at Derby, and in the last reach the flow is wide and deep and majestic. In the whole Lower Valley there are on the river only three industries large enough to be called factories, with a dozen or more hidden back in the hills.

The fourth, or Tidewater, part of the river begins at industrial Derby and Shelton, where the gorgeous bluffs at the confluence of the Housatonic, the Naugatuck, and the ocean tides are ubiquitously disfigured and vilified by chimneys, smoke and slums. From here down, the river widens between sycamore trees, salt marshes and fertile peneplanes for thirteen tidal miles to its food harbor at Stratford, and so between Milford and Stratford Points to Long Island Sound and the sea.

Of the four parts of the valley, the central two, namely, the Upper Valley and the Lower Valley, constitute together about ninety of the valley’s hundred and fifteen miles of over-all length. It is in this main central stretch, neglecting both the Headwaters and the Tidewater, that the qualities of the region re most apparent, the combination of graceful, wooded mountains and cultivated, wholly agrarian lowlands, of quiet wilderness surrounding long-settled farms and the villages that serve them.

In the past, these conditions have been approximated in other river valleys in the east; but there is no other river valley in the populous parts of the country where they are preserved today to the degree that the Housatonic Valley preserves them. The region is unique in having been occupied and farmed for three hundred years, in being closely flanked, east and west, by two of the earth’s most highly industrialized districts, in itself possessing the resources that at least equally invited exploitation, yet in having resisted it in a contest of forces that make up the drama of its history. Twenty miles to the east the Naugatuck Valley clanks and reeks with “progress”. Forty miles to the west the beauty of the Mohawk Valley and much of that of the Hudson Valle have disappeared under cities, smoke, chimneys, garnish

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