Walking on Native Land
Our Deep History on the Banks of the Connecticut
Sharing the vast history of Hatfield, from any point in the past, is our mission. That history includes people of the Pocumtuc, Nonadnock, Nipmuc and Abenaki nations, as well as others, who lived here and traveled this river long before the town was established. Members of these nations live locally and throughout the Commonwealth to this day.
Let's start even farther back, though, before any people stood on this land and looked over this water. And just to say, this is a fairly basic overview, so if you know more details, that’s fantastic! This is a starting place, in our on-going effort to explore all of history.
Let's start even farther back, though, before any people stood on this land and looked over this water. And just to say, this is a fairly basic overview, so if you know more details, that’s fantastic! This is a starting place, in our on-going effort to explore all of history.
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In the Cenozoic era, 20 thousand years ago, the Laurentide Ice sheet covered New England, including what became the Connecticut River Valley, in well over a vertical mile of glacier - 6000 feet!! Over the next 5 thousand years, the glaciation ground up the rocks and minerals and deposited them along the low-lying places.
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Reach of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, wikimedia coomons
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When the earth warmed and the glacier retreated, melt-water pooled behind the high point of Rocky Hill, Connecticut and backed up into the valley, forming Glacial Lake Hitchcock. Now we’re at about 15,600 years ago.
There was a long lake in the valley, with various islands poking out, like Mt. Tom, Mt. Warner, and Mt. Sugarloaf, and the hills all around - Conway, Williamsburg, Leverett, Pelham - were entirely free from ice. As the ice retreated, plants and animals moved into the newly open land, and the archaeology tells us that following the plants and animals were people, who by 13,000 years ago were establishing cyclical habitual cooking hearths and producing quantities of stone tools, throughout the wider region. |
Range of Lake Hitchcock, wikimedia commons
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Stone Tools and Pottery Shard collected in the 1930s by Leon Harris, donated by his wife.
Think of Lake Hitchcock like one of the Great Lakes today, with people all along the edges, using the lake just like we might today.
Three Sisters - beans, corn, and squash, wikimedia commons
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The glacial lake created a soft, layered lake-bed, gathering silt and sand in the summertime due to the influx of glacial melt-water, and bits of clay in the wintertime as the lake froze, over and over. Finally around 12,000 years ago, the water broke through the barrier at Rocky Hill and Lake Hitchcock drained into the Long Island sound, leaving three feet of fertile topsoil throughout the valley.
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Meanwhile, in old England, the glacial ice was about half the thickness, around .6 of a mile (one kilometer) deep. Underneath it was mostly Eocene era clay and chalk from 50 million years ago, up to 500 feet thick. It’s notoriously not good for agriculture.
Unlike here, with mountains on either side and a sandy bank between the melt-water and the sea, England’s land mass has the major mountains in the north and along a central spine. No great glacial lakes formed, only temporary lakes and ponds, like glacial vernal pools. When the ice retreated, the water mostly just took whatever it carried down to the sea, leaving, broadly, about 10 inches of fertile topsoil, with much smaller pockets of a deeper amount. |
England prior to unification in 1707, wikimedia commons
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The land is the bedrock of two very different approaches for how to feed your family.
By 1625, England had largely exhausted the land, and the people there were rather forced to be extremely experimental in figuring out how to grow or raise enough food. England was only 70% of the size of New England, and was largely surrounded by water - and of course Scotland and Wales, independent nations up to 1707.
Throughout English history, allocations of land were extremely carefully controlled, in a deeply hierarchical manner, and defending the arable land your family had was a key to survival. Fenced fields and managed herds were a big part of that, as well as trade with other countries for food that could not be grown locally on the roughly 50,000 square miles of land available. The unification with Wales and Scotland in 1707 was part of that process, opening up English access to another 30,000 square miles of grazing lands and coastlines and other resources. An agricultural boom followed, and food output grew steadily, finally outstripping population increase right around 1770.
This makes much more sense when you consider the geologic basis of the island on the far right, vs the entire North American continent on the left!
Throughout English history, allocations of land were extremely carefully controlled, in a deeply hierarchical manner, and defending the arable land your family had was a key to survival. Fenced fields and managed herds were a big part of that, as well as trade with other countries for food that could not be grown locally on the roughly 50,000 square miles of land available. The unification with Wales and Scotland in 1707 was part of that process, opening up English access to another 30,000 square miles of grazing lands and coastlines and other resources. An agricultural boom followed, and food output grew steadily, finally outstripping population increase right around 1770.
This makes much more sense when you consider the geologic basis of the island on the far right, vs the entire North American continent on the left!
North American continent vs United Kingdom - google maps
Across the 9 MILLION square miles in North America, there are regional similarities between nations of native people, and distinct geographic ecosystems, with their own cultural, linguistic and land use practices. Where we, are, in the Northeast Woodlands, is one of many such regions, alongside others such as the Plains, Great Basin, Pacific Northwest, any many others.
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The Northeast Woodlands region is roughly 990,000 square miles, which is almost 20 times the size of pre-1707 England, and includes all the land around all the Great Lakes and the river systems that surround them.
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A side note: the names the early British tribes called themselves have been entirely lost. The sole source for the existence and location of these tribes are Roman writers who visited Britain, particularly Tacitus who wrote on historical events in Britain, and a Roman geographer called Ptolemy who wrote a description of Britain, listing the names of the many British tribes - in Latin.
And while the 30 identified major tribes that lived in what became Great Britain were being invaded by the Romans in the 1st century CE, the Northeast Woodland peoples had already established massive trade networks along all the waterways, connecting to the whole rest of the continent, with evidence in the archaeological record of tools traveling thousands of miles from where the stone was mined to where it was used and later found. And of course, all those miles between were filled with people living their lives, tending the land, tracking the seasons and the animals, gathering for harvests and plantings. |
Roman invasion of Britain according to Tacticus, wikimedia commons
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So consider the two worlds as they come into contact and competition over and over, here on the banks of the river, between 1602, when the first Englishman lands on Cape Cod, and 1774 at the eve of the American Revolutionary War for Independence.
English land use
Thousands of years of increasingly intense competition for any arable land on a small, rocky island.
Food was, broadly, scarce. Every inch of land is owned and controlled by someone, including forests and fields and streams - the owner might be “the king” and very far away, but still, that just means the resources on that bit are not legally available to the people living nearby. The model of farming was to pull everything out of a field and plant only the crop you want. Mono-cropping is depleting the already poor soil, and making crops vulnerable to disease and pests and drought, making food scarcity an ever-present reality for most people. There was a general interest in discovering new sources of food, or ways to stretch food, or import food, which directly contributes to the formation of the Dutch East India Company in 1602, and we know how that turned out! |
Native land use
3 feet of fertile topsoil in this particular wide river valley, and another one a week's walk away, just over the Appalachians.
Food was, broadly, everywhere. Everyone expands patches of useful plants when they get a chance. It’s easy to pick some black raspberries, carry them along for a few days, and leave them somewhere else to germinate so that next time you come through, or someone else does, there will be more black raspberries for everyone, including the animals that are also food and clothes and other resources for you. The integrated agricultural management practiced here was spectacularly suited for sustainability and resistance to the things that caused famine. After the first 7,000 years or so, the people here started to develop even more regular habits in this landscape. The practice of co-planting the Three Sisters - corn, beans, and squash - with fish guts under the plants to fertilize the soil, meant the soil stayed rich. |
Black raspberries, wikimedia commons
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A note about black raspberries: they are basically a very enthusiastic and highly opportunistic weed. They will grow almost anywhere, there’s a million varieties, they mutate readily to adapt to different soils or climates, and everything on the food chain eats them. If black raspberries show up in your newly empty lake bed with three feet of fertile topsoil, it’s a given that everything else will follow, including humans.
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Coincidentally, 1602 was also the year an Englishman named Bartholomew Gosnold surveyed Cape Cod for England, the first of seven English contacts before Plymouth Rock. Trade between native people and eastern explorers is immediate, and soon becomes well-established, with an astonishing and overlooked impact on daily life: the disappearance of pottery shards from the archeological record in a startlingly short time-frame. Because it’s much easier to mend a metal pot than a clay one. This does not mean there was no more indigenous pottery made after 1620, it just means there was such a sharp drop-off, it doesn't show up in quantity in the ground.
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Brass Kettle Cooking Pot, Colonial trade good, donor unknown
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In 1622, crops in northwest Britain and southern Scotland failed. And again in 1623 & 1624. There was a shortfall each year of about 1/3rd the needed grain crops, such as barley, oats and millet.
Suddenly, leaving for the Colonies, even with the perilous ocean voyage, looked much more attractive to English people trying to keep their families from starvation. One of the major problems, of course, is that there were already Native people living here, with long-established systems of land use!
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Dr. John M. Gerber, professor in the Sustainable Food and Farming Program with the Stockbridge School of Agriculture at UMass Amherst puts it very succinctly in an article on his website changingthestory.net
“The first humans to visit [the region] were hunter-gatherers, passing through about 11,000 years ago. The First Peoples began to stay in the region around 6,000 years ago. They lived in movable villages with gardens on the river bottom soils along the Connecticut River and winter quarters in the forests farther up in the hillsides…where there was plenty of wood for winter fires.” 
Controlled burn in Oregon, wikimedia commons
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Dr. Gerber with students A note about fire: Recall that in England, if a place looked wild and overgrown, somebody owned it and you better not go there, and if a place looked tended, it was absolutely some lord’s hunting grounds, and you definitely shouldn’t go there! Native people had been using fast-moving, low-temperature controlled burning for thousands of years, to clear out the under-story on a regular basis, leaving open hardwood forests great for hunting and perfect for cultivating a wide range of nuts, berries, fruits, and other edible and medicinal plants.
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People would come to the valley when the weather first turned fine in the spring, and plant their gardens and tend their friendships all through till fall, then when winter comes, perhaps they head south with the trade goods made over the summer, and visit cousins in the south, or they head up to the hills to their winter camp, to hunt and snowshoe and ski, with plenty of shelter from the pines and firs, and plenty of firewood to heat their lodges.
But remember they didn’t stay there year-round and fence in those orchards or berry brambles or corn fields, because why would one do that? There were other places the people needed to be, and the plants were native to the places they were growing, so they were inclined to keep growing, and the people could go over to the Great Falls for the shad run, or up to the Potholes for fishing there, or figure out which stands of oak trees were bearing sweet acorns that year, and go there.
So when the English arrived in the Northeast Woodlands, they found wide open woodland “parks” full of game and food plants, but no walls, no fences, no stone houses, no long strips of cleared ground with a single crop sown in rows, and, by and large, for at least a little while, no-one around to say “excuse me, that’s the corn our people need for the winter that your cow is destroying.”
So when the English arrived in the Northeast Woodlands, they found wide open woodland “parks” full of game and food plants, but no walls, no fences, no stone houses, no long strips of cleared ground with a single crop sown in rows, and, by and large, for at least a little while, no-one around to say “excuse me, that’s the corn our people need for the winter that your cow is destroying.”
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A note about cows. These animals, along with horses, goats, sheep, pigs, and chickens, were introduced by English colonists in 1623, moving here during the famine in England. A cow is a big animal, and none of the peoples of the Northeast Woodlands had seen one before. Cows were devastating to integrated farming practices.
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Farmer at Colonial Willamsburg, wikimedia commons
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The colonial sense of land ownership extended to the animals they brought with them: if the cow was in the field, that field was, by extension, in at least some way belonging to the colonist. A pig in the forest extended the reach of the colonist into the forest. By 1668, the Plymouth Colony court ordered a man named Mekamoo to pay fifty shillings to William Pointing merely “on suspicion" of killing Pointing’s cow, which had gone missing. Pair this with fewer colonists available to tend their livestock, and the need for livestock to forage for their food, and it’s a recipe for disaster in the integrated agricultural systems of the indigenous people.
Rail fence, Colonial Williamsburg, wikimedia commons
One solution that was tried in the early 1700s was various fences and walls, to keep a large fenced pastureland as “commonage”, and fence off fields and gardens, Native and colonial alike, with the understanding that everyone would help maintain the fences.
Perhaps a good idea in theory, but in practice, less practical. As the colonial population grew, field allotments became more spread out, which was less convenient, and in the 1740s and 1750s, the landholders - all of them - put pressure on towns to do away with the shared obligations of the “commonage” and let individual lands be fully owned and managed by individual people. Some Native people recognized as landowners are listed as sellers on early deeds, having adapted to the shifting requirements of a colonized landscape.
Perhaps a good idea in theory, but in practice, less practical. As the colonial population grew, field allotments became more spread out, which was less convenient, and in the 1740s and 1750s, the landholders - all of them - put pressure on towns to do away with the shared obligations of the “commonage” and let individual lands be fully owned and managed by individual people. Some Native people recognized as landowners are listed as sellers on early deeds, having adapted to the shifting requirements of a colonized landscape.
The geology of the land, the available arable soil, the plants and animals available for domestication or propagation or cultivation, and the inherent sense of scarcity or abundance, individual struggle or collective responsibility to one’s fellows - all of these pointed to very different world views.
The two extremely different ways of living in and interacting with the landscape, which formed a basis for two profoundly different ways of organizing one’s time, one’s food and resources, one’s family structure, and one’s culture and social systems, aka, accepted customs and laws, contributed directly to the conflict between Native and Colonial people.
So this is the context, in brief, and full of gaps. From here, let us remember the people who lived here, throughout the last 13,000 years, first along the edges of the great glacial lake, then along the banks of this river. Where they came to fish, plant corn, and have their summer villages. Where we can still see some signposts of the reason why this was, and is, such a beautiful and bountiful valley.
Looking towards Hatfield from the top of Mt. Sugarloaf in Sunderland, wikimedia commons
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