Framingham Legends & Lore (2 page)

T
HE
N
IPMUC

At the time of first European contact, Framingham was part of the domain of the Nipmuc tribe, sometimes called the Nipnet. Their territory was centered on what is now Worcester County, Massachusetts, but also stretched from northwestern Connecticut to southern Vermont. They cleared fields for agriculture, fashioned weirs to catch fish, constructed forts to protect themselves from other unfriendly tribes, built villages of small huts to house themselves and traveled along an extensive network of trails carved out through the woods over the course of centuries of human habitation.

There were three principal native villages in Framingham. The largest was called Washakamaug, or “eel fishing place.” It was located on the plain between Farm Pond and Lake Waushakum in what is now downtown Framingham. The village is commemorated by a monument on the Park Street Common, the area's last piece of open space, which at one time served as a native burying ground. A second village was adjacent to the falls at Saxonville. Here natives erected weirs to trap the fish that lived in the Sudbury River. The third encampment was near the shores of Lake Cochituate, where there was once evidence of a fort. Perhaps most significantly, they had carved out a trail through the area—the “Old Connecticut Path”—that linked Massachusetts Bay to the Connecticut River.

The first two villages were located in what have long been the two most densely populated areas of Framingham: downtown and Saxonville. But that should not be surprising. By and large, the same qualities made them attractive places for both natives and Europeans to settle, even if the two societies viewed and employed the land in different ways. In fact, often it was the improvements that the Indians had made to the land that attracted the Europeans. For example, when the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, they settled at Plymouth because it had previously been the site of a native village. It had a natural (if quite shallow) harbor, a high hill for defense and abundant fresh water, but just as importantly, there were fields already cleared for planting, a major consideration given all the other tasks necessary to establish a brand-new colony.

If Plymouth was a desirable place to settle, then why had the natives abandoned it? In the years following 1602, a number of European explorers had visited the New England coast—Bartholomew Gosnold, Martin Pring, Samuel de Champlain and Captain John Smith of Jamestown fame, among others. With them had come diseases to which the Indians had no prior exposure or immunity, and an outbreak of smallpox (or possibly bubonic plague) had greatly reduced their numbers, driving them to consolidate their tribes farther inland.

“Old Field” monument on the Park Street Common, site of Indian village of Washakamaug.

The Nipmuc were still occupying the villages in Framingham in the early 1630s when they traded much-needed corn to the newly established Massachusetts Bay Colony in Boston. Between 1633 and 1635, an outbreak of smallpox greatly reduced the number of natives in the Connecticut River Valley in central New England and led to an incursion of Mohawks from northern New York. The Nipmuc began paying tribute to the Mohawk, and retreated farther inland when the Pequot War between the colonists and the natives of southeastern Connecticut broke out in 1636, abandoning their encampments in Framingham and elsewhere in eastern Massachusetts.

So when John Stone's family became the first English to settle within the bounds of present-day Framingham about 1647, they encountered not thriving villages of Nipmuc, but a few scattered and desultory native inhabitants. Indeed, the Stones settled near the falls at Saxonville, adjacent to the site of one of the abandoned Nipmuc villages.

J
OHN
A
WASSAMOG
, O
LD
J
ETHRO
, O
LD
J
ACOB
, C
APTAIN
T
OM AND
N
ETUS

From the 1640s to the 1670s, as the first few families from the Massachusetts Bay Colony established homesteads in Framingham, there still was an Indian presence in the area, however reduced. Wuttawushan was a Nipmuc chief who traded with the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1621 and whose tribe made seasonal use of the Washakamaug village site in South Framingham. (The spelling of English names in the 1600s was not yet standardized, so it should go without saying that English renderings of Indian names can have widely varying spellings and pronunciations. We will try to stick to the most common spelling for the sake of clarity.) When he died, control of those lands passed to his nephew, John Awassamog. Awassamog continued to visit the area and received assistance in his old age from at least one of the white families, as evidenced by the deed in which his son Thomas surrendered his claim to the Eames family in the 1680s.

Other natives also continued to reside in the area. The family of Tantamous, or “Old Jethro” as he was commonly called among the English, lived on the east side of Nobscot Mountain in north Framingham. Like other Nipmuc, he was accustomed to a life of seasonal migration, and it was only late in life that he came to adopt a settled life more like that of the English settlers. Long after his death there continued to be a Jethro's Meadow and Jethro's Orchard east of Nobscot, and the remains of his cellar hole and granary could be seen as late as the 1880s.

It would be impossible to write about Native Americans in Framingham without mentioning Reverend John Eliot, “the Apostle to the Indians.” Eliot dreamed of converting the natives to Christianity and integrating them into English colonial society. He met resistance both from Indians who had no wish to join an alien culture as well as from settlers who were unwilling to recognize the natives as equals. Eliot established Natick, just to the east of present-day Framingham, as a town for “praying Indians,” as the native converts were often called. Included in these lands was much of what constitutes downtown Framingham today, east of Farm Pond and Mount Wayte, stretching north along the east bank of the Sudbury River to just south of Saxonville and Cochituate Brook.

One of Eliot's earliest converts in 1646 was Aponapawquin, or “Old Jacob.” He lived on the Natick lands on a hill still called Indian Head, today a quiet residential neighborhood to the east of Prospect Street and north of Route 9 in Framingham. He also lent his name to Jacob's Meadow, just to the east of the hill, now similarly covered by tidy lawns and comfortable houses. He later removed to the seventh praying Indian village established by Eliot, Magunkook, located on what today is the Ashland/Hopkinton town line. Another convert was Peter Jethro, the son of Old Jethro.

The most prominent of the Natick Indians was Wuttasacomponum, or “Captain Tom.” He was so well regarded by his English neighbors that he was commissioned an officer by the colonial government and commanded a regiment of Indian soldiers. In 1674, he moved west to the new village of Hassanamesit, in present-day Grafton. Almost equally at ease in white society was Netus, sometimes called William of Sudbury. Netus was a landholder in Sudbury, attended Reverend Edmund Browne's church there and sent a son to be educated at Cambridge in preparation for college. This was not a wholly positive experience, however. He had understood that the costs of his son's education would be borne by the Society for Propagating the Gospel in New England, a British organization dedicated to Christianizing the Indians. But when it failed to pay for the boy's expenses, Elijah Corlett, the teacher, sued Netus and received title to three hundred acres in Grafton as compensation. Netus later settled in Natick.

It would be a mistake to overly romanticize this period in Indian-English relations. The overall trend was marked by a receding native population and a burgeoning white one, with settlers pushing steadily inland. Treaties and deals negotiated between the societies were inevitably conducted on European rather than native terms and therefore led to the ultimate benefit of the settlers. However warily they regarded one another, they did at least attempt to accommodate each other, if it was at times an uneasy peace. Yet even an uneasy peace was preferable to the devastation of war, as both sides were soon to learn.

K
ING
P
HILIP
'
S
W
AR

King Philip's War, the most destructive of all the conflicts between the English settlers and natives, broke out in 1675. It shattered the nearly forty years of peace that had endured since the close of the Pequot War of 1636–37. It originated in the continuing friction between Philip, sachem of the Pokanoket of the Mount Hope peninsula in Rhode Island, and the leaders of the Plymouth Colony. Philip's father was the sachem Massasoit, who is renowned for having aided the Pilgrims during their difficult early years in America. While in Massasoit's time the alliance helped the Pokanoket and their Wampanoag allies fend off their more powerful Narragansett neighbors, by the 1670s the expansion of Plymouth into new towns closer and closer to Mount Hope meant that the white settlers posed an increasingly greater threat to Philip's domain.

The long-simmering conflict erupted into open warfare with the Pokanoket raid on the town of Swansea on June 20, 1675. While deeply troubling, there was no reason for the few white families living in what is now Framingham to believe they would be directly affected. The area was in the Massachusetts Bay (not Plymouth) Colony, and the local natives were Nipmuc, not Pokanoket or Wampanoag, and most of them were Christian converts.

By midsummer, the forces dispatched from Plymouth successfully drove Philip and his allies out of southeastern Massachusetts, but they failed to capture him. More important, their efforts to intimidate neighboring tribes into remaining neutral had the opposite effect of pushing them into open alliance with Philip. The Narragansett began wreaking havoc on Providence in the Rhode Island Colony while, even more troubling, on July 14, 1675, the Nipmuc attacked Mendon in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

T
HE
T
RAGEDY OF THE
P
RAYING
I
NDIANS

Any doubts as to which side the Nipmuc favored were answered in August 1675, when they ambushed an English expedition that sought to negotiate a treaty of neutrality with them and allowed Philip and his followers safe refuge at their village at Menameset (near New Braintree, Massachusetts). This put the natives settled in and around Framingham in an awkward position, to say the least. Most of them were Christian converts, and all lived alongside if not actively participated in white society. Yet their brethren had declared war upon that society. As a result, they were trusted by neither side.

So what happened to the Indians we met earlier in the chapter? John Awassamog, aged by this time, seems to have had the good sense or good fortune not to become ensnared in the conflict, probably staying with his son Thomas in the vicinity of Sherborn. The same could not be said of Old Jethro, Old Jacob, Captain Tom and Netus.

When the English settlement of Lancaster, eighteen miles to the north, was attacked on August 22, 1675, the praying Indians of Magunkook were suspected, and the village was seized by the English a week later. At their trial, the natives were able to prove their innocence by producing witnesses who testified that they had in fact attended Sunday meeting at Marlborough that day. Nonetheless, the village lay abandoned as some Indians remained imprisoned and others were relocated to Deer Island in Boston Harbor to keep them out of further trouble, while most (probably including Old Jacob) joined their neighbors at Natick. Old Jethro, though not a Christian, had decided to demonstrate his loyalty to the English by moving from his home on Nobscot Mountain to within the bounds of the praying Indian town of Natick.

During the autumn of 1675, King Philip's War raged from Rhode Island to the Connecticut Valley to the frontier of Maine, but the vicinity of Framingham remained relatively quiet after the raid on Lancaster that August. At first the colonial government sought to isolate the praying Indians from their Nipmuc compatriots by forbidding them to leave Natick, whether to hunt game in the forests or harvest corn planted outside the borders of the town. This represented a considerable hardship, as their numbers had swelled with refugees from Magunkook. But to the Massachusetts Bay authorities, the mere continued existence nearby of such a large settlement of natives, Christian converts or not, represented a powder keg that could be ignited at any time.

On October 26, a detachment of soldiers from Cambridge swept through Natick to forcibly relocate all the natives to Deer Island. No provision of housing or food stores had been made for them there, although it was already the eve of a New England winter. Feeling betrayed by their fellow Christians, a number of natives whose only crime was to be Indian chose instead to take their chances with the Nipmuc and fled to the west, including Old Jacob, Old Jethro, his son Peter and Netus. Captain Tom also reluctantly joined the warring Nipmuc when a party of warriors arrived at Hassanamesit on November 1, gave the converts there the choice of joining with them or being attacked and told them of the fate of their friends at Natick.