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What Happened To The
Wangunk?
(part 2)
by Doris Sherrow, January
2000
The Wangunk Indians and early settlers of Portland
seem to have gotten along quite well. James Stanclift hired a
brave named Sacient to deliver gravestones. The tribe welcomed Giles
Hall, Job Bates, Richard Strickland, and others onto their
land as fellow farmers and hunters. Cuschoy helped two local
officials lay out part of High Street. So what happened to induce the
Wangunk to leave Portland?
From all appearances, there were two main factors.
First, younger Wangunks began to move out of the area, to places where
other tribes were gathering, as the English presence increased in the
land. Second, various officials seem to have begun a subtle pressure on
the Indians to leave the area, at least in part to further the
development—by the English—of their towns.
The first official foray into the reservation came
from the Congregational Church, when they bought land for their new
minister, Moses Bartlett, in 1731. They chose 40 acres of the
Wangunk reservation bounded by what are now Bartlett, High, and William
streets. It seems curious that no English settler had land to sell to
the new minister, that 40 acres of Wangunk land had to be taken.
Nor did Bartlett build his house on the south side of
the lot, near the church. He built on the north side, on Bartlett Street
opposite Prospect, facing part of the reservation.
In the 1740s, the church decided it had outgrown its
building. The siting of the meeting house was traditionally a
controversial issue in early towns: both civil and ecclesiastical
meetings were held there, and the men who lived closer would have more
power in the town’s affairs. Portland seems to have had an ongoing
controversy between settlers in what is now Middle Haddam and those
along Main Street and up the Glastonbury Turnpike.
The standard solution to a siting-the-meeting-house
dispute was to have a committee from the General Assembly, ostensibly
disinterested parties, to determine a fair location. The committee which
came to Portland in the late 1740s found the fairest location to be
squarely in the middle of the Wangunk reservation, on what is now the
northeast corner of Bartlett and Prospect streets, opposite Rev.
Bartlett’s house.
Why there? It was hardly the geographical center
between Middle Haddam and Main Street. Could the General Assembly have
been pursuing a policy of easing the Indians off land which they felt
could be more productively occupied by English settlers? A couple years
later, they voted to reserve 500 pounds for use by any Indians who would
migrate to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where many had gathered.
Despite whatever pressure might have been rising, the
Wangunk retained their mettle. The church hoped to buy three acres. The
buyers were instructed to get three acres if the price was 15 pounds per
acre, otherwise to buy one acre. The Wangunk held out for 18 pounds, and
the settlers bought a single acre.
A few short months later, James Sasepequen
sold a fellow tribesman one acre, similar in every respect to the church
acre, for 15 pounds: was this coincidence or was he sending a message to
the increasingly avaricious settlers?
In 1756 the settlers petitioned the General Assembly
for permission to buy the rest of the Wangunks’ land. These are the
reasons they gave: the spot for the meeting house had been picked by the
General Assembly (which was true) —"we was obliged to build
there," they wailed—and now no inhabitants could settle nearby
because it was Indian land.
Furthermore, it would be good land for tilling,
"yet it bares no charge to Society, Town, or Colony, therefore
great damage to us all but especially to us who want to have our charge
eased." In other words, it was generating no tax money, and the
townsmen wanted it to generate tax money so that their own taxes could
be lowered.
The English said further that the "Indian owners
are dispersed—few live on said land; those that do … are all
together unable to support themselves & are daley supported by some
of our inhabitants." Cuschoy, the sachem, was allegedly lame and
unable to work. Cuschoy, for his part, explained that there were no more
than 12 or 13 descendants besides himself, and that they were dispersed
and would be difficult to locate.
A committee from the General Assembly came to
Portland to investigate. They found that no Indians were being "daley
supported" by any English, a fact which town poor records from the
period confirm. They did, however, vote to allow the settlers to buy the
Wangunk land in 1765. The 12 to 13 descendants that Cuschoy had claimed
would be hard to locate mushroomed into approximately 30, who somehow
found their way back to Middletown to sign the deed for the property.
From these deeds, it appears as if the Wangunk
community had been slowly migrating away, to Farmington, to Stockbridge,
and west. The signatures on the deeds suggest that the young people had
left the area—there were more couples and minors from outlying
areas—leaving the old people, like Cuschoy and his wife, in Portland.
Compare this to 20th-century city dynamics, where families matured in
the city in the early 20th century, then moved to the suburbs, leaving
their elderly parents behind in the old neighborhood.
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