Strangers for Ancestors #7: Nichewaug / Petersham
Settler-colonizers depicted leisurely strolling around a building on the land they stolen from the Nichewaug peoples and renamed Petersham, Massachusetts, 1732; .
Joseph Wilson, the first child of Jeremiah Wilson and Hannah Beaman Wilson, was part of the second generation of my Wilson family settler colonizers to be born on this land we now call the United States that was stolen from the land’s Indigenous peoples through acts of genocide. Joseph was born on September 1, 1692 on land taken from the Nashaway peoples, renamed Lancaster in 1653. Joseph’s grandfather was Benjamin Wilson, my great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather; and Joseph is my great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather.
Settler Colonialism is a very specific type of colonization in which foreigners settle on land which is already inhabited by Indigenous peoples and uses various forms of genocide that include depopulation and assimilation to intentionally annihilate the existing communities and cultures. In addition to the United States, settler colonial nations include New Zealand, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Uruguay, South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Israel.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz notes in her book Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion, that in the United States, “while some of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, others are descendants of white settlers who arrived as colonizers to displace those who were here since time immemorial, and still others are descendants of those who were kidnapped and forced here against their will.” I will add, there were also orphaned children who were placed on ships and taken to serve the settler-colonizers who invaded and stole the land from its rightful stewards; this was the case for Benjamin Wilson, who was sent from England in 1643 as a seven-year-old orphan to serve the Massachusetts Bay Colony. As Dunbar-Ortiz explains, this ideology is a toxic lie that is used to obscure the history of the United States and its violent history of white supremacy, genocide, structural racism and inequality, which are at the root of our failings today.
I highly recommend watching this video of San Francisco’s current poet laureate and Manifest Differently poet, Tongo Eisen-Martin in conversation with Dunbar-Ortiz about her book Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion, presented by the Mechanics’ Institute of San Francisco. It provides excellent insight into this subject, as well as a fierce and powerful reading by Tongo.
Between 1722 - 1725, Joseph Wilson was one of the 18 men from Lancaster who served on scouting expeditions as part of what became known as “Graylock’s War”, “Dummer’s War”, “Father Rale’s War”, “Lovewell’s War”, the “Three Years War,” the “Wabanaki-New England War,” or the “4th Anglo-Abenaki War”. This was a series of battles between New England and the Wabanaki Confederacy, who were allied with New France. The battles were mainly fought along the border of New England and Acadia, and northern Massachusetts and Vermont. The fighting began as a disagreement over the border between Acadia and New England; however, at its core it was about two European nations (France and England) fighting for the right to commit genocide and pillage the land using the bodies of the Indigenous peoples it set out to annihilate as part of its weaponry.
The Wabanaki Confederacy and “Graylock’s War”, “Dummer’s War”, “Father Rale’s War”, “Lovewell’s War”, the “Three Years War,” the “Wabanaki-New England War,” or the “4th Anglo-Abenaki War”
The settler-colonizers’ Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor William Dummer began peace talks with the Penobscot tribal sachems/chiefs, though the French did not participate. On 31 July 1725, Lieut. Gov. Dummer announced an end to the War. The eastern Abenaki groups made peace with Massachusetts in 1725 and 1726, and Abenaki bands in Canada agreed to peace terms in 1727, except for Sachem/Chief Gray Lock who refused and continued to defend his ancestral homeland over the next two decades conducting sporadic raids on the settler colonies, and dying a free man around 1750.
Megan Wilson, Stains Series: Nichewag/Petersham, quilling (paper craft) on paper, 9” x 9” unframed, 12.5” x 12.5” framed, 2021
On September 21, 1726 Joseph, 34 married Rebakah Phelps, 27 the daughter of Edward Phelps and Ruth Andrews in Lancaster, Worcester, Massachusetts, the land stolen from the Nashaway peoples. Joseph and Rebakah were members of the Congregationalist (Independent Protestant Christian) Church of Lancaster.
Rebakah and Joseph’s first child, Joseph Wilson Jr. was born on January 2, 1727 in Lancaster; their second child, Solomon Wilson was born November 1, 1728; their third child, William Wilson was born on September 3, 1730.
In 1733, petitioners for a grant of land at Nichewaug, which became Petersham, asked for it in consideration of “the Hardship & Difficult marches they underwent as volunters under the Comand of the Late Cap’t Lovell & Cap’t White after the Inden enemy and Into their Countrey.” Most of the men listed above appear in the list of Proprietors of that Grant of Nichewaug, including Joseph Wilson.
In the book The History of Petersham, Massachusetts by Mabel Cook Coolidge for the Petersham Historical Society, published 1948, in its first chapter titled “Indian Origins”, a passage on page 21 reads:
Lancaster suffered much at the hands of the Indians, and in 1722 an act was passed offering the sum of one hundred pounds for the scalp of a male Indian over twelve years old, and half that sum for a woman or child, dead or alive. This act proved an incentive to undertake this desperate warfare and the volunteers fro the frontier towns of Lancaster, Lunenberg Brookfield, etc., were led by Capt. John White of Lancaster, and Capt. John Lovell, of Dunstable. During the four years that this war lasted , these Volunteers had ample time and opportunity to become familiar with this section of the country and it apparently was pleasing to them, for in Jan. 1731, they petitioned the General Court for a grant of land as a consideration of their hardship and difficult marches into this country after the Indian enemy, as Volunteers und the command of Captains Lovell and White.
There is a tradition that the early settlers of our town suffered no ill treatment from the Indians because they had paid them for the land. There seems to be no record of this, so we infer the reason may be that of the historian who said that the Nipmucks welcomed the English as a protection, believing them to be superior beings. Elliot set the number of the Nipmucks in Worcester County at 1150 after King Phillip's War.
Altho' Mr. Willson was convinced there had been no previous English settlements here when the grant was made to the Volunteers "or half crown men" as they were called in 1733, he said that Jared Weed was sure that Joseph Wilson, said to be the first white man to ' spend a winter here, was established in town as early as the autumn of 1731; and the vital records indicate that Abner, son of Joseph and I Rebakah, was born Oct. 10th, 1732, a year before Joseph drew his I houselot no. 66 with other Proprietors.
There is a reasonable tradition that the grown sons of the English in neighboring settlements wandered into this Nipmuck country, partly from curiosity or love of adventure; were favorably received, and found the free, lawless life of the red men preferable to the arbitrary life of the Puritanic English. The fact that the first houselots were laid on the ridges of hills, while the lowlands, swamps, and river valleys were referred to as "common" or ''undivided" land subject to a later distribution, gave rise to the supposition that the Indians continued in these sheltered, fertile regions several years after the English established their homesteads on the hilltops, in harmony, both races realizing the value of peace and unmolestation. Thirty years after this Church was gathered, a dismission was granted to Lydia Squin, an Indian woman, to the church in Rochester in 1768, and less than ten years later, Peter Gore, a half-breed, was guarding the church pulpit against the intrusion by the Tory parson, Aaron Whitney. George Marsh , related the story that his grandmother, Mrs. Simon Dudley, saw an Indian peering into a window in their Sacketts Harbor home, and she didn't go there to live until 1816. That same window was transferred to the bungalow built for Homer Marsh. Apparently there was considerable mingling of the races, and as recently as the beginning of the present century, not less than eighteen of our prominent Petersham families could trace their ancestry back to the Indian as well as to the English.
There is another tradition that an agreement between the first settlers and the Indians allowed the Indians the privilege of taking any ash tree, wherever it happened to be growing, to be used in their handicraft of basketry.
It’s sickening to read just how savage and horrid the settler-colonizers were in their attempt to annihilate the Native peoples; as well as their savagery in deeming Black people to be slaves to them. Rather than serving the god they worshipped, it seems they instead believed themselves to be God, and hence the origins of Christian hypocrisy.
And while there’s a sense of humanity in the passage above claiming a harmonious relationship between the settler-colonizers and the Indigenous peoples, it is still written from the perspective that it was the invaders who had the authority to ‘allow the Indians the privilege’, rather than what it really was - they were pillaging the ancestral land of the peoples who they had set out to annihilate for their needs and pleasures.
However, it is reasonable to believe that there were offshoots of the younger generation who moved further away from the established settlements to create their own and practice different variations of their families’ Protestant backgrounds, as noted Joseph and Rebakah were members of the Independent Protestant Christian Church. It is also not surprising to me that this line of the Wilson family would be the first to leave and build their home outside of Lancaster in an area that had not been inhabited by other settler-colonizers, as this practice of taking trails less traveled is another recurring theme in our family’s history.
Gustave Joseph Witkowski, American pioneer birth scene, 1887
On October 10, 1732 Abner Wilson, the fourth child of Rebakah and Joseph was born at the Wilson Homestead on the land of the Nichewag; he was christened on November 12, 1732 at the First Church of Lancaster, 35 miles east of their homestead. In 1733 their house was registered as Lot No. 66 when Petersham became a town. Lot No. 66 was “located on the southern brow of Nichewag Hill.”
Ten more children would be born to Rebakah Phelps Wilson and Joseph Wilson:
October 9, 1734 - David Wilson, the fifth child
February 25, 1736 - Elizabeth Wilson, the sixth child
July 25, 1737 - Deliverance Wilson, the seventh child
June 14, 1738 - twins Elijah and Lydia Wilson, the eighth and ninth children
December 1741 - Releaf Wilson, the tenth child
July 25, 1744 - Mary Wilson, the eleventh child
September 3, 1748 - William Wilson, the twelfth child
November 1, 1750 - Son Wilson, the thirteenth child (died in birth)
January 1752 - Son Wilson, the fourteenth child (died in birth)
Over 26 years Rebakah would have 14 children; the last two dying in birth when she was 51 and 53-years-old, respectively.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one-percent to one-and-a-half-percent of all births ended in the mother's death as a result of exhaustion, dehydration, infection, hemorrhage, and/or convulsions. The average mother gave birth to five to eight children and three in ten would die before their fifth birthday. Additionally, pregnancy was accompanied by superstitions that included: if a mother was to see a “horrible spectre” or was startled by a loud noise, her child would be disfigured; if the mother looked up at the moon, her child might become a lunatic; if a hare jumped in front of her, her child could suffer a harelip. Yet women were also expected to continue to work hard until the onset of labor, since it was believed hard work meant an easier labor. Pregnant women regularly spun thread and wove on looms, performed heavy lifting and carrying, and slaughtered and salted down meat. In these practices we see the early origins of the deep misogyny and punitive standards the invaders brought to the land we now call America.
The family of Rebakah and Joseph Wilson Sr. remained in Petersham until 1771, when Deliverance Wilson moved north to Rindge, New Hampshire.
Sources:
Vital Records of Petersham, Massachusetts, To the end of the year 1849 (Worcester, Massachusetts: Franklin P. Rice, Trustee of the Fund (Systematic History Fund), 1904; http://archive.org/stream/vitalrecordsofpe00pete#page/n3/mode/2up), 57
Coolidge, Mabel Cook, for the Petersham Historical Society, Inc.. The History of Petersham Massachusetts: Incorporated April 20, 1754, Volunteerstown or Voluntown 1730-1733, Nichewaug 1733-1754. 1948. Hudson, Massachusetts, USA: Powell Press, 1948. Digital; http://www.archive.org/stream/historyofpetersh00cool#page/n7/mode/2up. openlibrary.org/internet archive. . : 2011. pp. 21, 29, 32, 42, 57, 58, 61, 116, 210, 219-220.
Notes on Lovewell's War: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Rale%27s_War
Childbirth in Early America: https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/topic_display.cfm?tcid=70#:~:text=Childbirth%20in%20colonial%20America%20was,infection%2C%20hemorrhage%2C%20or%20convulsions.