Call it a teaching moment. Learning on the fly.
Honestly, I should have known better, but there I was, wheels spinning to a shrill cranial scream, new information piled atop old. But one must guard against getting carried away with new discoveries of an historical nature, which slapped me upside the head on April 19, speaking to a group of kindred local-history spirits at the Shelburne Historical Society’s annual meeting and supper.
It had been one wild day leading up to the evening event, beginning with the morning discovery of Canada townships related to pre-settlement Ashfield. I was familiar with the Boston townships that ultimately gave us our western Franklin County hilltowns from Colrain to Monroe, and I was also aware of the “Falltown grants” that were divvied up among families of colonial soldiers who participated in the May 19, 1676 Falls Fight in Gill. But Canada townships? No. I had never heard of them.
I would still be in the dark had it not been for Nancy Gray Garvin’s online “Huntstown Beginnings,” which was not “out there” the last time I was looking into the settlement of Ashfield and Conway and neighboring hilltowns. Adding to my delight was the fact that it fit snugly into my talk that night focusing on what hilltown settlement patterns tell us about our hilltowns’ little-known indigenous past.
“We hear about our old roads, ferries and taverns,” said Ashfield Historical Society member Jim Wholey, “but nobody seems to know much about Indians.”
It’s true. Only rare historians the likes of Rev. Josiah Howard Temple, author of histories of Whately, Brookfield and Framingham and co-author with George Sheldon of “A History of the Town of Northfield, Massachusetts,” were interested in the indigenous history of places they researched.
Others touch on the Native past, but give you little to sink your teeth into. They tell you that the oldest roads were originally paths referred to in deeds and county commissioner records as “ye old footpath,” but they don’t explain how these paths and the major rivers they crossed were the interstate highways of the historical contact period. Yes, we know of the Bay Path, the Great Trail of New England, the Connecticut Path and the Mohawk Trail, but we know very little about all the tributary pathways leading in all directions off of these main arteries, ones that led to the earliest settlement of our western hilltowns. Some of these deeply worn old trails can still be deciphered in the forest if you know what to look for. They follow ridgelines, drop down through ravines and snake their way up through cliff faces to high, lonesome chambers like the shelf caves of Mount Sugarloaf.
But that’s a topic for another day. Now I must correct the record from that little evening talk I gave Thursday in Shelburne. To guide me through this free-flowing, “stream-of-consciousness” delivery, I had done cursory research that morning, just to refresh my memory about the settlement patterns of hilltowns like Ashfield, Shelburne, Conway and Colrain. In the process, I created a handwritten, bulleted list as a guide to keep me on message. Like I explained to a couple of nice ladies afterward, “Speaking like this is kinda like sitting down to write a weekly column. Though I have an idea where I’m going, it’s like throwing yourself into the current, riding it out and discovering where it leads you. It’s not unusual to wind up far from where you expected to land.”
A complicating factor is that the settlement of towns like Ashfield, Goshen, Plainfield and Hawley were somewhat different than Shelburne and Conway, both of which drew 18th-century spillover residents of Deerfield, which had run out of land for sons born far down the feeding chain in large colonial families. There was some of that in Ashfield, too, but also absentee proprietorships dating back to 16 Canada townships of 1690, which eventually became the 1735 Huntstown grants.
The first division of Huntstown land in 1739 produced 63 50-acre parcels that were divvied up among soldiers and heirs of a troop of King William’s War veterans who had marched under Captain Ephraim Hunt on a failed mission from Weymouth to Canada in 1690. Some 45 years later, Huntstown was born. Four subsequent land divisions occurred in 1762, 1770, 1782 and 1783, and Ashfield was born, incorporated after the second division, in 1765.
Now two corrections of inaccuracies uttered during my Thursday presentation. Chalk it up as brainstorming on your feet, always dangerous. First, Weymouth is not on Cape Cod; it’s a South Shore town of Norfolk County. What threw me off on that point was that Weymouth was indeed first settled as Wessagusset in 1622 by a Plymouth Colony benefactor named Thomas Weston, thus the strong pre-Massachusetts Bay, Cape Cod association. Though not part of Plymouth Colony, it’s in the neighborhood and would help to explain the influx of Cape Cod families into early Ashfield.
Second, Hunt (1650-1713) likely never stepped foot in Ashfield. His planned path from Weymouth to Canada would most likely have taken him along the most popular route from greater Boston to the Pynchon plantation of Springfield. The Connecticut River would have been crossed in Springfield, following a path through Westfield to the Berkshires and the Hudson Valley, then north to Lake George, Lake Champlain and Canada.
Yes, the surveyors who laid out those original 63 Huntstown lots in 1738 likely chose the northeast part of town because it was most suitable for settlement, likely due to Native American style “forest-management.” Though no one can be certain whether the Native Americans who called Ashfield and other western Franklin/Hampshire hilltowns theirs were from the then upper Connecticut Valley (Pocumtuck/Sokoki/Norwottuck), eastern Hudson Valley (Mahikan) or both, it is certain that indigenous peoples from both sides knew our western hills well.
The place that shows up on early Dutch maps as untamed forest may have been overlap territory visited annually by all four of the aforementioned tribes during their hunting/gathering autumns and winters, and perhaps also during their maple-syrup-gathering springs. It was during the fall that valley maize cultures set up shop in the hills to hunt, gather nuts and berries, and start collecting furs. The footprint of these activities would have shown as small clearings for small, temporary, seasonal village sites that would have been obvious to explorers setting stakes for new upland towns.
It’s my own fault for jumping to conclusions that fit snugly into a long-held narrative about the settlement and deep history of our hilltowns. Although the overall narrative was valid, a couple of inaccuracies rose by spontaneous combustion of ideas. The lesson is clear: don’t hypothesize on your feet in front of a crowd when discussing fresh discoveries that have not been thoroughly explored with go-to sources. By the next morning, I had it all sorted out … too late.
Oh well, still learning the hard way after all these years. Water over the dam. Still, I should have known better. Something I learned long ago in the newspaper business holds true with public speaking as well: next-day corrections are too late.