The Hilltop Farmer 2

That Exceptional Yankee, the Hilltop Farmer William Nilly,

        plowed both sides of the same field they say,

Just because he could, just because he was so frugal,

          just because of all those stones…

He had a million sheeps and twice or half as many pigs and cows 

          and his plow was the finest in the land.

Singlehandedly and willy nilly, he tossed them stones 

     (that some silly people think are “Serpent Walls”)

           while holdin’ the plow with the other hand…

Sometimes he had some help of course

 And sometimes he helped someone else of course:

How Things Were

 

“One day I'll be old gray grandpa

All the pretty girls will call me "sir, "

Now, where they're asking me how things are

Soon they'll ask me how things were…”

 - Jesse Winchester

  I guess that is what I have been trying to tell you about, “how things were,” here in Nonnewaug, a little section of a town in western CT. Much has disappeared from the landscape, much has changed – from the stones along the roadways to the stones in the Nonnewaug River and anything along the powerlines – you know, I felt the rumble of those big machines sometimes before I ever saw what they were doing just like I felt an earthquake one morning not all that long ago.

 

   “How things were” isn’t just the changes on the landscape since 1650, but it’s the changes in the landscape since 1970 when I first visited Nonnewaug Falls as well as those changes in the landscape since 1990 when I read William Cothren’s History of Ancient Woodbury and realized that there was a village right here on the floodplain when the English settler colonists arrived in 1673, a permanent Indigenous settlement that continued to be occupied up to around 1740.

 “How things were” has been affected by floods and frost, stone structures along the little brooks and streams, as well as the diagonal stone fish weir on the Nonnewaug River that may be the source of the place name that still survives here, a “fishing place” like Cothren suggests, over by the cornfields of the Nonnewaug Wigwams. 

    “How things were” has also been greatly changed, like I said, by those big machines in an archeologically sensitive area, without any investigation I’m aware of, no thought given to these culturally stacked stones that may well predate colonization and Euro-American settlers in the Paugussett Homeland.

    There’s a bright spot in this ‘how things were” business. That old “History of Indians in Connecticut” by John Deforest can be retired as the “go to history.” Dr. Lucianne Lavin’s “Indigenous Peoples of Connecticut” is a remarkable book that replaces older 1850s misinformation and misconceptions with reliable information and reinterpretations of those misconceptions.

   And then of course there are other bright spots, other recent publications such as Curtiss Hoffman’s “Stone Prayers” and “Our Hidden Landscapes” edited by Dr. Lavin and Elaine Thompson, two more books I highly recommend.

  In the meantime, I’ll keep trying to tell you, like an old grey grandpa, about “How Things Were.”

Images from my notes in a folder called “Picture of Nonnewaug Wigwams 2025”