The Sagamore at the Place Known as Weekeepeemee (CT)

 

  We were looking for zucchini plants and a farmstand called the Farm on Weekeepeemee Road just the other day. We had a few guesses as to where this farmstead could be since we’d been driving on Weekeepeemee Road, the road my sister and cousin Glen live on, for our entire lives, my wife and I. But then next thing you know, we suddenly ran out of Weekeepeemee Road – or so we thought. Our GPS suggested we turn left and continue on Weekeepeemee Road, onto what is also known as route 132, as we’ve thought that stretch of road was called all these years.

  We headed downhill, passing by some more of the recent and most ugliest of stone wall rebuilds that have become so popular around here, down to a floodplain nestled into the hills.

   That’s when finally Weekeepeemee made sense to me, as another Pootatuck person and a placename switcheroo.

   It’s entirely possible and very probable that Sagamore Weekeepeemee, like Sachem Nonnewaug or Sachem Waramaug, was the leader of a group of people who were living at the place of the linden or basswood trees, Indian cornfields, and house sites above the flood zone that had been used for perhaps thousands of years by generations of Indigenous People.

  Drew Shuptar- Rayvis writes: “Among Algonkian-speaking people, the governing body was led by a Sachem/Sakima and often included (as found in New England) a vice chief called a Sagamore, War Chiefs and Peace Chiefs, whose official titles have been lost to time."

https://encyclopedia.nahc-mapping.org/sites/default/files/2024-04/AlgonkianGovernanceStructures_DrewShuptarRayvis_2024.pdf

 

“Weekeepeemee is a little hamlet in the north-west part of the town,” writes William Cothren in his History of Ancient Woodbury, Connecticut. 

“Weekeepeemee was a sagamore , and was buried somewhere near the village of that name in Woodbury ; but the locality is not now known,” William Cothren also writes in his History of Ancient Woodbury Connecticut. 

Mr.Cothren claimed Weekeepeemee or Wecupemee meant “twisted river,” but Mr. John C. Huden disagrees with that and tells us “wikopi” refers to the twisted inner bark of the Linden or Basswood tree, used to make cordage for making string or netting, probably known as Bastewood to the Europeans.

 

   I’m guessing that the fields and house sites last used by the Sagamore at a place known as Weekeepeemee were acquired by the early English settler colonists as field and house sites.

The planting lands, my friend Nohham writes of, hakihakanink, “garden/farmlands,”

Kuttinakish in Nipmuk, here and other places:

 https://www.academia.edu/74035468/Framing_Intercultural_Discourse_Within_Ethics

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I’m guessing there are interesting “stone walls” or Qusukqaniyutôkansh in the area to be observed for some cultural clues as to who may have created the oldest of rows of culturally stacked stones - and some modern vandalism... 

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