Watching from the Watch House (Woodbury CT)

    The apple trees are in blossom, so I know it’s just past the time that I first discovered Cothren’s History of Ancient Woodbury (CT), the illustrated version with the woodcut illustration of Sachem Nonnewaug’s Grave, marked by an apple tree and a mound of stones. I’m not quite sure at this moment whether it was 1990 or 1991, so I will just say, “It was almost 30 years ago.”

    I wasn’t looking for the “Indian History” contained in that book but rather something about the history of this house I’m writing this in. I didn’t find anything specifically about this old salt box style home, just a mention that in 1740 the Pomperauge Plantation began allotting “homelotts” to the settler colonists of European ancestry, but it did explain the 1740 date that has become attached to house as it’s listed into an inventory of Historic Homes.

Woodbury historic building 001 circa 1935-1942

    I did begin looking for more local “Indian Histories” from towns all around, particularly the oldest of them, which included what became New Milford. I recall pricing a job out that way and stopping afterwards at the New Milford Library, checking the Local History section, probably in the Reference Only section where some of the more rare books are kept but not circulated. I can’t remember the author or the title, try as I might, but I’m almost sure the cover was a yellow kind of color. Perhaps my notes are still in the book because they aren’t with the other bits of scrap paper I wrote them on. What I do remember quite clearly was an account of the First Puritan/Pequot War, when the colonial militia chased a group of Pequot warriors along the coast to the mouth of the river that has become known as the Housatonic and someone or other quoted as saying something like, “these are the most beautiful lands discovered so far – ours by right of conquest.” As best as I can remember, the author states a little later that Capt. John Minor made a treaty with the Weantinock, building (and nominally owning) a Watch House for the settler plantation. The house “watched over” the agricultural fields of the Indigenous band (clan?) living there at the time, awaiting the time that the Indians did not plant the fields and the settler colonists could fence the land and establish individual property rights by maintaining those fences.

Looking East toward the Nonnewaug Stone Fish Weir and the floodplain Agricultural Fields associated with the Nonnewaug Wigwams, one of  two known Contact Era Pootatuck Villages.

    My mother-in-law could never put her hand on the title search she compiled for an Adult Education program she once participated in, “How Old is Your Old House?” I’ve never duplicated the search, so I don’t know exactly when the paper trail began for this house. A Late Medieval wooden structure, one of the architectural details, a stairway to the right
in the front entryway, allowing the free movement of the sword arm of the master of the house at the top of the stairs while limiting that of the person entering, is a diagnostic trait used to date castles in England and Ireland to before 1734.

    Perhaps something similar occurred here on this floodplain, a Watch House at the Nonnewaug Wigwams, nominally owned by the same  John Minor for the Pomperauge Plantation…

    

“1702: Deed of "A Certain Tract of Land called Weeantenock" from 14 Indians to the "Proprietors of New Milford" (109 people). The purchase price? "Sixty pounds Current money of this Colony of Connecticut and Twenty pounds in Goods." This deed is recorded in the Town Records at Volume 9, page 269 and in Hartford. New Milford was called a Plantation until 1712.

1703: The legislative title to the land called a "Patent" was granted to New Milford by an act of the General Court (the Governor and his assistants) on October 22.

1705: Indians leave their Fort Hill land, where they had a large settlement and a Fort.”

Time-Line History of New Milford http://www.newmilford.org/content/3090/3100/3824.aspx