Iconic New England Stone Fences along the roadsides,
Old Indian Trails paved in layers of gravel and asphalt,
Chip sealed the
day before yesterday,
Rebuilt into
estate walls during the days of the WPA…
Mr. Freeman was a regular at the coffee shop
in the town I’m from in Connecticut, and he had family there that went way
back, reflected in his last name, from a time when a black person’s last name
was their own name. He had many a story to tell about the old days in Watertown
and many of the surrounding towns. One particular morning, he was talking about
how his grandfather was a stone mason who had worked on the famous walls of the
Whittemore Estate, over by Lake Quassapaug. My Great Grandfather Giovanni
Rinaldi also worked on those same stone walls, part of a crew of three that
included one of his brothers and a cousin. I mentioned that to him, added that
Giovanni lived nearby, the first farm in Woodbury to have electricity, and Mr.
Freeman told me he was familiar with that side of the lake because, as a kid,
he used to spend the summers there with his Woodbury Indian grandmother, at the
Indian Fish Camp.
Now, this conversation happened in 1990, just
after I’d first come across and read an Ancient
History of Woodbury CT that had no information about the house my family
was living in, but it did get me started thinking about the possibility that I
was observing Indigenous Stonework, sort of like waking up to find I was on
Turtle Island at an actual Village site. I had just reviewed the old “go to” 1850s History of Connecticut Indians by
John DeForest who was under the impression that only one insignificant group of
Indians, the Pootatuck, ever lived in the “desert” of Litchfield County in Northwestern
CT.
Mr. DeForest called the Woodbury Indians, the Pootatuck,
“extinct,” vanished with barely a trace, and forever gone in that book.
When I mentioned that to Mr. Freeman, he
remarked that his Grandmother “must’ve never read that book.”
34 years later, I’m driving by some of that
Whittemore Estate stonework, thinking about the foundation of my house where I’ve
been removing Portland cement and am about to start repairing with lime mortar.
I stop for a moment because all these rhomboidal stones have caught my eye…
And then, there’s this turtle in profile, and then I start to think about Mr. Freeman’s Grandfather, and Woodbury Indians, and wonder "Just who is a "Real Indian?"
