While we’re about to hear a great deal about the Pilgrims’ landing in Plymouth a year from now during the 400th anniversary celebration, chances are we’ll hear little about what happened in and around Bristol, Warren, and Barrington the year after the Pilgrims landed, in 1621.
Readers of Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower discovered a decade ago that much of the story of that time actually took place in what is now Southern Massachusetts and nearby Rhode Island.
I, hailing from Bristol, along with Helen Tjader of Barrington, identified locations in eight communities including Barrington, Bristol, East Providence, and Providence, as well as Rehoboth, Seekonk and Swansea, and have set out to give them national recognition. The area was then known as Sowams, meaning “southern area” in the Native Pokanoket language, a vast area of largely cleared land first discovered by Edward Winslow when he first walked there from Plymouth in 1621.
Winslow had met the Massasoit, or Chief of Chiefs, Osamequin, when he walked into the Plymouth settlement on March 22, 1621. Realizing that the English, with their guns and cannons, could help protect him from the incursion of the Narragansetts to his west, the Massasoit struck a treaty with the Pokanokets that neither should harm one another, a truce now celebrated on the back of the Sacagawea dollar coin first minted in 2000. The English in turn benefited greatly from his knowledge about the land and successful ways of hunting and fishing in their new home. This mutually-supportive relationship prevailed for half a century until the Massasoit’s death in 1661.
The Massasoit was buried in what is now Burr’s Hill Park (behind my own house) in an Indian burial ground that was unknown until after the King Philip’s War when the land was taken by Plymouth Colony. A monument to Massasoit Osamequin now sits in the Park marking the place where 42 Pokanoket graves and their contents were exhumed in 1913 by then Town Librarian Charles Carr, an amateur archaeologist. Carr acquired permission to remove artifacts from the Providence, Bristol, and Warren Railroad Company which had been taking gravel from the site to build a rail line that is now the route of the East Bay Bicycle Path.
While only a dozen houses built prior to 1700 still stand in the eight communities that make up Sowams, dozens of other sites have been located and are now described, documented, and mapped on the extensive SowamsHeritageArea.org website. Some locations preserve evidence of the 14-month King Philip’s War that began in Warren in 1675, including six cemeteries where participants were buried and a monument at the Myles Garrison where the war began. Artifacts from that period can also be found at the Carpenter Museum in Rehoboth and at the Martin House in Swansea.
Two colonial-era farms and many open spaces and waterways that remain essentially unchanged from that time are described on the website. Churches that first assembled prior to 1700 and located in Bristol, East Providence, and Swansea are also included. Parks, including the Roger Williams Memorial, Slate Rock Park, and India Point Park in Providence were built on land in use during the 1600s. Even the Weybosset Bridge in downtown Providence is built on the same site where the first bridge was constructed in the late 1600s. Roger Williams was said to have served for a time as the toll taker for that Bridge.
What was most interesting to me are the locations of significance to the Pokanoket Tribe who occupied the land for 10,000 years or more. Best known is Potumtuk, or King Philip’s Seat, at Mount Hope in Bristol, located on land now owned by Brown University. Permission to visit the Seat can be obtained at Mount Hope Farm. Less well known is King’s Rock on Sachem’s Knoll that straddles the Warren-Swansea line on Route 136. Native women were said to have ground their corn atop the Rock, and a perched or balanced rock that sits on a bedrock outcropping across from Johnson’s Market was likely placed there by Native people to mark the sacred site. Other locations include Abrams’ Rock behind the Swansea Town Hall and Anawan Rock in Rehoboth, the site of the final battle of King Philip’s war.
I continue to be fascinated by the massive transition from Native to colonial occupation of the Sowams land. It’s a story that should be as well-known as that of the Pilgrims in Plymouth. Making this a National Heritage Area would go a long way toward bringing this important history to light.
David Weed is Coordinator for Sowams Heritage Area Project and can be reached at drweed@cox.net
