Mansion_rev8.qxd - National Park Service

the entire homeland, were often spiritually revered. In
the nineteenth century, historians recorded Abenaki
petroglyphs of the native flora and fauna that reflected the
culture’s value of the natural world. [Figure 1.5]
The Western Abenaki called their homeland Ndakinna
meaning “our land.” 13 The land was organized into territories
belonging to five bands—the Missisquois, Pigwackets,
Pennacooks, Sokokis, and Cowasucks—whose individual
homelands occupied distinct geographic regions, each
with a principal year-round village. [Figure 1.6] At the time
of European contact in the seventeenth century, the
Woodstock area was probably within the Cowasuck
homeland. The principal Cowasuck village was Cowass,
located near the present-day village of Newbury, Vermont,
on the Connecticut River. 14
During the warmer seasons, families left the principal
village for their own hunting territories, established
according to the limits of watersheds, where they maintained
small seasonal camps. 15 Little is known about the
appearance of these seasonal camps, except that they were
usually established on high ground close to rivers, and had
agricultural fields on adjoining floodplains. 16 In these
fields, the Western Abenaki may have grown crops such as
corn, beans, squash, and tobacco. Agriculture was limited
by the short growing season, so that hunting, fishing, and
gathering remained important mainstays. Passenger
pigeons, deer, bears, moose, muskrat, beaver, and otter,
along with eel, salmon, and trout were important staples.
Some of the Western Abenakis’ favorite foods gathered
from the forests included maple and birch sap, spring
greens, blueberries, butternuts, and chestnuts. 17
The first Europeans to settle at the eastern foot of Mount
Tom in the 1770s encountered what was probably evidence
of Native American habitation. Historian Henry Swan
Dana, in his 1889 History of Woodstock, wrote that settlers
found a clearing in the woods on the floodplain east of the
Mansion grounds near the present location of the barns at
Billings Farm & Museum. According to Dana, this clearing
had been “occupied some time in the history of this valley
as an Indian camping ground.” The exact location and size
of the clearing was not recorded, and apparently the
PRE-1789
Figure 1.6: Ndakinna, the Western Abenaki homeland, showing general
location of major bands about 1600. Based on map in Colin
Calloway, The Western Abenakis of Vermont (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1990), 4-5. SUNY ESF.
Europeans found no other traces of habitation, as by that
time the camp may have been long abandoned. 18 The
Western Abenaki population had been decimated by this
time due to many factors, including European diseases and
cultural influences. Already by the mid seventeenth century,
the population had fallen from a pre-contact level of
about 10,000 to a few hundred, a decline of more than
ninety percent by best estimates. 19
Given that the Western Abenaki had practiced agriculture
for centuries prior to the arrival of the Europeans, the
clearing observed by European settlers may have been a
fallow agricultural field that was part of a Cowasuck family’s
seasonal camp. This location would have provided
such desirable attributes as ready access to water, including
the Ottauquechee River, its tributary Barnard Brook (then
known as the North Branch of the Ottauquechee River),
and springs on Mount Tom; elevated terraces to provide
safety from floods; and southern and eastern exposure for
13