Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center

At Mashantucket in the 1760s, a community called Indiantown was established on the western edge of the Great Cedar Swamp. Indiantown was modeled after the villages of European colonists, with framed houses clustered together at the town center and surrounded by barns, root cellars, and wells. Evidence suggests that domesticated animals were common at Indiantown, and that some of the settlement’s pasture land and cultivated fields were enclosed with stone walls. Significantly, the community also had a meeting house -- a place of worship -- and a cemetery.

Indiantown Today

What stands on the site of Indiantown today are the remains of a Native village whose occupants had embraced an entirely new way of life. The remains of house foundations, stone walls and outbuildings can still be seen at Indiantown, where a group of Christian Pequots adopted many European ways of life before leaving Mashantucket in the Brotherton Migration.

The Pequots who lived at Indiantown were Christian converts -- followers of the Native missionary Samson Occum. In response to the mounting impact of land loss and poverty, the Reverend Occum set forth a formula for the salvation and preservation of his fellow New England Natives. “What Occum was advocating was the establishment of Christian Indian farming communities,” says Dr. Kevin McBride of the University of Connecticut and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. “He advocated the best of European culture -- sobriety, work ethic, farming -- and the best of native society, including the values inherent in family and the land. The irony was that he was advocating adoption of European-style farming, architecture, clothing, and form of government in an effort to maintain Native identity.”

Before its abandonment in the Brotherton Migration, Indiantown was the perfect reflection of Samson Occum's model. Faced with a diminishing land base, the Christian Pequots living there had adopted the agricultural methods of European colonists, which allowed them to farm a smaller area of land more intensively than the traditional practice of clearing new fields every few years.

“This is one of the few Native communities of its kind that was internally generated,” says Dr. McBride. “It wasn't imposed on the outside by Europeans, as we see in previous efforts to Christianize Natives. That's a very old idea by the English, that if you're going to civilize Natives, you've got to first Christianize them. And if you're going to Christianize them, you first have to make them live after the European manner -- you have to make them work like Europeans, you have to make them look like Europeans, you have to make them live like Europeans. In the case of the Indiantown Pequots, this was a Native decision to do that.”

Indiantown was abandoned at about the same time that Occum’s followers moved west to establish a new community called Brothertown, around 1795. Presumably, the residents of Indiantown joined this migration.