Mohican History Walking Tour of Stockbridge (Stop Nine)

Town Cemetery

Connections

Berkshire OLLI will again be sponsoring “Footprints of Our Ancestors” tours during the Housatonic Heritage walk month in 2025. For the past few years, Kate Kidd and I have led many of these walks along Main Street in Stockbridge. We will be offering the walks on most weekends in September as well as the first weekend in October. Details will appear in the Housatonic Heritage brochure as well as the OLLI website.

In this series of posts, I am describing topics that have been featured. Some of these are in addition to the material in the brochure and short videos, all of which are linked to in my posts.

A description of Stop One is here, my write-up on Stop Two can be found here, Stop Three here, and Stop Nine here.

Even if you have absorbed all of the material in these posts, please join us in person, if you can. Each walk is different because we mold our conversation around the comments and questions from those on the walk. It’s a wonderful way to spend a couple of hours on a crisp autumn day.

About the Cemetery, from the Brochure (<click for a pdf version)

Mohican tribal member Naunauneecannuck’s property is the eastern half of what is now the Town Cemetery. Mohicans traditionally had one name rather than first and last name. After baptism in the Stockbridge mission, his name Naunauneecannuck became a last name, with the first name given as David. Eventually, the first name David became a last name in the Stockbridge Munsee tribe, “Davids.” The Davids family in the tribe today are therefore direct descendants of David Naunauneecannuck and have a direct cultural connection to this land. Please walk over to the southwest corner of the cemetery to view a memorial to Chief Konkapot, as well as two Stockbridge Indian women, Roxy Seebuck and Sarah Towsey, the widow of Revolutionary War veteran. The cemetery also contains the grave of Reverend Sergeant and his wife.

The Stockbridge-Munsee Community through its Tribal Historic Preservation office actively worked to ensure the grave markers for the two Stockbridge Indian women were put in place, and tribal members continue to visit to pay respects at the cemetery, placing tobacco at the graves as an offering.

Further Comments

Gratitude is a central value to the local indigenous culture (and that is true throughout most — if not all — of North America). One common act of gratitude is to make an offering of thanks by using tobacco, as mentioned in the quotation from the brochure. Also, it is presented to give thanks when harvesting a plant or animal for food.

Traditionally, tobacco is not used recreationally, but is a sacred plant employed in ceremonies. I have participated in sitting circles in which a small container of smoldering tobacco is passed around (usually in a clay container, sometimes suspended by rawhide straps) and each participant waves one hand inward to gather in the smoke. Thus purified and blessed, they then pass the smoking vessel on to the next person.

The grave marker mentioned above honors two women buried in the town cemetery. The whereabouts of their graves is unknown, since the Natives did not use gravestones, but they are known to have been buried in the old part of the cemetery. In the memorial stone, as indicated, there is an small cavity, which I point out during our tours, for the purpose of holding tobacco offerings. I usually demonstrate by placing a small amount of tobacco from a pouch that was given to me by a Abenaki friend. And then I offer the pouch to anyone who wants to do the same. Usually no one volunteers, but when I was guiding a group of Brothertown Indians, nearly all of them took me up on the offer.

As a result, I was running low on tobacco. eBay does not allow the sale of tobacco products, so I found a website that does. I could have ordered an ounce of pipe tobacco for about $3.50 but the shipping charge was $8, so I declined. A few days later I stopped in a local Mobil convenience store to see if they sold pipe tobacco. Yes, they did, for about the same price. So I bought an ounce. "Do you need matches?" the clerk asked. No, I told him, I was going to use if for offerings, not for smoking. He gave me a funny look.

Cemetery Words

I always point out the words on an earlier memorial stone that were said to have been written by Captain John Konkapot (for more on him, see my post re Stop One).

In customizing each tour to the interests of the participants, I sometimes mention pieces of Stockbridge history that post-date the years covered by the brochure. I might point out, for example, a house on Main Street built by a relative of mine in the 1790s, or the place where the “third rail” (electrification) of trolleys was invented. One story that overlaps with both periods is the tale of Mumbet (Elizabeth Freeman).

I once guided a group of middle school students, telling them some of Mumbet’s story. When we arrived at the cemetery I took them on a side trip to her grave. They were delighted to learn that Massachusetts had been the first place in this country to liberate a woman from slavery.

Thus ends our time in the town cemetery, stop number nine of eleven. I have thus far written about three of them. The others will follow as I have time to write them up.