Location

Name Origin

Language Spoken

Connecticut Village Locations

Population

Culture

The 18th century Tribe followed a traditional seasonal round of group movements involving a winter-spring village, a summer village, and numerous smaller camps at which economic activities occurred, such as fishing, hunting, tin crafting, and collecting materials for basket and broom-making. The community supported itself through a mixed economy of maize agriculture, home gardens, hunting and fishing, and small livestock farming. Tribal members added to these subsistence activities by selling woodsplint baskets, brooms, canoes, tin products, and other wood objects to white farmers and shopkeepers.

History

The Schaghticoke Tribe was first documented as an Indian community within the Housatonic Valley of Connecticut Colony as early as the seventeenth century. Under the leadership of its first recorded Sachem, Gideon Mauwee, the Tribe became a refuge for Indians who were fleeing colonists. The 18th century community consisted of 500-600 members, mostly of Mahican, but including those of Oweantinock, Pequot, Pootatuck, and Tunxis descent.

In 1740, missionaries from the Moravian Brethren, an evangelical Protestant sect headquartered in Pennsylvania, began to visit the Schaghticoke and other tribes in northwestern Connecticut and Dutchess County, New York. In 1743, the Tribe invited the Moravians to build a mission and school on the Schaghticoke Reserve. The missionary activity lasted until approximately 1770, when the English permanently forced the Moravians from the land.

It was during this time that the Tribe began to experience the economic and socio-political problems suffered by coastal tribes a century earlier. The end of the boundary dispute between the colonies of Connecticut and New York opened up the "Western Lands" to white settlers. Droves of white farmers, traders, and entrepreneurs moved to northwestern Connecticut, encroaching on Tribal lands and disrupting the Native economy.

To protect Tribal interests and land, in 1757 Schaghticoke leaders asked the General Assembly to appoint their friend and neighbor Jabez Swift as overseer to the Tribe. Connecticut's response was a long line of individual and institutional overseers that lasted until the Tribe spearheaded a change in the late-20th century from state oversight to government-to-government interaction - a change that ultimately saved the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation from government attempts to force it into extinction.

In New Fairfield on April 24, 1729, colonists negotiated with Chief Squantz of the Schaghticoke to purchase 49.9 square miles or about 30,000 acres of wooded, hilly ground for sixty-five pounds sterling which included Squantz Pond as well as the land on which Candlewood Lake was eventually built on.

It is said that Squantz Pond State Park takes its name from Chief Squantz who lived at the northern tip of the lake, which is now separated from the rest of Candlewood Lake by the Route 39 causeway. Before becoming a state park, the area around Squantz Pond was also a farm and an apple orchard. Despite many changes to the land, the presence of the original residents is still marked by occasionally uncovered artifacts such as stone adzes, mallets and other tools. The remains of an Indian canoe over 22 feet long and 5 feet wide was raised from the bottom of the lake, leading to speculation that even before the settlers came, Squantz Pond may have been much larger than it was just prior to its expansion during the flooding of Candlewood Lake.