Archive 2008 - 2019

Arrival in the New World

by Martha DeWolf
1/31/2012

The history of a place and the attitude of the people inhabiting it are entangled and inseparable. The Bullards were the direct descendant of a yeoman farming family of Barnham, northwestern Suffolk County, England.  Four brothers from that family came to New England in the early 1630’s.

Born in England, Benjamin Bullard, the son of one of them, settled on the then-western frontier (now Holliston) as a young man and first put the plow to the land around 1652.  His descendants lived on and farmed the same piece of land for the next six generations over two hundred years.

Thus the farm itself was a major part of the family identity.  It defined the Bullard family’s status socially, shaped its thinking of the future, and created its personal mythology. The early nineteenth century Bullards saw themselves as continuing a steadfast tradition as independent yeomen, owners or tenants of heritable land, as had been their age-long custom in England.  In America, they were sturdy and practical farmers who, when they had accumulated a modest amount of money, reinvested it in more land.  Their experience on this particular piece of land shaped who they would become in the 19th century.  Their children's and their grandchildren’s outlook and attitude, born deep into the industrial revolution, precedes and is the root of the attitudes prevalent in the early 21st century.  Theirs is a headlong rush into the future and - at the end of their lives - faint bewilderment at what they and their children had wrought upon the planet.

The Bullard ancestors immigrated to America in the 1630’s along with some twenty thousand others seeking freedoms and land unavailable at home in England.  The Bullards were among the yeoman and Puritans coming to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and not the separatist Pilgrims of Plymouth.  However, while the leaders of the Puritans were largely motivated by religious, political, and economic purposes, the yeomen, as typified by the Bullard brothers, were primarily seeking successful agricultural opportunities; they were looking for land to farm and raise their families. 

The Bullard brothers, Robert, John, George and William came from Barnham, which is situated at the northern edge of the poor, flinty, soils of Suffolk County’s Brecklands.  Two of the brothers, Robert and John, had married the Martyn sisters, Ann and Magdalen.  Ann had three small children and Magdalen had an infant when they arrived.  Ann, Robert, their children and Robert’s brothers John, William, and George, all probably went first to Watertown, where Robert and George settled and remained. William and John moved immediately to Dedham when it was founded in 1635.

The land to which these settlers had come was immense. The boundaries of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were set forth by edict as "lying between three miles north of the Merrimac [River] and three miles to the south of Charles River, and in length...from the Atlantic Ocean to the South Sea [Pacific Ocean].  The land was not, as some early settlers may have anticipated, a largely unpopulated wilderness.  In fact, the country of southern New England had been inhabited for many centuries by agricultural Indians.  Extensive areas had been long cultivated and paths on the lands had been well traveled for generations before the English came.  Indigenous Americans lacked iron tools, but they had fire.  In what is now the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the indigenous people had annually burned the woodlands and meadows to control the under-story of woody plants.  This allowed large areas of grass to grow for the whitetail deer, elk, beaver, rabbit, porcupine as well as turkey and quail, etc. [Cronin, William; Changes in the Land; 1983.]  Annual spring flooding, particularly along the banks of the upper Charles River, also drowned out the establishment of tree seedlings, and the grassy meadows and marsh there stretched for miles.

On the North American continent, pre-contact indigenous American population estimates vary wildly from 2 million to 18 million.  Whatever the number, European diseases killed perhaps 90% of that population. The passage of disease commenced before English settlement even began, transferred first from Viking whaling ships (9th to 11th centuries) [McGovern, Thomas. 1990. The Archaeology of the Norse North Atlantic. Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 19, 331-351] and then Basque fishing fleets and already established fishing stations which the first English explorers noted. [Kurlansky, Mark. 1999. The Basque History of the World. Walker & Company, New York.]  Just as ancient oriental diseases had devastated Europe in the centuries before, these same pestilences, to which the English had developed resistance, were brought to America and caused mass mortality in the Indian villages, especially along the coast.  The European pestilence was thinly reciprocated by the introduction of syphilis to Europe which was treated with another American export; Sassafras.  Sassafras was popular from its first import by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1602 until the 18th century for its medicinal value treating the syphilis which spread throughout Europe.  During the early part of the seventeenth century sassafras was the second-largest export from America behind tobacco. The wood was also prized for its beauty and durability.  The Colonial economy also relied on those other items that were so abundant in America; cod, whale products and timber as well as fur.   

By 1620, the American Indian populations were only a small percentage of what they had previously.  Those who remained were devastated.  The depopulation caused by the epidemics led to the abandonment of entire villages, such as the one at Plymouth, and the gathering of the remaining Indians into centers that they could defend more effectively against raids by non-agricultural tribes to the west and north.  In Massachusetts the surviving agricultural Indians at the time of the first English settlements in Massachusetts and the first generation of English settlers lived mostly at peace.  The Pilgrims were obviously not a threat to the Indians as they had arrived with women and children and were not in good health.  Fifty percent of those who landed would die the first winter.  The two peoples came together in a time of mutual need.  The Indians needed allies against the Mohegans and the Pilgrims needed to survive in the New World.

Life for the following generations, however, was not as harmonious as that of their parents.   A major factor in the war between the Indigenous Americans and the English was that the very nature of English agriculture was incompatible with indigenous agriculture.  In extremely simple terms the cause of the Pequot War was increased pressures over access to the fur trade, the manufacture of wampum and murder. The English built fences, not to keep animals in, but to keep animals out of their own cultivated land.  Their horses, cows, sheep and particularly pigs were free to roam and forage.  Indigenous Americans farmed without fences and though the English animals constantly ruined their crops and stores, the English did little or nothing to stop it. The English population was increasing each year and the pressure for more land for more English settlers was marginalizing the Indian settlements. The English had competitors for the land in other Europeans as well, and they took up as much as they possibly could for England.  

In 1634 a grist mill dam was built on the lower Charles River at Watertown severely limiting fish migration up the river.  [http://www.epa.gov/region1/charles/history.html ]  The same year, a slaver named John Stone, along with seven of his crew were killed at the mouth of the Connecticut River (while kidnapping Indian women and children for sale in the Virginia Colony), in retaliation for the murder of the sachem Tatobem aboard a Dutch trading vessel. The Puritans in Boston protested and demanded that the warriors responsible be sent to Massachusetts Bay Colony for trial and penalty.  Understandably the Niantic refused.

Two years later, in the summer of 1636 a well-known trader named John Oldham, along with his crew, was killed on a trading voyage to Block Island.  In retaliation the English sent 90 men to Block Island where they burned two apparently abandoned villages and destroyed the stores of grain that they could not carry away.  Throughout the fall and winter of 1636-37 the Pequot besieged Fort Saybrook.  When spring came the Indians attacked several Connecticut towns. Wethersfield was attacked killing six men and three women, as well as some cattle and horses, and two young girls were taken captive.  The Indians killed about thirty English in the Connecticut Colony.

The English raised a militia and on May 26, 1637 four hundred men under the command of Captain John Mason, attacked the Indian town of Misituck (Mystic, Connecticut) where they found mostly older men, women of all ages and children, the warriors having gone to attack Hartford.  Captain Mason ordered the town burned.  Of the six to seven hundred people at Misituck that day, seven survived as captives and seven escaped to the woods.  This slaughter was incomprehensible to the Indians.   In June 160 English men with 40 Mohegan scouts caught up with the Pequot near what is now Fairfield, Connecticut.  Surrounded in the swamp the Pequot refused to surrender. This time the English allowed the women and children to leave and in the battle that followed 180 Pequot men were killed or captured and the Pequot War was over.

 © Copyright 2012, Martha L. DeWolf

Comments (2)

Martha, Very interesting, a great read to start my morning. Thanks for sharing it! Pete MacDonald

Pete MacDonald | 2012-02-06 06:25:16

Martha, Thank you for all of this. It really is an incredible story and place. I would like to meet you one day.

Tony | 2012-02-03 08:17:41