Come and join us on Memorial Day to learn the history of our early settlement...straight out of our 250 years of History!
There is so much history in this little CNY area I live in …but it seems time and time again only the glitzy, money pushed, history sites make it to our attention.
Take for instance the existence of a peace-seeking town where people could interact as brothers working together to form a new community and a better life after many struggles.
No it isn’t a commune with religious fanatics or gun totting radicals… it is a place called Brothertown. Yes Brothertown.
This town like every other Native American site has been pushed out of our local history. Brothertown was located around the area we call Deansboro today.
The population of it was made up of a number of New England tribes that had been marginalized (our new modern term) as the white man took over American soil. Pequots, Mahegans, Mohegans, Narragansetts, and more. (Yes Uncas’ Mohegans)
The idea was the brainchild of leaders like Joseph Johnson and then organized and realized by Samson Occum. Both Native Americans who had attended the school of Rev. Eleazer Wheelock, both Christian converts. Samson Occom became the first Native American to have his works published and was considered a fabulous public speaker which can be attested to by the amount of money he raised in England for Rev. Wheelock’s cause… of educating Native Americans in Christian white culture. The money raised eventually helped Wheelock form Dartmouth College, which like our own Hamilton College pandered to white societies children.
Started on a tract of land given to them by the Oneida Nation prior to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the community never came into being until after the Revolution. Then the group in the 1830’s was pushed out to Wisconsin. A few remained or returned thanks to the help of Quaker missionaries… but the site itself now is just another American community called Deansboro, and roads like Bougusville Hill Road are nothing but back roads where a NYS Historic Marker denotes an abandon cemetery or two… and nothing more.
Samson Occum was a special man we should know about in our local history.
With all the rain this week I was unable to finish a video that I have planned to do on Samson Occum's graveyard at Occum Grove. As the Madison County Historian I got to meet one of the Mahican historian's who was researching the different families that migrated to Brothertown and although many think that the Brothertown and Stockbridge tribes just signed the paper to sell the land without duress before their move to Wisconsin... this is something I sincerely doubt considering the atmosphere and hatred of the era of "Indian Relocation to reservation in the West". We may never know. But locally the move occurred after the death of Samson Occum their leader.
Samson Occum was an unusual man… he was said to be a direct descendant of the great Chief Uncas of the Mohegan’s. (There were a number of Uncas leaders… a fictitious one was put in as a character in James Fennimore Cooper’s “Last of the Mohegan’s”.)
Occum studied at the Rev. Eleazer Wheelock’s “Latin Theology” school and was able to read English and Hebrew. After graduation Samson became an ordained Presbyterian minister and teacher to the Pequot’s of Montauk, New York.
In 1851 his former teacher Rev. Wheelock…asked Occum to travel abroad to raise money for a charity school he was founding for the schooling of Native American children in Christian white ways.
On this tour of England, Occum and a co-speaker raised over 12,000 pounds for Wheelock and preached 300 plus speeches (sermons – appeals) to an audience that was most likely in awe of a Native American preacher and speaker. *King George himself donated 200 of these pounds.
While Occum was out of the country however… the money he raised was being used by Wheelock to start what would become Dartmouth College, a school that catered to children of white families with some money. (Wheelock had also failed to take care of Occum’s wife and children… something that was part of the agreement he made with Wheelock before leaving.)
So with his son-in-law Joseph Johnson, Occum then set out to found his own tribe of Christian Indians from the New England area, they became known as Brothertowns. The Brothertowns settled on a parcel of property given to them by the Christian Oneida’s of Kanowanhole, the land lying in today’s Town of Marshall.
This piece was just outside of Rev. Samuel Kirkland’s parcel now called Clinton. (Kirkland) Ironically Kirkland said that he too was going to found a college where the White and Native Americans could learn together. That college became today’s Hamilton College and up until recent years that school had not graduated one Native American.
Occum’s home is marked by and NYS Historic marker near Deansboro and Samson Occum is buried in the Occum Grove Cemetery on Bougusville Hill Road. His obituary was carried in many Newspapers and the Rev. Samuel Kirkland delivered his funeral sermon. Some of Occum’s papers rest today at Dartmouth College.
The chief of the Christian Oneida’s that supported the colonies in the Revolutionary War and great friend of Kirkland’s who gave land and promoted the college for co-education of Native Americans and whites...(Skenandoah) is buried with Kirkland at the Hamilton College Cemetery.
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