After the story headlined “Did you know…” who the first inhabitants of Lincoln were? story was published on December 9, town historian Jack MacLean offered this additional information abut the map that was included:

The map here shows Massachuset territories extending further north than was the case at the time of contact. Along the coast, lands associated with the Pawtucket Confederation extended down to Charlestown, which was purchased from Pawtucket leaders. Boston (Shawmut) was associated with the Massachuset, with the Charles River providing a divide. Watertown and Cambridge south of the river were also Massachuset. However, Lincoln’s primary parent community of Concord was purchased from local leaders (Tahattawan) and from Squaw Sachem, along with her second husband, who lived at Mistick (Medford). Squaw Sachem had succeeded her first husband (Nanepashemet) as the leader of the Pawtucket Confederation. While Concord was formally seen as being under Squaw Sachem and the Pawtucket Confederation, the close proximity of the two “tribal” groups in this area indeed suggests much fluidity and interconnectedness.

David, it should be noted, is the coauthor with his mother of The First Peoples of the Northeast.

By David P. Braun

When people ask, “who were the first inhabitants of Lincoln,” they often mean, “what tribe lived here?” The short answer is, probably Massachuset.

But as best we can tell, most Native American “tribes” were somewhat fluid. They did not have rigid boundaries or a concept of land as property in the way that the European invaders did. With some exceptions, they were more like loose confederacies of local communities that sometimes acted together as larger groups. They had territories based upon their traditional uses of the landscape, their shared history, and their shared history of alliances and disputes with neighboring groups. They spoke related, mutually intelligible Algonquian languages and were descendants of Algonquian-speaking communities that had lived and evolved together for thousands of years.

The exact tribes known from the historic record may not have had that much antiquity. Social relationships and identities likely evolved over those thousands of years, as lifeways changed and as populations grew and shifted over time. But the incorporation of agriculture into their lifeways starting around 1000 A.D. likely brought considerable changes. Populations grew faster, and areas with good soils for farming would have become valuable resources.

Occasionally, where the edges of tribal territories met or overlapped, the communities would have worked out rules for sharing. There is a lake in Webster, Massachusetts, famously named (or at least so recorded), as

“Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg”

If my memory serves, this native name is usually translated literally as something like “you fish on your side of the lake, we fish on our side of the lake, and nobody fishes in the middle.” However, Algonquian languages are very figurative. The local communities might have thought of the lake simply as “Border Treaty Lake.”

Places such as Lincoln, which is mostly upland terrain, may have been part of some native communities’ identities and hunting territories before Europeans arrived, but not the site of winter or even seasonal villages. That was not how the indigenous communities lived. Instead, the adjacent Sudbury/Concord/Merrimack River valley and its wetlands would have been far more important as dwelling places. The rivers were avenues of travel and sources of food, and the floodplains would have provided productive farmland near to their villages.

The arrival of the Europeans in the early 1600s and the fatal diseases they brought caused havoc, disrupting the indigenous peoples’ lives, locations, and connections with each other. Many communities became mixtures of local natives and refugees from neighboring areas that had suffered worse. And the written records we have of these communities post-date the start of that havoc. They do not necessarily record how the people lived beforehand. The historic records, biased though they may be (after all, who wrote them? Not the natives…), suggest that the natives did their best to maintain their sense of identity and their identification with their traditional home landscapes. But the European diseases killed their elders fast. As the native communities lost their elders (with their unwritten stores of history and traditional knowledge), they lost much of their collective cultural memories.

It is wrenching to think of the thousands of years of tradition and knowledge that were lost with the erasure of these communities.

For those who wish to read more, I recommend Charles Mann’s book, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (2011). It is grim reading but also important and fascinating. Also valuable is Nathaniel Philbrick’s book, Mayflower (2006). This also is grim and specific to southeastern New England, but an excellent treatment of how the natives and early European settlers in the Massachusetts Bay area perceived and treated each other.

Addendum — After this story was published, town historian Jack MacLean offered this additional information abut the map:

The map here shows Massachuset territories extending further north than was the case at the time of contact. Along the coast, lands associated with the Pawtucket Confederation extended down to Charlestown, which was purchased from Pawtucket leaders. Boston (Shawmut) was associated with the Massachuset, with the Charles River providing a divide. Watertown and Cambridge south of the river were also Massachuset. However, Lincoln’s primary parent community of Concord was purchased from local leaders (Tahattawan) and from Squaw Sachem, along with her second husband, who lived at Mistick (Medford). Squaw Sachem had succeeded her first husband (Nanepashemet) as the leader of the Pawtucket Confederation. While Concord was formally seen as being under Squaw Sachem and the Pawtucket Confederation, the close proximity of the two “tribal” groups in this area indeed suggests much fluidity and interconnectedness.

David, it should be noted, is the coauthor with his mother of The First Peoples of the Northeast.

“Lincoln’s History” is an occasional column by members of the Lincoln Historical Society.

A new photo has been added to the photo gallery at the bottom of the December 8, 2021 story headlined “Archivist, family members unwrap a historic quilt.” The inadvertently omitted image shows a square hand-written by Joseph Flint.

The Lincoln Public Library archives contain all sorts of historical items, but not all of them are on paper — a quilt that was made for a woman before she sailed off to be a missionary recently came out of the vault to be admired and rewrapped.

The Flint family, which has lived in Lincoln since the 1600s, donated the quilt to the library some years ago. Three generations of Flints were on hand in the Tarbell Room when the quilt was removed from its box, carefully unfolded on the big table, and refolded with layers of acid-free tissue paper for posterity.

Overseeing the process was Virginia Rundell, Lincoln’s town archivist, who splits her part-time job between the library and working with materials including vital records (births, marriages and deaths) the Town Office Building. 

When 26-year-old Mary Susan Rice, an ancestor of the Flints, decided to travel to Persia in 1847 to pursue her missionary vocation, members of the Lincoln Ladies’ Missionary Sewing Circle (part of the First Parish Congregational Church) sewed individual squares for the quilt and added hand-written messages of inspiration and affection, many of which are still legible today. They did this knowing that it would serve as a cherished reminder of her Lincoln home for Rice, who quite possibly would never return, given the dangers of distant travel at the time.

The large quilt (109” x 96”) has an unusual structure, with cutouts at the two bottom corners to allow it to be laid flat on a four-poster bed. It was made of scraps of many types of material but only lightly quilted for “sentimental value rather than hard everyday use,” according to a 1998 article by Tracy Barron of the American Quilt Study Group.

Each of the 82 squares contains a personal note or Bible verse signed by Rice’s numerous friends, family and acquaintances, among them her mother, who penned a heartfelt inscription into the cloth:

Father to Thee
I yield the trust. O bless her with a love
Deeper and purer, stronger far than mine.
Shield her from sin, from sorrow and from pain.
But should thy wisdom deem affliction best,
Let love be mingled with the chastening.
With an unshrinking heart I give her, Lord, to Thee.
Thy will, not mine be done.

(A bit of research revealed that this was not an original composition by Rice’s mother; it appeared at least once before in print. It’s part of “Love’s Offering” published in The Mother’s Magazine in 1840.)

Rice was well qualified to teach at the Fiske Girls’ School in Oroomiah, Persia (now Rezaiyeh, Iran) — she had attended Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary (later Mt. Holyoke College), founded just 10 years before her departure by Mary Lyon, who also contributed a Biblical verse and wish on one of the quilt’s squares.

Rice did in fact return to Lincoln after 22 years in Persia, where she “helped implement progressive ideas about the roe of women in a society where women were not educated and considered second-class citizens,” Barron says. Some of her students even converted to Christianity in “Holyoke-style revivals.” She resumed living in Lincoln and attending Sewing Circle meetings until her death in 1903.

Mary Susan Rice was the sister of Caroline Rice Flint, the great-grandmother of Peggy Flint Weir and Ephraim Flint. Mary and Caroline grew up in the house that still stands at 7 Old Lexington Rd. When Mary returned from Persia, she lived with her sister and brother-in-law Ephraim Flint in the Flint homestead on Lexington Road, still home to three generations of Flints. The quilt was found by Margaret Flint Sr. in the attic of Bertha Chapin, whose mother also grew up in the Flint homestead, according to family members.

Preserving artifacts like the quilt are central to the work of archivists like Rundell. Along with local historians, they’re sometimes called on when older residents are downsizing and looking to dispose of old letters, photos, papers, records and other materials that may have been sitting in attics or basements for decades. Documents that are deemed historically significant are treated so the paper so won’t degrade any further. Sometimes books are unbound and later archivally rebound so they can be digitized, making them available online to researchers anywhere in the world. Much of this work in Lincoln is funded by annual town budget appropriations requested by the Community Preservation Committee (the money comes from property taxes and the state).

Another part of the job is making archival materials more “discoverable” using finding aids for the various collections pertaining to Lincoln buildings, families, events, organizations and photographs. “One of the big goals is to get people engaged with the archives,” Rundell said. “You don’t get this stuff and put it in a vault so it just sits there — you went people to use it.”

Click on an image below for a larger version and caption (photos by Alice Waugh).