Norwalk

Two miles to the north, on the east side of the Saugatuck, and at the head of the avenue called for the chieftain Compow, stood the Capt. Waite home- stead. This became the purchase of Hon. Richard H. Winslow, a financier of high repute, and who con- verted the grounds into a floral and arboreal park. Mrs. Winslow, who descended from one of the his- tory families of Norwich, cognate to the Thos. Fitch family of Norwalk, survived her husband, and mar- ried, R. C M. Paige, M.D., of New York City. Opposite to"Compo House," resided a typical New England legal gentleman, John Cleveland, of marked endowments, and whose cleverness was finely unobtrusive. The home was blessed with children, 74 NORWALK An interesting document was signed in Not walk in 1660, at the following instance and to the following effect : The sons of Ponus, whose sachimo was situate several furlongs west of the ancient line of Norwalk, and of Mahackemo,1 who governed the Norwalk valley, and of Compow,2 who ruled east of the Saugatuck, and of Queriheag, who, with "his predecessors from generation to generation," reigned over the territory to the east of Cnmpo and west of the Unquowa, had, in the neighborhood of 1658-9-60, removed to some extent from the coast inland. At that time there was left at Pequonnock (Bridgeport) only about one hundred wigwams, which, however, represented a larger population than that at any other single point, perhaps, between the Rowalton (Five Mile River) and the Housa- tonic. This red remnant was the cause of so much discussion and disagreement among the wife and mother being the youngest daughter of Ebenezer I). Ilovtof Norwalk. The venerated Horace Staples, who owes his po- sition to his own merit, holds, as a nonogenarian, the deep and grateful respect of the community of which he has, down to extreme age, been an honored mem- ber. His days have been actively employed, his years usefully spent, and now at the approach of four-score and fifteen, the issue of his helpful life is serene satis- faction, while the " Staples High School " is his stand- ing memorial. His descent deserves description. John Banks, a barrister, came from Windsor to Fairfield in 1651. " He was one of the richest men in Fairfield, and one of the largest land-holders in Fairfield County; that he was from one of the best families of England there is no doubt." His son Benjamin married Elizabeth, daughter of Richard Lyon, and had Benjamin, 2d. Benjamin, 2d. married an Ogden. These had a son, Hezekiah Banks, whose daughter married the father of Horace Staples of 1896. T-he Ketch urn - Staples connection arises from the marriage of Silas Burr to a niece of Hezekiah Banks, (the daughter of his bro- ther Benjamin.) Morris Ketchum and his brother Hiram, with Francis Burritt, were particular friends of Horace Staples. Mr. Staples is of the lineage of Thomas Staples, an early Fairfield settler. 'The impression concerning Mahackemo is that he was a hunter. What might to-day be termed cen- tral Norwalk was, it is logical to deduce, a game dis- trict. Undiscovered traces of burial places, "mills," and important relics, such a« boiling boulders, cleav- ing stones, etc., so intimate. Nearer the sea-shore, and notably in the Smith Norwalk of 1896, there are abor- iginal-appearance-remains. Along the upland west of the Tramway power-house, in the present Meadow Street, were Mohawk settlements, possibly. Below Meadow Street two or three Indian cemeteries have been discovered. In the vicinity of Washington Street graves have been found, and the present Chest- nut Street (see W. S. Bouton's contribution in Kurd's Fairfield County, page 494) was an immolation-lo- cality. There appears to have been but little of the like, however, in Norwalk proper. Stray Indian in- terments* were evidently made in different portions of mid-Norwalk, as stray traditional "Indian rocks" have there been pointed out, but the most that under this head it is safe to say is that the centre of the town was not as densely Indian populated as was the circumference. There was one genuine " Pockohantes " (a brook- let or rivulet between two heights, and the Indian root-word for Pocahontas, the historic daughter of the royal Powhattan of Virginia,) near, if not actu- ally in, Mahackemo's empire, viz. : the enchanting glen-run a little south of the Branchville Station, on the Danbury Railroad. From the Ludlow deed, it is right to argue that Mahackemo was the head or chief Norwalk Sachem, and if so, his claim to the haunts 'twixt the northern Pockohantes and the southern Naramake-meads no one could dispute. One fact, at least, entitles him to Norwalk Indian remembrance. He was, beyond doubt, the party who received the "consideration," brought, probably, from Fairfield as far as the east Saugatuck bank, on the backs of pack horses, on the day which saw the deed that thenceforth forever alienated the soil from his race's possession, signed and passed, and the first page of Norwalk's history written. It is probable that at the parting that day between Ludlow and Mahackemo, the former intimated to him that his wigwams need not be immediately broken up, and assured him of undisturbed possession for a time. After the settlers came, ten years later, Mahackemo seems to record- disappear, and Mamachimon to have mention. 1 Sometimes spelled Compoe. * The base of the hill, (lower end of the 1896 High Street) held several (supposed to be) Indian bodies. Human remains ((uwsihlv TrWs men buried before the British departure ) have been unearthed at Benedict's farm. *A Baltimorean, several years since, du# up well-preserved arrow-heads on Town House HUJ. These, and sometimes In- dian bones, have been found in various portions of this ancieut Township. NORWALK. 7 5 their Stratford and Fairfield contemporaries that the General Court, in May 1659, interfered, and ordered that Gold Hill (now Golden Hill, Bridgeport) should thereafter be the resid- ence place of these diminishing sons of the soil ; and the same Court, for some reason, saw fit to make choice of Norwalk men as a committee to carry out its ordaining. The committee selected was a quartette of the strongest Norwalk settlers, viz. : Matthew Camp- field, Thomas Fitch, Richard Olmstead and Nathaniel Ely. These proceeded to their work, laid out eighty of the, to-day, choice Golden Hill acres, and saw that the dusky people there removed. The committee's Court report was dated " Narwoke, May 2, 1660." The above arrangement continued in force for about a century. In 1763, the Indian^ (now fast decreasing in number) made complaints of wigwam destruction and of eviction by the whites. As a consequenee everything was sold out to the whites, excepting Nim- rod's' 12-acre spring lot, and none the less than John Huntington, Benjamin Hall and Robert Treat, Esqs., completed the work that the Norwalk committee, one hundred years before, had inaugurated. Norwalk has no voluminous offering to make to extant Indian lore or legend wealth. Its founders' red brethren, were more or less hardy, physically, and seem to have been endowed with average Indian sagacity. How they appeared in profile we do not know, neither is it ascertained that they were particularly deed or daring prominent. That they were elsewhere, in the new settlements, eclipsed in numbers, is most probable, and that our sea-fringed uplands and lowlands were preserved by them, as in some sort, a hunter's "reserve," is quite possible. The number of stone arrow-heads turned up in the cultivation, in later times, of the Saugatuck soil some distance to the southward of the present Wheeler manufacturing plant, would seem to indicate a native American constituency thereabouts, and from the fact of the existence of "Wampum Hill" in our borders, (Wilton) inference as to an Indian "mint" may reasonably be drawn. But these "straws" are insufficient to establish any very "grand" Indian hypothesis Norwalk- wards ; and while the library shelves of their European successors may never be filled with their annals-literature, yet is the not pleasure-unmixed thought of their "Mohican" blood, and the determination to loyally collect all available tales and traditions concerning them a simple but faithful, and because so, the proper tribute to proffer their memory. Were it possible to obtain it, one foster red son of Norwalk merits vellum portrait- ure. On Oct. 28, 1646, the Indian apostle, John Eliot, preached his first sermon to the North American natives, and he had so mastered the savage tongue that the aborigines fully understood his message. The name of this first Indian preacher's first Indian precep- tor occurs on page 69, col. I, line 3, of this work's aboriginal calendar. He was a Long Island inhabitant, but an enrolled 1667 dweller in Norwalk. He was a part)- in the 165 1 Runckingheage covenant, and the original of the patronymic of the easternmost of the •He inhabited, near the water, about foot of Gold | present station, in the city of Bridgeport, and lived Hill, a short distance north of the Consolidated road's , to a great age. 76 NORWALK. N'orvvalfc islands, viz.: " Cockenoe." lookers exceptionally fine and felicitous story of him has this year been published, and the author's concluding words concerning his hero are calculated to awaken a response in every Norwalk breast. ■■For the part he took in the rise and development of our settlement— a life-work unparalleled by that of any other Long Island or New England Indian— he deserves to he enrolled upon the page of honor. . . A scarred and battered fragment from Nature's world— a glacial boulder, typical of the past— should be his monument— on one side a sculptured entablature inscribed : To the Memory of a Captive in the Peg/iot War, the first Indian teacher of John Eliot ; a firm friend of the English Colonists ; Coekcnoc-de- Long-Island"