The Praying Town Experiment
John Eliot and the Mission to the Interior
John Eliot came over the water in 1631, a young English minister bound for the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was soon settled over the church at Roxbury, where he would preach to his English congregation for more than sixty years and where he was eventually buried, an old man worn thin by a work that had consumed the better part of his life. But Roxbury was only where he lived. His life's work lay elsewhere — inland, among the Native peoples of the interior, on ground he never owned and may never have even walked, including the hill at Magunkaquog. Even so, no Englishman would come to shape that ground more durably than he did.
The Puritans of the Bay had crossed the ocean with their own salvation chiefly in mind, and many of them regarded the Native people of the country as an obstacle, a danger, or at best a curiosity. Eliot looked at the same people and saw souls in need of saving. Sometime in his first decade in New England, he decided that the families of the inland ponds and the coastal marshes were to be brought into the Christian fold, and that he would be the one to bring them. It was, by the religious logic of his century, a perfectly consistent position. If every human soul stood in eternal peril without the gospel, then the native peoples of Massachusetts were not a problem to be removed but a field waiting to be harvested. Eliot believed this completely, and he set about the one thing almost none of his countrymen would trouble themselves to do. He learned the language.
Learning Algonquin and Preaching at Nonantum
This was no small undertaking. The tongue spoken by the people of the Bay and the interior bore no resemblance to English, and there were no grammars to study and no schools to attend. Eliot found a Native teacher and worked at it the slow way, sound by sound and word by word, until he could not only speak the language but write it down in an alphabet never before bent to that purpose. He would eventually translate the whole Bible into it, the first Bible printed anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, a project that still seems startling once you consider that he was inventing much of the spelling as he went. But the Bible came later. First came the speaking, and the speaking had a place where it began.
On October 28, 1646, Eliot rode out from Roxbury in the company of Major Daniel Gookin and two others, bound for a spot on the Charles River called Nonantum, within the bounds of what is now Newton. There, in the large dwelling of a man named Waban, he preached for the first time to a Native congregation in their own language. The gathering had been called together chiefly through Waban's own efforts. Waban was an important man among the Nonantum people, though not their sachem, and he had taken an interest in the new teaching before most of his neighbors had. Eliot preached, the people listened. He returned through the rest of that winter and into the spring, and prominent ministers and laymen of the colony often rode out to attend, lending what help and sympathy they could. Out of that one dwelling on the riverbank grew everything that followed.
Daniel Gookin: Magistrate and Superintendent
The second name in that riding party matters as much as Eliot's own, because without Daniel Gookin the story of Magunkaquog would be almost entirely dark. Gookin was a Cambridge man and one of the colony's magistrates, and he became Eliot's indispensable partner. Where Eliot was the preacher and translator, the man of the language and the pulpit, Gookin was the administrator and the recorder. In 1656 the Massachusetts General Court named him superintendent of the Christian Indians and empowered him to keep a higher court among them every three months, a court carrying the powers of the ordinary County Court. He held that office, with one brief interruption of 3 years, until the colonial charter itself ended in 1686. For roughly thirty years, then, Daniel Gookin was the colonial government's eyes and hands among the praying Indians, and, fortunately for the historical record, a man who wrote things down.
Gookin's own account preserves the single most precious thing that survives about the people who lived on the hill at Magunkaquog: a count of them. But before that count, the shape of the larger project has to be understood, because Magunkaquog was not a thing on its own. It was one piece of a deliberate design.
Design of the Praying Towns
Eliot's idea, refined over the years following Nonantum, held that Indians who accepted the new faith should be gathered into settlements of their own. These came to be called praying towns. The reasoning behind them was partly spiritual and partly pragmatic. Eliot and the men around him had concluded early that teaching Christian doctrine alone would not be enough. They meant also to remake the whole manner of Indian life along English lines, to bring the people, in the phrase of the period's chroniclers, to the ways of civilized life. Converts were encouraged to give up the seasonal movement that had carried their families across the country for uncounted generations and to settle permanently in one place, building English-style houses and farming in the English manner. They were furnished with farming tools and carpenter's tools. Young men were taught trades. At the model town of Natick, laid out according to Gookin's own account on a grant of six thousand acres along the Charles in 1651, the residents built three long streets and a bridge eighty feet long across the river, with a piece of land attached to every house, along with ditches, stone walls, orchards, fenced fields, and regularly laid-out roads. Waban moved there from Nonantum that same year and became the town's ruler, described favorably by Gookin and other contemporary observers, and a Christian church gathered there in 1660.
Eliot and his helpers poured decades into the work, learning the language, walking from village to village, translating scripture word by word for people most of their own countrymen despised. The bargain they offered asked Native families to surrender the very way of belonging to land that had been theirs since long before England existed, in exchange for a way of living that happened to leave a great deal of country conveniently empty. The praying towns offered something and narrowed something at the same time.
The Seventh Town: Magunkaquog Formed
The towns multiplied. Eliot trained itinerant teachers from among the converts and sent them ahead of him to open the way with other bands, and the work spread inland from the river. By 1674, when Gookin set down his survey of the whole effort, communities of Christian Indians were scattered across ground that would later become a string of familiar Massachusetts towns, among them Canton, Grafton, Marlborough, Lowell, Littleton, and Hopkinton. Seven were reckoned the older, established towns, with a further handful the colonists called the New Praying Towns, younger and less settled. Magunkaquog belonged to the first group. By the order in which the old praying towns were founded, it was counted the seventh.
The Hopkinton sketch in William Richard Cutter's Historic Homes and Places of Middlesex County (1908), states that from the year 1669, the seventh of the towns where Eliot's converts lived. Other accounts place Magunkaquog's founding earlier, in 1660, the same year Natick's church was gathered. The two dates need not be treated as flatly opposed. A community of converts may well have begun gathering on the hill some years before the colonial government drew a line around a thousand acres and formally called it a plantation. The earlier date may mark the first stirrings of Christian settlement there. The later date, the one Cutter and the town's own historians settled on, marks the formal grant and recognized habitation, the moment the place enters the colonial ledger as the seventh of the old praying towns. By the close of the 1660s Magunkaquog was there, named, granted, and counted among Eliot's towns.
Community Life: Leadership, Crafts, and Literacy
The wood and bark of Magunkaquog's houses went back into the soil long ago, as such things do. The colonial record gives a handful of hard facts, and those few facts carry more weight than a great deal of guesswork would.
The first and best of them is Gookin's count. In 1674, by his own report as the colony's Indian commissioner, the settlement at Magunkaquog stood partly within the bounds of Natick and partly upon land the county had separately granted, and its people numbered about eleven families, or roughly fifty-five persons. It is a small number, smaller than a single street in the town that stands there today. But these were not fifty-five strangers passing through. They were a settled community on ground they knew, families with children and elders, living out the ordinary rhythm of a year on a fertile rise of land within sight of land their people had walked for thousands of years.
Gookin names their ruler as Pomhaman, describing him in his own record as a sober and active man, and pious. A handful of other residents' names have survived through later local research, drawn together from the same colonial-era sources Gookin and his contemporaries kept: a man recorded as Apumatquin, another as Jackananumquis, and a third as William Wannekjow. Their teacher, the closest thing the settlement had to its own minister, was a Nipmuc man named Job Kattanamit, of whom Gookin thought highly, describing him as a person well accepted for piety and ability among his own people. A community of fifty-five people, living and working this hill for well over a decade, left behind in the surviving English record a headcount, a handful of names, and a scattering of official observations.
That the settlement lay partly within Natick's bounds and partly on separately granted land is telling in its own right. Magunkaquog was not an island. It sat at the edge of the larger praying-town world, half within the orbit of the great model town on the Charles and half upon ground the colony had specifically set aside for it. Its people were tied to Natick by faith, kinship, and church membership, since Magunkaquog itself had no ordained congregation of its own. Waban's town was the center of the whole enterprise to which Magunkaquog belonged, a satellite near enough to share in that center's life and far enough to keep something of its own.
One detail of daily work stands out above the rest. At Magunkaquog the praying Indians had been taught to make cedar shingles and clapboards, and Cutter's account adds, almost in passing, that in this work they showed more skill than the English themselves did. That admission is rare. Here was a colonial writer, from a culture that built its whole claim to the land on the idea that the English understood its use better than anyone else, pausing to record that the people of Magunkaquog were simply better at this particular craft than his own countrymen. Better at splitting the cedar true. Better at shaving a clapboard so it lay flat and shed rain. The praying-town project had set out to teach the Indians English industrial arts, and at Magunkaquog the pupils had not merely learned the lesson. By this account, they had exceeded the teachers.
The school is another documented fact, and it matters for what it shows about the town's intended future. A school was established at the plantation. Its existence shows that Magunkaquog was meant to have a future, a place where the next generation would be raised in the new faith and its accompanying literacy. Eliot had labored to put the Bible into the people's own language precisely so they could read it for themselves. A praying town without a school would have contradicted the whole premise of the project, which rested on the belief that these people could and should be brought to literacy and scripture together.
The colonial pen wrote down the count, the craft, and the school. Whatever else continued on that hill, older ceremonies carried privately, or older beliefs folded quietly into the new observance, lived in the daily lives of the people themselves rather than in any surviving page.
The Fragile Peace
For all the labor Eliot had poured into the work, for all the towns gathered and the Bibles printed and the children taught, the whole structure of the praying towns rested on a peace between the English and the Indians of New England that was thinner than it looked. The Christian Indians had cast their lot with the colonists and the colonists' God. They had left the old grounds, taken up the tools, learned the trades, and made themselves, by every outward measure, the most accommodating Native population in the colony. The colony's leading men in government, church, and militia knew it and said so. The great body of the English population had never made the fine distinction between a praying Indian and any other.
In the same year Gookin set down his careful count of the praying towns, trouble was already gathering to the south and west, in the country of the Wampanoag sachem the English called Philip. When it broke, it would fall hardest on the very people who had done the most to make peace with the English, and the hill at Magunkaquog, with its eleven families, its school, and its stacks of fragrant cedar, would be swept up along with the rest.
The hill stood, in 1674, in the last full season of its settled life as Gookin had known and counted it.