Charlemont cemetery tells unique tale of local history
Editor's note: This is the third in a summer-long series in which Advocate writer Judith Fairweather visits old cemeteries to try to dig up interesting tidbits of local history. Read all of her columns at blogtheberkshires.com.
By JUDITH FAIRWEATHER
CHARLEMONT -- Last fall, I received an e-mail from Bea DaSilva inquiring whether my invitations to accompany me on my cemetery quests were literal or not. She had no idea she was someone from my long-ago past, having served as an English teacher at both my junior high (Crosby) and my high school (Taconic).
Thus, I had the chance to reminisce with her about some former teachers on a recent drive over the Mohawk Trail to Charlemont. How lovely. Our mission was to find a graveyard recommended by Advocate Editor Rebecca Dravis, although that was all I knew about it.
But we weren't going to have to investigate this cemetery on our own. We met Joanne MacLean, director of the Charlemont Historical Society Museum, who, even though an eighth-generation resident, had never visited this particular site. We headed to the Zoar Outdoor property right on Route 2, scrambling up a small hill to reach the gravesite of Capt. Rice, his family and Phineas Arms. Rice and Arms were killed in an attack by Native Americans on June 11, 1755, on the site.
In order to understand the story, we need to travel back in time to the settlement of North America by the French and English in the 17th century. Each culture had its own reasons for colonization. The French were after resources and wealth, such as could be found in the fur trade; the English wanted land.
This race for conquest would inevitably lead to conflict. Caught in the middle were the Native Americans. In the East, squeezed between the French who settled Canada and the English in the Northeast, was the Abenaki tribe, a subdivision of the Algonquian nation of northeastern North America. Continued settlement by the English would prompt the French to seek alliances with the Indians, including one with the Abenaki.
As tensions rose between the French and the English, a series of conflicts broke out between them beginning in 1689. The last of these is called the French and Indian War (1754-1763).
The infamous Deerfield Massacre occurred on Feb. 29, 1704, during one of these conflicts known as Queen Anne's War (1702-1713). During the attack of French and Native American forces, the settlement was razed, 56 men, women and children Colonists were killed, and 109 others were taken captive.
The English could be savage, too. During Drummer's War (1721-1725), in which the French allied with the Abenaki, asking them to raid English settlements, the Massachusetts Bay Colony set a bounty of about $20,000 today for each Native American scalp obtained. Grey Lock, an Abenaki chief, led these raids.
Capt. Moses Rice came to Charlemont in the fall of 1742. Rice, born in 1694, had grown up with these conflicts. In Charlemont, he began establishing himself as a farmer. He soon built his own grist mill, which in 1745 was grinding corn for Fort Massachusetts in North Adams.
In 1746, Rice, for unknown reasons, sent his family away to Old Deerfield. In that same week, Fort Massachusetts was overtaken by French and Native American forces. When Rice finally returned to his home, he found it burnt to the ground, his cattle and hogs killed and his grain destroyed.
Rather than rebuilding, Rice took his family east to Rutland, Mass., where they stayed for three years. He was a determined man, however. The year after another French and Indian conflict ended (King George's War, 1744-1748), Rice returned to Charlemont with his family.
There they lived for another six years, until June 11, 1755. Rice was out hoeing corn with one of his grown sons, Artemas; his 9-year-old grandson, Asa; Titus King; and Phineas Arms. In a fabulous book titled "Charlemont, Massachusetts 1765-1965, a Bicentennial History" written by Allan Healy in 1965, it states that a party of six "St. Francis Indians," as the Abenaki were called, ambushed them. Arms, 24, was killed immediately. Rice was badly wounded in the thigh, while King was overpowered and seized. Asa, thrown from his horse, attempted to hide, but also was captured. It was left to Artemas to run down the road 6 miles to sound the alarm.
The women in the adjoining field, hearing the shots, fled up the hill to the fortified Rice house, where, Healy writes, "they watched as the captives were taken to the high plain behind the fort (Rice's house). Here Rice was left scalped and bleeding." He died later that night.
But the Rices and other families that had begun to settle Charlemont were made of sturdy stock. Despite the tragedy, they stayed. And once the final French and Indian War concluded in 1763, settlers poured into the western portion of Massachusetts.
But this story cannot be complete without including the story of the Abenaki. Before they had contact with Europeans in the 1500s, they may have numbered as many as 40,000. Through devastating armed conflict and diseases such as smallpox, typhus, influenza, diphtheria and even measles, there would be only about 1,000 Abenaki at the end of the American Revolution.
They were thus literally fighting for their very lives when the small war party ambushed Rice and his friends and family. And what of Chief Grey Lock, who led raids in the years prior to this event? On the Abenaki website (abenakination.org/historicalsites.html), it credits the naming of the Berkshires' own Mount Greylock to the fact that the English never defeated him, and the mountain was named for him in acknowledgment of his skill and bravery.
And so, if you decide to venture to Charlemont to climb the hill behind Zoar Outdoor, I would ask you to stop along the way at the Hail to the Sunrise monument right on Route 2. A bronze statue of a Mohawk stands with his arms outstretched to the east, honoring the five Indian nations of the Mohawk Trail. A fountain contains 100 inscribed stones from various tribes and councils from across North America. Spend a moment considering all that they lost in their fight to protect their homes, their women and children, their language and culture and even their scalps. There are always two sides to a story.
E-mail comments to Advocate writer Judith Fairweather at jfairweather@advocateweekly.com.