Garrisons at Groton
In the Middlesex County list from 1692, Groton was organized as eight garrisons with a total of “91 men”, including three soldiers provided by the colony. These included at least 70 families, with infants and the elderly, pregnant women and widows, and devout church members alongside an adulterer and a woman once thought to have been possessed by the Devil. Some had lost loved ones in previous fights with natives. And several, not long after this time, would themselves be captured, wounded, and killed.
(The list, with families at all garrisons, is provided)
A moment in time
Shortly after the garrison list was assembled, events nearby would have raised alarm in Groton.
We’ll pick a date and, by reviewing events and communications that led up to this time, we get a sense of what people were doing and feeling.
July 20, 1692
Mid-summer in Massachusetts.
It had been 14 years since families had returned to the abandoned town. After clearing away burnt ruins, they rebuilt their homes and resumed work on farms - tending livestock, milking cows, clearing trees to open new fields, planting corn and apple trees and rye.
Many of the natives who once lived nearby had either left or been killed or enslaved in the recent war. But a native settlement remained at Nashoba and individuals and small groups of natives often came to town. Residents of Groton were wary. Natives were “warned out of the town” and laws were passed, restricting the sale of arms or liquor. Some incidents of native drunkenness were recorded (due to which one woman was whipped) and Groton passed a law that no natives were permitted to trade or dwell in town without a license.
No incidents occurred for several years. Then in 1685, a rumor spread - that 300 to 400 natives had gathered in Chelmsford. A journal entry from this time talks of “mistrusts of their mischevous designs” and say “The fears and Rumors concerning them much increase”.
In the summer of 1688, several raids on towns in Maine prompted fear of local attacks. A letter from Captain Francis Nicholson said “ . . . I went through Groton and Lancaster, where the people were very much afraid . . .”
The following year, events in Europe brought war to the frontier. And, as the French opposed the English, they encouraged natives to raid New England settlements. Attacks would be made, on and off, on frontier towns for another 35 years.
Some of the attacks were horrific. For example, in Dover, in June of 1689, native women who had asked for shelter opened the doors of garrison houses, and residents were slaughtered in their beds. 23 were killed, 29 were taken captive, and a mill and many houses were burned. Residents of Groton would doubtless have heard descriptions of how Major Waldren was tortured in this attack.
A letter to the Council in Boston from Major Hinchman said:
“ . . . I understand the great and eminent danger we are in, upon the account of the enemy, our Towne being threatened the next week to be assaulted . . .
He described how, at the Welds garrison in Dunstable . . .
“ . . . 4 Indians shewed themselves, as Spyes; and it is Judged (tho not visible) that all the garrissons in said Towne were viewed by the enemy: ant that by reason their cattle and other creatures were put into a strange ffright.”
Over the next two years, attacks were infrequent, but frightening. In Amesbury, Captain Foot was captured and tortured to death. An attack at Dunstable “killed quite a few, which so terrified the inhabitants that most of them fled the town”.
Then, in nearby Lancaster on July 18, 1692, a marauding party entered the house of Peter Joslin while he was away at work in a field. A story (much like the version, below) would have reached Groton soon after . . .
Mrs. Joslin was baking bread and her sister Elizabeth, who was visiting her, was singing while she was spinning flax. When the Indians came to the door, they were met by Mrs. Joslin, who, with an oven shovel tried to prevent their entrance. One of them threw his tomahawk, which struck her in the head, killing her instantly. The Indians then rushed in and murdered three of the children, taking captive another child, which they afterwards killed, and also Elizabeth, whom it is said they spared because she was a beautiful singer and whom they compelled frequently to sing for them.
With this recent attack, the people at Groton would have been much alarmed. For, beyond the basic facts of a nearby killing, they knew, from direct experience, the ferocious nature of native attacks.
Many had huddled in garrisons some 15 years earlier, in the attack during King Philip’s War. They remembered how, when four men went out to fetch some hay, one was captured, two escaped, and one was “slain, stripped naked, his body mangled and dragged into the highway, and laid on his back in a most shameful manner”.
Natives occupied a house near the garrisons and, at night, one of the native leaders . . .
“did very familiarly in appearance, call out to Captain Parker . . . and entertained a great deal of discourse with him, whom he called his old neighbor, dilating upon him the cause of the war, and putting an end to it by a friendly peace, yet oft mixing bitter sarcasms with several blasphemous scoffs and taunts, at their praying and worshipping God in the meeting-house, which he deridingly said he had burnt. Among other things, which he boastingly uttered that night, he said he burnt Medfield . . ., Lancaster, and that now he would burn that town of Groton . . .”
Within a few days, more than 100 soldiers from Watertown arrived. The natives left. But, the town, now destroyed, was abandoned.
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