Celebrate Greenwich

Pride in community, state and nation is codified in stories of origins. In Greenwich we recognize the Town’s beginnings through the annual tradition of Founders Day. This year, during a time of protest and pandemic when we have committed to shine light on our Greenwich stories, the Historical Society invites you to join in a virtual Founders Day to explore places in Greenwich and look at a wide array of stories about our Town. But first, let’s consider how Founders Day began, what it commemorates and how we can do a better job of telling our Greenwich stories.

The first Founders Day was held in 1940, an era when the Town’s population had almost tripled between 1900 and 1940 from 12,000 to 35,500. There were impressive new public buildings, representative town government, a planning commission and a beautiful new parkway. But as forward looking as the Town was at that time, people also looked to the past to mark its importance as among the state’s earliest Colonial towns. Greenwich celebrated the Connecticut Tercentenary in 1935. And although not recognized as a separate town until 1665, Greenwich proudly celebrated its own Tercentenary five years later with great fanfare, adopted an official coat of arms, and established Founders Day.

The original proclamation read “that the eighteenth day of July shall henceforth be known as ‘FOUNDERS DAY’ and shall be recognized as such by the citizens of Greenwich and that the day shall be celebrated in appropriate manner as the Town Council may see fit and that all citizens shall be in attendance.”

July 18 commemorates the day a deed was signed in 1640 by indigenous, Munsee-speaking Indians who traded a parcel of land in southeastern Greenwich (today’s Old Greenwich) for twenty-five “Coates” to four English-born settlers from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Often this story is told as the great bargain made that day at the expense of the native people to acquire Greenwich for bolts of cheap woolen fabric that was woven in England and served as currency for trade in the New World. This story is quickly followed by that of the brave and notorious colonial woman, Elizabeth Feake, who made a separate provision that day to acquire for herself Monakawego (today’s Greenwich Point). What a deal!

While Founders Day has become a civic vehicle to witness the reading of the original deed and to repeat the stories that tie us together as a community, it does not tell the older and longer story of the human occupation of Greenwich to pre-historic times (2500 to 1700 BC) and of the shell-fish gathering groups who camped on Greenwich Point (circa 1300 AD) for a century and later abandoned the site, perhaps giving rise to the name “Siwanoys” inscribed on Nikolaus Visscher’s 1685 map of the Connecticut shore.

The Woodland Indians who signed the deed were what remained of loosely organized local groups of Algonquin peoples descended from the Lenape Indians who occupied what is now New Jersey, southeastern New York State, southwestern Connecticut, eastern Pennsylvania and northern Delaware, a large geographical area that they later called Lenapehoking (Land of the Lenape). Although they were not united politically and had no written language, the Lenape spoke one of two dialects, “Munsee” in the north, and “Unami” in the south. They had never before seen tools or utensils made from copper, brass, iron or pewter and, once introduced to European textiles, greatly favored them to their native materials.

To shine light on this financial transaction in 1640, we need to reflect upon what we know today. The Native Americans, though distrustful of the English settlers, were unaware of the competition between European maritime powers to claim “Indian” lands. They did not think it was possible to “sell” land that had been created for the use of all creatures. They thought they would continue to have access to its waters and resources, but learned through conflict and violence that they were to be first forced off coastal sites like Greenwich, and ultimately driven from all of Lenapehoking.

Their lives, fortunes and traditional ways would forever be changed. Never a very large population, the estimated 8,000 to 12,000 natives of Lenapehoking declined dramatically after European contact attributable to colonial wars; diseases for which they had no natural immunity, the ill effects of alcohol to which they had no tolerance, and the domination of their territory and economy by the more powerful Susquenannok and Iroquois. By 1640 it is estimated that as few as 2,400 of the original inhabitants of Lenapehoking survived. Dispossessed of their traditional land, they migrated over time to Texas, Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Ontario, Canada.

This year we have had our lives disrupted by an imported virus. It is sobering to reflect that that between 1500 and 1800, an estimated fifty million Native Americans died, chiefly of diseases brought by settlers to North America. Let’s recognize Founders Day in all the traditional ways, but let’s also do a better job in the coming years of learning more about the people whose lives were upended.

Note
To learn more about this period of American history, see Herbert Kraft, The Lenape: Archaeology, History and Ethnography (Newark: New Jersey Historical Society, 1986) and Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (W. W. Norton & Co, 2018), part one.