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New England Antiquities Research Association

Stones left unturned

John Hill, Providence Journal Staff Writer

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, April 15, 2007

Although a development has been proposed for an area near the stone mounds, the land where they are actually located is still privately held. The owners would like to work with preservationists to protect the stones.

The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

NORTH SMITHFIELD

Douglas Pike is a modern asphalt highway. Travelers drive up and down it in gasoline-powered vehicles, occasionally chatting on cellular phones. Telephone poles stand along its side, draped with fiber optic cables transmitting data at the speed of light.

But walk off that road into the Nipsachuck woods for about 15 minutes and the hills hide the road and the trees muffle the sounds of modern technology. Then, on a rise in that oak forest, there is another sign of humankind; older, simpler and much less understood.

Over several acres, spread out through the woods, are more than 60 large piles of lichen-encrusted stones. They vary in size, but most are around three feet high and four feet around — all of them made of individual rocks about the size of basketballs. Most of the piles appear more or less intact. Some have collapsed and spread out on the ground. Others have thin oak trees trying to push their way through them.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said William S. Simmons, a Brown University professor, chair of the anthropology department and expert in New England tribal folklore. “These are definitely human construction. Whoever built these built them carefully. ... One thing you can say about it for sure is that it’s old.”

Frederick F. Meli, an adjunct professor in anthropology at the University of Rhode Island, has toured the area four times. He said he found more cairns in the surrounding woods. He said he is certain they mark a burial ground.

“That type of burial mound is consistent with peoples in this area,” he said of the burial styles of New England’s native tribes.

THE ACADEMICS were brought to the woodland site by Wilfred Greene, chief of the Seaconke Wampanoags, whose tribal name is Eagle Heart. Greene and his 250-member tribe have appointed themselves the spiritual caretakers of the site in hope that the rediscovered burial ground might help the rebirth of their tribe.

The stones are very heavy, Greene said, and when the whole of the landscape is considered, must number in the thousands.

“I do wonder, like a lot of people, what took place here,” Greene said. “It makes me think.

“They went through a lot of pain to put all these rocks here.”

The meaning of the word Nipsachuck has been lost to time, Greene said. Even without the cairns, the Nipsachuck area, an uneven landscape of woods and swamps in the southwest corner of North Smithfield, was important to the Wampanoags. Irene Nebiker, a local historian, said in the 1600s, it was used for planting beans by area tribes in the spring and fall, before and after they would migrate to the coast for the summer.

It was also the site of an early battle in King Philip’s War, when Metacomet, the Wampanoag chief known to the colonists as King Philip, led a coordinated and ultimately unsuccessful uprising by several New England tribes against the European settlers.

In June of 1675, some of Philip’s Wampanoags attacked colonists in the Swansea area, beginning the war that took his name. Colonial militia from Plymouth tried to keep him contained in that area, but he got away with more than 300 warriors, women and children. They headed west to link up with the Nipmucks in what is now eastern Connecticut and central Massachusetts.

When they left Massachusetts, they didn’t roam aimlessly. They had a plan. If they were going to get to the Nipmucks on foot, they needed a place to rest and resupply. That place was Nipsachuck.

On July 30, they were spotted around Rehoboth and a group of English colonists and Mohegan Indians gave chase. Philip and his group got across the Pawtucket River, but the English and their Mohegan allies kept pace. The Mohegan scouts followed the Wampanaogs to Nipsachuck, where they heard the sound of Wampanoag axes as Philip’s group built a camp in the woods near a swamp.

Early in the morning of Aug. 1, the colonists and the Mohegans attacked. The Wampanoags were caught by surprise and many were killed outright. The rest fled into the swamp, said to be about three-quarters of a mile from the camp. The militia held back, its commander leery of chasing them into the thickets of the swamp. Philip and his people hid until nightfall, and then slipped away.

Some of the group, mostly women and children, headed south to Narragansett territory. The rest went northwest with Philip to link up with the Nipmucks and carry on the war for another year, before Philip was caught and killed. Nipsachuck would be fought over one more time, in July 1676, when Connecticut miltiamen caught a group of Narragansetts there.

After Philip’s defeat, Nipsachuck was taken over by settlers. Historian Nebiker said its sandy and rocky soil was ill-suited for large-scale agriculture. Over the centuries, landowners made their best money by selling timber rights to the land. The rocky base made it difficult to build on, so most of the area has been left alone.

Greene, who doesn’t live in North Smithfield, said relatives had told him of the cairns before, but word of a 120-lot subdivision that is proposed to the southwest of the site prompted him to go look. North Smithfield Town Planner Michael Phillips said, as planned, the subdivision doesn’t include the area where the piles were found. But Meli said he feared that once the houses are built nearby, residents and their children will begin exploring the woods, find the piles and take them apart.

The current owners of the property where the piles are located have not sold their land for development and are helping Greene and his group research them. They said they didn’t want to be identified by name for fear people would figure out where the piles are and ruin them by souvenir hunting.

For Greene and his group, the piles could have meaning beyond the historical. They claim to be descendants of a subgroup of the Wampanoag nation that, before contact with the Europeans, lived in the Seekonk area. They use the old spelling of the place, Seaconke, in their name. They have been working for decades to obtain state and federal recognition of their tribe.

In 2003, Greene filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of the tribe, saying a 1661 deed showed the Wampanoags had claim to 34 square miles along the Blackstone River in Cumberland and Woonsocket. A District Court judge in Providence threw that claim out, and an appeals court in Boston upheld the ruling.

Late last year, Greene acquired 50 acres at the old J. M. Mills site along the Blackstone River in Cumberland. He has said if his tribe gets recognition, he hoped it could open a bingo hall there.

The members have compiled genealogies, researched Colonial era deeds, wills and letters, and collected testimonials from older members to past efforts of the tribe to preserve its collective identity, Greene said.

If the stone piles could be shown to be Wampanoag-built memorials, that could be solid evidence — literally — of the tribe’s existence in the area.

GREENE, HIS WIFE, Germaine, and others walk among the stones, looking for clues, details, instances where the piles are the same and where they are different. Then they try to figure out if those similarities and differences mean something or if they are just … similarities and differences.

One of the piles has a large quartzite stone in it. Germaine said that could mean it marks the grave of an important person, such as Nimrod, one of Philip’s chief lieutenants who died in the first Nipsachuck battle.

“This must signify some kind of high rank,” she said, wiping dirt off the stone. “You don’t find that anywhere else.” She burned some sage leaves on the pile as a tribute, then covered the stone with leaves, to protect it from vandalism or theft.

Some of the piles are smaller, and she recalls how women and children died at Nipsachuck, too. She said she wondered if the smaller piles were assembled by grieving parents who marked the scene of their children’s deaths.

“You wonder what it was like,” she said. “What they went through. What did they feel like when they tried to protect their kids. I have kids. To just sit there and watch them die …”

Meli said places with streams were considered spiritually significant by tribes, and the piles are near one. He said he found arrow points and what he believes is an ax head near one that had been disturbed when a developer sank a percolation test pipe into the ground through the middle of the pile.

In others, he found smaller rounded stones he said could only have been worn smooth by ocean action and pieces of Cumberlandite, a type of rock that has been found only in Cumberland.

He said excavating the piles was unlikely to provide a definitive answer to who built them. Part of that is because of the chemistry of the Rhode Island soil; any organic matter — such as a body — that might have been buried there would have long ago been dissolved.

A body might have been buried with arrowheads or pottery, he said, and those could help date when the piles were built. Meli said there are so many piles over such a large area, that the site may have been used for burials for many generations. Greene said the tribe can’t afford to buy the land, but wants to work with the property owners and perhaps state historical officials to hire qualified archaeologists to excavate some of the piles.

“We are going to have to spoon some soil out of there,” Greene said, “to establish a point in time.”

Simmons said that might be the only way to figure out for sure the cairns’ purpose.

“It’s really hard to know until you excavate,” he said. “…You’ve got a good mystery here.”

‘I do wonder, like a lot of people, what took place here.’

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