Creating Community: Exploring 375 Years of Our Past Docent Gallery Guide This interactive, family friendly exhibition is designed to introduce visitors and students to the people and major events that have created our communities in Fairfield County, and in doing so, inspire visitors to take an active role in strengthening their own communities. The exhibition will be an essential step toward realizing FMHC’s educational vision to use history to strengthen community and shape its future. Exhibit Themes • What makes a community change over time? • What makes a strong community? • How can objects tell us about history? • How do people adapt to their environment? • Draw connections between the past and today • Investigate the connections between local, regional, national and global history. Exhibit Sections 1: Native Americans & Contact Period Hello and welcome to the Fairfield Museum’s permanent exhibition Creating Community: Exploring 375 Years of Our Past. This exhibition traces highlights of the people, places and events from the history of Fairfield and the region. The exhibition includes many of the most unique items in our collections. In this first section, you are standing on a general map of the area about 1639, when Fairfield was settled. The period when colonists arrived in North America and met the Native Americans is called the “contact period,” and lasts up until the Revolutionary War. The colonists in New England included the Dutch, French and the English. They had little regard for the culture and traditions of the Native Americans and thought they were “savages.” [The contact period was] … any interaction between Native Americans and Europeans. Frequently this took the form of stories of great ships, men riding strange creatures, exotic goods such as beads, brass kettles or flintlock muskets and, unfortunately for the Native Americans disease and warfare. It was a period of cultural transition, fragmentation and eventual collapse of Native American cultures (http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/portal/communities/archaeology/native-american/contact-period.html) By this time many Native Americans had already been decimated by disease from the very early explorers, including smallpox and typhoid fever. Those remaining had to adapt and learn to live the colonists’ way of life. Yet they had been highly successful in living with the seasons and surviving in the harsh New England climate for hundreds of years. They made all of the items necessary for survival from the abundant natural resources and animals. They dugout canoes from large trees to navigate the waterways. They used reeds and 1 Creating Community: Exploring 375 Years of Our Past Docent Gallery Guide other fibers to create baskets. They used animals for a wide variety of purposes; such as clothing, making arrows and bags. They also used gourds for water containers and as rattles or musical instruments. Sidebar -- Wampum Wampum were various sizes of beads created out of quahog (clam) shells and the central section of the whelk shell. In the Native communities, the beads were highly symbolic, valued and respected. When an agreement or promise was made between people, they exchanged wampum. A sachem or chief would wear a wampum belt to signify his station and often the designs had spiritual meaning. It was used as an offering in ceremonies or to express condolence or bereavement. The color of the beads had meaning. For the Algonquians, white beads represented purity, light and brightness, and would be used as gifts to mark events that invoked those characteristics, such as the birth of a child. Purple beads represented solemn things like war, grieving and death. The combination of white and purple represented the duality of the world; light and dark, sun and moon, women and man, life and death. Wampum was given as a gift for many occasions: births, marriages, the signing of treaties, occasions for condolence and remembrance. Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/01/14/beads-bounty-how-wampum- became-america%E2%80%99s-first-currency%E2%80%94and-lost-its-power-146941 Unfortunately the colonists immediately translated wampum into currency. It became a part of the growing trade between the colonists and the Native Americans, which also included beaver and fur pelts (which decimated the population). • Dutch the first to create trading posts (near Hartford) and established trade with Indians for fur and wampum (Adriaen Block, a Dutch explorer, sailed up the Connecticut River in 1614) • Dutch manufactured wampum from shells and colonists considered it like their currency, although it was far more symbolic to the Indians. Sidebar: A Brief History of the Fur Trade http://cwh.ucsc.edu/feinstein/A%20brief%20history%20of%20the%20beaver%20trade.html The map shows the general locations of some of the local tribes that fell under the Paugusetts; Maxumux, Sasqua, Unquoway and Pequonnok. The Native Americans spoke an Algonquin-derived language and many of their words are still in use today, can you think of any? Connecticut, Pequonock, Pequot … In this area of CT, the Native Americans often traveled to the coast for the summer and then moved inland during the winter months. 2 Creating Community: Exploring 375 Years of Our Past Docent Gallery Guide 2: The English Colonists 1639 – 1700s Colonists arrived for religious and political reasons, but also to search for the Western Passage to China and India. Realizing their failure, they turned towards exploiting the resources in America. Part of what attracted the colonists to this area were the natural salt marshes, the land that was cleared by the Native Americans and the hardwoods / trees. Later on, farmers used the natural salt marshes to harvest hay and to graze livestock. Can you imagine seeing a cow chomping away in the bushes near the beach? At the floor map, you can also compare and contrast the Native Salt Marsh at Southport, CT, 1862-3. Martin Johnson Heade. American home (the wigwam) and North Carolina Museum of Art. the Colonists’ home (a typical New England saltbox or Colonial home). Roger Ludlow founded Fairfield in 1639. They came from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and created the four squares of the original Fairfield. It was very important to establish a Meetinghouse for people to worship and to act as a Town Hall for meetings. People had to have permission to join a colony and the founders had the ability to exclude whomever they liked. The colony was centered around the Town Green, which is a unique feature of New England colonies. People built their homes along the green, often to use the common Green area for grazing their livestock. Farmlands and fields were located around the Town Green. The Green was an area for a sign post, militia drills and even punishment. Have you ever seen a stockade? Criminals were put on public display to shame them and passers-by were encouraged to throw insults or toss rotten food at them. Alongside the Colonial section of this exhibit, you’ll see more about the strict Colonial rules that were established. Sidebar: Roger Ludlow & the Pequot War From the 2014 exhibition on the Pequot War: The murders of two English traders—John Stone in 1634 by the Pequot and John Oldham in 1636 by the Manisses—are often cited as the cause of the Pequot War, but the conflict was really the culmination of decades of tension between Native tribes that was further stressed by the arrival of European settlers. 3 Creating Community: Exploring 375 Years of Our Past Docent Gallery Guide The Pequot War resulted from intense competition for control of trade as well as inter-tribal conflict as Native groups wrested themselves from Pequot subjugation. The conflict was as much Native vs. Native as it was English vs. Native. Tribes that were resentful of the Pequots’ domination, such as the Narragansett and Mohegan, allied themselves with the incoming English, while the Pequot, determined to maintain control over trade in the Connecticut Valley, pulled in local [Fairfield] tribes like the Sasqua and Unquowa, who owed them allegiance. Sidebar: Roger Ludlow & CT The Constitution State The colonists believed in self-government and created their own rules organized around the Church. Roger Ludlow is credited for writing the Code of 1650 and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. Educated at Oxford, he was elected (1630) an assistant of the Massachusetts Bay Company and in the same year sailed to America. He was one of the founders of Dorchester, Mass., and served (1634) as deputy governor of Massachusetts. It was noted that he wanted to be Governor, but he never attained that position. Moving to the new settlements along the Connecticut River, he presided (1636) at Windsor over the first court held in Connecticut and is credited with the final drafting of the Fundamental Orders, adopted by the colony in 1639. He also completed the first codification of Connecticut laws, known as Ludlow's Code or the Code of 1650. Although given a charter to start a new colony, it was not in Fairfield, yet he defied these orders and settled here anyway. Disagreement over his proposed expedition against the Dutch settlers of New Netherland caused him to return to England, after which he settled in Ireland. Years later the Fundamental Orders are considered by some historians to be “the first real Constitution” and harbinger of other founding documents to come. “it is our wisdom therefore to improve what we have, to walk close with our God and to combine and unite ourselves to walk and live peacable and lovingly together, that so, if there be cause, we may join hearts and hands to maintain the common cause aforesaid, and to defend our priviledges and freedomes we now enjoy, against all opposers” Roger Ludlow, writing from Windsor on May 29, 1638, in a letter addressed to “The Gouer & brethren of Massachusetts Baye” (Coleman) 3: A Community at War – The American Revolution 1775 - 1783 An expanded community becomes a community of wealth – and a British target.