Thank you, Merriam Ansara, for your May 21 letter [“Whose land did Justus Dwight buy in 1765?”] regarding my column “Justus Dwight: Conflicted about Revolution, Constitution,” [Gazette April 21]. Allow me to fill in the gaps on who originally settled this land.

Justus Dwight’s land, of course, originally belonged to the Native Americans who lived here long before European settlers like the Dwights arrived. According to Broadfork Permaculture (www.broadforkpermaculture.com/land-acknowledgement), several tribes are documented in what’s known as the Middle Connecticut River Valley, including the Sokoki Abenaki (part of the Wabanaki Confederacy), the Pocumtuck, as you mention, the Nonotuck, the Nipmuc, and the Agawam.

There are many books on Native Americans in Massachusetts, including “Our Beloved Kin” by Lisa Brooks, which covers King Philip’s War, and “The Indians of the Nipmuck Country in Southern New England, 1630-1750: An Historical Geography” by Dennis A. Connole.

At the village in north Belchertown about which I have been researching, European settlers in the region — from Northampton and Hadley — were grazing cattle and harvesting the area’s thick pine forests for candlewood for their homes and tall ship masts for the King’s Navy, even before Justus arrived to build his cabin in 1769.

According to Hampshire County deed research, Justus purchased his land from lots in the Equivalent Lands, which were large tracts of land that Massachusetts made available to Connecticut settlers in 1716 as compensation for an equivalent area of territory that had been inadvertently settled by its citizens. The names of former owners include Abner Smith and Ebenezer and Benjamin Pemberton.

The Dwight area, like most of Belchertown, was not a known Native American settlement, but considered part of a crossroads of trails that Indigenous people traveled for centuries, with fluid tribal boundaries. Artifacts found in the early 20th century near Lake Metacomet — just south of Dwight — suggest “evidence of Native American occupations” that began some 7,000 years ago, according to research from the University of Massachusetts Archaeological Services.

Also, there’s a petition at change.org to return hundreds of acres of state-owned land (known as the Lampson Brook Farm) in Belchertown — closer to the Common than Dwight — to the Nipmuc Nation. Nearly 4,000 people have signed so far.

I hope this provides a bit more information about “this land we live on and love.”

Michael Carolan

Belchertown

]]>