VOLUME 22/NUMBER 3/SUMMER 2024       Connecticut Explored

The Major John Mason monument after its move to Palisado Green in Windsor. photo: Wikimedia Commons

By David J. Naumec

After more than 385 years, the Pequot War (1636–1638) remains one of the most controversial events in American history. It forever changed Connecticut’s political and social landscape. The war has been commemorated through both Indigenous and Euro-American oral tradition, historical writings, artwork, and monuments, as well as colonial, antiquarian, and scholarly historical writings. In recent years, the perspectives of Connecticut’s Indigenous communities have received more consideration and respect, providing a more complete story for historians and the citizens of Connecticut. While many aspects of the war remain contentious, few figures evoke more emotion and debate than Captain John Mason, the wartime commander of Connecticut’s colonial troops. Mason has been remembered over the centuries alternately as a hero for his leadership during the Pequot War or as a mass murderer of hundreds of Pequots during the “Mystic Massacre.”

The controversy over Mason’s role in history is embodied in the furor surrounding memorials to John Mason in Windsor, Connecticut, and at the state capitol in Hartford. The John Mason statue now located on the Palisado Green in Windsor, a short distance from the house Mason built there in 1634, is a 20-foot-tall monument featuring an imposing 9-foot bronze of Mason standing atop a boulder, his hand unsheathing a sword. The statue was unveiled in 1889 in Mystic Village, Groton, a short distance from where English forces destroyed the Pequot Fort in 1637. In the 1990s, local activists, including some members of the Pequot tribes, petitioned for its removal from what they argued was a massacre site. In 1996, the statue was moved to Windsor, where the controversy surrounding the monument continues.

Meanwhile, on the north side of the state capitol building overlooking Bushnell Park, located in one of the 24 niches adorning the structure, which is home to 16 sculptures celebrating Connecticut’s important historical actors, stands an 8-foot-tall stone carving of Mason clad in armor. His sword is sheathed but still in hand. If this symbol of Mason’s military status is not clear enough, just a short distance away, etched into the very stone of the building, is a sculpted relief titled Attack on an Indian Fort, which depicts the assault at Mistick.* The capitol was completed in 1878, and the Mason statue was placed in 1909. In 2021, the State Capitol Preservation and Restoration Commission held an hours-long hearing and ultimately voted to keep the statue where it is. From the 1889 unveiling of the Mason statue through the 2021 hearings at the state capitol until today, the Mason monuments have remained controversial.

The Man

Born in England in 1600, John Mason joined the English Army as a young man and fought in the Netherlands during the Thirty Years’ War. In 1632, Mason arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, settled in Dorchester, and, with his military experience, was appointed an officer in the militia. He was later elected to the General Court. In 1634, he settled near the newly founded town of Windsor.

The movement of English settlers like Mason into the Connecticut River Valley threatened the established Pequot-Dutch wampum and fur trade network. At the same time, European diseases wreaked havoc on Indigenous groups and further destabilized the balance of power in the region. Amid rising tensions, the deaths of English traders in 1634 and 1636 were blamed on Pequot warriors. In retaliation, Massachusetts Bay forces attacked Pequot villages on the Pequot (now Thames) River in August 1636, which, according to Lieutenant Lion Gardiner’s Relation of the Pequot Warres (Acorn Club, 1901), “thus began the wars between the Indeans and us in these parts.” During the winter of 1636–1637, the Pequot laid siege to the Saybrook Fort on the Connecticut River. In April 1637, Pequot warriors raided Wethersfield, and immediately afterward, on May 1, 1637, the Connecticut Colony declared war on the Pequot and were joined by a contingent of Indigenous allies, including Wangunk and Podunk men as well as some Mohegans under the sachem Uncas.

On May 26, 1637, English allied forces attacked the fortified Pequot village at Mistick. During the battle, Mason ordered the village set ablaze, killing some 150 warriors and 400 noncombatants, as discussed in The Pequot War by Alfred Cave (University of Massachusetts Press, 1996). It was the turning point of the war. Pequot refugees fled west with their sachem, Sassacus, and were defeated by English troops in present-day Southport. The Hartford Treaty of 1638 ended the war, and the Connecticut English claimed Pequot land as their own “by Conquest,” as noted in the very language of the treaty, a copy of which still exists in the Connecticut Archives at the Connecticut State Library. The war and treaty fundamentally altered the balance of power in the region. Pequots could no longer call themselves “Pequots” and had little access to their homeland. Only the Connecticut Colony, the Narragansett, and the Mohegan participated in the treaty. The Wangunk and other Native people were not invited.

After the conclusion of the Pequot War, Mason remained active in Connecticut politics and military affairs, becoming the colony’s chief military officer in 1638 and serving as deputy governor from 1660 to 1669 and then acting governor from 1661 to 1663 while John Winthrop Jr. secured the colonial charter from King Charles II. Major John Mason died in January 1672 and was buried in the Post-Gager Burial Ground in Norwich.

The Memorials

For years, Pequot Hill, the site of the Mistick Fort, lacked any physical markers commemorating the events of 1637, except for the remains of palisade logs occasionally unearthed by farm plows. Yet Mistick Fort was not forgotten. Its location and stories of the battle passed through generations of Pequot people and other Mystic residents. In 1856, a dramatic historical reenactment was organized by a Groton farmer near Pequot Hill in which he piled dozens of wigwam-sized brush piles on his land and invited residents to watch as he set them ablaze while quoting Mason’s orders: “We must burn them!” For many years, sightseers visited Mystic in search of the “Pequot Fort.”

The Figure of the Indians’ Fort or Palizado in New England and the Manner of the Destroying it by Captayne Underhill and Captayme Mson, engraving in John Underhill, Newes from America, London. Printed by J. D. for Peter Cole, 1638. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

Talk of a monument at Mystic began in November 1859, but efforts stalled until 1870 when the Mystic Historical Society pushed to commemorate Mason and the Pequots’ defeat. A letter published March 12, 1874, in The Mystic Press called for “a monument worthy of the greatest day in the early annals of Connecticut.” But not everyone agreed with such sentiments. The following year, another letter appeared in The Mystic Press on April 9, 1875, opining that “our Puritan Fathers, no doubt, thought their object a noble one, and their means commendable,” but questioned, “Why should we blindly commemorate in honor and sympathy, the hard, forcible manner in which our forefathers took possession of the rocky hills and woods of Connecticut?”

The U.S. centennial celebration in 1876 and the subsequent annihilation of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry Regiment at the Battle of the Little Bighorn furthered the debate over a monument at Mystic. In September 1881, a monument to a different massacre was erected for the centennial of the American Revolution’s Battle of Groton Heights. One Groton resident in attendance, Charles Allyn, transcribed the address of special guest William Tecumseh Sherman, then commanding general of the army, in which he reflected on the precedent set by the Pequot War: “The people of Connecticut should remember above all things when you criticize sharply and flippantly the Indian policy of the nation, and condemn the army, that it was you who first set the example for the Indian policy now pursued when you drove out the Pequots from these very lands almost 250 years ago” (Battle of Groton Heights, Seaport Autographs, 1999).

The movement to accurately place the proposed Mason statue near the Mistick battle site included interviews with farmers and investigative field trips by several prominent historical societies. Citizens lobbied the legislature for assistance, and in 1887, the state General Assembly passed a resolution to fund a bronze Mason statue “of heroic size” atop a boulder in Groton, as noted in Thomas Collier’s history of the Mason statue (The Commission, 1889). The memorial was sculpted by James Hamilton of Westerly, Rhode Island, and cast at the Ames Manufacturing Company of Chicopee, Massachusetts. The dedication was set for June 1889, and several dignitaries, including Mason descendants, were invited. No one from the Pequot tribe received an invitation. Mason’s sword, still in the possession of a descendant living in Mystic, was carried at the unveiling. Groton historian Carol Kimball recalled hearing stories from Mystic residents of how signage meant to direct attendees to the dedication ceremony was moved, perhaps in protest (Naumec personal correspondence, 2008). Nonetheless, the dedication occurred, and the Mason statue, situated on the junction of Pequot Avenue and Clift Street, quietly overlooked Mystic for over a century.

Or not so quietly. Protests were frequent, and both detractors and curious tourists visited. Mystic resident Alla Lynne Allyn’s memoir records that her grandmother talked of visits from an Eastern Pequot man, Soloman Sebastian: “He’d stand there and cry, ‘Why did you do it, WHY did you do it? Kill all those little papooses!’” By the turn of the 20th century, a neighbor took such offense at the Mason monument that he designed his own statue, a Pequot warrior aiming an arrow at Mason; although never completed, its stone base stands today on Pequot Avenue. Local accounts abound of the Mason statue being vandalized, the sword broken off at one point, or being covered in paint. Eventually, it became an annual Halloween tradition to toilet paper Mason.

By 1992, local activists petitioned to remove the statue from what they considered sacred ground. As a result, the state and town of Groton formed a Mason Advisory Committee comprised of Pequot tribal members, historians, residents, and Mason descendants to decide the statue’s fate. The committee recommended that the Mason statue be moved to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center as part of a permanent exhibit. The state rejected this solution and instead relocated the monument to the Palisado Green in Windsor in 1996, where it remains a source of controversy and the target of continued vandalism. According to a July 9, 2020, article in The Hartford Courant, for instance, it was adorned with spray paint reading “BLM” for “Black Lives Matter.”

Treaty of Hartford (copy) September 21, 1638. Paul Grant-Costa, et al. eds. Yale Indian Papers Project, Yale University, 1638.09.21.00

Not all Pequot people supported the decision to move Mason. Dr. Kevin McBride, then director of research at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, noted that Tribal Chair Skip Hayward pushed for reinterpretation of the monument in the belief that “if you take it down, no one will remember what happened here.” As decades passed, Hayward’s prediction proved partially true, as discovered during a 2007–2009 archaeological survey of Mistick Fort in which only about half of the landholders in the project area were aware of the history related to Pequot Hill. As new residents move to Pequot Avenue, the memory of the event continues to fade.

But the Pequot never forgot. Each year, on the anniversary of the Mistick Massacre, members of the community gather for a First Light ceremony to honor the lives of those killed on May 26, 1637. When considering the emotions, passions, and personal perspectives tied to the historical discourse of the Pequot War and recent arguments over historical memory and commemoration, I think of William Faulkner’s words: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The memory and legacy of the Pequot War remain very much alive today, as seen in the continuing disagreement over the Mason statues that adorn Palisado Green and Connecticut’s state capitol building.

* Dr. Naumec uses the colonial-era spelling of Mistick when referring to the location of the Pequot fort at the the time of Pequot War.

Dr. David J. Naumec

Dr. David J. Naumec is a museum consultant who has worked as senior historian and archaeologist for the Battlefields of the Pequot War project and field director for Heritage Consultants LLC. He is currently an assistant professor of history at Central Connecticut State University.

Learn More!

Kevin McBride and Laurie Pasteryak Lamarre, “Exploring and Uncovering the Pequot War,” Connecticut Explored, Fall 2013, ctexplored.org/exploring-and-uncovering-the-pequot-war

“Slavery and the Pequot War,” ConnecticutHistory.Org, November 29, 2020, connecticuthistory.org/slavery-and-the-pequot-war

Reader Survey: What Should Happen to the Mason Monuments?

You’ve heard from our writers; now we want to hear from you! Link to our survey and share your opinion about the role of monuments and what should happen with the John Mason statues. Results will be published in an upcoming issue.