What Did Natick Look Like?
Once Native people began arriving in Natick, they quickly set to work building their new town.
South of the Quinobequin (now the Charles River), residents cultivated fields, planted orchards, and fenced pastures. On the north side, they laid out streets with lots for homes and built a large fort and a schoolhouse. They also built a stone and timber footbridge across the river. An English carpenter was hired for a day to guide construction of an English-style meetinghouse.
Left: Stone walls, erected around 1651, still visible today at Pegan Hill in Natick. Image courtesy of Historic Newton.
In some ways, the town looked much like any other English settlement. However, Native residents chose to build traditional wetus and longhouses for their homes. These homes signaled that Natick would retain its Native identity, even as a Puritan “praying town.”
Farming in Early Natick
For many generations, Native people had farmed sustainably using traditional methods, such as seasonal migration and the burning of woodlands to enrich the soil. By contrast, English farmers lived in permanent dwellings, cleared and fenced fields, and raised livestock. Farming in this way signaled that the land had been “improved” according to English expectations.
English-style farming in Nonantum and in Natick reinforced new cultural norms, including year-round, permanent homes and English gender roles. It also depleted soil and reduced the numbers of deer and other game available for hunting. Puritans believed that Native people needed to cultivate land in the English fashion before they could convert to Christianity.
“But I declared unto them how necessary it was, that they should first be Civilized, by being brought from their scattered and wild courses of life, unto civill Co-habitation and Government, before they could, according to the will of God revealed in the Scriptures, be fit to be be trusted with the sacred Ordinances of Jesus Christ, in Church-Communion.”
—John Eliot, A Late and Further Manifestation, 1655
Header Image: Quinobequin (Charles River), Fall 2020. Image courtesy of the Natick Historical Society.