‘A vehicle of genocide’: These Mass. towns were founded on the killing of Native Americans

“As she dug for clues about her ancestors in the pages of Petersham, Massachusetts’ local history , Jennifer Albertine struck the underbelly of the town her family has called home for 11 generations.

The present-day boundaries of Petersham are nearly identical to those outlined in a 1733 grant , in which colonial Massachusetts carved out a chunk of Nipmuc land, divvied it up into roughly 50 to 100-acre parcels, and doled it out to 72 volunteer bounty hunters as a bonus for scalping 10 Abenaki nearly a decade before.

“A Nipmuc person lost that connection — that connection that I have to the land,” Albertine said. “That’s heavy to think about.”

In 1724, at the request of Captain John Lovewell, the Massachusetts government offered 100 pounds — about the annual salary of a schoolteacher at the time — for each male Native American scalp brought to its council in Boston.

Months later, Lovewell’s men massacred 10 Abenaki next to a lake that now bears his name: Lake Lovell in New Hampshire.

Lovewell trudged to Boston, assured the council the victims were over the age of 12, and paraded their scalps around town before weaving a wig out of their hair and departing for another bloody expedition in Maine.

In the decade that followed, soldiers, bounty hunters and their children demanded land previously promised for over half a century of capturing and killing Natives across New England.

In 1733, the government fulfilled that promise for Lovewell’s men, handing out parcels in an area northwest of Worcester. These lots comprised “Volunteer Town” — a nod to the bounty hunters’ murderous initiative — and in 1754, the town was incorporated as Petersham.”

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