The People of Agawam: The Indigenous History of Ipswich Before the English Arrived

Long before the first English house rose on the hill, this place had a name: Agawam. Old records spell it several ways, Aggawom, Angoam, and others, because the people who used it were not the ones writing those records. However it was spelled, it named a particular place: the principal village of the people who lived here, standing on the rise of land we now call Town Hill in the heart of Ipswich.

Today Agawam is sometimes spoken of loosely, almost like a broad territory. It was not that. It was a village, a home place, a gathering of households along the river and the marsh. The English themselves kept a trace of it in their own records: the river that runs through Ipswich was long called the Agawam River before it took the town's name.

So when you stand on Town Hill, you are standing where people gathered, planted, and raised their households for thousands of years. The whole first chapter of this town's story happened before anyone wrote it down, and it belongs to the people whose village it was.

The people of Agawam were the Agawam band of the Pawtucket, an Algonquian-speaking people with close ties to the Pennacook of the Merrimack. They were not one small group living alone. They were part of a world of related villages strung along the coast of what is now Essex County, connected by language, by river routes, and by marriage.

Their coastal villages are still remembered in older place names. Quascacunquen stood on Old Town Hill in what is now West Newbury, ground that spoke of good planting. Wenesquawam lay along the Annisquam in Gloucester. Naumkeag was the great settlement at Salem, named for the eel runs that fed the people. And here, at the bend of the river, stood Agawam.

None of these were territories the way a map draws them today. They were villages, each with its own sagamore and its own rhythm, knit together by water and by kin.

For thousands of years, the people of Agawam lived on the strength of this place. They fished the river and the sea, farmed the lower slopes and the good river flats, and worked the great salt marsh that still borders this corner of Essex County. The marsh was not scenery to them. It was food, building material, and medicine, a working landscape tended with care.

Life moved with the seasons. Spring brought the fish runs up the river. Summer meant corn, beans, and squash in the fields and gathering along the coast. Autumn meant the salt hay harvest, and winter meant drawing on what the land had given. Travel was by water, along the same routes their relatives used between villages, the same waters that still carry kayaks past Ipswich today.

The Ipswich River Watershed Association, which now works to protect this same water, echoes what local historians have long noted: the Pawtucket related to Agawam through travel, agriculture, and fishing, and they kept the river's ecology in balance while they did it. The health of the marsh and the river was not an accident. It was stewardship, practiced and passed down for generations.

That is worth pausing on. The Great Marsh did not simply happen. It was maintained by people who understood it, harvested it carefully, and taught their children the same. The land that looks wild to us today was, in its own way, a tended place.

Then came the years that changed everything. Between 1616 and 1619, a devastating epidemic swept the coastal peoples of New England, striking long before the English settlers arrived. Historians still debate exactly what it was, but its scale is not in doubt. In many coastal communities, the majority of the people died.

The Pawtucket were hit hard. Villages that had stood for generations were reduced to a fraction of their former numbers. When the first English ships began probing this coast in the 1620s and 1630s, they found a people already grieving and a world already broken open.

I tell you this plainly because it is part of the story of Ipswich, and it should not be softened away. The people who welcomed, negotiated with, and often resisted the English settlers were not the people of a thousand years of abundance. They were survivors, holding their communities together through a catastrophe that had come, like so much else, from across the sea.

The leader of this band in those years was a man the records call Masconomet, also written Masconomo. His given Pawtucket name was Quonopkonat. Later he received the honorific name Masquenomoit, or Masconomet, from the Nipmuc, to whom he was related by marriage. The English, who recognized his standing, came to call him Sagamore John.

In June 1630, Masconomet met John Winthrop aboard the governor's ship. It was one of the first formal meetings between the leaders of these two peoples on this coast, a moment of diplomacy carried out on the water, and an act of hope that the newcomers could be neighbors rather than a threat.

English settlers arrived on this ground in 1633, and the town was incorporated as Ipswich in 1634. The years that followed were complicated, full of welcome and pressure, friendship and loss. One documented moment stands out: in February 1637, Masconomet deeded a tract of land to John Winthrop the Younger to farm, a transaction preserved in the record. It shows how quickly, and how often in good faith on Masconomet's part, the ground beneath the new town changed hands.

Through it all, Masconomet worked to keep his people a place in the new order. He dealt with the General Court over land, testifying and petitioning as leaders had to in that uneasy time. Sagamore Hill and Sagamore Street in Hamilton still carry his title, a quiet reminder on the map of the man this country once knew by name.

Masconomet died in 1658 and was buried on Sagamore Hill in what is now Hamilton, with his gun, his tomahawk, and the belongings a person would carry into the next world. It was a place of honor, high above the country he had known all his life.

A year later, in March 1659, a young man dug up his remains. The town's response tells you how the English settlers themselves regarded Masconomet: the man was imprisoned and fined. What happened that spring was treated as a crime against a respected leader, not a curiosity to be shrugged off.

I will not linger on the violation itself. I will say this instead: that the town acted to protect his memory, and that this story survived the centuries, is part of why we can still tell it. The Sagamore Hill Burial Ground marks the place today.

Here is the part of the story that matters most, and the part too often left out: the people of Agawam did not disappear. Historian Mary Ellen Lepionka has documented living descendants of Masconomet, Nanepashemet, Passaconaway, and other Pawtucket and Pennacook people. Some carry surnames like Tyler, English, and Wiser, and they live today on Cape Cod and the Islands and elsewhere in New England, while other lines continue within Native communities across the northeast.

That means this land's first story is not only in the past. It is held by living people, and it is honored by the institutions of this town. The Ipswich Museum keeps and tells the town's history. The Ipswich River Watershed Association works to protect the river the Pawtucket kept in balance. The marsh itself is protected and studied. The descendants carry the deepest thread of all, memory.

When I walk the river with a buyer, or stand on Town Hill and look out over the marsh, I try to remember who was here first and what this place meant for thousands of years before the first English chimney rose. I hope you will too. The people of Agawam shaped this corner of the North Shore long before any of our towns existed, and their story deserves to be told with the respect it has always earned.