The Hassanamisco Nipmuc are keepers of a deep history inseparable from the Kittacuck/Blackstone River Valley of today’s Central Massachusetts. Drawing on a rich corpus of information drawn from LiDAR, paleoethnobotany, landscape and oral tradition, this paper presents an overview of the Hassanamisco landscape of what is today Keith Hill in Grafton, Massachusetts. The results document the transformation that accompanied the advent of water-powered industry throughout the Kittacuck River Valley during the early 19^th century. An earlier landscape history revealed through botanical analyses suggests increased upland clearing in the surrounding river valley prior to European colonization. LiDAR and archaeological excavations reveal a landscape of upland Nipmuc farmsteads surrounded by Anglo-American farmsteads located on the dispossessed lands of the Hassanamisco. Despite the impact of colonization, industrialization and the damming of rivers, oral history and placenames linked to the current landscape of Keith Hill still include places of spiritual importance for today’s Hassanamisco.

This project explores changes in land use and management practices of the Hassanamesit Woods project area through pollen analysis. Pollen diagrams, created from a wetland sediment core located North of the Deb Newman site, allow for an almost 1000-year long picture to be created of the vegetation changes in this area; AD1100 - present. The goal for this was to capture the created landscape of the Nipmuc ancestors, the arrival of Europeans and the dispossession of Nipmuc land, implementation of European land management practices, and subsequent industrialization of the region and reforestation of Massachusetts farmland.

This presentation will discuss the use of micromorphology to define and isolate archaeologically significant markers within soils that otherwise show extensive post-depositional disturbance. In this context soil thin sections taken from the house site of Augustus Salisbury and the seasonally occupied site of Deb Newman in Grafton, Massachusetts will be used to define and interpret the significance of soil rubification in household versus short-term occupation settings.

This paper will present the results of archaeological excavations focusing on the homesteads of Betty Sampson and her daughter Deborah Newman. Betty Sampson was the daughter of Andrew and Deborah Abraham one of the original 7 Hassanamisco Nipmuc families who received properties set aside as part of the 1728 sale of Hassanamisco Lands to more than 30 English families. In addition to the original 7 “proprietors lots” a separate, 120-acre lot was set aside for other Nipmuc families. This “overplus” lot has been the focus of more than 7 years of excavation and analysis as part of the larger Hassanamesit Woods Project. Excavations have unearthed the remains of a stone-laid foundation that is believed to be the 18^th-century homestead of Betty Sampson that was later inherited by her daughter Deborah Tommac Sampson. A second area that contains the remains of what could be multiple, seasonal Wetu’s has also been uncovered.

What does settler colonial dispossession look like when we attend not only to land, but to water—rivers, currents, and their interconnective flow? In the Kittatuck Valley Nipmuc riverine and riparian knowledge shaped foodways, mobility, and kinship across generations. By the early nineteenth century, the Kittatuck was heavily dammed to power settler mills—slowing what was an important vein of Nipmuc seasonal movement to a series of mill ponds linked by a dwindling stream. Villages once defined by riverine relationality—Worcester (Pakachoag), Woonsocket, and Pawtucket—became industrial centers where cholera and typhoid thrived in stagnant water. These were not only Indigenous losses, though Indigenous communities bore particular harms. Yet Nipmuc knowledge persisted in the face of hydrological disruption. Drawing on archaeological, archival, and ecological sources, this paper explores this era of water dispossession as it impacted the Hassanamisco Nipmuc community and highlights the persistence of Indigenous environmental knowledge amid settler infrastructural transformation.

Documentary research into the Hassanamesit Woods Augustus Salisbury (HWAS) site revealed an unexpected, though likely not unique, domestic arrangement between an owner-operator and multiple tenant families that facilitated a combination of agricultural and industrial labor. Without this research, the site would have continued to be incorrectly remembered as the home only of its namesake, a singular white Anglo-American man, rather than the multiple families who lived alongside him, thus pushing these occupants, who both experienced marginalization due to their identities, and who lived on recently dispossessed Nipmuc land perceived as marginal, to the margins of the historical narrative and public memory as well. HWAS functions as a case study for sites of continuing marginalization and for challenging assumptions about “typical” New England farmsteads through extensive documentary research, thus complicating our characterization of these sites and their assemblages.

The presence of shoemaking tools at the Hassanamesit Woods Augustus Salisbury (HWAS) site in Grafton, Massachusetts offers a unique opportunity to investigate the processes of industrialization in rural New England as well as the individuals who navigated this period of rapid socioeconomic change. Archaeological analysis of these tools illuminates the processes of the outwork system of industrial labor, while extensive documentary analysis provides insights into the human consequences of industrial transition. Along with uncovering unique details of individual lives, documentary research further reveals broader patterns in geographic and socioeconomic mobility amongst the class of laborers that lived and worked at the site from 1850 to 1890. Ultimately, this analysis of shoemaking tools and census data seeks to understand the collective experience of a highly mobile working class who engaged in both agricultural and industrial labor and leveraged the domestic arrangement at HWAS in an attempt to gain economic independence.

The 19th-century Hassanamesit Woods Augustus Salisbury site (HWAS) provides insights into an understudied and little understood type of complex farmstead that was likely common in Central Massachusetts, if not throughout New England, during the period of industrialization. As farmers and industrial laborers, and in many cases as immigrants, located on the margins of town on land dispossessed from the Nipmuc not long before, those living at HWAS from 1850 to 1890 would have been seen as working-class by many of their contemporaries. The bottle glass and smoking pipe assemblage produced by occupants such as Civil War veteran shoemakers, immigrant factory workers, and even a single mother with eight children attests to navigations and expressions of this class identity amidst rapid cultural and economic change while bringing to life occupants’ labor experiences, engagements with or resistance to the temperance movement, and healthcare practices and ethnomedical beliefs.