By Gypsy Meneses The Quinnipiac Indian Monument is a relatively new memorial sight, honoring the Native Americans that once called New Haven their home. Three individuals decided it was time to commemorate this Native American tribe: Doris Townshend and Harry Townshend, whose grandfather Captain Charles Hervey, was an early historian of the Quinnipiacs, and Priscilla Oliver. The memorial sight is located at Fort Wooster Park in New Haven on Townshend Ave, just below the oldest burial sites of the Quinnipiac tribe. Peter Horbrick from Bethany, Connecticut was the artist who carved the memorial depicting a father, mother, son, and their dog at the harbor walking up to greet five English Puritan settlers on April 24, 1638. The 9,000-pound black granite memorial has inscribed, “A Quinnipiac Indian family walks to the harbor to meet the Newcomers- April 24,1638 as their way of life changes forever.” Quinnipiac history has been difficult for New Haven historians to recover, since the descend...

By Megan Mancarella Standing on the fading grass, looking out at the sea of graves and headstones in the Old Cemetery of East Haven, one encounters a deep divot in the land. The hollowed area spans wide and is barren of most graves, despite being located next to the cemetery. What meets the eye is a simple basin, but the history behind the geographical feature reveals a dwelling of Connecticut’s Quinnipiac Natives. Ezra Stiles and his friend, Reverend Nicholas Street, explored the area in October 1761 where they had encountered the remains of a Quinnipiac fort used for defense against Mohegan and Mohawk peoples; they estimated the fort existed until the late Sixteenth or early Seventeenth Centuries.  There is a forty-foot rectangular depression where the fort once stood, and the spring-fed pond that was once its water supply was drained in 1895 for cemetery renovations—the hollow of the pond can still be seen today and is referred to as the “Indian bowl.” Stiles’ drawn map shows a ...