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 ...