More than 90 years ago, fourth, fifth and sixth graders attending Lynn schools did their part to chronicle Lynn’s origins on the 300th anniversary of its beginnings.
Believe or not, the students, with help from teachers, produced a 257-page book titled, “History Stories of Lynn” a copy of which ended up in my hands thanks to Patricia Flaherty, who appreciates the city’s history as much as anyone.
Brickett, Tracy, Cobbet and former Burrill School students banded together to research and write about “Lynn’s First Settlers, the Indians” in several detailed chapters complete with illustrations and literary references.
Their history starts with the Pawtuckets and focuses on Nanepashemet, a tribal chief described in the student history as a ruler over a domain stretching from the Charles River to what would become southern New Hampshire. With 3,000 warriors under his command, Nanepashemet, or New Moon, lived for part of his life on Sagamore Hill within sight of the ocean.
The student historians described how allies living along the Merrimack River visited the coastal area stretching north from the mouth of the Saugus River. By 1615, according to the history, the Pawtuckets were at war with the Tarratines. Nanepashemet made a strategic decision to relocate from the area that would become Lynn to the Mystic River area where he built a fort.
“The Tarratines followed and in 1619 the great chief was assassinated by one of them,” the history states.
Nanepashemet’s widow succeeded him with the title Sachem and delegated governing responsibilities, according to the history, among her three sons. She remarried and her new husband received a position of power among the Pawtuckets but the Sachem continued to rule and outlived her husband by almost 50 years.
According to the history: “It was the custom of an aged Indian woman, the last of the Saugus tribe, to visit the place of her birth near Nahant, in the autumn of the year, when, having gathered shellfish and eaten, she would walk slowly and sadly away.”
The history goes on to chronicle how three sisters known as Wanapanaquin sat on the rocks overlooking the ocean in Nahant, wearing feather headdresses, and how another chief, or sagamore, was taken into slavery, sent to the Caribbean, only to escape and return to New England.
Tribe members built homes from wood that were more than 50 feet in length and could house 50 or more people during a winter. A roof opening allowed cooking fire smoke to escape and corn, beans and smoked fish and meat saw the tribe through a New England winter.
A walk along the coast from Saugus to Marblehead 300 years ago revealed early sailors paddling birch, animal skin or log canoes. Divers with deer skin bags scooped up lobsters and net tenders trapped fish in shallows. Some of the fish became fertilizer for fields that grew beans, corn, squash and melon.
The moon ruled the earliest Lynners’ lives, with the Snow Moon dominating winter until the Green Moon of March and May’s Moon of the Flowers waxed and waned. Summer saw the Moon of the Deer and the Sturgeon Moon. The history recounts how October was the Traveling Moon month.
Lynn acquired global fame as a shoemaking city and the area’s original residents knew how to scrape animal skins and stretch and dry them before trimming the dried skin and using a fishbone needle to stitch it into footwear.
Another history detailing early Lynn and written a few years after the students wrote their stories focuses on Saugus Center’s value centuries ago as a flint deposits.
Jasper Street, located off Winter, takes its name from the stone deposits mined using a method that involved heating jasper ledges, according to writer Russell C. Parsons, and then dousing the hot rock with cold water in order to loosen it and break away chunks. Broken into small pieces, jasper could be traded and worked into arrow and spearheads.
“Westward, westward Hiawatha
Sailed into the fiery sunset,
Sailed into the purple vapors,
Sailed into the dusk of evening.”
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
