Just whose land was it?
I want to emphasize that I am not claiming in any of these posts that either side of the family was part of the original communities we learn about in secondary school history classes -- Jamestown, Plymouth, the Massachusetts Bay Colony. No, the various American colonies were pretty well established by the time our family's folks started to showing up.
I'd also point out that when we think about the early days of colonization, I know that I tend to think almost exclusively in terms of the English colonies. I'm apt to forget that other nations had quite a head start on establishing outposts in what would come to be the United States, most notably Spain. And of course, we shouldn't forget that pretty much everywhere Europeans dropped in, even as far back as the Norsemen, aka Vikings, people already lived here.
Which leads us into today's tale.
I had traced several branches of the tree for Sharon's dad until I ran out of listed relatives. So I backtracked and took off from one of his grandmothers and quickly encountered the Hurt family. The Hurts settled in Virginia's Tidewater area in what became King William County, not far from present day Richmond.
John Hurt Sr. shows up in Tidewater Virginia Families: A Social History, by Virginia Lee Hutchinson Davis. (Quoted on FamilySearch.com)
"John Hurt was living in Pamunkey Neck before June 1699 when he was granted title to land he had leased at an earlier date from the Pamunkey Indians.
"The land lease was declared null and void but because he had made improvements he was allowed to keep the land. A favorable grant was made of eighty acres in one parcel.
"John had also leased 900 acres of Indian land with Ambrose Smith, John Dixon, and Benjamin Arnold. The men were granted a favorable title in this land also."
The land in question was land that had been agreed upon by the Assembly with Queen Anne of the Pamunkey Indians that they would receive a grant to the land in accordance with the English laws. The Indians had accepted the land as their own and had leased some of it to the English settlers.
"When Ralph Wormley accompanied the surveyor onto their land, the Indians had complained to the Assembly through their interpreter. The original agreement had been that they were to be granted a considerable quantity of land in Pamunkey Neck, and no English were to settle within three miles of their towns.
"The Assembly agreed that the Indians had no right to lease the land for ninety-nine years and declared the leases void. The committee judged the land which the families were occupying to be sufficient for their needs, and granted the settlers the land they had leased. It was a considerable amount that they turned over to the English settlers."
The Indians in question are the Pamunkeys, who were part of an alliance of Algonquin-speaking tribes in the area. They were among the earliest inhabitants of the area to encounter the English settlers, and as you might imagine, relations weren't always cordial. From 1609-46, the settlers and the tribes engaged in three "periods of hostility," as Encyclopedia Virginia so quaintly calls it.
A peace treaty reached in 1646 set aside land for the tribes involved in the Pamunkey Neck area. I haven't been there, but looking at the map, it looks like prime land. The English apparently thought so as well, and even though they had an alliance with the Pamunkey, they thought they ought to have a bit more of the land.
Some 30 years after the treaty, the English sought the tribe's help with a rebellion that cropped up led by an English settler. The chief at the time agreed to help, after reminding the English that they didn't always deal faithfully with the tribe but still expected military aid when threatened. She -- that's right, she -- negotiated a new treaty in which she "swore allegiance to the Crown, including an annual tribute of game, in exchange for hunting rights, access to civil courts, and ownership of land within a three-mile radius of any Indian town." Sound familiar?
Her successor, the Queen Anne mentioned earlier, was given the task of continuing the struggle for her tribe's rights. Next time, we'll continue to look at Pamunkey history. Spoiler alert: It gets worse before it gets better.
Comments
Post a Comment