The Paugussett and the Golden Hill

Before Bridgeport was a factory city, before it was a port, before it was even a village, it was a place the Paugussett people called Pequonnock, a Quiripi word meaning cleared land. The Paugussett were an Algonquian-speaking people who had occupied the coastal lowlands around Long Island Sound for thousands of years. Their most significant site was a rise called Golden Hill, which overlooked the harbor at the mouth of the Pequonnock River, a place of natural springs and planting fields that had served as a sacred site for generations.

When English settlers arrived in the sixteen forties, they established a village near the harbor, close to but not directly on the Paugussett's sacred ground. The Colony of Connecticut granted the Golden Hill Paugussett a reservation in sixteen thirty-nine, a formal recognition that the land was theirs. That reservation lasted until eighteen oh two, when it was extinguished by the state.

The story of what happened to Golden Hill in the twentieth century is one of the more direct examples of how American cities erased their own indigenous geography. The hill, the springs, the planting fields: blasted through, as the Bridgeport city history quietly notes, for construction of an expressway. The land that carried the name and the memory of the people who lived here before anyone else was removed to accommodate an interchange.

The Golden Hill Paugussett Tribe remains a state-recognized tribal nation in Connecticut, though federal recognition has been a long-running legal dispute. One branch acquired land for a small reservation in the late nineteenth century that is retained in the Town of Trumbull. The tribe has been fighting for its legal standing for decades. The legal record is incomplete and contested. What is not contested is who was here first.