The Mohican Homeland

Long before the cottages and concert halls, this valley was the homeland of the Mohican people, who called themselves the Muhheconneok, the people of the waters that are never still. Their ancestors lived across this region for thousands of years, centered on the upper Housatonic River watershed and the Hudson Valley to the west. The Mohicans knew these hills and waters intimately, hunting, fishing, and farming the river bottoms.

Beginning in the early sixteen hundreds, warfare with the powerful Mohawk to the west pushed many Mohican families eastward into Berkshire County. In seventeen thirty four a mission community took shape on the Housatonic just south of here, at what became Stockbridge, where the people were known as the Stockbridge Indians. Over the following decades, treaties, debt, and steady pressure from colonists stripped away their land.

By the seventeen eighties most had been forced to leave, beginning a long migration that eventually carried them to Wisconsin, where their descendants live today as the Stockbridge Munsee Community. They have never forgotten this valley. In recent years the tribe has returned to the Berkshires, reclaiming parcels of their ancestral homeland and reminding visitors that this landscape has a history far older than any mansion.