According to William Strickland, an Englishman who visited Clermont in 1794, “upon a swamp near Clermont, some families of the Stockbridge Indians have resided til within this twelvemonth…” [i]
The Stockbridge were mainly Mohicans. The Mohicans had settled what became known as the Hudson River Valley thousands of years ago. They called the river, Mahicannituck and themselves Muh-he-conneok, The People of the Waters That are Never Still. This spelling of their name eventually was Anglicized into Mohican. Because they lived close to the water, they were sometimes called River Indians.
With the coming of Europeans to their homelands beginning in 1609, the Mohicans were driven east away from the river. Many settled in far western Massachusetts in a town they called Wnahktukuk. In 1734 a missionary arrived in the town and began baptizing people. In 1738 he was given permission to construct a mission building in the town. The village was soon renamed Stockbridge.
Members of other tribes including Wappinger, Pequot, Mohawk, Oneida, and others, soon began to move to the village. This amalgamated group became known as the Stockbridge Indians.
During the Revolutionary War the Stockbridge Indians sided with the Americans. The Stockbridge militia was led by Daniel Nimham and his son Abraham. Daniel had been born into the Wappinger tribe. They participated in several of the most famous events of the war including Valley Forge. On August 31, 1778, at the Battle of Kingsbridge, fifty of the Stockbridge militia were attacked by a much larger force of the Queen’s Rangers, a loyalist force led by Lt. Col. John Graves Simcoe. Many of the Stockbridge were killed.
The survivors returned home to Stockbridge only to find that their European neighbors had effectively stolen their homes and their land through frequently fraudulent debts and mortgages. By the end of the war, the European settlers of Stockbridge made it clear that the Stockbridge Indians were no longer welcome in the town.
The Stockbridge Indians began to move west starting in 1783. Many went to land near Oneida Lake that the Cayuga had given to them. They founded a new town they called New Stockbridge.
As Strickland has shown us though, not all of the Stockbridge Indians went to western New York right away. Some of the families stopped near Clermont. It is entirely unclear what their status on the land was. Were they tenants? Squatters hoping to get back a piece of land their ancestors once held? Freeholders of some kind? Whatever their status, the Chancellor would sometimes hire them to work in his fields. He told Strickland that “one Indian was capable of executing as much work as three white people…”[ii] The people also supplemented their income by making baskets and brooms that they could sell to their neighbors on Livingston’s land.
These families did not stay at Clermont more than a few years before moving west themselves in 1793 to New Stockbridge. Of course, the United States government was perpetually unkind to the Native Americans, and by 1818 many of the people of New Stockbridge were being forced off their land again to the White River area of Indiana. In 1822 they were pushed to modern day Wisconsin.
During this period of turmoil, the Stockbridge were joined by a group of Lenni Lenape/ Munsee people who were historically related to the Stockbridge. The group was soon known as the Stockbridge-Munsee. They were eventually recognized by the government as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, Band of Mohican Indians. They finally received a reservation in Northeastern Wisconsin where many descendants still live.
The tribe has been able to buy some of their ancestral land along the Hudson River back. An office of Historic Preservation, located in Troy, New York, ensures that the Mohicans have a voice in what happens to their ancestral lands.[iii]
As for the Stockbridge that briefly resided on Clermont’s lands, we may never know their true status as residents of the land. What we do know is that their time here was only a brief stopping point during the push of American colonists and later Americans to dispossess Native Americans, who had lived on the land for hundreds or thousands of years, of their property to make way for white settlers.
[i] Strickland, William. Reverend J.E. Strickland ed. Journal of a Tour in the United States of America 1794-1795 The New York Historical Society, New York, 1971 p.116
[ii] ibid
[iii] With tremendous thanks to the history of the Mohicans available on www.mohican.com, the official website of the Stockbridge-Munsee, Band of Mohican Indians.
Clermont State Historic Site 
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