The present-day boundaries of Petersham are nearly identical to those outlined in a 1733 grant , in which colonial Massachusetts carved out a chunk of Nipmuc land, divvied it up into roughly 50 to 100-acre parcels, and doled it out to 72 volunteer bounty hunters as a bonus for scalping 10 Abenaki nearly a decade before.
“A Nipmuc person lost that connection — that connection that I have to the land,” Albertine said. “That’s heavy to think about.”
In 1724, at the request of Captain John Lovewell, the Massachusetts government offered 100 pounds — about the annual salary of a schoolteacher at the time — for each male Native American scalp brought to its council in Boston.
Months later, Lovewell’s men massacred 10 Abenaki next to a lake that now bears his name: Lake Lovell in New Hampshire.
Lovewell trudged to Boston, assured the council the victims were over the age of 12, and paraded their scalps around town before weaving a wig out of their hair and departing for another bloody expedition in Maine.
In the decade that followed, soldiers, bounty hunters and their children demanded land previously promised for over half a century of capturing and killing Natives across New England.
In 1733, the government fulfilled that promise for Lovewell’s men, handing out parcels in an area northwest of Worcester. These lots comprised “Volunteer Town” — a nod to the bounty hunters’ murderous initiative — and in 1754, the town was incorporated as Petersham.
Scalping and genocide
Kimberly Toney grew up a few miles away, in Barre. She is the coordinating curator of Native American and Indigenous Collections at Brown University Libraries and member of the Hassanamisco Band of Nipmuc. Last April, she spoke on Petersham’s formation at its historical society’s annual meeting.
“I got emotional myself, talking about the scalp bounties,” she said.
It’s one thing to push back against the “cultural predisposition in America to think of Indigenous people as being of the past,” she added. “It’s kind of another thing to talk about the very real sanctioned murder of men, women, and children.”
Massachusetts was not the only colony that issued bounties for Native scalps; the practice was pervasive. And since the borders of Massachusetts were much larger at the turn of the 18th century, some of the bounty land is now in Maine and New Hampshire.
After they received land, some of Lovewell’s mercenaries built homes. Others sold. Daniel Spooner and William Negus — who had fought for Lovewell but was not given a land grant — purchased lots, and by 1750, became two of Volunteer Town’s original 55 settlers.