King Philip's Stockade

King Philip’s Stockade is technically across the Springfield border, but is divided from the rest of that city by the entrance to Interstate 91. This hilltop park — technically an extension of Springfield’s Forest Park— is mostly accessible to and frequented by inhabitants of Longmeadow. Every Fourth of July, they congregate in large numbers for a distant but clear view of Springfield’s fireworks. The park is named after Metacom, the Wampanoag leader whom English settlers called “King Philip.” In 1675-1676, Metacom helped lead a region-wide Native struggle against the English which is now known as “King Philip’s War.” On the far edge of the park is a statue of Toto, a Native man who warned Springfield’s settlers that the local Agawam Indians were planning to attack the city from their hilltop stockade in October 1676.

In reality, King Philip’s Stockade was neither King Philip’s nor a stockade. The Agawams indeed lived in a fort, but it was miles away from this park. The Agawams indeed attacked Springfield, but no there is no evidence that Metacom personally provoked the action — as was claimed by later historians. After English settlers arrived in the 1630s, Native people in the Connecticut River Valley faced decades of devastating epidemics and gradual land loss. In The Story of Western Massachusetts (1949), amateur historian Henry Andrew Wright claims that the English themselves erected the fort as a prototypical “reservation” to contain the Agawams neighbors even more thoroughly.

In the Connecticut River Valley, King Philip’s War was not an aberration, but the culmination of the state of English-Agawam relations. The motivations for the attack on Springfield cannot be known for sure, but the English had fought pitched battles against neighboring and kindred tribes in the preceding months. Fearing retribution, the leaders of Springfield sent Agawam hostages to Hartford, Connecticut to prevent the Agawams — who had thus far supported the English war effort — from changing sides. The Agawams were undeterred; but it seems that they attempted to free their hostages before attacking Springfield. Metacom did not lead or incite the attack, but white historians have claimed that he did as a part of a broader narrative in which one Native leader was responsible for the entire war. On the way to retrieve the hostages from Hartford, the Agawam rescue party might have passed through the English estate where Toto worked as a servant or slave. 19th-century histories (including the Historical Address at Longmeadow’s 1883 Centennial) speculate that this is how Toto learned of the attack, but we do not know why he decided to relay this information to the people of Springfield. More on Toto is available in “Chasing Toto,” an article written by Springfield College’s Anne Wheeler in January 2020. 

White historians insist that after the war, Native people vanished from the region. Jean O’Brien calls this process “lasting” : the insistence that Indians are extinct and that their vanishing is a precondition of New England modernity. Historians like Lisa Brooks and Margaret Bruchac have traced the path of Native descendants into Northern New England and Canada, where they persist to this day. They often travelled back to Western Massachusetts, including for a large-scale raid on Deerfield in 1704. A handful of individuals remained as permanent residents well into the 19th century.

 The City of Springfield created “King Philip’s Stockade” in the early 20th century, a product of complex and often objectively false manifestations of historical memory. By the early 1920s it was clear that it had been placed on the wrong hill, but a park superintendent told the Springfield Republican that “if an Indian stockade never existed there before, it’s a pretty good idea to put one there now.” The Connecticut Historical Society commissioned the statue of Toto 1926, a few years after the creation of the park itself. Local historian Henry Wright sardonically wrote that it wears “the regalia of a Sioux… and several [other] tribes - some which must have been evolved in the sculptor’s mind. This caricature of Toto, or whatever it is supposed to represent, peers toward Springfield as if searching for his creator in order to wreak dire and deserved vengeance.” For decades it was repeatedly vandalized and moved about the area, much to the amusement of local newspapers. In a 1953 editorial called “King Philip, You Don’t Scare Us Anymore,” a writer assumes that Philip — not Toto — is represented by the statue. They go on to explain that the modern sight of children playing at the stockade is the ultimate repudiation of the danger that Indians once posed. When highway construction cleaved the park in two and forced the statue’s relocation, commentators saw a beleaguered Indian with “Progress, that old devil, snapping at his heels.” Strategies to prevent the statue from being stolen or damaged included housing it in the monkey exhibit of Springfield’s Forest Park Zoo. The city returned the statue to the stockade in 2003, containing in a wrought-iron fence to prevent future vandalism.

In the autumn, the paths and parking lots of King Philip’s Stockade are lost amidst the fallen leaves. The park is quiet, with the earth absorbing most of the rumbles of the interstate highway at the bottom of the hill. Residents of Longmeadow can gather at the picnic tables and walk along the paths without even noticing the statue in a far-flung corner. Besides Fourth of July fireworks, the hill gives visitors a perfect view to watch the U.S. Air Force Chinook helicopters fly overhead. The statue, the stockade, and the memory of Native people are on the geographical and historical margins of both Springfield and Longmeadow, but this has not prevented Native people from attempting to reclaim them. The Springfield Republican mentions one visit from the “Black Gold Tribe” in 1947, and in 2005 a group from the Nipmuc Nation (Grafton, MA) performed a rededication ceremony in Metacom’s honor. By stepping outside of Longmeadow’s official boundaries, consider how the past — its borders, its events, and its central participants — is created through the act of remembering.

Bruchac, Margaret M. “Historical Erasure and Cultural Recovery: Indigenous People in the Connecticut River Valley.” University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2007.

King, Moses, and William Clogston. King's Handbook of Springfield, Massachusetts: a Series of Monographs, Historical and Descriptive. J.D. Gill, Publisher, 1884.

Storrs, Richard Salter, J. W. Harding, and Jabez Colton. Proceedings at the Centennial Celebration of the Incorporation of the Town of Longmeadow, October 17th, 1883. Longmeadow: Centennial Committee, 1884.

Wheeler, Anne. “Chasing Toto.” Windsor Historical Society, 2020. 

Wright, Harry Andrew. The Story of Western Massachusetts. Lewis Historical Pub. Co., 1949.

Clips from the Springfield Republican lack dates and names, but were provided by the Windsor Historical Society.