Pequot Hill

Pequot Hill is roughly a ten minute run from our house on Bruggeman Place. Past Drawbridge Ice Cream and Mystic Pizza, the main road leads up a hill overlooking the Mystic River, which divides the towns of Stonington and Groton. There on the hill, at the corner of Clift Street and Pequot Avenue, is the John Mason Monument, or at least that's what GoogleMaps says. Today only a tree in the triangle of the intersection marks where the statue used to stand. John Mason, who "overthrew the Pequot Indians and preserved the settlements from destruction," has since been removed (*).


This intersection, bordered on all sides by picturesque wooden New England estates, is estimated to have been the center of the Pequot Village back in the day. In the above illustration, the circle of soldiers are all closing in on that spot where the mailboxes and recycling bins now mark the top of the hill. The offensive in 1637 wasn't meant to be a massacre, but a tactical decision was made to surround the village and set fire to it. Under John Mason, the English settlers along with Narragansett and Mohegan allies prevented the Pequots from fleeing their burning village and killed those who tried, leading to what is sometimes called the Mystic Massacre. Well of course that's only part of a more recent historical tradition.

The New York Times
June 16, 1889, Wednesday
To Stand on Pequot Hill; A Heroic Statue of Major John Mason.Connecticut to Honor her Heroic Soldier on the Spot Where the Pequots Were Exterminated.

Fast forward to 1992 when activists within the Pequot nation demand the statue be removed and destroyed claiming it represented the genocide of their people by John Mason. The citizens of Mystic protested the proposal since the monument commemorated part of their founding history. As Leigh Fought continues in her book, A History of Mystic Connecticut: From Pequot Village to Tourist Town:

Emotions ran high, and Groton town meetings on the subject became intense and heated. A commission was appointed to research the merits of the arguments on both sides, and to recommend a solution.

Both parties reached a compromise in 1996 and the statue was removed though not destroyed. While construction was being done on the area, graffiti replaced the plaques in proclaiming the merits of the absent Major, but now at the top of Clift Street there is nothing that would suggest to the passerby that any of this had occurred.