Sarah Phillips her mark
Moving out of the seventeenth-century for a minute to share the signature of Sarah Burnee Phillips, a Nipmuc woman of Hassanamesit, or so-called "Grafton, Massachusetts"
Sarah Burnee Phillips was born in 1744 to Sarah Muckamugg and Fortune Burnee. Her kinship lines connect her to Sarah Robbins, Peter Muckamugg, and Petavit. Several of the men in Sarah’s family, including Fortune Burnee Jr., Joseph Aaron, and Prince Paine, served in the Revolutionary War. Her half-brother, Joseph, returned disabled, no longer able to work the family farm. Prince Paine, Sarah’s first husband, died after returning from the war, in 1777. Before marrying Boston Phillips in 1786, Sarah worked the family homestead herself.
Sarah lived on ancestral land passed down through family matriarchs, even as that land had been constrained by colonial and state systems of allotment, debt, trusteeship, and dispossession. After Boston Phillips died in 1798, Sarah continued to sustain herself and her family at Hassanamesit through farming, animal husbandry and basket making. She died in 1824.
I have been thinking about Sarah while preparing a TEK and archival recovery walk through Hassanamesit Woods. Now a completely wooded landscape, there is sassafras, sarsaparilla, oak, berries, medicines, stone walls, trails. Beneath the native and invasive plants are cellar holes, buried pewter pots, stone tools. There are the invisible allotment lines, absences, stories, and records that vibrate in my mind when I walk this place.
The upcoming walk in these woods cannot only be about “learning plants.” It has to be about relationship, responsibility, surveillance, survival, and the archival traces of Nipmuc people who continued to live, farm, tend, make, remember, and remain there under conditions designed to make that survival nearly impossible.
Sarah and her kin lived at Hassanamesit for hundreds of years. Their homesite has been the subject of a series of intensive archaeological excavations in the 21st century. Because of that work, we can know intimate details about their household — even fragments of plates, spoons, and other belongings from their daily lives. In some ways, I am grateful for what can be recovered. I am also sitting with the harder question of what it means that so much of what can be known about ancestors comes to us through these forms of (settler) entitlement to knowledge, through legal documents like deeds, debt records, trustees’ reports, through excavations, and the documentation of colonial control.
Sarah's mark leaves the trace of a Nipmuc matriarch whose life at Hassanamesit asks us to read land, plants, archives, and memory together, not separately.
This quit claim for 80 acres of Sarah’s land transferred to Joseph Aaron, signed September 4, 1798. Seen at the American Antiquarian Society.
