Coursing through time

Even a river has roots

It is a mere sliver of water, one of hundreds right here in New England.

When it comes to majesty or size, you won't find it on a list of the world's greatest rivers – or even in the footnotes.

But there's no mistaking its importance.

Some say Ware, Palmer and other surrounding towns just wouldn't be without it.

Over centuries, the ribbon of water has enabled sustenance, settlement, industry and recreation.

In this series, we look at the long, varied course of the Ware River, and try to determine where its currents will lead with the procession of the 21st century.

By Taryn Plumb

Turley Publications Reporter

As time surges forward, the ribbon of water ceaselessly keeps pace.

Gushing, surging, seething, dipping, swelling in an endless flow.

Sluicing and ribboning across southern central Massachusetts, the river vacillates narrow and wide, gurgles over rocks, disappears in groves and valleys, whispers past rushing cars, businesses, homes and ghosts of industry.

Originating in Hubbardston, the Ware River slices a short southwest track across the middle of the state, slicing through Barre, Hardwick and New Braintree, then cutting through the one-time mill city that took its name, and later passing into Palmer and ending in Three Rivers, where it unites with the Quaboag and Swift Rivers to form the Chicopee river, which is in its own constant rush to the Connecticut River.

With a watershed (or drainage area) of about 23,000 acres (according to the Department of Conservation and Recreation), the Ware River is supplied by dozens of ponds and smaller alleys of water along its route, and, second-hand, by dozens more water bodies along their paths – all churning together in a constant rhythm.

But it, in turn, supplies just as it takes.

Seasonally (that is, when its currents are running high enough), it dumps into a manmade aqueduct along its course that filters through to the Quabbin Reservoir.

Today, it hums like an engine, a tireless machine.

It is a well-traveled, time-worn path blazed millennia upon millennia ago, during the Great Ice Age. It was then that a giant slab of ice gripped most of North America, sliding back and forth and creating this small waterway and thousands of others, along with valleys, larger water bodies and other contours in the land.

Thousands of years later, it became a settlement spot for Native Americans – its coursing currents ensured survival. They knew it as “Menameset,” “Nenameseck” or “Menameseek” (various British spellings) which to their ears meant “fishing weir.”

Some of them were Nipmucs, others Quaboags, according to historians.

As described in an account by Howard S. Russell, they were “black-haired, out-nosed, broad-shouldered, brawny-armed, long and slender handed, out-breasted, small-waisted, lank-bellied, well thighed, flat-heeled,” with “handsome grown legs and small feet.”

Before the fateful first steps across Plymouth Rock, the main centers of most tribal populations were close to the shore or valleys of rivers, Russell explained in “Indian New England Before the Mayflower.”

This was for a few reasons, he wrote, the first being sustenance: Fish were the most reliable source of food.

But just as important, the natives relied on waterways to cultivate their crops, which included corn, beans and squash, Russell explained. Planting near the water could “stabilize” these plantings when they were hit by spring and fall frosts, ultimately extending the growing season by more than two weeks.

Another benefit was the constant driftwood offered up by the currents, providing fuel for fires.

Similarly, Indians capitalized on the networked intaglio of rivers across the state to create pathways; one well-known route started in Weston and passed along the Ware River on its way through to Springfield, according to Josiah Howard Temple and Charles Adams, who penned a history of North Brookfield. Another started in Lancaster and passed along the Indian villages along the “Menameset.”

The latter, a series of three settlements, were relocation spots for “able-bodied” warriors of Quaboag clans. In early July 1675, they left their ancestral towns to the east and concentrated in “Menameseek country,” according to Temple and Adams.

Splitting apart, they built their homes on the east bank of the Ware River, to each of which the name “Menameset” was applied.

As described by Temple and Adams, one was in New Braintree, and “about 20 rods,” (or 5-and-a-half yards), from the river. Another was a mile north of this spot, on a plain 35 feet above the river and a screened in by a terrace of hemlocks and pines. The third was up the river about two miles, in Barre Plains, where the water forms a double oxbow.

These villages were located “with special regard to good fishing places at the outlets of the ponds, and conveniency of large and easily tilled planting fields,” as stated in Temple and Adams' account.

All told, the relocated Quaboags were a people small in number, isolated in position. “Evidently they are not an aggressive people: the facts rather imply that they have the reputation of being inoffensive,” Temple and Adams recounted.

Indeed, much of their lives were as they are today, banal and revolving around mere survival – tending crops, erecting shelters, preserving food.

A most important activity was undertaken in the spring, when they gathered at waterfalls along the river to spear hundreds of spawning salmon, bass and sturgeon.

When ascending, fish were caught with scoop-nets and spears, or shot with arrows. When descending, they were taken in weirs – these being stone walls with narrow openings where large cages of twigs waited to snare, according to Temple and Adams.

“Some of these fishways remained in the river till within the memory of our men now living,” the historians explained.

Another vital activity was in late autumn, when they burned dry grass and sprouts to keep rivers and brook meadows clean, “and thus they were found ready for a mower's scythe.” Otherwise, Temple and Adams recounted, the natural grass would grow “thick and rank, up to a man's face.”

The Pocumtucks of Deerfield were said to have kept the Ware River valley – twenty miles from their home, but a cultivation spot nonetheless – so clear that from a Brookfield hill “a deer could be spotted four miles distant,” as recounted by chroniclers Elias Nason and George Jones Varney in an 1890 Massachusetts gazetteer.

Yet as time progressed, this simple way of life became raucous, as settlers pushed further and further into the wilderness. As the seventeenth century surged to its end, the Ware River witnessed an ongoing cycle of war and strife.

Huts were eventually replaced with small settlements comprising of simply-constructed homes and churches.

But just like the natives, the settlers came to rely upon the river.

And so came the dawn of a force that would impact the slicing channel of water as perhaps never before: Industry.

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