Pequitside Farms, land once occupied by the Ponkapoag Indians   (Canton Public Library Collection)

John Eliot¹

Records tell us that on September 14, 1646 John Eliot (c. 1604 – 21 May 1690) first preached the gospel to the Indians in an area then known as a territory of Dorchester.  This event took place in the wigwam of Kitchamakin, the successor of Chicataubut (sachem of the Neponset Indians) near the mouth of the Neponset River in an area known as Vose’s Grove.

Once cheated and deprived of their lands at Neponset, these native Americans found a friend in Eliot as he petitioned the town of Dorchester that they might settle together and be “gospellized”.  Eliot took a deep interest in their welfare and advised the Indians to move to Ponkapoag when they left Neponset.  This territory derived its name from the pond, and so the Indians formerly know as the Neponset tribe became the Ponkapoag Indians, receiving the name of their new home.

In 1657, town records show a committee was appointed to lay out a 6,000 acre Indian Plantation at Ponkapoag. This was the second of seven "praying Indian plantations" in Massachusetts during the seventeenth century, part of a movement at that time to propagate Christianity amongst the native people. It was modeled after a similar community established a few years earlier in Natick by John Eliot.  Eliot had desired to move all of the Indians into one location but gave up that idea, instead adopting a policy of colonizing his converts by sequestering them from their heathen brethren and subjecting them to none but Christian influences.  Eliot found the Indians to be more content living in small communities rather than a large town, and also found “that a position more retired from the whites would better promote their interests, spiritual and temporal…” 

Eliot taught the Indians to keep the Lord’s Day and translated the Bible into the Indian language, a feat of enormous skill and diligence.  This monument of prodigious labor was achieved as a result of fourteen years spent studying as much as he could to acquire a complete mastery of the Algonquin dialect spoken by the Indians of Massachusetts Bay.  His preaching was adapted to suit the comprehension of the Indians, using a combination of prayer, Scripture and question and answer sessions to further illuminate the teachings of Jesus Christ.

John Eliot was a Congregationalist and the first meeting house in what is now Canton was built by him. He was pre-deceased by his son, also named John.  The elder Eliot is remembered in this inscription on a granite drinking trough erected in Canton in 1880: “In memory of the labors of the Apostle Eliot among the Indians of Ponkapoag, 1655-1690.”

Resources¹

History of the Town of Canton by Daniel Huntoon, 10-44.

History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts by D.H. Hurd, 919-921.

The Beginnings of New England or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty, by John Fiske, Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and Company,1899.  http://books.google.com/books?id=y2AxAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false