A Lighthouse in the Forest

Ken Feder, Ph.D.

It doesn’t happen very often that an archaeologist has the opportunity to assess the reality of a legend, and yet that’s exactly what happened to me beginning in the early 1990s.

While conducting an archaeological site survey in People’s State Forest, located in the northwestern Connecticut hill town of Barkhamsted, my crew encountered the remnants of some very irregular cellar holes and quarried stones on a heavily wooded terrace overlooking the Farmington River. Intrigued, we excavated a couple of test pit transects in which we recovered a wealth of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century material including busted up ceramics, rusted nails, glass bottle fragments, and even some brass buttons.

Embarrassingly, at the base of the hill, adjacent to a paved road, we next noticed a plaque which talked about the presence of an “Indian village.” Now even more intrigued, I went into town, asked about the “Indian village” and was handed a book, the title of which was The Legend of Barkhamsted Light House.

Wait. What? Barkhamsted is located about sixty miles from the Connecticut coast with Long Island Sound. What kind of “lighthouse” could be here, and who dug the cellar holes we encountered in the woods? And what’s all this about a “legend?”

Well, we have been investigating the legend of the Lighthouse ever since. Though some of the stories told, about ghosts and mass murder, are sheer nonsense, the reality is far more intriguing. In the second half of the eighteenth century, a young man from Block Island, James Chaugham, a Native of the Narragansett People, married Molly, a white woman and, running from the disapproval of her father, established a hidden and isolated community in what is now the town of Barkhamsted. During the one hundred or so years of its existence, the community provided sanctuary for other Native People, as well as poor folks of European and African descent. The village was the first sign of “civilization” for the stage coach drivers traveling from Albany to Hartford and they are the ones who gave the place the name “the Lighthouse,” as it was a beacon of literal light from the hearth fires burning in the cabins that adorned the hillside.

The most gratifying element of the work we’ve done are the literally hundreds of descendants of James and Molly who I have been in contact with. My peak experience occurred in 2015, when a reunion of those descendants from all across America was organized by Coni Dubois, a ninth-generation descendant of James and Molly. I had the wonderful opportunity to give those descendants a tour of the archaeological site which was the village where their ancestors lived. My proudest moment came when the family was invited to march in the Independence Day parade in town. As a way of expressing their appreciation for the archaeological work we had conducted and that had helped provide them with a missing part of their history, I was granted the privilege of marching with them, now an adopted member of this wonderful, fascinating, and enduring family.

And there’s a book:

Kenneth L. Feder
2023 The Barkhamsted Lighthouse: The Archaeology of the Lighthouse Family. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Maryland.

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