From Paleoindians to Puritans—a 12,000-year journey walking through New England

Thomas McLaughlin is writing a series of articles on hiking in the region.

With nearly 6,000 acres, the Douglas State Forest offers a trove of nature trails. There are more than 36 miles of trails, 7.8 miles of which is the Midstate Trail. Just 20 miles south of Worcester and 25 miles north of Providence, this forest is a hidden oasis. “Away from the lake, a different visitor experience awaits. Trails crisscross thousands of acres of rock-strewn uplands, allowing visitors to get away from crowds, explore the Forest, and reconnect with nature.” (Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR)) 

Longer outside trails connect to the forest (the Midstate, the Southern New England Trunkline (SNETT), Air Line State Park, Tri-State, and the North-South), but there’s also numerous shorter trails within the Douglas Woods—Coffeehouse, Cedar Swamp, Bird Blind, Rocky Brook, Chamberlain Pond, Sassafras, Ridge, Wallis Pond, Eagle Bridge, Laurel, CCC Water Hole, Schmidt, White Pine, Red Pine, and others. 

Heading north on the Midstate from the Massachusetts and Rhode Island border you can enjoy more than three miles of uninterrupted wilderness before reaching Southwest Main Street, which is a minor break in the wilderness. Beyond this you can hike almost two more miles until you reach Route 16 with a few more miles of woods after this.

The Douglas Woods are full of remnants of the past from old foundations and stone walls to random glacial erratics among the trees. It provides a nice hike along ponds and marshes, on boardwalks over streams, across rocky fields, and through serene pine groves.

When you exit the forest and begin walking north along Northwest Main Street you’re not far from where New England’s Great Trail, the Old Connecticut Path, crosses into the Douglas Woods. 

Some portions of the Old Connecticut Path are main roadways today such as Route 126 from Wayland to Framingham, near the Shopper’s World Plaza, but in Douglas it’s still a walk in the woods. What was once a major trade and travel route for the Nipmuc and Agawam people is itself a remnant in the forest.

This path began in what is now Harvard Square in Cambridge, and it ran through Framingham, Westborough and Grafton. It continued on through Sutton, Douglas, Webster and Dudley and across Connecticut all the way to the Connecticut River.  

Jason R. Newton, a retired educator, created an impressive website on this trail, “Guide to Rediscovering the Old Connecticut Path.” He has researched and written extensively about this topic. He shows portions of this ancient trail in his YouTube videos that include visits to Water’s Farm, Manchaug Pond, and the Douglas Woods. It’s worth checking out.

The Paleoindians were the first to arrive in New England thousands of years ago. These early hunters followed herds of wooly mammoths and mastadons from Siberia into North America. As the ice retreated here in Massachusetts (leaving behind glacial erratics, tills, drumlins, and kettles), vegetation grew, and herds of caribou, elk, and deer populated our region.  

After the Paleoindian period ended, later groups in the Archaic and Woodlands stages populated the region.

For centuries the Nipmuc and Agawam tribes walked along the Old Connecticut Path and the Bay State Trail. They walked on trails that were likely created and worn down by deer drawn toward lakes, streams, and grazing areas.  

Less than fifteen years after the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower in 1620, and just four years after John Winthrop, who spoke of a shining city on a hill, arrived in Boston on the Arabella in 1630, a group of ten Puritans known as the Adventurers set out in 1634, on the Old Connecticut Path from Watertown to establish Wethersfield, CT. 

The adventurers were led by John “Mad Jack” Oldham, who was banished from Plymouth Colony. Oldham’s death off of Block Island two years later led to the Pequot War. 

Two years later, a second, larger group of Puritans led by Cambridge ministers, Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone, ventured out on the Old Connecticut Path and founded Hartford, Connecticut and created the Connecticut Colony.

These groups were the first Europeans to venture into Central Massachusetts. All the English settlements were on or near the coast in the early 1630s. It would be decades before the English established settlements further inland at Lancaster, Groton, and Mendon.  

Sandwiched between the adventurers and Thomas Hooker’s party was William Blaxton or Blackstone, who moved from the western wilderness of Beacon Hill to settle in Cumberland, Rhode Island in 1635. Roger Williams went on to establish Providence the following year in 1636.

William Pynchon, a trustee of the Massachusetts Bay Company and founder of Roxbury, sailed up the Connecticut River in 1635, and returned in 1636, to found Springfield, MA. 

But the Old Connecticut Path offered an overland route from Boston that otherwise would have required sailing around Cape Cod on a ship, passing Rhode Island and going up the Connecticut River. This historic path went through our area and crossed through the Douglas Woods.