The other Bunker Hill

Bunker Hill in Cornwall is named, not for a particular historical event, but for the early 19th century Rufus Bunker homestead. 

It took some doing for Bunker to take title to the property — even though it was willed to him and three brothers. 

Bunker, Jeremiah Cogswell and Peter Mawehu, Schaghticoke Indians, were sons (by different fathers) and heirs of Eliza Warrups Chickens Mawehu. After her death in 1812, they were obliged to petition the Connecticut General Assembly regarding the disposition of the land. They asserted “that said Eliza, while in life, owned in fee a tract of land in said Cornwall containing about thirty acres, that the same is inconveniently situated to be divided, and that the same may be sold to advantage.”

The Assembly was agreeable.

The land, said in 1762 to be rough and swampy, was unprofitable. 

Eliza Warrups Chickens was the daughter of Wawumpekum (Johannes/Benjamin Warrups Chickens). Eliza and her husband, Peter Mawehu, were known as the “king and queen” in 1789. By 1799 they were living in Cornwall on land left to Eliza by her father, according to research by the Native Northeast Research Collaborative of Yale Divinity School.

Eventually Rufus Bunker ended up with the property.

“The hill up which the road from Cornwall to Goshen winds is named Bunker,” according to Theodore S. Gold writing in “Historical Records of the Town of Cornwall” (1877), “from the residence on it of Rufus Bunker, an Indian of the Schaghticoke tribe; an old and honest man whose name is associated with a more enduring monument than the pyramids of Egypt. North and easterly of this hill is situated Red Mountain, so named from the color of the oak-leaves in the autumn when touched by frosts.” 

South of Bunker Hill is Clark Hill, southeasterly is Mohawk Mountain.

Gold in an article titled “Fostering the Habit of Industry” in a 1904 issue of Connecticut Magazine said: “Rufus Bunker, with his wife, Rosey, lived on the Sharon and Goshen turnpike near the top of the hill named after him. He was a tall, well built Indian and had quite a family of children. They were all good workers. Bunker bought a rough farm of fifty acres, cleared it, fenced the fields with stone walls and built a comfortable frame house. He once said to my father, ‘Dr. Gold, when I get this all cleared up, I am going to the top of the hill, sit down and look at it, and he accomplished it as the nature of the land would allow.

“My father met him on the road near a large spring, in the early days of temperance reform. ‘Doctor,’ he said, ‘I am going to join the cold water society.’ So saying, he knelt down and quenched his thirst in a copious drought. Bunker had a son about my own age, and passing there one day I was caught in a cold North Cornwall rain storm without a ‘great coat,’ ... I stopped and borrowed one belonging to my Indian friend, young Bunker. 

“Rosey, his mother, never forgot this incident, that I was not too proud to wear an Indian’s coat and it laid the foundation for mutual esteem. I never lacked a supply of baskets and she always went home carrying in return pork, beef or other household necessities to her full satisfaction.”

And that’s the story of Cornwall’s Bunker Hill.

The writer is senior associate editor of this newspaper.