Missionary Opens School for Mohican Indians
On this day in 1734, the Yale-trained missionary John Sergeant opened a school for Mohican Indian children in Great Barrington. About 50 members of the Housatonic tribe of the Mohicans joined four English families on a tract of Berkshire County land set aside by the General Court in Boston. John Sergeant envisioned this Indian town as a community where English and Christianized Indians would live side-by-side in peace. As Sergeant hoped, the native residents followed the example of their English neighbors — farming, lumbering, sending their children to school, worshipping in church. By the time Sergeant died in 1749, more than half of the 218 Indians living in what had become the town of Stockbridge had been baptized into the Protestant faith.
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