09/06/2026
Most people know Deer Island as the place with the giant egg shaped tanks out past Winthrop. Very few know what happened out there in the winter of 1675. ๐ฏ๏ธ
When King Philip's War broke out, hundreds of Native people in eastern Massachusetts were living in what the colonists called praying towns, Christian communities like Natick that had been organized under English missionary rule for years. They were not fighting anyone. That did not matter. On October 13, 1675, the Massachusetts Council ordered them rounded up, marched through the countryside and held on Deer Island for the duration of the war.
They arrived in late autumn with almost nothing. There was no adequate shelter on the island, no stored food and no way to leave. Estimates of how many people were confined there range from roughly five hundred to more than a thousand, and historians estimate that about half of them died over that single winter from starvation and exposure. The survivors were released in May 1676. Others were sold into slavery in the Caribbean.
There is a memorial on the island now, and Nipmuc, Wampanoag and other Native communities of this region continue to make a journey there to remember it. It is one of the hardest stories in Boston's history and one of the least told. ๐