Taunton

Variant name of place

Tanton

Geographic position

41.9000° N, 71.0903° W

Sources

Baylies, Francis. An Historical Memoir of the Colony of New Plymouth. Masachusetts: Wiggin & Lunt, 1866; ”History and Culture.” Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head. http://www.wampanoagtribe.net/pages/wampanoag_webdocs/history_culture; ”History of the Titicut Site.” Taunton River Organization. http://www.tauntonriver.org/titicutreserv.htm; “Massachusetts Indian Villages, Towns, and Settlements.” http://www.accessgenealogy.com/native/c-massachusetts-indian-villages-towns-and-settlements.htm; ”Taunton, Massachusetts, 1890.” Cape Cod History. http://www.capecodhistory.us/Mass1890/Taunton1890.htm; “Wampanoag History.” http://www.tolatsga.org/wampa.html; “Wampanoag Indians.” Indians.org. http://www.indians.org/articles/wampanoag-indians.html; Geo coordinates at https://www.google.com/#q=geographic+coordinates+of+taunton+ma.

General note

Taunton is a city on the Taunton River in Bristol County, MA, located around 35 miles south of Boston and 20 miles east of Providence, RI. Taunton was known as Titicut, meaning “the place of a great river,” by its original inhabitants, the Wampanoags. Epidemics throughout New England devastated the Wampanoag people even before contact. In 1637, members of the Plymouth Company completed the Tetiquet purchase with the Wampanoags, taking land that would eventually become Taunton, and naming it after a village in Somersetshire, England, from which many of its English settlers hailed. In 1654, Puritan minister John Eliot encouraged many of Taunton’s remaining Wampanoags to move to the Indian praying town of Ponkapoag, leaving Taunton’s population primarily English. As a result, Taunton saw multiple raids during King Philip’s War, which began in 1675 as a conflict between the Wampanoags and the English. By the time Occom preached in Taunton, the area’s Wampanoag population had been almost destroyed, and his audiences were primarily English. During the Revolution, Taunton was again the site of several skirmishes. In 1864, the town had grown large enough to be reincorporated as a city by the state of Massachusetts.