Towsey, David, - 1778

David Towsey was a son of Hatchet Towsey, a Pootatuck, and husband of Sarah, the daughter of Timothy Indian of Farmington, Connecticut.  One of them was a descendant from the original 17^th century Wangunk proprietors.  The couple had at least two children, Benjamin (1765-before 1828) and Joseph (1769), both of whom were students of Eleazar Wheelock.  Towsey may have been the David noted as being baptized with several others of the Tunxis at New Hartford on June 17, 1744.  

 

He served in Captain John Patterson’s Company of the First Regiment in 1755 and 1756 and in Colonel Nathan Whiting’s Company in 1762, the same year his name appeared on a Wangunk petition, requesting sale of the tribal reservation.  On April 26, 1768, Towsey received fifty acres of the Stockbridge common land in Stockbridge, Massachusetts,  He and his family had removed there by the following year.  While at Stockbridge in 1771, David Towsey wanted to enter the maritime trade and contemplated sending his two young boys to Wheelock's Indian school.  It is unclear if Towsey did go to sea, but by March 1772, the family had quit the town.  Warned that if he did not return by May 1st of that year, his property would be forfeited by the Stockbridge proprietors to Timothy Yokun.  In 1777, Toswey was assigned land at Farmington, which may have brought him back to the Tunxis community but just temporarily, as he died shortly thereafter. 

 

Love, Samson Occom, 363. James Dow McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Publications, 1932), 242-245.  New Hartford, Connecticut, Church Record Abstracts,  1630-1920, Ancestry. Bates, Rolls of Connecticut Men in the French & Indian War, 15, 131-132, 169.  Stockbridge Indian Proprietors Book, 76, 112