Fagins, Lucretia, 1805 - 1877
Lucretia Fagins was born circa 1805 near her tribe’s land, the Mashantucket (Western) Pequot reservation in what is currently defined as southeastern Connecticut. Today, the reservation is in Mashantucket, CT, adjacent to Ledyard, North Stonington, and Preston, CT. Over the course of her life, Lucretia participated in tribal affairs and raised multiple children with her traditions. Both of her marriages were to Pequot men and she would ultimately become the matriarch of several larger Pequot families.
While little is known of her childhood, sometime around 1821, at the age of about 16, Lucretia Fagins married a Pequot man, Peleg George. There is no extant marriage certificate, but the timeframe of their union can be inferred by the age of their eldest child, Sally, who was born that year.
In March 1825, Lucretia and Peleg put their names to a request for the appointment of a new overseer. The couple, along with 17 other Pequots, petitioned the New London County Court in Norwich for the discharge of Overseer Elisha Crary, and the appointment of Erastus Williams in his stead. While it was common for Pequots to petition the state with their opinion of who should serve as overseer, this was the first time Lucretia included her name. Perhaps it was the first Pequot petition sent to the state since Lucretia became adult aged or perhaps it was because she was one of many displeased with Crary’s management of the tribe’s lands. As a traditional Pequot woman, she balanced these tribal civic duties with welcoming the family’s second child, a son named Austin, in the same year.
On June 2, 1826, Lucretia’s brother-in-law, Peter George, was named as a defendant in an adultery case brought by the State of Connecticut. The legal matter involved Lucretia, which made for an interesting story to retell generations later. Members of the Brayton and Orchard families, who were affiliated with the Pequot community, were called by the state to serve as witnesses in the case. Peter was found not guilty on charges of adultery with Lucretia. Despite the state’s charges, Peleg and Lucretia’s marriage persisted.
Five years later, on February 7, 1831, Lucretia added her mark to another tribal petition, this one requesting to retain the services of Overseer Erastus Williams. He, according to the petition, was “well suited to the task,” relative to other overseers. Williams would end up being one of the longest serving overseers for the Western Pequot reservation. In that same year, 1831, Lucretia and Peleg had their third child, Amos Washington George.
While clearly not all in the Pequot community embraced Christianity, the early 1830’s saw an increase in religious interest on the reservation as a part of the larger “Second Great Awakening”. This coincided with the arrival of the Rev. William Apes amongst the Mashantucket Pequots. Lucretia George became a supporter and added her name to a December 3, 1832 certification allowing Apes, a Pequot man, to act as agent for the tribe in raising funds to build a house of worship on the reservation. Together with Margaret George, Mary George, Lucy Orchard, William Apes, Sr., and Frederick Toby, Lucretia agreed that necessary expenses for the Apes family might be drawn from the funds raised for the church. Apes eventually moved on from the Mashantucket community to the Mashpee in Massachusetts without having constructed the church.
By December of 1833, Lucretia was enumerated in an informal census of tribal members. Erastus Williams, having just concluded his tenure as overseer, described her, in a letter to William Williams, as a 28-year-old Pequot woman “of mixed Indian and white” ancestry living in a household with her husband, Peleg, and children Sally (age 12), Austin (age 8), and Amos (age 2).
Lucretia was widowed, less than four years later, when Peleg was buried at sea, August 1837, in the waters off the coast of Brazil. Peleg was on a whaling voyage aboard the Stonington ship Caledonia, when he contracted smallpox and, after 14 days, succumbed to the disease in the middle of the night. It was Peleg’s eighth voyage in a decade; like other Pequot men, he sacrificed living each day with Lucretia and his three children on their land to provide for his family. Peleg was a cooper on the whaling ship, usually one of the highest paying non-officer positions aboard. Widowed Lucretia remained on or near the reservation with children, ages 16, 12, and 6 years of age, although the annual accounting of the overseers does not appear to reference her. However, she and her two youngest children were recorded in the 1840 Federal Census as living just miles from the reservation in the Mystic portion of the nearby Town of Groton. The records of the Preston Baptist Church indicate that at some point in 1840, she and the children began living in Preston with David Orchard, a non-Pequot man with ties to the Mashantucket community.
On March 17, 1845, Lucretia Fagins George married another Pequot man, Jabez Prince Niles (b.1788), in Ledyard (or Norwich, according to other news reports). It was his third marriage, having previously been married to two of the daughters of well-known minister, Quash Williams. Within several years the couple had two daughters, Jane Ann (b. 1848) and Eliza “Blind Liza” Jane (b.1850). The couple lived on the reservation, although neither Lucretia nor Jabez appear during this time in the records of the state-appointed overseer to the tribe by design. Lucretia’s husband, Jabez, was forced to petition the courts to have his own tribal rights recognized by the State. In 1859, he filed a lawsuit against the Mashantucket Pequot overseer, Ulysses Avery, and successfully obtained an order affirming his rights to reside on the reservation and benefit from the Tribal funds, through his Pequot mother, Ann.
Just four short years later, Jabez died on May 3, 1863 in Ledyard after suffering a bout of typhoid fever. He was 75 years old. Lucretia’s daughters, Jane and Eliza, despite only being teenagers, begin to appear in the records of the overseers after the death of their father. While it seems logical to include all Pequots in government enumerations, up to this point, overseers systematically failed to name Pequot children and continued the erasure of Pequot families as intact, traditional units. Jane, after marriages to Ephraim Williams and Ammon Potter, would ultimately die in 1875 at age 27, leaving behind 9-year-old son, Ephraim Williams, Jr. Lucretia’s youngest daughter, Eliza, would also marry the Pequot man, Ammon Potter. Blind Liza and Ammon would raise Lucretia’s grandson, Ephraim, on the reservation until he became of age and grew to be a well-known preacher.
As per tribal custom, Lucretia’s daughters would care for their tribal elder, the matriarch of their family, in her later years as a two-time widow. On July 15, 1870, she appeared with her daughter Jane Ann Niles Potter and son-in-law Ammon Potter's family in nearby Stonington. Three days later, she was shown living, also in Stonington, in the household of her son-in-law, Frank Levi and eldest daughter, Sally George Levi. The census enumerator only had room to include Lucretia’s occupation, listed as “housekeeper” and did not note her familial tie to the head of household. Despite being inappropriately labeled as mulatto, a catch-all phrase of the time that was assigned to Pequots that did not fit the overseer’s phenotypical Indian definition, Lucretia clearly lived as a Tribal Elder in a neighborhood of Pequot kin. Her neighbors were her husband Jabez’s former Williams’ sisters-in-law, Mercy Quash (wife to Ammon Quash Williams) and Mary Ann [Williams] Potter. Just a couple of homes over lived Lucretia’s grandson, Frank Levi, Jr., with his wife Ellen and their infant son, Oliver. Lucretia Niles died on May 18, 1877 at Wolf Neck Road in Stonington, at the home of her daughter, Sally.
CHS, William Samuel Johnson Papers, III, 100: December 13, 1833 Letter from Erastus Williams to William T. Williams; Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 160-161; CSL, NLCC:PbS, Indians, Mashantucket Pequot; O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 247-248; Mystic Seaport, Museum Resources, Active Maps, Peleg the Cooper, https://educators.mysticseaport.org/maps/story/amos_george/; Ancestry.com. 1840 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010. Images reproduced by FamilySearch; Ledyard Vital Records, Marriages, Vol. 1, Item 1, p. 19; Ledyard Vital Records, Births, Vol. 1, Item 1, p.73; Brown and Rose, Black Roots, 269; Ledyard Vital Records, Deaths, Vol. 1, Item 2, p. 187, Brown and Rose, Black Roots, p.268; Mystic Press, Death Announcement, May 24, 1877
Sources for this biography also come from the Related Digital Heritage Items listed below.