Teaching Wampum at Stoneridge

Recently, Sharon Maynard, President of the Old Mystic History Center, spoke to thirty residents of Stoneridge Senior Living community about wampum.

After presenting a short film featuring Allen Hazard (Narragansett) crafting wampum from quahog shells, Sharon explained its significance to Native peoples, noting that the beads were traditionally used for spiritual, diplomatic, and ceremonial purposes. She also highlighted how European traders and colonists later transformed wampum into a form of currency. In fact, wampum beads became the first legal currency of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Sharon also shared insights from Eva Butler’s notebooks about the history and cultural importance of wampum.

·      It was sometimes used to seal a marriage proposal or as an addition to a “bride price”, (known at the time as ‘wife buying’).

·      In 1636, John Winthrop was paying the indigenous inhabitants to produce wampum for his use.

·      At one point, the colonists devised ways of counterfeiting wampum with such items as bone, stone, glass, and wood. In Canada and Vermont, the French were making wampum out of porcelain only to be rejected by their native trading partners as worthless.

·      In the 1600s, ministers complained that their parishioners were dropping broken and counterfeit wampum in the collection plate. This prompted the New Haven clergy to pass laws prohibiting this practice.