Major historic find at Walk Bridge site includes Indian fort, thousands of artifacts

A quartz-point arrowhead unearthed at the Walk Bridge construction zone in East Norwalk. A quartz-point arrowhead unearthed at the Walk Bridge construction zone in East Norwalk. Photo: Contributed / Connecticut Department Of Transportation Photo: Contributed / Connecticut Department Of Transportation Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close Major historic find at Walk Bridge site includes Indian fort, thousands of artifacts 1 / 8 Back to Gallery

NORWALK — A historic — and historically illuminating — discovery has been made in East Norwalk with the uncovering of the remnants of a contact-period Native American fort.

Several thousand artifacts — some thought to be more than 3,000 years old — have also been uncovered at Walk Bridge construction site, including arrowheads, wampum (or traditional shell beads), European flints and iron trade tools, which may shed light on what life was like for Native Americans and Europeans when they first met.

“The contact period is a period of really a few short decades when both Old World and New Wold came together and changed dramatically — both groups,” said Ernest Wiegand, a professor or archaeology at Norwalk Community College.

Such sites are extremely rare — most of them have been destroyed by development, erosion and the actions of vandals and looters. Wiegand said the only Fairfield County site from the period he had known of previously was a temporary encampment where hunters may have spent a couple of days.

“Now we have a village,” he said. “This is an absolutely thrilling, thrilling discovery.”

The archaeological survey that led to the discovery was part of an agreement made by the state Department of Transportation to mitigate the effects of replacing the Walk Bridge. The bridge is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and when such places are demolished, the National Historic Preservation Act requires steps be taken to lessen the historic loss.

The DOT plans to release more information Thursday afternoon.

Tod Bryant, president of the Norwalk Historic Preservation Trust, said the law created an opportunity for the historical community to finally investigate whether anything remained of the ancient Native American fort.

“This is a site that has been marked on maps since 1847,” he said. “So we saw an opportunity with the bridge property to have professionals look at it and see if there’s anything there. And as it turns out, there’s a significant part of it there.”

The Department of Transportation asked that the exact location of the excavation not be revealed to prevent the curious from disturbing the site.

Wiegand has had that happen to one of his own archaeological digs in the past.

“One of the key things of archaeology is you must record the context,” he said. “The artifact itself, while it might be informative to a point, is not really worth that much when it is removed from its context.” That context can be destroyed by people looting artifacts or even walking through the site.

“You can burn down a forest, and you can grow it back,” Wiegand said. “You can pollute a river, and you can clean it up. But if you lose an archaeological site, it’s gone forever. It’s like tearing the pages out of a history book.”

The fort — which many Norwalkers unwittingly reference in the name Fort Point Street — is mentioned in a 1689 deed describing “the point of common land where the Indian fort formerly stood.”

Mandy Ranslow, an archaeologist with the Connecticut Department of Transportation, explained in a November interview with Hearst Connecticut Media that marshlands such as those found in Norwalk were valuable to Native Americans for the food and medicinal plants — and later, shelter from aggressive colonists — that could be found there.

“This is an area where native people had been using these swamps and marshlands for a long time, whereas the colonists were not as familiar with it,” said Ranslow. “So these were areas where they,” the Native Americans, “could escape to in times of strife.”

Famous Native American battles in New England took place in these landscapes, including the Great Swamp Fight — in which Roger Ludlow, one of the founders of Norwalk, helped kill and enslave Pequots who had taken refuge in a Fairfield swamp.

Ranslow believed that this fort may have had something to do with the Native American and European conflict in the 1600s.

“Especially because it’s shown on historic maps for so long, and it’s in people’s memories,” she said — two signs that the fort made a lasting impression.

Historic maps suggest that the area surrounding the former fort may have been filled to create solid land in the late 1800s, and archaeologists had hypothesized that portions of the fort may have been covered rather than destroyed.

When they were proved correct, the state Department of Transportation consulted with the Federal Transit Administration, the State Historic Preservation Office and federally recognized tribes. Together, they decided to complete the removal and conservation of historic artifacts from the site, the Department of Transportation said. A display is planned for the Walk Bridge Program Welcome Center on Marshall Street in Norwalk.

“Everyone’s just blown away,” said David Westmoreland, chairman of the Norwalk Historical Commission. “We’re ecstatic about it. And the DOT,” or Department of Transportation, “is doing the right thing; they’re funding probably close to a million dollars, the archaeological work that they have to do to really go through this site.”

That work could shine a new light on Norwalk’s early history.

“It’s important to the founding of Norwalk because that’s the place where Roger Ludlow supposedly bought Norwalk from Mahackamo, the sachem, the chief of that group,” Bryant said of the fort.

Westmoreland was also excited about what we could learn about Native Americans who inhabited this area.

“They were the first settlers of Norwalk and they loved this place and ate oysters out of the Sound just like we do,” he said, “But there’s not a lot known about them, and they’re largely forgotten.”

That could be about to change.

rschuetz@hearstmediact.com; @raschuetz