The People of the Stony Country

Knowing Sussex County the way we know it today makes it difficult to visualize the indigenous people who once lived in this area, but if you’ve ever visited the museum at Space Farms and seen its large arrowhead collection, you know that this area was once populated by the Lenni Lenape.  Also referred to simply as the Lenape, which means “true or native men, or common people,” these people occupied “Lenapehoking,” or “the land of the Lenape.”

The Lenape are divided into three sub-groups who speak different dialects of the Delaware Language: the Minsi or Munsee, “the people of the stony country,” who occupied Sussex County and other parts of northwestern New Jersey and the highlands of eastern Pennsylvania; the Unami, “people from down river,” who occupied the Piedmont province of New Jersey south of the Raritan River; and the Unalachtigo, “the people who live near the ocean,” who occupied the coastal plain.  “Lenape” is a word from the Unami dialect, and linguists determined that the Lenape are descended from Algonkian-speaking people.  The Minsi people acted as a buffer between the Mohawk people to the north and the other Lenape groups to the south.  Their main village, Minisink, was along the banks of the Delaware River in Sussex County.  Their totem was the wolf.

There were indigenous people living in this part of New Jersey before the Lenape developed the technology and culture that we think of today.  At the end of the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago, Paleo-Indians arrived, living as small nomadic bands of hunters.  As time went on, and as the climate warmed, people began to seek out additional food sources, such as fish, shellfish, and wild vegetables.  As forests became dominated by oak trees, acorns provided an additional food source for humans; acorns also brought deer and wild turkey to the region.  About 2,000 years before European arrival, the people began to develop new hunting tools, woodworking tools, stone cooking pots, and pottery.  Bows and arrows, dugout canoes, tobacco pipes, and storage jars were also created.  Early crops included plants such as sunflower, pumpkin, squash, and gourds.

From year 1000 to 1350, archaeologists can more specifically identify the culture of the indigenous people, and it is from this point on that the people are referred to as the Lenape.  Their housing structures, known as wigwams, were round-edged, oval-shaped shelters made of sapling frames with coverings of chestnut, elm, and cedar bark shingles.  The houses had storage pits to hold dried fish and meat, squash, maize, beans, native artichoke, and pumpkins, indicating that gardening was becoming a more important part of the culture.  Arrowheads and fishing tools from this period show that hunting and fishing were still significant methods of food procurement.

Walking through the forest today, you will come across many of the wild plants that the Lenape gathered.  Maple syrup was extracted from maple trees; tea and medicine were made from the root of the sassafras tree; crab apples, plums, grapes, persimmons, mulberries, strawberries, blackberries, and cranberries were gathered; acorns were boiled and then ground into a pulpy flour; chestnuts, walnuts, hickory nuts, and hazel nuts were eaten; and hemlock and pine needles were used to make tea.  Swamp potato, jack-in-the-pulpit, wild morning glory, American licorice, wild ginger, cattail flag, ginseng, and the American lotus were also food sources.  Additionally, bark from trees such as the elm and basswood were used to weave mats and baskets, as well as to aid in the construction of wigwams.  Many flowers, roots, barks, and sap were used to make a variety of medicines, and specific people in the community served as healers and were familiar with these plants.  In addition to curing illnesses, these older men and women also made weather forecasts, prepared charms for hunters, and made prophecies.

The first European explorer to describe the Lenape was Giovanni da Verrazano, who wrote in 1524:

“These people are the most beautiful and have the most civil customs that we have found on this voyage.  They are taller than we are; they are a bronze color, some tending more toward whiteness, others to a tawny color; the face is clear-cut; the hair is long and black, and they take great pains to decorate it; the eyes are black and alert, and their manner of the   ancients…they have all the proportions belonging to any well-built men.  Their women are just as shapely and beautiful; very gracious, of attractive manner and pleasant appearance” (quoted in Bertland et al., 1975, p. 30).

Though relations between European settlers at this time were peaceful, such harmony would not last.  Less than a century later, when more Europeans—particularly Dutch, Swedish, and English settlers—arrived in North America, the Lenape began to feel the effects of disease, loss of land and natural resources, and negative encounters.  By the beginning of the 18^th century, the population throughout Lenapehoking was estimated at about 2,400 to 3,000 as a result of disease and colonial wars.  Due to these pressures, the Lenape began to migrate west, though they were sometimes forced to even more distant locations by the Iroquois.  The Lenape were eventually displaced as far away as Texas, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Canada.  Despite these hardships, the legacy of the Lenape remains.  Next time you head into the woods or relax along the banks of the Delaware, imagine these people who once lived in our forests; when you see acorns littering the ground in fall or a white-tailed deer bounding across the road, imagine the abundant resources available to these eastern woodland people and the way they lived amongst nature.

References:

Bertland, D. N., Valence, P. M., & Woodling, R. J. (1975). The Minisink: a chronicle of one of America’s first and last frontiers. Four-County Task Force on the Tocks Island Dam.

Kraft, H. C. (1986). The Lenape: archaeology, history, and ethnography. Newark, NJ: New Jersey Historical Society.

Orr, D. G., & Campana, D. V. (1991). The people of Minisink: papers from the 1989 Delaware Water Gap Symposium. Philadelphia, PA: National Park Service, Mid-Atlantic Region.