The Girls Who Found History

The audience was quiet under the bright blue sky as tall blades of grass rustled in the breeze.

Then, in a powerful voice, Larry Fisher, a member of the Massachusett Native American tribe, began singing a song in his indigenous language. His steady chants, rising above the chirping of birds in the distance, were not for the 100 people seated in front of him but for the six eighth-graders standing beside him at the podium. Fisher, whose tribal name means “White Feather,” was performing an “honor song” to thank the students, known as the History Girls.

That was the scene in June at a salt marsh in Quincy, Massachusetts. The crowd, made up of lawmakers and tribal leaders, was there to celebrate the salt marsh, which, thanks to the teens, had just been renamed in honor of the tribe.

The site’s new name, Passanageset (pass-uh-nuh-ges-it) Park at Broad Meadows Marsh, will soon appear on official U.S. maps. The renaming is the culmination of a two-year campaign by the students, which began after one of them stumbled upon a part of Quincy history unknown to most residents. 

While doing research for a school project, Michaela O’Gara-Pratt discovered that a chief of the Massachusett had once lived with his people in the salt marsh—right next to her school. It was their home for thousands of years until the early 1600s, when European settlers arrived.

Following Michaela’s discovery, the teens did more research and met with city officials, advocating to get the tribe the recognition they believed it deserved.

“These were the first people here, and everyone should know that,” Michaela, 14, explains. “Our history doesn’t start with the Europeans’ arrival. It goes back much, much further than that.”

It started with a homework assignment in 2013, when Michaela was a seventh-grader at Broad Meadows Middle School. Her teacher, Ron Adams, asked his students to each research a historical site in Quincy that they’d like to show tourists. But there was a catch: The site could not be related to the town’s most famous family. (Quincy, about 10 miles south of Boston, is the birthplace of two U.S. presidents: John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams.)

Looking for ideas, Michaela began leafing through some books that belonged to her parents. She couldn’t believe what she found. According to one historian, the salt marsh adjacent to her school—known in 2013 as Broad Meadows Salt Marsh—was once called Passanageset Knoll. It had been the headquarters of Chickataubut (chik-uh-taw-but). He was a sachem, or chief, of the Massachusett in the early 1600s. (See map, below) 

Michaela verified her findings at the local historical society. Then she let her teacher in on the news. Adams admits he was fascinated—and embarrassed. “I’ve been teaching in this building for 30 years, and I had never heard that before,” he explains.

Michaela felt that the Massachusett’s history and its status as the original inhabitants of the area needed to be recognized. So she reached out to classmates for help. 

Five students joined Michaela, and they started collecting records and giving presentations around the community to spread the word. They also met with Massachusett members. While they were doing all this work, Adams, their teacher, nicknamed them the History Girls. 

After a meeting with Quincy mayor Thomas Koch in 2014, the teens came up with the idea of renaming the salt marsh in honor of the Massachusett. The land, once overrun with invasive species, had recently been restored. It seemed like the perfect time to rename it.

With the support of local leaders, the History Girls submitted a proposal to rename the salt marsh to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names earlier this year. (The board approves the names of geographic features for the federal government.) Then they waited.

“The Massachusett were the first people of Quincy, but no one knew that they lived at the salt marsh,” notes Mackenzie Maguire, one of the History Girls. “We wanted to make sure their story was told.”

The Massachusett’s story begins thousands of years ago. Before European settlers arrived, the tribe lived in what today is Massachusetts, from Salem to Cape Cod along the Atlantic coast, and inland as far as Worcester, explains Ren Green. She is a Massachusett tribal leader who helped the History Girls with their research.

“We were a large nation of many, many tribes,” Green tells JS. “Many people don’t realize the state of Massachusetts got its name from us.” (The word Massachusett means “at the large hill,” in reference to the Great Blue Hill, which is southwest of Boston. See “Native Names,” below, for more.)

But then came the pandemic. From 1616 to 1619, a plague killed about 90 percent of native people from Maine to Rhode Island, including many of the Massachusett. The illness is believed to have been smallpox, and was most likely carried by the Europeans.

To save his tribe, Chickataubut moved his people from the marsh to a disease-free site in Quincy called Moswetuset (moss-weh-too-set) Hummock. Although the chief lived there for only a short time—until his death in 1633—Moswetuset became widely regarded as the tribe’s original headquarters in Quincy, and Passanageset was slowly forgotten.

According to Green, one reason Passanageset and other parts of the Massachusett’s past may have fallen off historians’ radar has to do with Chickataubut himself. Unlike some well-known American Indian chiefs who “went down in history as the good guys, Chickataubut was not looking to befriend the English,” she says. “He was looking to defend his territory.”