There are no grassy expanses or remnants of a stronghold there to help imagine the scene.

But Groton's quiet neighborhoods and manicured lawns are on the same land where colonial settlers and their American Indian allies fiercely fought the Pequot tribe 370 years ago.

Many know the story of the Pequot War, but few think of the land as a battlefield, sharing the same blood-soaked history as Revolutionary War and Civil War sites across the United States.

The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center wants to make the area the earliest - and only - 17th-century site included on the list of National Battlefield sites, an endeavor that could take years to complete.

With a $22,000 grant from the National Park Service American Battlefield Protection Program, a team from the museum hopes to study Groton's land area, which may have stretched from River Road in Mystic as far as Flanders Road.

As home to the most well-known piece of the war, the town will be a keystone to the project. In the area that is now Pequot Avenue, the colonists and their American Indian allies surrounded the Pequots' Mystic Fort and killed more than 500, the beginning of what amounted to a cultural extermination of the tribe, said Kevin McBride, the museum's director of research.

It was the first time the English brought “total warfare” to the population, killing women and children, and the first time the natives in New England had experienced it, said McBride, who is also a University of Connecticut professor.

But researchers also want to raise awareness that the war involved much more than just the massacre, he said. They are also looking at land in Old Saybrook, Fairfield, Wethersfield and Dover Plains, N.Y., that lay within the bloody path of the 1636-1638 war. Routes of march and camp sites are also part of the study.

The museum has sent letters to some 250 Groton landowners. Also of interest are town-owned properties along Fishtown Brook and Fort Hill.

Rather than digging large test pits, the team would canvass large areas with metal detectors, as metal is likely all that would have survived, in a search for musket balls and brass points, and possibly flint and pottery, McBride said.

Recovering specific items found by the detector would disturb the property much less, he said.

Participation is voluntary, but McBride said he hopes people will see the value of the project.

”We cannot do this without the help of everyone in town,” he said. “They know stuff and may have a great perspective we've never thought of.”

The museum would not have a right to take any land, he said, similar to properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which says there is no obligation to open properties to the public, to restore them or even to maintain them.

”There's no disadvantage to assisting us, and it could be to their advantage,” McBride said. “It's pretty cool to know you're part of a battlefield site.”

Similar methods were used to chart the Rochambeau Revolutionary Route (the trail from Newport and Boston to Yorktown, Va., that the allied U.S.-French armies followed in 1781 to capture a British army at Yorktown) and Little Big Horn Battlefield in Montana. McBride was involved in a 1987 survey of the Mystic Fort area, and there's no physical evidence of that property study, he said.

To designate an area a battlefield, a historically significant event had to happen, there had to be bloodshed, and the boundaries and locations have to be defined, McBride said. The last part is more difficult than one would think, he said; the team is poring over old maps, letters and eyewitness accounts.

According to historical accounts, the English troops and natives stopped overnight in a place called Porters' Rocks, presently Old Mystic. A sentry could hear the Pequots singing, but the main camp could not. McBride said they hope to use a sound specialist to figure out why that was and whether they were in some kind of depression to help pinpoint the location.

There are also “mysterious” brass points found in a Pequot burial site, McBride said. The style is not from southern Connecticut. They are going to the Smithsonian for further research.

The team has also discovered two new narratives of the war in other historical documents.

Rahiem Eleazer, who is working with the team and will be a high school senior in the fall, is a Pequot. Though he grew up knowing of the massacre, he said he was amazed to discover the complexities of the war.

Eleazer's current assignment is to figure out which tribes were on whose side, and why.

”I had no idea how many tribes actually participated in it,” Eleazer said. “I don't think people know that much about it, and it's their history.”

Part of the museum study will include a “historiography” of the war - the history of the history, both the positive and negative perceptions over the years, McBride said.

For example, a statue of John Mason, who defeated the Pequots, made in the 1880s once stood at the corner of Pequot Avenue and Clift Street in Mystic. It was moved to Windsor in 1995 after it became an uncomfortable reminder of those killed in the massacre.

For McBride, there is a certain irony to the colonists' efforts to wipe out the Pequots, known to be an aggressive tribe.

”Because of that two-year stretch, people are trying to chronicle that time more than any other,” he said.

They plan to work with the Office of the Connecticut State Archaeologist, Connecticut State Historian, State Historic Preservation Office and local historical societies.

Anyone with questions or information can reach McBride at 860-396-6814 or kmcbride@mptn-nsn.gov.

K.WARCHUT@THEDAY.COM

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