A few years after the Boston Commissioners travelled down Three-Mile Hill (three miles it is from the top to the Great Bridge) and passed through Housatonnuck, Captain Konkapot and a few Indian families were here and others at Skatekook (Sheffield) and Wnahtukook (Stockbridge). In Great Barrington a mission wigwam was built about a mile south of Maus-waw-se-ki (Monument Mt.). John Sergeant, fresh from Yale, preached here until they removed to the reservation of Indian Town.

When Matthew Arnold visited the chosen valley of the transplanted Mohicans, did he recall his first impression of America, and his facetious little remark, apropos of the idea of many foreigners, that Indians in war-paint frequented the boulevards scarce a league from Broadway? Arnold writes: "We had crossed the bar and were inside New York Bay. . . . You may imagine I was on deck with the first light. We were lying off Staten Island, a beautiful orne landscape with spires, villas, hills, and woods. 'Just like Richmond,' I said to some one by me, 'and not a single Mohican running about.' This precious speech got into the newspapers here !”

Great Barrington was the North Parish of Sheffield from 1742-1761. Boundary disputes became hot and fierce between Patroons of the border manors and the Massachusetts settlers, over debatable land east of the Taconics. New York claimed by patent the lands east as far as the Connecticut River, and Massachusetts by right of occupation.

On the Van Rensselaer Manor in 1762 serious disturbances broke out owing to refusals to pay rent to the Manor house, and Robert Noble, who had been engaged with David Ingersoll and Josiah Loomis in the more peaceful occupation of establishing an Episcopal Church [1] in Great Barrington- the first in Berkshire,-" put himself at the head of an armed force, and actually defeated a strong posse headed by the sheriff of Albany who were attempting to dispossess squatters on the Van Renssalaer tract." [2]

The story of Belcher's Cave near "Bung Hill Corner" in 'Great Barrington is connected with these troublous times; a gang ofcounterfeiters is said to have had their workshop here with "Gill Belcher, Goldsmith,"as leader.

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