Page:History of Barrington, Rhode Island (Bicknell).djvu/146

108 Mr. Brown and Captain Willett who lived at Wannamoisett, were members of the Plymouth Government and had the best possible knowledge of the whole country, they must have ordered the name of Sowams to be applied to the chief settlements on the territory. As we have seen, as early as 1652, Sowams was assessed; £1, 10s. in the Colonial tax, when there was not a white resident on the territory now known as Warren, except Hugh Cole and Mr. Butterworth, east of the Kickemuit River. It is well known that the principal settlement of Sowams was on New Meadow Neck, where Mr. Myles's Church was afterwards built, and North of the Indian village on the south end of the Neck. Had Warren been the original Sowams, there would not have been a white settler to have laid claim to the name or to have preserved it. Mr. Willett and Mr. Brown, Mr. Allin, and others were the largest proprietors of Sowams, and must have known its true location and bounds, and used the name in local affairs, until Swansea was incorporated.

XI. As early as 1632, a trading post was erected in the Pokanoket country by the Plymouth settlers, at Sowams, in the vicinity of the largest Indian village, as it was established to carry on barter with the Indians. In Miller's history of "The Wampanoag Indians," it is stated that the trading post was supposed to have been located on the Barrington side of the Sowams River, on the land known as "Phebe's Neck." This trading post or house, as it is called at Sowamsett as related in Winthrop's Journal, was the place to which Myles Standish and his men came in 1632. Massassoit had fled to the post for protection from a threatened attack of the Narragansetts who could easily make a raid on the Indians at Sowams, by a water approach in canoes across the bay from Warwick, or by land from the upper end of the river at Providence. Governor Winthrop sent twenty-seven pounds of gun-powder to Standish, but a messenger soon brought news from Standish that the Indians had returned from Sowams to engage in a contest with the