When we talk about Sweet Botanicals as our little eight-acre farm in Granby, Massachusetts, it gives a slightly misleading picture. There are gardens, fruit trees, blueberries, raspberries and herbs around the house, but most of our land looks nothing like a farm.
About five of our eight acres are in Pitchawam Swamp.
For years, that was simply the name of the wetland behind us. It’s the place where the ground gets soggy, where water collects and drains, where wildlife moves through the property, and where nature has considerably more say about what grows than we do. But Pitchawam Swamp turns out to have a history that goes back much farther than Sweet Botanicals, and much farther than Granby itself.
The name appears to come from an Indigenous name recorded as Pitchawamiche, or in some older sources Pitchawamuche. A Massachusetts Historical Commission survey of Granby identifies a Native travel route that probably ran from the area of Bachelor Brook toward Pitchawam Swamp, roughly along what later became Easton Street and possibly North Street. The same survey suggests that the wetlands around Pitchawam would have been natural locations for small hunting camps.
The people using that landscape were likely connected with the Norwottuck, whose communities were centered farther west in the Connecticut River Valley around what are now Hadley and Northampton.
That changes the way we think about the swamp.
Wetlands can look like the empty spaces on a map, the places between roads, farms and houses. But long before those roads and property lines existed, a swamp like Pitchawam would have been anything but empty. It provided water, plants, animals and habitat, and it sat within a landscape crossed by people who knew the woods and waterways in ways we can barely reconstruct today.
The name survived.
An 1890 description of Granby recorded the name as Pitchawamuche, shortened to Pitchawam, and said it was believed to be the only Native place-name still surviving in the town. Whether that claim was completely accurate is something we'd like to investigate further, but the survival of the name itself is remarkable. Generations came and went, Granby was settled, roads were built and farms divided, yet people kept calling this wet ground Pitchawam.
The swamp also became part of Granby's colonial history. The early center of town developed near its southern end, around the present-day Amherst Street and West Street area. Granby's first meetinghouse was there, along with some of the community's earliest homes. The center of town eventually shifted, but Pitchawam remained.
And now part of it is behind our house.
That makes us think differently about what we're doing here at Sweet Botanicals. We grow berries, fruit and herbs on a relatively small part of these eight acres. The majority isn't ours to cultivate in any conventional sense. It is wetland, and perhaps that's exactly what it should remain.
Those five acres are doing their own kind of growing.
They're habitat. They're part of the local watershed. They're a corridor for wildlife. They're storing water and supporting plants that chose this ground long before we arrived. And they connect our little patch of Granby to a landscape whose human history reaches back centuries before there was a town called Granby.
So as we begin telling the story of Sweet Botanicals, we want to tell the story of the land too.
We thought we lived next to an old swamp.
It turns out we live in Pitchawam.
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