I’ve heard that New England Indians used to have saunas? Is there any evidence of that in Ridgefield?
Probably not any physical evidence, but land records indicate there was at least one hot house here more than three centuries ago.
One of the more unusual names of Ridgefield’s past is “Peespunk,” which appears only in very early deeds. It first shows up in a 1712 deed for land at “Peespunk Spring.”
Another deed from around 1717 mentions “ye Peespunk Brook.” The reference suggests that the brook was near “Tackora’s House.” Tackora, an Indian leader, had an “old house” on the Titicus River near the New York state line, according to one of the settlers’ deeds from the Indians.
These and other deeds make it clear that the Peespunk Brook and Spring were around what is now the New York line in the Titicus Valley, possibly along the west side of North Salem Road.
Eventually, deeds simply referred to land “at Peespunk,” suggesting that the locality was so well known that it became the name of a neighborhood — like Farmingville or Flat Rock.
Peespunk is an unusual and interesting word that offers a glimpse of local Indian life not previously noted by Ridgefield historians. Also spelled Peace Punk, Pesuponck, and Pissepunk in other parts of southern New England, the word comes from “pesuppau-og,” meaning “they are sweating.” It appears in the languages of the Narragansett and the Paugusett tribes; the latter lived in Fairfield County.
A peespunk or “sweat lodge” was a hut or a cave where men built hot fires and took ceremonial sweat baths. Roger Williams, leader of the settlers of Rhode Island, described such sweathouses where the Indian men went “first to cleanse their skin, secondly to purge their bodies…I have seen them run (summer and winter) into brooks to cool them without the least hurt.”
“This hot house,” said Jonathan Trumbull in his Indian Names in Connecticut (1881), “is a kind of little cell or cave, six or eight feet over, made in the side of a hill, commonly by some rivulet or brook; into this frequently the men enter after they have exceedingly heated it with store of wood, laid upon an heap of stones in the middle.
“A lot at Indian Hill in Portland (Conn.) is called Hot House Lot, because it had one of these…and a swamp opposite Saybrook Point in Lyme is called Hothouse Swamp for the same circumstance.”
Thus, long before the Finish custom had become a fad in North America, our American Indians were appreciating saunas.
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