10/13/2025
My neck of the woods. I love roaming thru old cemetery’s. You rarely know the story of the person buried there. This one is fascinating!
For Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I wanted to highlight the gravestone of Rhoda Rhoades, “Indian Doctress,” at Norwich Bridge Cemetery in Huntington, Massachusetts. She was born around 1751, and she was the daughter of a white colonists from Rhode Island and a local Mahican woman.
Rhoda lived in Norwich (modern-day Huntington) Massachusetts, in a village known as Indian Hollow. She was a well-known healer who used traditional medicine such as herbs, roots, and extracts to treat her patients. She would often travel around the Western Massachusetts region to make house visits, but her patients would also visit her at her home in Indian Hollow.
She continued to practice medicine until her death in 1841 at the age of 90. She was buried in the cemetery at Indian Hollow along with her son Simon, who died a year later. However, in the 1930s this cemetery was relocated because of the construction of the Knightville Dam, which created a flood control reservoir in the area where Indian Hollow used to be. Rhoda and Simon’s gravestone was moved to Norwich Bridge Cemetery, where it now lies flat on the ground, m broken and partially covered in grass and dirt.
Not sure who the carver was, but possibly someone from Lee or another town in the Berkshires.
