This intriguing portrait on a fragment of silk belongs to a descendent of the Portt family who lives in Massachusetts. The six Portt brothers left Ireland in 1819 and settled on lands in Tyendinaga after the first surrender of a large part of the Mohawks’ original territory in 1820. One of the brothers, William, is described in a letter of 1835 as having learnt the Mohawk language. In the 1820s William Portt had been a schoolteacher for the Mohawk people and it seems from correspondence dating from that time that he often acted as a representative for the Mohawks’ interests. One of William’s brothers, John, was a Justice of the Peace, while another, James, served as a sergeant in the Hastings militia and lived to the remarkable age of 94.
The portrait was discovered in the binding of a Portt family photograph album and is only a few inches square and, as you see, very fragile. We don’t know who painted it or the name of the man it depicts, although it seems very likely that the subject is one of the Portts’ Mohawk neighbours. It is possible that this item is over 175 years old: an extremely rare visual record from Tyendinaga in the first half of the nineteenth century that we are thrilled to be able to show here. If you can add anything to our knowledge of the item or have any information about the Portt family that you’d like to share, please leave a comment.
Deseronto Archives 
December 18, 2012 at 7:33 pm
Does the Portt correspondence mentioned in the blog article make any reference to the Culbertson Tract or officials associated with it from the Indian Office?
April 4, 2013 at 8:54 pm
There are some letters in the Catalogue of Culbertson Tract Land Claim Documents Collection that refer to William Portt and John Portt, two of the brothers that were part of the Tyendinaga family to whom the family album belonged and we are assuming the silk cloth portrait must date back to the 1820s or 1830s time period. We have no documents that establish the origin or content of the portrait.
September 17, 2018 at 7:04 pm
what denomination is the bill in the bottom left hand corner of the portrait?? If you look you can see the bill, if you can ask the family to use a magnifying glass it would help identify a date. It is an American bill.