What does it mean to be connected to a place, to have a sense of a place… and how does it change over time?

I pondered that question during a recent daybreak walk along the shoulder of a lonely, gray, Upper Meadows road in Greenfield. Since then the thought has reappeared, darting through my consciousness like one of those gray squirrels, tail raised high, that darts out in front of your car, comes to sudden halt, and scoots back in the nick of time to live another day.

The impetus for that initial thought may have been the frosty air entering my nostrils. It cooled my throat, expanded my lungs, revved my gait, and got my wheels spinning.

Down the road a piece, the fluid thought train only intensified. Running a bit late as I turned west for the homestretch, I was greeted by flaming orange maples illuminated along the western ridge by the first rays of sun peeking over the eastern horizon. Ten or 15 minutes makes a huge difference at that time of day.

What a glorious sight. Right place, right time. It so moved me that the thought lingered all the way home and reappeared throughout the morning and sporadically over ensuing days.

I suppose at the root of it all was the deed research in which I’ve been hopelessly immersed for the past three years, ever since the COVID scare began. Piecing together the genesis of South Deerfield, my path has also meandered through East Whately, Greenfield, and Montague, all connected by the same founding families, from some of which – Arms, Allen, Allis, Catlin, Hawks, and Williams – I descend. What better way to occupy a retired man’s time and energy than exploring land records dating back to the beginning of Franklin County’s colonial settlement?

Thanks to 21^st-century digitization, these records can now be reviewed in the comforts of home. What a grand luxury. A far cry better than passing through courthouse metal detectors to page through large, cumbersome volumes in the Registry of Deeds library.

But be forewarned: home deed research can become an obsession. The problem is that one search leads to another, all of them with dangling threads of inquiry to pull and see what unravels. And that’s just the half of it, leaving out entirely all the unexpected “peripherals” leading down into enticing rabbit holes.

Newbies will struggle to lean how to navigate through the online database, but once that’s accomplished, it’s all downhill and captivating.

I suppose diligent researchers who pursue all leads could be in danger of learning far more than they need to know. But, really, is that possible? Can one ever learn too much about anything?

Late, esteemed English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead would say no. He favored focused, specialized learning over a liberal education that bombards students with a little bit of everything. In his classic essay The Aims of Education, he dropped a critical hammer on modern education by opining that “a merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth.”

Those who favor the modern standard of a well-rounded liberal education and standardized testing will likely take issue with Whitehead’s assessment, but the line has stuck with me since reading it five decades ago as a student under UMass journalism professor Howard Ziff. Or maybe it was philosophy prof Robert Paul Wolff. Not certain. One or the other.

It’s not that Whitehead couldn’t tolerate an introductory liberal education for elementary students. He just believed that specialization must be the goal, and that it can’t come too soon. That’s where he bucked modern educational trends.

Which circles us back to the sense-of-place narrative: that is, choosing a place to inhabit – and learning everything there is to know about it.

I remember well my days on the road as a professional fundraiser, living briefly in strange places I did not know. Having grown up isolated in small-town South Deerfield and gone to college in nearby Amherst, I was ready to explore new places. Life on the road was exciting at first, but then became disorienting. It was six weeks here and six weeks there, with interesting stops in Colorado, Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Delaware, New Jersey, and all over southern New England.

Those were wild times for a young, single man speeding the interstates to new places and living out of a suitcase in Sheratons, Holiday Inns and worse. I ate in restaurants, drank in bars, and felt like an outsider. I spoke a slightly different dialect than the locals and most often felt like a rudderless ship navigating swirling, unfamiliar waters. I eventually tired of the destructive lifestyle and returned home, marrying my current spouse in 1979.

Before I tied the knot, I quit the fundraising game and took a temporary job as a laborer for the Montague DPW. Then I got a break when my Uncle Ralph called me from his second home in Charlemont. He knew I had studied journalism and wondered if I wanted to get my foot in the door at the Greenfield Recorder – a classic who-you-know, not-what-you-know job opportunity.

It just so happened that the Recorder editor of the day spent a lot of time at my uncle’s Berkshire East ski chalet, and was looking for a part-time sportswriter. My uncle promised he could plug me into the job if I wanted it. The rest is history. I worked in that newsroom for 40 years until retirement, working my way up the ladder as far as I dared.

The pay was meager, the hours chaotic, the holidays few. My first full-time sportswriter paycheck was 185 bucks a week – less than I made as a DPW laborer, and a lot less than I made on a good day as a fundraiser. No lie. But at least I was home in a place that I knew and wanted to know better. That was important to me, and that’s why I stayed, bought two homes, and raised a family here. I didn’t want to bounce around from paper to paper, city to city for more money. Been there, done that. Place was important to me.

By the time I rose to sports editor in 1986, a position I held until my 2018 retirement, I was probably best known for my weekly column, On The Trail, which appeared each Thursday. Its backbone was hunting and fishing, but its soul was local history and place. Think of it: how do you separate place and local history from topics like flora and fauna, woods and waters, fish and wildlife restorations, hunting harvests, stocking reports and fish migrations, cellar holes and decaying maple-sugar camps on abandoned roads? Truth is, it can’t be done. Not if it’s done right.

So here I sit, retired and still writing about the same stuff, now for a weekly paper in the same general community. Over the years I’ve read thinkers like Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and many others who believe in place-based living and narrative. They all advocate setting roots in a place, and spending a lifetime learning about it. That means wading its rivers, braving its swamps, walking its faded trails, following its stone walls, walking its ridgelines – and always paying heed to the whispering winds.

Deed research has only deepened my understanding of this place, while strengthening my personal connections through my father’s gene pool. His ancestors and mine were here in the Connecticut Valley for the first wave of colonial settlement. Of that, I have been proud for decades, and less so about my maternal grandmother’s ancient Acadian roots in Nova Scotia, which, to me, is still foreign ground.

Now, a sobering fact – one that speaks to the temporal insignificance of colonial settlement here. Franklin County deeds only date back some 350 years. That’s at least 12,000 years after Native Americans arrived here.

No matter how you slice it, that’s a harsh reality. On those terms, I am reduced to a mere squatter – a clueless brother from another mother who will never understand this place like they did.

Unexpected diversions and distractions can sometimes strike historical gold… like the one I stumbled across last week.

Most often these unexpected discoveries come to light as what I refer to as “peripherals” – that is, random findings unveiled entirely by dumb luck while reading, researching, or engaged in informal conversation. Nowhere do such bits of helpful information appear more regularly than newspaper archives. That’s where you find an interesting obituary accompanying one you’re seeking, front-page stories next to the one you’re chasing, or even gossipy little blurbs from a town adjacent to the one you’re exploring.

Because such surprise discoveries are fleeting and often elusive, they can be difficult to recover if you don’t immediately capture them. I have learned the hard way to jot down notes by any means necessary or risk losing unexpected data. Trying a few days later to retrace the path back to such peripherals is rarely easy, and at best time-consuming.

My latest such finding occurred during a recent early-morning telephone conversation with Paul Olszewski of South Deerfield. Five years younger than me, Paul grew up in the same neighborhood as me, and we have known each other in passing for decades. In recent months, we have had many discussions about the history of his North Main Street property. Our conversations have ventured back to founding Muddy Brook families like Barnard, Cooley, Wright, and Anderson, and later immigrant families like Gorey, Yazwinsk, Milewski, Bartos, and his very own.

Our latest chat was focused on a 1909 deed his wife had recently studied. The land record transferred less than an acre of North Main Street frontage from William Gorey to his son Robert. The lot on the other side of Bloody Brook from his father’s antique farmhouse provided more than enough space for Robert’s two-story dwelling, currently owned and occupied by Olszewski.

Being familiar with the document, I filled in additional details about the property reaching back to the original 1688, so-called Long Hill Division East lot, “bounded west by the Country road leading from Deerfield to Hatfield.”

During the meandering discussion that ensued, most of it focused on North Main Street, Olszewski shared an interesting fact. He revealed that his two-bay garage was built as an add-on by the well-known South Deerfield building contractor Bill Gass – the man credited with restoring Historic Deerfield houses to the colonial museums they are today. Off we traipsed into a spontaneous discussion about the colonial-restoration guru.

I soon learned that Olszewski was a valuable source of Gass information. He was able to identify South Deerfield structures built by Gass and, even better, some signature design elements that were immediately familiar to me. His insight came from deep collective memory, having been captive audience to many holiday family conversations involving his Uncle Francis (Olszewski).

I knew his uncle a wee bit from my teenage years myself – when I met him, he was teaching carpentry to his students at Smith Voke in Northampton – but had no clue that as a young man he had learned his carpentry skills from master builder Gass himself.

I already knew a little about Gass’s historic-restoration expertise, and less about his signature architectural design details. Recently I learned that he was also a house mover. An example was his move of Old Deerfield’s Ashley House back to its original location. Another similar project was his move of South Deerfield’s old Frary Tavern to Old Deerfield, where it now stands as the Bloody Brook Tavern Museum.

Gass also had a hand in moving the Hall Tavern from East Charlemont to Old Deerfield, and salvaging many antique Swift River Valley buildings doomed by the Quabbin Reservoir project of 1938. Thanks to Gass and other joiners of his ilk, many of those old, condemned homesteads from the submerged ghost towns of Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, and Prescott are proudly standing today in surrounding communities. Plus, many architectural elements – such as doors, floorboards, staircases, mantles, raised paneling, and chestnut-framing timbers – were saved, stored, and recycled into buildings new and old.

How do you beat that for authenticity?

The historical bombshell dropped by Paul Olszewski was that Gass was also known for sprucing up tired old house exteriors with an outer coating of preservative stucco. Apparently, another trademark of his are the distinctive cobblestone porches I’ve known since childhood without a hint about Gass origin.

Upon learning of these two signature design details, I could immediately name examples from my old hometown. During a brief visit a day or two later, on a quick loop around the downtown area, I passed a few that had escaped my memory. I will surely recognize more in my future travels.

I couldn’t have learned of Gass’s stucco background at a more appropriate time. In recent weeks my attention had turned to the house on North Main Street I knew as “the Dana Jewett place,” with its narrow swath of pine woods running west to the railroad tracks along the northern border of the Frontier Regional School athletic fields.

I was recently perplexed when a dependable nonagenarian source told me that when she was young, this palatial home was brick. Familiar with the building since as far back as my memory reaches, I knew it only as stucco. When I contacted the current owner, the fact that it was a brick building was also news to her.

Researching the property further, I found that Henry D. Packard had the home built in 1912 and moved into it with his wife Jeannie C. in 1913. The Packards died within a week of each other thirty-five years later, in early December 1947 – the same year my nonagenarian source graduated Deerfield High School. Two months later, Jewett bought the place.

I suspected it was Jewett who had hired a local contractor to spruce up his new digs with a fresh sheet of white stucco, remarkably similar to that of a home a half-mile up the street. Maybe, I speculated, the two homes had been treated by the same hand.

Although it made perfect sense that a man of Jewett’s social status would have used a master such as Gass for home-improvement projects, I never thought of Gass as a potential stucco contractor. I knew of him only as a skilled finish carpenter, not a mason or plasterer. Once I learned that he was associated with stucco restoration, I surmised it most likely that he would have hired masons for that chore. Who these masons were is anyone’s guess, and might in my estimation be difficult to ascertain before the Gass clue.

So I did a little more poking around and, sure enough, Gass’s younger brother Samuel was a mason who liberally advertised many services in his newspaper ads, including plastering. Although I can’t say for sure that Samuel worked for his older brother, it’s a safe assumption. The brothers lived their entire lives in South Deerfield, and as adults owned downtown homes within shouting distance. So, yes indeed, it’s likely that many stucco coverings and cobblestone porches in town were the handiwork of Samuel, of whom I have no recollection. He died in 1962, when I was 9. I do remember his wife and their disabled, adopted son.

I also have vague memories of Bill Gass, a downtown regular who died in 1986. I can still visualize his trademark bow tie and, if memory serves me, suspenders. I was more familiar with his sons, Ed and Billy, who were of my father’s vintage, and knew his grandchildren, Paul and Karen, better.

I never realized how little I really knew about the Bill Gass family before my recent research. Online data unveils a prolific Irish family of local building contractors beginning with William Gass, Sr. (1878-1952), whose obituary says he was born in Newburgh, New York and had lived in South Deerfield for 58 years, which brings us back to 1894.

That information doesn’t square with his father’s FindAGrave profile, which claims that Samuel Gass was born in Ireland in 1845 and died in 1885 in South Deerfield, where he is buried. So, it would appear that the family touched down in South Deerfield long before 1894. Sons Thomas J. (born 1877) and William E. (born 1878), both future Franklin County contractors, would have both been 7 at the time of their father’s death, Thomas soon to be 8.

William E. Gass, Sr., married Bridget Toomey from Whately in 1901. In 1908, he was awarded the contract to build the downtown Redmen’s Block, which opened in early June 1909 on the corner of South Main and Elm streets. On the second floor was the spacious Redman’s Hall, which hosted meetings, gala dances, weddings and other gatherings, and basketball games. The tall building met the wrecking ball in 1978 and was replaced by the modern Deerfield Spirit Shoppe building on the lot today.

Sons and grandsons of William and Thomas carried on the prolific Gass tradition for many years, establishing sterling reputations as building contractors in Deerfield, Greenfield, and Amherst. Old Deerfield contractor William E. Gass, Jr., “employed about 60 full-time employees” according to a profile in Harry Andrew Wright’s four-volume The Story of Western Massachusetts, published in 1949. Examples of the Gass dynasty’s work can be found in many Franklin and Hampshire County communities.

From humble beginnings, the Gass boys worked hard, and left a legacy that will outlive us all.

It occurred two years before I was born: a Saturday-morning plane crash that exploded on impact in bucolic Mason, New Hampshire, instantly killing four prominent South Deerfield townsmen and shaking the village to its core.

The date was July 28, 1951, the time about 9:30 a.m., visibility poor in foggy rain.

The crash made the national news wires. Photos of the twisted wreckage appeared on the front page of newspapers throughout the land, especially in the Northeast. Today, it has faded from the collective memory, even in South Deerfield – except for a few 80- and 90-somethings like Patricia McNerney Kelleher, then a young woman living in town. She remembers it well.

“The town seemed to stand still,” she said. “We were numb.”

The victims, closer in age to my grandfather than my father, had departed for Boston from the Turners Falls Airport the previous afternoon in pilot Delmer M. Jewett, Jr.’s private, four-passenger, Ryan Navion, single-engine plane. Their destination was Fenway Park, for a Friday night Red Sox game vs. the Cleveland Indians, won by the visitors, 3-2, on a ninth-inning run.

Although they planned to return home that night, stormy weather moved in soon after Indians righthander Bob Lemmon closed out his complete-game win, and Jewett didn’t want chance night flight. He called home to report they’d spend the night in Boston and return in the morning. That’s the last anyone heard from them. About halfway home the pilot got disoriented in a cloud bank and crashed into a mix of trees and fields some 15 miles north of Fitchburg.

Accompanying Jewett, 43, who had owned the plane for about three years, was his 79-year-old father, Delmer, Sr., 52-year-old South Deerfield postmaster and former police chief Edward J. Redmond, and downtown pharmacist Hollis D. Billings, 50. The victims’ ages varied in breaking-news accounts, but are reported here according to birth dates published in obituaries.

The Jewetts owned what was known around town as the “Pickle Shop” – that is, D.M. Jewett Corporation and Oxford Pickle Works, the official name prominently displayed on the plane. The company was founded as Sugarloaf Pickles in 1896 by Delmer Sr.’s father, Alvord Austin Jewett (1838-1905), a decorated Civil War veteran buried in the Brookside Cemetery.

The Jewett family came to Bloody Brook, now South Deerfield, from Templeton in the mid-1780s, and by the turn of the 19^th century had established a large “downtown” presence on both sides of the county road from Deerfield to Hatfield, now South Main Street. Patriarch Enoch Jewett (1739-1813) and his son Reuben first appear as Deerfield taxpayers in 1786, when development was burgeoning on the south end of town, between Elm Street and the Whately line.

By the 1850s, the Jewett family had split into branches from Reuben – one associated with the Pickle Shop, another with the first Mount Sugarloaf summit house and a large North Mill River farm. The summit-house family was headed by Dwight Jewett (1812-1909), and his son-in-law, Granville Wardwell, built the first Sugarloaf structure during the Civil War.

Delmer M. Jewett, Sr., was the semi-retired pickle company president at the time of the crash, and had lost his wife about a year earlier. He left a son Dana in South Deerfield, a daughter in Houston, Texas, and six grandchildren.

The pilot, Delmer, Jr., was the company vice president, manager, and treasurer. He left a wife and two daughters. Delmer, Jr., was born and raised in South Deerfield, where he had been a selectman and president of the Rotary Club before moving to Northfield, where he owned a large cucumber farm. He had been a licensed pilot for 10 years, and bought the plane in 1948 for travel to a sister pickle plant in Paris, Maine.

Hollis Billings, the pharmacist, was born in Northfield to a family with deep Connecticut Valley roots in Sunderland, Hatfield, Conway, and South Deerfield. He left a wife, son, and daughter – not to mention another gaping hole in the downtown business scene. Just four months before the crash that claimed his life, downtown South Deerfield had lost its centerpiece when the stately Bloody Brook Inn, diagonally across the common from the drugstore, was destroyed by fire.

The Redmond family was relatively new in town. World War I veteran Edward Redmond, born and educated in Westfield and previously a patrolman on the Palmer police force, came to town as the newly appointed police chief in 1928. In 1943, he left that job to become South Deerfield’s postmaster. A member of St. James Catholic Church, Redmond brought a large Irish family to town. He left a wife and six children, the two youngest of whom, son Richard and daughter Jane, are alive today.

“I remember that day like it happened yesterday,” said 83-year-old Richard Redmond. “I was only 12 when I lost my dad.”

As it played out, Redmond’s father and Billings were the victims of a simple twist of fate. They had accepted last-minute invitations to the Red Sox game after police chief James Rosenthal and auto dealer Guy Hosley, Sr., declined due to previous commitments.

The crash was witnessed by many Mason, New Hampshire residents who reported hearing the plane circling in distress before emerging from a 100-foot ceiling on a fatal downward trajectory that could not be corrected. Others heard a loud, distant explosion. A woman said she thought the plane was going to land on her home as it passed close overhead, shearing off treetops before crashing to earth and exploding.

The New Hampshire Aeronautics Commission attributed the tragedy to pilot error. An inexperienced instrument pilot, Jewett, Jr. got disoriented in a dense cloud bank, took a steep dive, and perished. No one was sure whether he had been aiming for the airport in Keene, New Hampshire or Turners Falls.

Friends who had flown with Jewett praised him as a careful and conscientious pilot, and his plane did have instrument-flying technology for blind flying without sight lines to the horizon. But his instrument-flying experience was limited and, without visual reference to the ground, he succumbed to the fates.

An experienced local pilot who today owns a small plane provided insight to me about the dangers of blind, instrument-flight through cloud banks, which he admitted avoiding at all costs. Faced with such perilous conditions, he said he opts to go around cloud banks, even if he must travel 100 miles out of his way.

“To get through cloud banks, you have to totally trust your instruments,” he said. “You don’t want to get disoriented and experience vertigo.”

He said he has been in the cockpit with sophisticated pilots who won’t even look out the windshield when navigating through cloud banks, focusing exclusively on the instrument panel. He compared it to trusting a compass to get out of the woods. The golden rule is to never to doubt a compass or instrument panel.

Jewett must have seen a favorable weather report before taking off that morning from Boston’s Logan International Airport. Investigators speculated that when he encountered the cloud bank, he incorrectly interpreted it as a small, localized patch and immediately got in over his head.

The pilot was identified by officials who went to the crash site. The other three victims were later identified by Francis Redmond and Dana Jewett, who traveled to the scene from South Deerfield.

Activity in South Deerfield came to a complete standstill for the funerals on Tuesday, July 31, 1951. Town offices, stores, and other businesses were closed to allow friends and neighbors to pay their final respects to four community leaders. The tragic victims were literally here today, gone tomorrow – leaving their grief-stricken Deerfield village in a state of shock.