I found a great spot for the restored, circa-1855 ambrotype photo of my third great-grandmother, Mary Graham Arms, who was born in Sunderland on June 28, 1794 and died in South Deerfield on Christmas Day 1887.

As I sit here writing about her, her framed portrait is looking out at me from a bottom pigeonhole shelf of a Chippendale secretary she would have probably known as a desk and bookcase. From her cherry perch, she appears to be peering directly at me, with photos of her daughter and son-in-law behind me on each side of the front door.

Though there is some online disagreement about her birth date, I’ll accept the Greenfield Gazette and Courier’s death notice that gave her age as 93 years, five months, and 27 days. Those numbers square with the birth date above, published in John Montague Smith’s 1899 History of Sunderland.

The third of 10 children born to shoemaker Benjamin and Mary (Smith) Graham, Mary wed Erastus Arms (1785-1830) on January 12, 1814, but would become known as a South Deerfield village widow. She survived her husband by 57 years and resided in different family homes situated within a stone’s throw of the Bloody Brook Monument, erected while she lived there in 1838.

Known as Bloody Brook Corner to residents and motor vehicle operators who learned to negotiate the sharp curve in the road, the neighborhood surrounding the obelisk monument could just as well have been dubbed Arms Corner. At least seven homes clustered along that section of North Main Street, and three additional dwellings abutting on the west, began as properties of the same Arms family in one form or another.

These homesteads surrounded the Arms Manufacturing Company, which stood in my youth as a plastic factory but was still known to older generations as the Arms Pocketbook Shop. Mary Arms had skin in that manufactory as well – it was founded in 1845 by Dennis Arms (1790-1854), the younger brother and former shoemaking partner of her late husband.

Mary’s formal, seated, ambrotype image came to me from a remarkable family collection of old photos protected for decades by her spinster great-granddaughter, my great-aunt Gladys Hayes Sanderson (1895-1989), who never left her five-generation family home on Pleasant Street. The encased photo printed on ruby glass must have been dropped or crushed at some point, and was broken into several vertical pie wedges running through Mary’s face and torso.

Though it is unknown when it was broken, I’m glad it wasn’t discarded with the trash. Nowadays, modern technology makes it possible to salvage such damaged photos.

When I learned that my friend Chris Clawson of Turners Falls had the restoration tools, I allowed him to give it a go. Meticulous and careful, he didn’t disappoint – removing the sherds piece by piece from their case and carefully reassembling and scanning them before going to work on a cloning restoration. The result is a restored, printable photo that is probably the only surviving image of Mary Graham Arms, a member of historically important Sunderland and South Deerfield families, besides being an ancestor of mine.

Mary Graham Arms’s life wasn’t easy. Far from it, in fact. Just 36 at the time of her 45-year-old husband’s untimely death on December 17, 1830, she was left to care for eight children ranging in age from 16 to 1. Included among them was her 12-year-old daughter Angeline, identified by Deerfield historian George Sheldon and some Deerfield records as “simple.” Precisely what that means is unclear. Most likely the child suffered from birthing brain damage or Down syndrome.

I knew little to nothing about my third great-grandmother before researching deeds as a member of the Deerfield 350th Anniversary history committee. I discovered her during a deep dive into the town’s 1688 Long Hill Division, which had established the original proprietary lots that became Muddy Brook, Bloody Brook, and eventually South Deerfield.

Mary Arms spent her entire married and widowed life residing on the eastern border of “Lot 22 West,” dominated by Arms dwellings and located roughly between today’s high school and Pleasant Street.

It appears that husband Erastus died before the completion of his new home, which still stands at 111 North Main Street. Today known as the Yellow Gabled House, it was the creation of South Deerfield joiner Pliny Mann, whose account book survives at Deerfield’s Memorial Libraries. His records place him on the job in 1830, the year Erastus died. Mary probably never got to enjoy a day in her new home before widowhood.

Deeds reveal that her community took care of her after her husband’s passing, and she never remarried. When financial times got tough, family and friends pitched in to keep her afloat with what is today known as refinance mortgages.

Then, as she got older and her youngest child – son David Brainard Arms (1829-1918) – came of age to start a family, he took ownership, likely initially keeping his mother under his roof.

At the time of her death, she resided across Bloody Brook in a family home that still stands on 101 North Main Street. The front end of that building began as a post office, run by mid-19th century stagecoach express agent and nephew William D. Bates, whose mother, Miriam, was Erastus’s sister.

That lot is bordered north by the old W.D. Bates home lot, historically occupied by his grandfather Eliphas Arms, uncle Josiah Arms, and eventually cousin D.B. Arms, who lived across the brook in the Yellow Gabled House and temporarily transformed the so-called “Old Arms Place” into a pocketbook shop in the 1890s.

Today, the home on that lot is occupied by my 96-year-old mother – not an Arms descendant, but the spouse of one.

So, Mary Graham Arms lives on, stoically watching me peck at my keyboard from her cozy perch. Thanks to Chris Clawson’s extraordinary efforts and modern miracles, the South Deerfield grande dame’s portrait and legend are preserved for posterity.

On the walls surrounding a small bookcase in the southeast corner of my study hang a trio of framed images – one a small oil painting of a spaniel retrieving a cock pheasant; another a sepia-toned, circa 1882, Lewis Kingsley photo of my great-grandfather Willis Chapman Sanderson’s East Whately family, restored by Chris Clawson; the third a numbered print (3/999) of an Indian squatting down to read tracks in the snow.

It’s the third that I wish to focus on today: a thoughtful, spur-of-the-moment gift from friend John Nove, a bookbinder I got to know and like in many arenas after he moved to my hometown of South Deerfield around 2010 and ran the Grey Seal Bindery from his Mountain Road home.

John died at 77 on July 1, the day after my 72nd birthday. I’m going to miss him.

I knew John’s home as that of Ray Bergiel, a town cop with a daughter Elaine in my graduating class. I used to stand talking to John on the deck leading into his kitchen, pointing out the old shade-tobacco plots to the immediate north and south, and, east, to the high, lonesome North Sugarloaf Indian cave I frequented as a kid. I promised to take him there some day if he wanted to see it. It never occurred. I would have liked to lead him up there, assuredly telling him childhood tales from the South Deerfield I knew, a fun place that ain’t what it used to be.

John, a career scientist, took up bookbinding after retirement, training for two years at Boston’s prestigious North Bennet Street School, which teaches old trades. He was a good man, soft-spoken and fair, active in the community as chairman of the Deerfield historical commission and as Deerfield’s representative on the Battlefield Grant Advisory Committee researching the historic “Falls Fight” (May 19, 1676) of King Philip’s War.

John read my column and knew of my interest in deep local history, thus the cherished gift of this print he gave me on a thoughtful whim. Though I don’t know this for a fact, it must have come to him from someone in Old Deerfield as a memento of the 300th-anniversary remembrance of the 1704 attack on Deerfield.

I promptly had it framed and hung it in my study for posterity – now a daily reminder of my late friend. Soft-spoken and kind, John always treated me fair and engaged in interesting conversation.

I know I’m not the only person who’ll miss him dearly. He was a good, honest man. A straight shooter. Ethical to the core.

—

I would be remiss, if not dishonest, to let an error from my last column pass without notice.

The inaccuracy had nothing to do with the mid-19th-century painting I recently bought and featured in the column, but rather with what turned out to be a bogus example of artistic license I attributed to 19th-century artist Charles Louis Heyde on his circa-1852 oil painting Deerfield Toll Bridge, acquired recently by Historic Deerfield.

It was an unfortunate case of misreading the Heyde painting’s perspective. Because of my bad fix on the site, I inaccurately claimed Heyde had conveniently moved Mount Toby a few miles north as a convenient framing device. I was wrong – Heyde’s painting is actually a realistic depiction of the landscape he saw backdropping the bridge at the site of today’s Montague City Bridge from a spot on Greenfield’s Rocky Mountain near where Poet’s Seat Tower stands today.

My incorrect fix on Heyde’s easel placement placed it west and slightly south of the bridge, which crossed the Connecticut River just above the Deerfield River confluence. I figured it for somewhere between Woolman Hill and the Cheapside Railroad Trestle, and I stuck to it, despite failing to find a likely spot on maps or drive-through searches.

Perhaps, I pondered, Heyde stood on a hill that no longer exists – possibly on a promontory now long gone and hollowed into a massive crater at Trew Corporation’s gravel pit off the south end of River Road in Deerfield. My problem was that the site is a wee bit out of my domain, which begins a couple miles south of it and extends south and west.

With my site interpretation far in the rearview, JoAnn M. Costa posted a late 19th-century engraving that caught my attention on her popular Facebook page, “Historical Franklin County Massachusetts Realm of Wonders.” There she displayed a sketch of the Heyde painting described as a view of the Deerfield Toll Bridge from Rocky Mountain.

Lesson learned. In the future, I’ll try to stick to intimately familiar landscapes. For me, Rocky Mountain and the last mile of the Deerfield River are not among them.

—

Speaking of Facebook posts, there seem to be a lot of backyard and downtown black-bear sightings around the state these days.

Viewing the recent photo of a big bear lounging and munching on someone’s downed birdfeeder in a heavily settled, flatland, Franklin County neighborhood, a thought immediately came to mind: How many people born after 1980 viewing the post understand that, prior to that, bear sightings here and throughout the Bay State were rare indeed?

In fact, I would venture a guess that most people in towns like Greenfield, Deerfield, Whately, Montague, Gill, Bernardston, and elsewhere had never seen a bear. Even in the upland towns, sightings were rare.

Now the big beasts are not uncommon on city streets, or treed in thickly-settled suburban neighborhoods of Boston, Lawrence, Lowell, Worcester, West Springfield, Pittsfield, and you name it.

For this development we can salute Jim Cardoza, a retired MassWildlife biologist I often spoke with during my days as a fulltime newspaper man and outdoor columnist. Cardoza’s highly-successful bear and wild turkey restoration programs made the struggling, contemporaneous Atlantic salmon restoration program look like an exercise in futility.

Some tough-guy, NRA, sportsmen’s club types criticized Cardoza as an eccentric egghead who ruled from a strong academic bent. Not me. I respected him, viewed him as a friend, and salute him as an exemplary wildlife biologist whose restoration efforts were more successful than anyone could have ever dreamed.

Today, with altruistic hopes of annual Connecticut River salmon runs unplugged forever, state officials aren’t quite sure what to do with all the turkeys and bears brought back to the Bay State by “quirky” Cardoza and the restoration teams he led with aplomb.

A record Maine Eastern brook trout weighing nearly eight pounds darted through my Facebook feed last week.

The photo and story posted by a fellow New England Outdoor Writers Association member told the story. Both were pulled from a recent issue of the Bangor Daily News, which had lifted them from the smaller biweekly Moosehead Lakeshore Journal, which seems to have broken the story.

So why not drag it through the five fingers of Montague and bordering communities?

Caught on January 22 by well-known Greenville, Maine ice fisherman Eric Ward, the record fish was a brook trout for the ages, measuring 25 1/16 inches in length and weighing seven pounds, 10 ounces. The weight topped John Dixon’s July 4, 1959 Moosehead record by two ounces. At 25 ¼ inches, Dixon’s seven-pound, eight-ounce fish was a hair longer, with a girth of 17 ½ inches. The girth of Ward’s fish was not reported.

The largest brook trout recorded in Maine was caught in 2010 at Mousam Lake. That one tipped the scale at nine pounds, two ounces. Maine squaretails grow so large due to high populations of rainbow smelt in the food chain. These forage fish are preferred bait for ice fishermen, and keep big trout and salmon fat during their winter dormancy period.

Known to northern New England anglers as squaretails or brookies, Eastern brook trout (Latin name Salvelinus fontinalis) belong to the char family. They are historically the only native trout in our familiar slice of the Connecticut Valley. According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, brookies populate eastern North American waters from the Great Lakes east to the Atlantic Ocean and south to Georgia along the Appalachian Range.

Squaretails are the first trout I learned to catch as a boy, bait-fishing a small, unnamed, mile-long spring brook that feeds the Connecticut River three or four hundred yards north of the intersection of Hillside and River roads in South Deerfield. The spunky, colorful, voracious fingerlings ranged in length from five to seven inches, and kept me and childhood buddy Mike Manson busy whenever our parents dropped us off there.

We’d return home with a creelful of the speckled beauties, which without exception went from creel to sink to batter bowl to a cast-iron skillet flavored with sizzling, splattering bacon fat. Thus the name “panfish,” brookies sweetest of them all, served with sides of thick-cut slab bacon and crispy home fries.

In later years at forbidden sites, we discovered much larger squaretails in the one- to three-pound range. We called them “bakers,” meaning oven fish. But why go there?

No. Check that. I must tiptoe back. I can’t sidestep my youthful indiscretions for this discussion. Why? The statute of limitations long ago passed.

The big brookies we routinely caught a half-century ago from posted, spring-fed impoundments are directly related to my first impression of the record brookie photographed in Ward’s hands. I wasn’t awestruck because I have seen many large local brook trout and heard of many others over the years.

The big brookies we caught were taken on lures in forbidden waters where they grew large. Golden Thomas buoyant spoons were most productive, but Daredevils and small Mepps spinners worked in a pinch, especially when cast at dusk into an 60-foot outflow neck that collided with a cold, shaded feeder stream once known as Sanderson, then Harvey Brook. The action was fast and furious, and the one- to two-pound brookies ranged from 12 to 18 inches long.

Though I myself never caught a fish that compared to Ward’s there, I did indeed hear of one taken by a neighborhood kid who was probably five or six years younger than me. This notable catch occurred in the late ’60s. I would have been about 15, and heard the tale repeated by several witnesses fortunate enough to see the elementary school-aged boy lugging the fish up the hill home on a stringer.

Word was that the fish had to be nearly two feet long because the kid couldn’t keep its tail from dragging on the road.

I know fish stories tend to be exaggerated, but one of the tellers was a state policeman who had given much testimony in his day, not to mention fished the same, productive spot. In passing, he’d pretend he didn’t see me and my friends fishing there. I guess he liked us because we were ballplayers, and he figured we could be doing much worse than fishing.

We referred to that tidy arrangement as “the hot setup,” and had a blast fishing there. In later years, I took big squaretails from that same bucolic spot on White Wulff and Hendrickson dry flies. That was even more enjoyable than open-faced spin-casting and lures, especially on my friend’s father’s Tonkin cane rod.

In advancing years, when old enough to carry a shotgun, I hunted partridge and woodcock in adjacent woods traversed by a major feeder stream. There I discovered a settling pool at the base of step falls, where large, upstream-swimming brookies congregated on their fall spawning run. It was quite a sight to behold, and one that I shared only with the best of friends.

While I doubt I ever saw a seven- to eight-pound brookie in the mix, the visuals imprinted in memory suggests that some of them may have gone four or five pounds; and that was likely the case for that aforementioned kid’s catch that had the neighborhood buzzing.

My point is that back in the day, before acid-rain endangered native brook trout, there was no need to chase off to the blackfly-infested Northwoods for big ones. They were available right here in our own backyards.

I can’t help but wonder how many of the only trout available to the indigenous people who lived here before us are left?