Jan
16
2025

Gramly’s Mastodon Adventures Bearing Fruit

by Gary Sanderson

I feel like I’ve been swept into the mainstream of a raging archaeological/anthropological torrent that just won’t let go – no sturdy, overhanging tree limbs to snag or flotsam to maneuver to shore.

Hopelessly suspended in this roaring swell, I hear interesting cobbles of information tumbling past me on the invisible streambed. All I can do now is find a way out. There I can wait for the stream to clear. Then, perhaps, gather visible submerged clues.

I was first sucked into this maelstrom months ago by embarking on a fresh look at ancient weirs still discernable on some New England streams. That includes a few in the Connecticut Valley. The immediate question was: were they the work of Indian fishers, or enhanced versions of indigenous weirs taken over and annually maintained by colonial settlers?

The answer, according to the few scholars who’ve written in obscure sources about weirs, seems to be all of the above. I can accept that.

A follow-up question was: Why are they pointing downstream, an obvious difference between New England weirs and those documented along the upper West Coast of North America? We did attempt to sort that out and move on. Bigger fish to fry.

As an offshoot, we re-explored a topic I have probed under evolving views for nearly half a century. That is anadromous fish, including Atlantic salmon, that historically and prehistorically populated the Connecticut and many other New England river systems each spring. That was before capitalistic Europeans did their best to wipe them out with gross overharvest of fish and forest, impenetrable dam obstructions blocking spring spawning runs, and wanton pollution. Conservation and sustainability were not in those folks’ lexicon. Blinded by shortsighted greed, they aimed at maximum profit.

A question yet to be answered is: Why have salmon remains been thus far almost totally absent from New England’s archaeological record? Well, I’m afraid that’s above my pay grade. Perhaps it has something to do with Indians’ reverential riverside disposal of salmon remains compared to those of shad, sturgeon, herring, and eels, which do exist in the record.

Maybe we’d find the answer if archaeologists still fearlessly excavated sites like they did before the restrictions and oversight of 1990’s Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) cramped their style.

One expert who would agree with that assessment is Harvard Ph.D. archaeologist Richard Michael Gramly, known to friends as Mike. I have known him for 10 years – ever since we met at the famed Sugarloaf (or DEDIC) Site – a sandy, outwash plain on the southwestern skirt of Mount Sugarloaf that was seasonally visited by bands of Paleoindian caribou hunters dating back some 12,400 years before present.

By the time we met, Gramly had for some 40 years been actively exploring ancient caribou-hunting sites ranging from northwestern Maine to our slice of the Connecticut Valley. I was witnessing his second Sugarloaf Site dig during the fall of 2013.

Shortly thereafter, he pulled together a group of investors who purchased at auction the excavation rights to skeletal remains of an ancient mastodon discovered by a Middletown, New York farmer digging out a spring hole. Working there in 2014 and 2015, he uncovered many ground-breaking discoveries, and has ever since been on a mastodon crusade. Now 78, he fears there’s not enough time to get him where he wants to go.

I feel privileged to have been on the receiving end of a steady flow of fresh Gramly insights about the interactions of Paleoindian hunters and ancient proboscideans – mostly mastodons, but wooly mammoths, too. He’s fully involved in the elusive, esoteric study of ritualistic mastodon hunting as a rite of manhood. Radiocarbon dates tell him this activity dates back some 15,000 years, which ruffles the preened feathers of some respected scholars deep in experience and expertise pertaining to the peopling of the Americas.

Thus far, Gramly has uncovered not only previously ignored and/or undetected evidence of ritualistic mastodon hunting, but two apparent in situ shaman sled burials in the eastern United States: one in upstate New York, the other Kentucky. Included among his cutting-edge discoveries are artifacts made of bone and ivory, including sled runners and carriage parts, a diadem, tools, and recently even a stone cobble worked into a Venus figurine.

Now, a new wrinkle has come to light, forcing Gramly to adjust his ever-evolving hypotheses surrounding the shaman sled burials he identified from the Hiscock Site in New York’s Lake Ontario region and Lower Blue Lick in northeastern Kentucky. Dutch anthropologist and American academic Harold E.L. Prins delivered this new twist in his scholarly December article titled “The Sami Drum: Shamanic Journey of Another Kind,” appearing in Shamanism Annual, the Journal of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies.

Prins’s article discusses rare, sacred, exquisitely-painted drums used by Sami shamans in the pre-Christian world of Arctic Scandinavia. Most of these early, spiritual, Lapland relics were long ago destroyed by Christian authorities trying to rid their world of pagan symbols and devil worship. Featured with the symbolically illustrated drums are Y-stick reindeer-antler hammers used as drumbeaters, introducing a new interpretation for caribou-antler artifacts recovered in association with the Hiscock sled burial.

Gramly and righthand man James B. Harrod, a world religions expert, had previously speculated that the antler Y-sticks discovered at the burial site had either been vestiges of a shaman’s headdress or ceremonial staff. Now a third possibility for at least one remnant initially thought to be a damaged Y-stick. A shaman’s drum stick, perhaps?

Hmmmm?

“Yes,” was Gramly’s email answer. “The T-shaped Hiscock-antler Y-stick with a moose effigy carving was likely a drumbeater. When I wrote it up years ago, I did not recognize its significance. Remember, this is a continuously-evolving body of interpretation.”

Yes, indeed – precisely why it interests this retired old hen-scratcher most attracted to the unknown.

posted in Columns, Indians | No Comments

Jan
04
2025

Reevaluating New England Salmon

by Gary Sanderson

OK, at long last, time to revisit and reassess, as I promised many weeks ago, the uncertain topic of New England’s prehistoric and early-historic Atlantic salmon runs.

This subject was a staple of my weekly Greenfield Recorder outdoor column “On the Trail” in the 1980s and 1990s, when an aggressive, ultimately unsuccessful Connecticut River Atlantic salmon-restoration program was trying to justify itself. By the dawning of our new millennium the tide had turned against the altruistic effort’s feasibility.

Although I continued to studiously track, compare, and contrast the annual spring spawning runs of shad, salmon, blueback herring, and sometimes lamprey eels up our Connecticut River basin, it was by then clear that the salmon program was fast-tracking to its demise. So, I backed off and let others run with the baton.

Finally, the feds pulled the plug on salmon-restoration in 2013, by which time the paltry number of annual returns could no longer justify the expense.

Readers may recall the impetus for my most recent foray into regional salmon runs after years of back-burner neglect. Reading a 50-year-old book about New Hampshire’s frontier settlement, I noted a reference to the 18th-century diary of a Bedford, New Hampshire man named Matthew Patten, who counted among his many annual chores fishing the spring Merrimack River anadromous fish runs, including salmon.

Patten also occasionally fished for non-migratory native fish such as pickerel, perch, and hornpout, but not as aggressively, while capitalizing on occasional summer salmon found secreted in small, cold-water-tributary lairs awaiting fall spawning.

I bought a copy of the Patten diary, discovered it contained no index, and spent three days compiling a hand-written version for future reference, recording mostly fishing data but also miscellaneous items of personal interest – like, for instance, a heavy June 30 frost today unheard of.

I soon introduced Patten’s 1754-88 diary to my scholarly friend Peter Thomas, a retired archaeologist and historian. Immediately intrigued, he one-upped me by finding an online copy and laboring to produce a useful, 75-page, annotated digital index, along with two Excel spreadsheets tracking Patten’s many fishing activitie. He and fellow retired archaeologist Stuart Fiedel, both PhDs with many years of field experience, found the “new” information relevant to their current, ongoing examination of historic and prehistoric New England anadromous-fish migration, particularly in the Connecticut Valley.

Though I haven’t yet carefully dissected the spreadsheets, I’m sure they’ll become useful at some point.

Thomas and I have discussed anadromous fish runs and ancient fishing practices for the approximate 10 years I’ve known him. He led an archaeological dig at Riverside/Gill in the 1980s that revealed much evidence of Native American fishing long before European colonists reached our shores. Likewise, his Hinsdale, New Hampshire dig at the Sokoki “Fort Hill,” overlooking the confluence of the Ashuelot and Connecticut rivers, revealed some fishing culture. Plus, our recent discussions have focused on the dynamics of ancient weirs still discernable in some Connecticut Valley rivers.

My own recent research hit a brief snag with too many irons in the fire, so to speak. The most impactful wrinkle was an unexpected communication glitch between me and US Fish and Wildlife Services Connecticut River Coordinator Ken Sprankle. After years of easy exchanges, he was suddenly unable to respond to my queries when his government server blocked responses to my private email address linked to an old business website.

When we finally connected by phone and I mentioned the Patten diary, it immediately rang a bell. On the spot, Sprankle pulled from his office bookshelf a 21st-century source previously unknown to me. A glance at the index, footnotes and bibliography revealed that, as he suspected, Patten was an important source.

The book, Fishing in New Hampshire: A History, was published in 2003 and authored by Granite State historian and novelist Jack Noon. The introduction alone, by celebrated American author John McPhee, immediately validated the book in my mind. Then, when I read promotional snippets of praise by reviewers on the opening pages, one of them was none other than my old North Country pal, the late John Harrigan, former editor/publisher/outdoor columnist at Lancaster, New Hampshire’s Coos County Democrat newspaper.

Noon’s paperback has achieved “rare book” status in the online marketplace, inflating its cost and confirming its value as a source. Then again, the steep cost could merely reflect a tiny print run. I hunted down a reasonably-priced copy, bought it, waited for it in the mail, and couldn’t put it down once I opened it.

Noon introduces a refreshing new spin on ancient New England salmon presence – one in sharp contrast to anthropologist Catherine Carroll Carlson’s thesis that, yes, they existed, but in insignificant numbers compared to other anadromous fish. This opinion that shook the salmon-restoration world was based solely on the curious rarity of salmon in the archaeological record.

Of course, that begs the question as to whether the absence of salmon evidence in New England’s archaeological record proves they were irrelevant. Noon doesn’t think so, and frankly, I have evolved to agree.

My opinion has changed over some 40 years, especially since striking up friendships with a handful of professional archaeologists in recent years.

Initially, because Carlson’s scientific findings supported the position I was piecemealing out weekly in my Recorder column – based on second- and third-hand reports from published town histories – I was quick to take her bait hook, line, and sinker. My support of her thesis was only buoyed as she sharpened her attack in various scholarly journals between 1988 and 1996.

Convinced by the start of this new millennium that the Connecticut River salmon-restoration failure was a settled issue, word of Noon’s 2003 book somehow escaped me. It apparently received no attention from the New England Outdoor Writers’ Association. At least nothing I recall. Maybe the snub had to do with Noon’s non-member status. Had the organization’s newsletter mentioned Noon’s book, I wouldn’t have missed it.

Noon does cite Carlson in his bibliography, listing only her Fall/Winter 1996 Federal Archeology piece, “The Insignificance of Atlantic Salmon.” By then she had published her 1992 doctoral dissertation The Atlantic Salmon in New England History and Prehistory: Social and Environmental Implications, and was dancing in the end zone with a thesis damaging to the struggling salmon-restoration effort.

Otherwise, Noon pays Carlson no heed, totally ignoring her hypothesis in favor of his own reasoned approach: that there were lucrative annual salmon runs on many New England rivers up and down the coast, ranging as far south as the Connecticut, Housatonic, and Hudson rivers. The problem, according to Noon, was that unlike Native Americans whose cooperative, part-of-the-whole lifeways respected conservation and sustainability, Europeans exploited and soon destroyed the resource with wasteful commercial harvests in nets and seines aimed at maximizing profits.

As these interlopers overharvested forests, created insurmountable mill dams, polluted salmon streams with gill-clogging sawdust, and fished with apparatuses that invited waste and overharvest, they also made no effort to record and quantify for posterity the 17th-century anadromous-fish runs that greeted them here.

As to why only a few of the 75 Northeastern fishing sites listed in Carlson’s study produced salmon evidence, well, that may forever remain a mystery. Perhaps it had something to do with the reverence Indians held for salmon, which were less plentiful and more valued than their anadromous companions. Maybe they disposed of salmon remains with ritualistic respect and dignity compared to more populous shad, river herring, and lamprey eels, whose processing scraps found their way to garbage pits when not used to fertilize horticultural plots.

Although it’s probably now too late to determine why Atlantic salmon are absent from our archaeological record, we know they were here, and were treasured by Indians and colonials alike before they disappeared due primarily to foreign exploitation of the fish and their precious spawning channels.

I think Carlson, a West Coast native intimately familiar thick Pacific salmon runs, took a provincial attitude and overstated salmon insignificance here. I wondered how she had missed the insights of Patten’s diary – and found that actually she hadn’t. When, however, she did choose to mention him in her “Where’s the Salmon?” chapter published in Holocene Human Ecology in Northeastern North America (1988), she did so by lifting a June 7, 1785 entry that buttressed her argument that shad and eels were far more abundant than salmon.

Carlson probably stumbled across that Patten reference in passing, and used it without ever taking a deeper dive into the journal. Or perhaps she did dig a little deeper, found the diary lacked a convenient index, and pushed it aside in the rush to complete her dissertation.

Too bad. For had she thoroughly investigated Patten, she would have found that New England salmon were far from rare and insignificant. Human greed and a new commercial paradigm did a sorry number on a valued indigenous food resource in an exploited, colonized land.

 

posted in Columns, Indians, Local history, Salmon, Shad | No Comments

Dec
17
2024

Wadsworth Mayhew’s Signature Fishtail

by Gary Sanderson

Antique collecting can trigger the wildest, most unpredictable and fulfilling adventures – some hot and fruitful, others cold and barren. When an enticing, dangling thread of inquiry gets tugged and just keeps on giving, the eager anticipation of important discovery can be truly exhilarating.

Case in point: a pair of 18th-century banister-back chairs I recently purchased in their original red paint. I found them in the local marketplace for a reasonable cost. I have subsequently learned that these chairs, typically associated with the first half of the 18th century, came to market from a Northampton collector with a snooty preference for original finish; likely, however, he did not know they were made in Conway.

Their distinctive crest rail immediately signaled Conway to me, giving me an edge that’s important as a collector. I quickly recognized it because I had previously examined and photographed an identical chair on display at the Conway Historical Society. My interest in that chair was a decorative design element into which I had personal insight.

Most folks have probably passed the historical-society chair over the years without recognizing the two unusual, decorative fishtails ascending from the crest rail, protruding on each side of a dome centered between the finials. This maritime motif is generally associated with 18th-century furniture, looking-glass frames, and clocks made in New London County, Connecticut and Philadelphia. Because it’s rare, it often goes unrecognized by even sophisticated observers.

The reason I know the fishtail motif is that I own a family, six-drawer, Chippendale tall chest wearing six examples from the same template descending from an otherwise unremarkable straight bracket base. It gets better. My chest and the historical-society chair came from the same Conway homestead of Isaiah Wing (1761-1834), who moved there from Harwich, Cape Cod in 1774.

Both pieces were almost certainly crafted by the same hand, or at the very least are from the same workshop. I bought the chest some 25 years ago from Sunderland auctioneer-dealer William Lloyd Hubbard, who had inherited it from a spinster Amherst aunt. Hubbard, the dean of local antique dealers at the time, thought I should have it because it had descended through several brides in my Whately Sanderson family. I didn’t argue.

My immediate question was who built it? Then an obvious candidate came to mind: master craftsman William Mather (1766-1835), who arrived in Whately with his sea-captain father and Lyme, Connecticut family in 1787. Trained in Connecticut at the mouth of New England’s largest river, Mather was a joiner who built houses – and some truly remarkable furniture – before leaving the area for Canandaigua, New York around 1825.

Mather’s signature piece known by collectors throughout the land is a Chippendale high case of drawers with vine-carved pilasters, said to have last sold for more than $300,000. It was built for my fifth-great-grandfather Deacon Thomas Sanderson (1746-1824) around the time of his 1803 move from Canterbury, today upper River Road in Whately, to Indian Hill, now the start of Whately Glen.

According to Mather’s account books, owned by Historic Deerfield and Delaware’s Winterthur Museum, the carpenter and Deacon Sanderson did a lot of business. Around the time of his move to and upgrade of Adonijah Taylor’s home and millsite, Sanderson paid Mather $28 for the highboy and an additional dollar for a companion “desk and bookcase,” the whereabouts of which is today unknown.

The cumulative $57 expense was no small fee at the time – Mather charged a daily fee of $1.25 for his services, and 75 cents a day for the “unskilled” laborers assisting him.

As the son of sea captain Benjamin Mather and apprentice to a coastal Connecticut joiner, young William had maritime motifs in his soul. Thus, the expertly carved seashell centered on the skirt of the Sanderson highboy. Maritime embellishments such as fishtails, lobster tails, whale’s tails, and seashells occasionally showed up on the priciest New London County furniture crafted during the last half of the 18th century. So – coupled with the fact that he had a long, documented business relationship with Deacon Sanderson – Mather was in my mind the most likely maker of my fishtail chest.

There was, however, a doubt-stirring caveat.

On the back of the chest is a handwritten list of the Sanderson brides who received it as a wedding gift. It begins with the 1816 marriage of Mehitable Wing to Silas Sanderson, a younger son who accompanied Deacon Thomas to Indian Hill. The problem was that the chest’s construction screamed 18th century.

An example of “survival furniture,” perhaps? Well, maybe, but I had trouble accepting that. My suspicion was that Mehitable was probably not the wedding-chest’s first recipient. Yes, it accompanied her to her new Whately home as part of her dowry, but the Chippendale style and Queen Anne girth suggested it had been made a generation earlier.

Hmmm? Could it have been built instead for the wedding of Mehitable’s mother, Zelinda Allis, who married Isaiah Wing in 1786 and died from childbirth complications in 1797? Mehitable, born 1790, was Zelinda’s third child and first daughter, as well as her first-married daughter. Thus, she was a likely recipient of such a traditional wedding gift.

Proving a line of descent back to the Wing homestead was another matter, though, and I eventually relegated the search to the back burner until the banister-back chairs came to light. So, this recent purchase unleashed a new round of research, this time reaching into old Conway deeds for potential furniture-makers.

I had previously done some Conway deed research along the Deerfield line and, combined with various genealogical explorations, had noticed a surge of Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard families into Conway in the 1770s and 1780s. If one or more of these folks named Dunham, Mayhew, Look and Manter brought woodworking skills to their nascent “frontier” community, perhaps the fishtails came with them.

I emailed Conway Historical Commission chairwoman Sarah Williams, whose research often overlaps mine. We had previously discussed early Conway/Ashfield settlers from Cape Cod and the Islands, but I had never taken a deep dive into how they made ends meet.

The Cape Cod Wing family was, of course, the first one to activate my inquisitive juices, but I could find no evidence that Isaiah, his father or brothers were carpenters. Though distant cousin Elisha Wing (1782-1869) was a prolific 19th-century Ashfield housewright/joiner, I judged him too young to have made my chest or chairs.

My next target was the Dunham family, early settlers in Conway’s “South Part” community resting in the southeast corner of town. Col. Daniel Dunham Jr. (1711-1797) came to town from Martha’s Vineyard in 1774 with a family that included sons Daniel, Cornelius and Jonathan, all of whom show up in Conway deeds. Though the Dunhams didn’t stay, they left many gravestones in the old South Part Cemetery.

“So,” I emailed Williams, “were any of the Dunhams woodworkers?”

“Yes,” she responded. “Good thinking. There’s a deed identifying Daniel Dunham Jr. as a housewright. You may also want to explore Wadsworth Mayhew, a Martha’s Vineyard joiner who followed the Dunhams to Conway.”

Bingo! Deed and online research down many rabbit holes immediately convinced me Mayhew was my man. He not only knew the Dunhams: in 1778, his sister Lucinda (1738-1815) married Cornelius (1748-1816) in Conway, where they are buried. Also, a couple of years after settling in Cambridge, New York, in about 1790, Mayhew sold to Cornelius and Lucinda the last of his Conway landholdings within spitting distance of his Roaring Brook sawmill.

Born to a prosperous Martha’s Vineyard family in 1741, Wadsworth Mayhew came to Conway with younger brother Zephaniah and Lucinda around 1776, when he paid James Gilmore more than 193 pounds for a 70-acre parcel with dwelling and outbuildings. Three years later he paid Captain Lucius Allis 20 pounds for a small adjoining parcel where he may have built his sawmill.

Captain Allis could be an important twist to our fishtail-chest discussion. He was Mehitable Wing Sanderson’s maternal grandfather, and an important Conway character. Could this Mayhew neighbor have commissioned the wedding chest for daughter Zelinda? I believe so. In fact, I think you can take it to the bank. And it would have been the perfect occasion for Mayhew to decorate a chest of drawers with six of his signature fishtail drops in an uncustomary place.

Martha’s Vineyard deeds identify Mayhew as a joiner before his move to Conway, where he is also sometimes thus identified. By the time he left Conway before 1790 for Cambridge, New York, an outgoing deed identifies him as a “shop joiner,” the first such deed reference I have seen. It clearly refers to a furniture-maker. His shop was likely one of the Gilmore outbuildings he purchased, it conveniently close to the sawmill he soon built.

Further research shows that Wadsworth’s nephew – Abiah Wadsworth Mayhew (1774-1850), son of Zephaniah – was also a skilled cabinetmaker with an early Spencertown, New York shop. That village is 10 miles west of West Stockbridge, Massachusetts and 60 miles south of Uncle Wadsworth’s Cambridge, New York home.

So, finally my long search struck gold. Though there remain a few loose ends to connect, I believe Wadsworth Mayhew was the maker of my Conway chest and chairs. The Conway Historical Society chair, too. A Conway resident for a mere 15 years or less, his cryptic signature was Vineyard fishtails.

posted in Antiques, Columns, Genealogy, Local history | No Comments

Nov
29
2024

Makings of a Wing-Shooter

by Gary Sanderson

I remember my introduction to wing-shooting like it happened yesterday – occurring in my South Deerfield hometown, mostly along the base of North Sugarloaf between Graves Street and Hillside Road.

My late father was a sportsman of sorts, but not a hunter or fisherman. He loved team sports and was quite accomplished in football, basketball, and baseball – especially football, which carried him to the Boston American newspaper’s New England Unsung College Football Player of the Year award a year or two before my 1953 birth. He was a fleet, elusive halfback and a teammate of future NFL Hall of Famer Andy Robustelli at Arnold College in Milford, Connecticut.

Older local folks will remember the restaurant Robustelli owned on Barton’s Cove, a popular ’50s-’60s hangout. I remember meeting him and other New York Giants players at their preseason summer camp in Bridgeport. It was a big deal. I recognized their names from Sunday afternoon telecasts in the days of rooftop antennas and grainy black-and-white TV.

Never in my lifetime did my dad own a fishing rod or gun, but my mother’s brother Bob did, and he had introduced me as a young boy to fishing during summer Cape Cod and Nova Scotian vacations, and to skeet and trap shooting at a Minnesota sportsmen’s club. Prior to that I had honed my shooting skills with friends’ BB and pellet guns, then relied as a teen on some of their fathers’ beat-up shotguns and .22 caliber field guns, the use of which were accompanied by stern gun-safety rules. That laidback scenario wouldn’t fly in today’s world. Then it was tradition.

My wing-shooting adventures began most often in the company of my boyhood friends “Fast Eddie” Urkiel, who took his own life in recent years, and “The Count,” who’s alive and well as a 40-year veteran high-wire lineman at Utah’s Snowbird Ski Resort. We all had nicknames back then, and still use them today when we get together.

The Count lived on Eastern Avenue, a stone’s throw from a narrow secondary powerline we favored over all other partridge-hunting sites. At the time, old Yankee pasture along the forest’s edge was being overtaken by young growth with many seeds and berries. Perfect habitat for partridge, official name ruffed grouse.

The Count called grouse “grey ghosts” because of his dad’s admiration for their speed and escapability. If you walked our old hunting paths today, you wouldn’t get a single flush from mature forest.

The same holds true for woodcock. Back in the day, we’d flush occasional resident woodcock on summer days, then small flocks of flight birds in the fall. The Count called them “timberdoodles.” Their numbers, too, have dwindled greatly. Without a dog as kids, we flushed far fewer woodcock than partridge. Timberdoodles are small and tend to hold tighter when danger looms.

In the ideal 60’s habitat, partridge would regularly burst out of the undergrowth, providing quick, challenging shots before disappearing behind branchy obstructions. When they eluded us on the way in, we’d remember the location, and move in slowly on the way back. The strategy worked now and again, but less frequently than a similar back-and-forth trout-fishing routine on upland brooks and streams.

In later years, with better shotguns and more experience, I learned to bring partridge down with surprising success through naked apples, alder, poplars and tall, tangled wild roses. It’s a skill that takes a lot of convincing and time to master, aided by light, fast-pointing, side-by-side double-barrels with open chokes.

For my taste, the wide sight plane of my pre-World War II French 16-gauge double-barrel that shot 2½-inch shells produced far better results than my 12-gauge Browning Citori over-and-under with its 2¾-inch loads and modern removable choke tubes. The wider sight plane is faster and deadlier. Similar to other difficult challenges, efficiency is directly related to confidence. I always believed wing shooting and hitting a baseball shared many transferable skills.

These days, with the local partridge and woodcock population in noticeable decline, I choose not to kill them. Too much respect. Don’t need the meat.

That old childhood powerline along the base of North Sugarloaf isn’t the only covert where the decline is obvious. All my favorite grouse coverts are today barren. On the rare occasions when I flush one, my trusty shotgun still reflexively flinches upward, but I just don’t follow through. Instead, I tip my cap and let the bird escape, hoping it’ll establish a spring nest and brood.

In the old days, hunting without a dog, we’d hunt in small groups of two or three, and alternate walking five or 10 slow, alert steps before stopping to spook partridge into flight. In many cases I think that approach could sometimes be more productive than hunting with a dog, which produces more wild flushes.

A pointing dog can remedy that problem, but I never chose to own one. Personal preference, I guess. The big difference is that in the flush-and-retrieve game the hunter must read the dog and anticipate sudden flushes, while those hunting over pointers move in to flush birds themselves after their dog has locked on point. Give me the frenzied flush-and-retrieve game any day of the week. Gentlemanly shooting over pointers is, to me, too much like killing.

After I graduated high school, another friend who’s no longer with us introduced me to his personal style of pheasant hunting. The method was similar to my aforementioned partridge-hunting routine, except the pace was faster and busier. We’d get into heavy cover and walk three abreast, stopping often in unison to listen for fleeing footsteps in the undergrowth and watch for wiggling golden rod and other brush.

I must hand it to my late buddy. His was a highly productive game. We shot many pheasants, preferably flying, but often on the run like rabbit hunting. Myself, I always preferred a flush, but can’t say the same for my partners. I was a developing wing-shooter, and they were filling freezers.

Which brings us to another late friend, whose family owned a Whately produce farm liberally stocked with pheasants each year during the six-week season. The family owned a tagalong black Lab farm dog named Smokey, who loved the excitement of cackling ringneck-rooster flushes. Father and son encouraged me to “Take him anytime you want. Smokey loves to flush pheasants, and won’t run off.”

That was a year or two before I got married in 1979, and I took them up on the offer, hunting not only their vast acreage but many other bottomland coverts not far of. Those were the days when most pheasants were stocked on private land, spreading birds and hunting pressure thin. Today, most birds are stocked on state Wildlife Management Areas, which can be chaotic and potentially dangerous, with a lot of hunters and gun dogs working the same space.

When my South Deerfield grandfather died less than a year into my marriage, I bought his home, and within weeks purchased my first gun dog – a versatile black Lab named Sugarloaf Saro Jane, call name Sara. She had national-champion River Oaks Corky in her background and was a dynamo in the field.

As Sara aged out, a softball teammate and field-trialer introduced me to well-bred English springer spaniels, which I switched to in the early 90’s. Springers are smaller and an overall better dog for the type of bird-hunting I love. Sara was a better family pet.

Inevitably, it’s now me that’s aging out, and for the first time since I was a kid I’m without a dog. Meanwhile, the put-and-take pheasant-hunting game has changed dramatically – along with fall weather. I must say I find bird-hunting far less inviting when it involves sweating through tick-infested 60- and 70-degree November marshland.

Then again, if the day is right and the urge is there, I still have access to my friend’s experienced springers. But even that convenient arrangement won’t last forever. He recently put the demanding field-trial circuit in the rearview and will soon, more than likely, bury his last gun dog.

I have no concerns or regrets. Had my day. Many of them. And have now discovered new pursuits that fulfill my hunting instincts and keep me engaged.

I chase information.

posted in Columns, South Deerfield | No Comments

Nov
11
2024

Nope. Not a Patten Family in Patten District

by Gary Sanderson

As English speakers, we all know that “best laid plans” saying aimed at “mice and men.” Lifted from 18th-century Scotsman Robert Burns’ poem To a Mouse, it reminds us that intentions can and “often” do “go awry.”

Chalk this up as one of those. Not unusual among history sleuths who, in the process of researching one topic, always keep their antennae sharp for “peripherals.” It’s akin to starting down one forest trail and swerving on a whim down another.

During a recent read of Charles E. Clark’s The Eastern Frontier: Settlement of Northern New England 1610-1763, published in 1970, I investigated an interesting footnote introducing a primary source previously unknown to me. It was The Diary of Matthew Patten of Bedford, N.H., 1754-1788 – opening a rare window into the daily travels of a colonial Scots-Irish pioneer of New Hampshire’s Merrimack River valley around today’s Granite State city of Manchester.

Miraculously, this journal detailing 34 years of an important man about town’s life survived to the modern day. Protected for more than a century in the Patten family and the care of a local doctor, it finally came to light at the turn of the 20th century. The Bedford, New Hampshire Historical Society received it as an assemblage of fastened loose pages and published it in 1903. Still in print, it is today valued by scholars and local historians alike exploring New Hampshire’s earliest inland settlements.

Patten wore many hats in the community – including but not limited to justice of the peace, carpenter and surveyor. What interested me most were his descriptions of the many shad- and Atlantic salmon-fishing activities at Manchester’s famed Amoskeag Falls on the Merrimack River and smaller neighborhood tributaries. Clark’s Eastern Frontier book gave me snippets. I wanted more.

So, I purchased a recent printing to discover what else it had to offer about fishing and did not come away disappointed. Well, except for the fact that my mission was complicated greatly by the absence of an index. Undeterred, I laboriously skimmed through 545 pages in search of anything related to fishing. Three days later, I had assembled my very own eight-page index for future reference.

The information Patten provides about fishing practices of his times would have mirrored 18th-century Connecticut River activity at the Great Falls between Turners Falls and Gill. The spring weeks during which it occurred would also have been in the same ballpark. The problem is that I know of no 18th-century diary detailing fishing activity at Turners’ or South Hadley’s falls. All we have is potentially unreliable second- and third-hand reports published by local historians who never participated in the annual fish-harvesting routine.

My original plan was to condense here what I had learned about Amoskeag Falls fishing and speculate what it meant to Turners Falls. Then, I hit a bump in road that threw me off course. I fell victim to a dangling peripheral thread of curiosity relating to our town of Shelburne. I tugged at it and a whole new story line unraveled.

I should have known better but couldn’t resist. So, here we sit, my intended topic tucked away for the near future.

At least our new subject is local. Far closer to home than Bedford, N.H. Our focus is the so-called Patten District resting in the northwest corner of Shelburne, some six miles west of my upper Greenfield Meadows homestead.

The voluminous Patten diary got me wondering if maybe there was a genealogical link between the Scots-Irish diarist of Londonderry, then Bedford, N.H., and our own Patten District on Patten Hill in Shelburne?

The likelihood seemed strong. The Patten, as it is known to locals, borders north with Colrain, which was settled by hardy Scots-Irish emigrants from the Londonderry area before 1740 – remarkably early for upland settlement here. Perhaps, I pondered, there were Pattens in the Chandler Hill Cemetery, the town’s oldest burial ground. A quick peek at Lois McClellan Patrie’s History of Colrain, however, proved fruitless. Nope. Not a whisper about any Colrain Pattens.

Undaunted, I went to Leila Stone Bardwell’s Vanished Pioneer Homes and Families of Shelburne, Massachusetts and found no mention of a Patten family and nothing explaining how the name Patten came to the town’s district or hill.

Hmmmm? Now, presuming easy answers, I had to dig deeper.

Enter energetic, worker-bee friend and always-accommodating Greenfield Historical Society President Carol Aleman, who grew up on her Wheeler parents’ East Shelburne farm along the Patten rim. If anyone would know how the name Patten came to the isolated northeast corner of Shelburne, I suspected she would. So, I dropped her an email.

Although Aleman had no immediate answer, she was certain her sister Joanne and husband John Herron would know. She’d query them and get back to me. The Herrons own an expansive dairy farm on Hawks Road in the southeast corner of town, and share a lively interest in Shelburne history.

Indeed, they had the answer. The name Patten had no connection to any family of that surname. The place was instead initially known as the “Pattern District,” which over time became Patten in the old, obsolete, hilltown Yankee dialect. Fancy that. A simple case of colloquial mispronunciation.

But why Pattern District? Well, there appears to be no simple answer, just varying interpretations based on the meaning of the word pattern: That is a description of a neighborhood built on a social, moral or physical template worth emulating; one, in fact, superior to the rest of town.

Little did I know that I could have found my answer at home with a little digging. With the new information in hand, I took a deeper dive into my own sources tucked into bookcases and cupboards and, sure enough, found it.

The first supportive source was Ellsworth Barnard’s A Hill Farm Boyhood, Volume 1 of his four-volume memoir Sunshine and Shadows: A Teacher’s Odyssey, published between 1983-91. Barnard (1907-2003) was a Patten Hill native and college English professor. I met him and his wife Mary many years ago at their rustic High Ledges cabin situated on family property left by the Barnards to The Audubon Society. He was then over 90. I wanted to see and discuss the small grove of immature, 10-foot American chestnut trees featured in his 1998 collection of essays In a Wild Place: A Natural History of High Ledges.

Intrigued by this gentle naturalist and gentleman, I promptly bought his memoirs but didn’t place him and the Patten District in the same mental bundle when first pondering sources that might explain how it was named. When I finally pulled A Hill Farm Boyhood out of my bookcase, there on the first page of Chapter 1 was his suggestion that Patten District was so named “perhaps because, as legend has it (supported by local pronunciation habits), the dwellers in that area provided an exemplary pattern for their less righteous fellow townsmen.”

Barnard would have known. He was born and raised in the Patten Hill farmhouse built by his ancestors in 1790.

Soon, I discovered in my collection of sources yet another written by a deep-rooted Shelburne author who confirmed the Aleman-Herron-Barnard explanation. Buried beneath rubble in a bottom bookcase cupboard was Elmer F. Davenport’s 1968 booklet As You Were Shelburne. There, the last three lines of “Chapter 7 – The Patten District,” he informs us that its residents “were so strict in their conduct that others called it the Pattern, later shortened to Patten, in a spirit of jealousy.”

Not surprisingly, just another tendril off the pattern concept.

 

 

 

posted in Columns, Genealogy, Local history | No Comments

Oct
12
2024

Merrimack Shad Diary

by Gary Sanderson

In the research game, a chase can be quickly rewarded. Always nice. Then again, important information sometimes appears unexpectedly, from the clear blue sky. Even better.

Well, chalk up a recent discovery we’ll soon explore – pertaining to 18th-century migratory fish of the Merrimack River – as the latter.

What led to my new finding was enduring personal genealogical interest in “the Fort at Number 4,” once the Connecticut Valley’s northernmost 18th-century military outpost, built in 1743, in what is now the town of Charlestown, New Hampshire, established in 1753.

Nestled between Claremont and Walpole on the east bank of the Connecticut River across from Springfield, Vermont, early Charlestown helped sprinkle our slice of the valley with sturdy northwestern Middlesex County Massachusetts stock named Parker, Shattuck, Williard, Sartwell and Longley, to name some, all from the Groton area. Members of these Yankee military families occupied perilous outposts between forts Dummer and No. 4, and, during the most dangerous times there between 1740 and 1760, temporarily fled to safer places like Northfield, Deerfield, Sunderland, and Hatfield – the north part of which became Whately.

When the dust from the final French and Indian War settled in 1763, many of members of these hardy families settled here, particularly accumulating in Hawley after the Revolution and Shays Rebellion of 1786. Thus, the Fort at Number 4 gene pool is important to genealogists of all stripes researching these local families.

The problem is that, even in this day of Ancestry.com and other comprehensive online sources, the attempt to track them has become a vexing genealogical conundrum. I call it the black hole of Charlestown, New Hampshire – one left by a devastating downtown fire that destroyed the town’s vital records in 1842.

These days, the Charlestown vital records begin in 1842, nearly eliminating any hope of recovering birth, death, and marriage records from the town’s first 100 years. Oh sure, diaries and Bibles with hand-entered family-register forms do occasionally come to light at estate sales or on-site auctions. But time is sadly running out on such important discoveries that provide answers. Thus, the rest of the “answers” are conjectural.

I was nudged into this familiar Charlestown abyss by a Sanderson Genealogy Facebook post from a distant Connecticut relative I have not met. Identifying as a James and Sarah (Parker) Sanderson descendant of 18th-century Conway, I responded with a simple question: Did she know Sarah Parker’s lineage?

“No, do you?” was her rapid-fire answer.

So, the chase was on.

Not unexpectedly, my search led straight to Groton and Charlestown, eventually suggesting the strong but unprovable possibility of parentage by Isaac Parker, Jr. (1709-1760) and his second wife Mehitable. I had been down this road before with James’ three-years-older brother Joseph, who was born in 1741 and married the elusive Lois Fuller – undoubtedly, without hard evidence, the daughter of mysterious Micah Fuller, Fort Number 4’s first blacksmith.

By chance, the hunt for Sarah Parker’s lineage led me to a source that had somehow previously escaped me. I found it in a Fort Number 4 pamphlet footnote: Charles E. Clark’s The Eastern Frontier: Settlement of Northern New England 1610-1763, published in 1970, the year before I graduated high school. I found a reasonably priced copy in “very good” condition, bought it, read it, and gained new insight regarding migratory Merrimack River fishes of the colonial period.

Although as an annual tracker of Connecticut River anadromous fish runs for nearly a half-century I have always viewed Merrimack River fish migration as peripheral data, I have never ignored it. Quite the contrary, I remain alert for accurate assessments of the American shad and Atlantic salmon runs that greeted the first waves of colonial New England settlement.

Clark, a history professor who began as a newspaper reporter in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, and Providence, Rhode Island, visited the subject of Merrimack Valley migratory fish four times in his work chronicling the settlement of colonial Maine and New Hampshire. Not surprisingly, his descriptions of fishing practices and harvests on the Merrimack River closely resemble contemporaneous accounts from the Connecticut River at present-day Turners Falls and Gill. All the data were gathered from second-hand reports gleaned from town histories. In Clark’s case, he relied upon the 1851 History of Bedford, N.H.

And, yes, there were salmon, albeit in far fewer numbers than shad, smaller herrings, and lampreys. Curiously, Clark doesn’t mention sturgeon – Atlantic or shortnose – which appear to have been less important to colonists than to Native Americans.

Clark reports early opposition, by Indians and colonials alike, to migratory-fish-obstructing millsite dams. River-obstruction grievances were addressed by colony regulations mandating New England’s first fish passageways past grist and sawmill dams. Examples are many on the rivers of coastal Maine and New Hampshire, and on the Merrimack River, which flows from New Hampshire’s Lakes Region (Winnipesauke) to Massachusetts’ North Shore.

The late 18th-century fishing practices and harvests described by Clark at Amoskeag Falls in Manchester, New Hampshire mirror those reported by Franklin County historians Epaphras Hoyt (Antiquarian Researches, 1824), Francis M. Thompson (History of Greenfield, 1904), and Edward P. Pressey (History of Montague, 1910). Unfortunately, such second-hand numbers published in town histories are not always reliable, but they’re all we have.

These sources describing two major New England river systems say that shad were harvested in great numbers by seines stretched across heavily-used migration channels, while fishermen employing long-handled dip-nets scooped up many shad and smaller herrings, such as bluebacks and alewives.

Clark doesn’t quantify the daily take of scoop-netters, but he does report individual 1762 seine harvests of 2,500 and 1,500 shad, which is remarkably similar to reports by the Franklin County historians focused on the same activity some 30 years later.

Pressey reports that seine-netters at present-day Turners Falls took “as many as 2,000 shad in one haul, often [with] a giant salmon or two floundering in their midst.” He also says that solitary scoop-netters took as many as 5,000 fish in a day at Turners Falls, without naming the fish.

It would, however, appear that Pressey is parroting Hoyt’s “upwards of 5,000 shad a day by dipping nets at Burnham’s Rock” – a well-known mass of bedrock jutting from the head of the falls on the Gill side to create an ideal fishing site.

As for Merrimack valley salmon, they were obviously there, according to Clark, and his source is airtight: The Diary of Matthew Patten, 1754-1788. An original Scots-Irish settler of Bedford, New Hampshire, Patten (1718-1795) was a man about town and neighboring villages. He records fishing at his Patterson friends’ brook on July 17, 1762 and catching four salmon weighing 66 pounds, an average of 16.5 pounds per fish; two days later he caught 11 more totaling 134 pounds, better than 12 pounds each.

So, yes, salmon existed in the Merrimack valley back then, and take it to the bank that they were here, too – though in far fewer numbers than the accompanying shad, and their smaller herring kin.

The proof’s in the puddin’.

posted in Columns, Local history, Salmon, Shad | No Comments

Oct
10
2024

Squirrel Hunting Ain’t What it Used To Be

by Gary Sanderson

The Harvest Moon has passed, ushering into the midnight sky a new Hunter’s Moon to greet our annual fall hunting seasons.

Well, actually, bear and squirrel hunters entered the woods a month ago, though I must say I’m not sure how many of either remain amongst us. Interest in squirrel hunting has waned, and bear hunting has always in the modern day appealed to only a small fraternity.

When I was a kid growing up in South Deerfield, there were no bears. Now there are many, some occasionally pestering my old, more densely populated village. Times have changed.

When I was young, and less so into adulthood, I knew squirrel hunters. Not what I’d call serious hunters. Just a few diehards looking for an excuse to get out in the nut groves early and assess what was happening. These early-bird nimrods also welcomed the opportunity to fine-tune their shooting skills while getting a sneak peek at pre-rut deer sign.

Nowadays serious concerns about dangerous tick- and mosquito-borne illness have greatly complicated matters. Can’t say I recall any such worries when I was young. If they existed, I surely would have been aware. Nope. Never a word about ticks and Lyme disease, or mosquitos and triple E or West Nile virus.

The squirrel-hunting weapon of choice among old-timers I knew was the old Savage or Stevens 22/410 over-and-under. If memory serves me right, some of these handy little long guns had two triggers. Later models had one trigger with a barrel selector on the receiver. Seems to me both versions had manual, pull-back hammers, but I may be wrong on that.

The bottom, full-choke, .410-gauge barrel was typically loaded with No. 4 or 6 shot that fired tight, dense patterns for acrobatic, skittering, leaping targets. The top, .22-caliber barrel held an accurate, high-speed long-rifle cartridge for precision accuracy aimed at stationary targets standing tall and straight on their hind legs, clutching a nut at mouth level between their front feet.

Squirrel hunters would move into a nut grove as quietly and possible and settle in, giving their quarry a chance to forget about their presence. Then, once the squirrels got back into their normal, rollicking routine, opportunities for kill shots increased. Some hunters even used mouth calls as aids to stop their quarry or bring it closer.

I suspect the potential for conflict between squirrel and bear hunters, because shagbark hickory groves are popular among them. That said, I can’t recall ever learning of any ugly, confrontational incident.

Although I myself never was never a squirrel hunter, I have eaten sweet, tender squirrel meat. I’ve sampled halves separated along the backbone and sauteed with onions, peppers, garlic, and wild mushrooms in a large, preferably covered cast-iron skillet; and I’ve also eaten it parboiled and picked clean from the bones in delicious casseroles and meat-and-veggie pies.

I can’t help but wonder how many local families still have their grandmothers’ Yankee recipes? My guess is not many. Maybe some hilltowners still know recipes by heart. If not, I’m sure they could find some good ones in old, soiled cast-iron or wild-game cookbooks or by Googling it.

In colonial New England, squirrels were ubiquitous, destructive nuisances that harmed home, garden, and orchard. Eventually, bounties were offered for squirrel “scalps” – that is, pelts used for inner and outing clothing and various accoutrements. In those days, times were hard and wastefulness was sinful. So, not only were squirrels valued for their salubrious meat, but their pelts became warm stockings, hats and earmuffs, handy bags and pouches, and other useful everyday items.

Also of interest, it is said that, due to marksmanship skills honed by colonial squirrel hunters, Revolutionary snipers could outshoot the best of their better trained, better disciplined, and better armed Redcoat adversaries. Thus, those furry, mischievous pests that got into chimneys, attics, and partitions, harmed crops, and chattered loud warnings of a deer hunter’s presence in the woods helped the colonies win the Revolution.

Imagine that. Despite old Chuckles’ destructive ways around home and farm, he kept our early settlers fed, provided a source of supplemental income, and helped free them of their oppressive colonial yoke.

posted in Columns | No Comments

Sep
18
2024

Where Did Summer Go?

by Gary Sanderson

Towering cornfields obscure roadside sightlines, purple loosestrife and goldenrod color marshes and scalped-hayfield rims, festive midways are clogged, and Labor Day has passed.

Autumn is here. Wow! Where did summer go?

Not complaining. Fall has for many decades been my favorite season – ever since I hung up my spikes, glove and bat from the old American pastime that begins in spring, the season of optimism, mischievous youthful exuberance and nesting.

Now, with the crack of the bat far in my rearview, even my passion for the upland bird-hunting game that replaced it has greatly diminished. Attribute that to physical wear and tear brought by stubborn refusal to heed orthopedic surgeons’ warnings about my battered left knee and other things. Even with my trusty, old, 16-gauge, Jean Breuil side-by-side back in action – thanks to the People’ Republic of Montague Center’s gunmaker extraordinaire, Richard Colton – it’s not the same.

But why go there? Aging’s inevitable, and swamp-busting is not forever. I accepted that reality long ago. These days, I satisfy my strong hunting instinct by chasing information instead of pheasant, grouse and woodcock, turkeys and deer, trout and shad. It’s no less fulfilling. Same game, different playing field.

But why digress? Back to fall’s arrival.

It seems like yesterday I was watching and writing about that great horned owl nest up the road. Now those nestlings peering down at me from their temporary April home in a dead white pine are casting large, predatory shadows as they swoop down to my lawn for rabbits, squirrels and whatever else tickles their dietary fancy. So far, they’ve spared an animated black squirrel I’ve been watching since spring. While I do hope that little critter escapes those owls’ talons, I sure do wish they’d get a grip on those damn chipmunks that have thus far robbed me of every last one of my Roma tomatoes as they ripen.

I keep waiting for the pilfering to stop. The bold little rodents that have been staying just out of reach since spring are industrious, indeed. Secretive, too. They climb two tomato stalks tied to a 10-foot rebar pole pinned to my barn wall and, starting at the nippled base, devour the oblong tomatoes, leaving only a stem and thin cap. It’s annoying, to say the least. What remains resembles an inverted mushroom.

It’s a problem I’ve coped with for a few years now. I savor those heirloom tomatoes, whose storied past date back to the garden of an infamous Springfield mobster gunned down in the Mount Carmel Club parking lot. Ideal for spaghetti sauce and quick, stovetop marinara, they’re versatile and ain’t bad atall in salads, BLTs and whatever else you choose to use them for. Unlike Big Boys and other popular garden varieties, the seeds from this dense, meaty fruit don’t squirt out the side and onto your shirt when biting into a thick sandwich.

Chipmunks apparently appreciate them, too. Which reminds me. It was just this summer that I finally figured out they were the culprit. My neighbor told me chipmunks were eating her tomatoes, too In the past I had suspected squirrels and more so woodchucks, which seem to find their way to my property, taking refuge in the barn cellar, below the woodshed outhouse, and the crawlspaces under the front stone terrace and my home’s 18th-century western wing.

The last woodchuck I saw in my yard was way back in early April. So, I must assume something killed it. Maybe a neighbor’s domestic dog, a coyote, bobcat, fisher or, hey, perhaps even a great horned owl feeding its young. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if the so-called tiger of the Northwoods is capable of killing a woodchuck.

Other than that, it was an unusually quiet summer on the wildlife-sighting front. Far fewer deer on my daybreak walks around the Upper Meadows of Greenfield, and no sign of bears since that close spring encounter I reported a couple of months ago. Plus, curiously, I have not seen a turkey here in months, none of the typical summer hens and broods I’m accustomed to seeing. I still suspect those great horned owls may have something to do with that.

Which doesn’t mean deer, bears and turkeys have dwindled in my wildlife-friendly neighborhood. Just that I, personally, haven’t seen as many as usual. Sometimes there’s no explanation for such things. Luck of the draw, perhaps?

Just the other day at the coffee shop I spoke to a fella I often bump into in the morning. He told me he had in recent days seen at least 10 deer, including a big, handsome buck in a field where I used to walk daily with my gun dogs. The sighting occurred a quarter-mile or so from the southern perimeter of my morning walk. So, the deer are never far away, whether or not I happen to see them.

My friend and near neighbor agrees with me that he’s seen fewer deer and turkeys in his expansive backyard thus far this year. Yes, he’s seen occasional deer and a few turkeys, but nothing of note compared to previous summers. That said, he did tell of his nextdoor neighbors returning from their Maine camp a couple of months ago and discovering bear damage to a birdfeeder and a vulture nibbling at something along the wood line.

Upon closer investigation the following day, one of the homeowners investigated the scene and found the picked-over remains of a fawn’s hindquarter. What killed it is anyone’s guess. The bear? A bobcat? Fisher? Coyotes? Then again, perhaps it was roadkill scavenged in a safe place.

That’s all for now. We’ll see what the leaf-peeping, woodstove season brings.

posted in Columns | No Comments

Aug
17
2024

Falls River Has Become Fall River

by Gary Sanderson

A sharp, irritating, old thorn again found its way to my paw recently, placing me on a path I have previously traveled but never discussed in print.

I guess now is the time to go there. So, let’s venture off on a little discovery mission to set the record straight and put a vexing question in the rearview. I’ll try to keep it tight.

The topic is a trout stream that rises in the hills of Guilford, Vermont. Its path then meanders through Bernardston meadows, divides Greenfield and Gill, flows under Route 2 through the Factory Hollow gorge, and empties into the Connecticut River below the Turners Falls dam.

What we’re searching for is its proper name: Is it Fall River, or Falls River?

This issue has for me been a personal source of journalistic uncertainty for nearly a half-century. Whether writing about the stream from a fishing or historical perspective – both of which offer many interesting tendrils – my goal has always been to name it right. The problem is that the spoken word confuses matters, tangling the answer in doubt.

Which brings us to my most recent stumbling block, which popped up unexpectedly during map research unrelated to the Connecticut River tributary itself. It was just there, running down the periphery.

I was at the time attempting to plot the path through my Greenfield neighborhood of the so-called Seven-Mile Line, which had established Deerfield’s 12-mile western boundary in 1717. Viewing an 1894 topographical map, I noticed that the stream marking the town’s eastern border was spelled “Falls River,” plural form. This discovery immediately stirred my curiosity, compelling a deeper dive to a modern topo map that named it Fall River, singular form.

Hmmmmm, I pondered. Did I really have to go down that road again?

I thought the question was settled decades ago, when I decided upon “Fall River” without the s at the end. I had to choose a spelling for the sake of consistency because I often named the stream in columns about trout fishing and pheasant hunting, not to mention various historical subjects, such as but not limited to the fabled May 19, 1676 “Falls Fight” of King Philip’s War fame.

Despite making my Fall River decision out of professional necessity decades ago, I have had many informal conversations over the years with local yokels who grew up on the river and use the plural form, “Falls River.” Although our slightly different pronunciations were glaring to me but rarely discussed, I to this day find it awkward.

Who was I to argue in favor of the singular form, Fall River, when community language in Turners Falls, Gill, and beyond seemed to favor the plural form, “Falls River”? It was their river. Not mine. I grew up fishing primarily Southern Franklin County trout streams in the Deerfield and Mill River watersheds. Not Fall River.

So, when I recently read “Falls River” on that 1894 topo map, I revisited the issue to clear the air of uncertainty after six years of retirement and a lighter writing workload. I wasn’t sure how thorough my earlier investigation had been.

It never hurts to double-check. My latest fact-checking process began online, where I looked at the list of Connecticut Valley District trout streams stocked by MassWildlife. There it was in bold black letters: “Fall River,” confirming what I had already seen on the modern topo map.

But I wasn’t done yet. I had to back it up with additional proof.

I went to my bookcase and dug out the published histories of the three Franklin County towns the stream in question flows through – Bernardston (Lucy Cutler Kellogg), Greenfield (Francis M. Thompson), and Gill (Ralph M. Stoughton). All three agreed on the singular “Fall River,” without the s.

Deerfield historian George Sheldon also chose the singular form, “Fall River,” in his History of Deerfield. Maybe the other three historians, who published their works slightly later than Sheldon, followed his lead. That will never be known.

Although it appeared the case was closed and no additional fact-checking was needed, there is a little wrinkle.

Fall River was most likely first encountered by colonial scouts and fur-traders during the second half of the 17th century, when Northampton, Hadley, and Hatfield were being settled, and the stream had an important indigenous name that has not survived. Then came ancient Deerfield, which began as an 8,000-acre grant in 1663 and was expanded to seven miles square in 1673 – adding acreage that included Deerfield Fishing Falls and what would become the towns of Greenfield and Gill during the second half of the 18th century.

Although it’s unknown precisely when Fall River was named by colonials, most likely the name evolved over time, starting with the descriptive stream entering the Connecticut River below the falls, to Falls River, to today’s Fall River.

It’s important to note that although Deerfield was expanded in 1673, the seven-miles-square parcel wasn’t mapped until 1717. So, the river probably had no official European name before 1717, and most likely acquired one years later, sometime after 1750 when southern Gill, then referred to as the “nook of the falls,” was being cleared for settlement.

Greenfield split off from Deerfield in 1753 and Gill split off from Greenfield in 1793, and by that time the plural “Falls River” was probably in universal use. Still today that old plural form is alive and well in community memory, and widely used by deep-rooted “townies” and those who converse often with them.

So, who am I to challenge them? Though I intend to continue using the accepted, official, modern singular form, “Fall River,” in print, I’ll readily accept the plural form in informal conversation. In fact, I’ll probably even use it myself to keep the conversation rolling.

posted in Columns, Local history | No Comments

Jul
30
2024

Locating First Encampment of Deerfield’s 1704 Captives

by Gary Sanderson

Although it’s probably too late to prove the location of an important colonial Greenfield landmark, it never hurts to ponder the possibilities.

The place under consideration is the first overnight encampment occupied by captors and captives retreating from the surprise pre-dawn attack on Old Deerfield by French and Indian raiders on February 29, 1704. The aftermath left much of the small, isolated colonial settlement in smoking ruins, with 47 colonists dead and 112 missing. For the purpose of this probe, we’ll focus on the missing – captives, young and old, tattered and torn, marched to Canada in winter cold by their captors.

Experts and ancestors alike have concurred for centuries that the campsite touched down in the Greenfield Meadows. The question is where? In reviewing this question, I’ll use modern place and road names to avoid confusion.

Actually, during the first couple hundred years after the attack, people were secure on a location. Community memory placed the first campsite less than four miles from the Deerfield stockade in wetlands along the base of Greenfield Mountain – “west of the old Nims farm,” according to Greenfield historian Francis M. Thompson. The Nims farm he refers to was built by Revolutionary War veteran Hull Nims and is today, minus the old farmhouse, owned by the Butynski family at the Lower Meadows address of 370 Colrain Road.

Buttressing Thompson’s claim is an obscure Greenfield map on which an X marks the spot of “De Rouville’s Camp.” The site is between two spring brooks where now lies a small pond dug by the Butynskis for their cows in the mid-20th century. In 1704, the spot would have been ideal for an overnight stay, with a wetland providing thick shelter from the elements along with clean, sparkling water.

The map identifying this and other historic Greenfield sites appeared as a two-fold pullout in a now hard-to-find pamphlet published for the June 26, 1905 unveiling of the Capt. William Turner Monument at Nash’s Mills. Then a tidy neighborhood that included the North Parish Church, a silver factory, a large millpond, and Mill Brook Falls, the Nash’s Mills compound was erased in the early 1960s to clear the way for Interstate 91.

Indians killed Turner, the English Falls Fight commander of King Philip’s War fame, as he crossed the Green River below, just downstream from the so-called Greenfield Pool.

But let’s not confuse matters with Turner. He died a generation before the Deerfield attack. Back to 1704 and, for that matter, to the aforementioned Francis M. Thompson, who with the 1904 publication of his History of Greenfield introduced uncertainty into the previously-accepted location for the first campsite.

The Greenfield historian, who became a “Turner Monument Field Day” organizer the following year, offered this tidbit on Page 90:

“Until recently, the place of their encampment upon the night of the fatal day has been supposed to be in the swamp west of the old Nims farm, but later the discovery of an ancient broad axe (believed to be a portion of the Deerfield plunder) at the former junction of the Hinsdale and Punch brooks, makes it seem more probable that the first camp was made in the middle of the north meadows in Greenfield.”

More probable. Hmmmm? Really? On whose authority? But with that statement, the damage was done.

By now, Thompson’s hypothetical has been so often repeated in conversation and writing that it has grown from lean speculation to common knowledge. I have read of it elsewhere, including in a history of my own tavern home, and been informed of it by friends, colleagues, and neighbors. Until recently, I accepted it without further scrutiny. Took it hook, line and sinker. But when I revisited it recently, I realized Thompson’s off-the-cuff theory was thin indeed on justification.

Let me explain.

First of all, Hinsdale and Punch brooks did not meet in their original courses. They were violently joined by an 1843 flood that roared down from the western uplands to cut a new Hinsdale Brook channel to the Green River, picking up the Punch Brook bed for the final couple hundred yards. Punch Brook did, however, cross the major Indian trail leading through the Meadows to the Pumping Station and on to Leyden, Guilford, Vt., and the eventual site of Fort Dummer on the Connecticut River’s west bank.

Hinsdale and Punch brooks were then separated by nearly a half-mile at their closest point, with the former taking a sharp southern turn a short distance east of my home. From that sharp elbow, it sliced three-quarters of a mile down the Upper Meadows between Plain and Colrain roads, joining Allen Brook for their final half-mile run to the Green River. Before Mother Nature cut the 1843 channel, Allen Brook was thought of as a Hinsdale Brook tributary.

Thompson was aware of this, and even reported it in his Greenfield book. So, he must have forgotten or been confused in his inaccurate description of the axe-head-discovery site. Remember, Thompson was a native of Colrain, not Greenfield, and spent many adult years in Montana. He wasn’t nearly as familiar with Greenfield Meadows topography as his wife, Mary Nims, or her father Lucius Nims, heir to aforementioned Hull Nims farm.

Plus, even if the axe head did date back to 1704, the possibilities are many as to how and when it arrived at the discovery site. More likely than not it had no connection at all to the 1704 captors and captives. And even if it did, it wouldn’t necessarily mark the campsite.

Something else to evaluate when considering the veracity of the two possible encampment sites is sourcing. The best sources would have been captives old enough to remember where they slept in terror that first night. Thirty-one of them returned to live out their lives in Deerfield, and at least three of them were directly related to Hull Nims.

They were Nims’ grandmother, Elizabeth Hull Nims, who would have been 15 for the march, and his great-uncle and aunt, Ebenezer and Sarah Hoyt Nims, both 17 when captured. This trio of relatives died, in the same order listed above, in 1754, 1760, and 1761, and obviously would have been around long enough to identify the site.

Then again, Nims relatives weren’t essential. Community pillar Rev. John Williams was freed from Canadian captivity with four of his children in 1706 and returned to Deerfield, where he died 23 years later. That left him more than enough time to mark for posterity important sites along the march.

Does anyone honestly believe this man of the cloth never returned to the Pumping Station, some 3.5 miles away, where his wife Eunice met her maker? If so, he would surely have pointed out the first-encampment site in passing.

Even Williams’ valuable input was unnecessary. Five members of the Stebbins family who were 12 or older for the march returned to Deerfield with vivid memories, including husband and wife John and Dorothy, ages 56 and 42 in 1704. “Redeemed” sons John and Samuel were 19 and 15 when captured, thus could also have also offered helpful insight.

The reason I mention the Stebbins family – other than the fact that its eight hostages outnumbered all other captive Deerfield families – is that descendant Samuel Stebbins (1725-83) was an early Upper Meadows settler, breaking ground very near to or on the parcel where the axe was found. If the first encampment was there, within earshot of trickling Punch Brook, would he not have known it and told friends and neighbors?

Plus, how about searchers who followed the retreating raiding party’s tracks in the snow after the siege? They obviously would have seen the remnants of the first campsite. If not on the old Nims farm, would the eye witnesses not have quickly corrected the record?

When evaluating such questions, primary sources are always the best place to start. This is no exception. In my mind, the first encampment sat on the old Nims farm, which broke ground some 80 years after the Deerfield attack.

posted in Columns, Genealogy, Indians, Local history | No Comments

« Previous Posts
Mad Meg theme designed by BrokenCrust for WordPress © | Top