Mar
14
2025

The Beat Goes On

by Gary Sanderson

When you’ve worked a beat for nearly a half-century as I have, and enjoy deep roots therein, upturned stones of investigation can trigger vivid memories.

This is such a circumstance.

It started with word of a supposed archaeological site in South Deerfield, about to be disturbed by the construction of a new dog shelter. When I caught wind of it, I immediately dug deeper because I didn’t recognize the address in my original hometown founded by ancestors. When I finally located East Plain Road, I initially decided to back off from it as a column topic – the site was a little out of range, in my opinion, for a small weekly newspaper serving greater Montague.

That changed, however, when I discovered a solid Montague link. The proposed facility is intended to replace the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office regional dog shelter located on Sandy Lane in Turners Falls, just a hop, skip, and a jump across Turnpike Road from the old Park Villa outdoor movie theater.

Though I was learning of the shelter for the first time, I was familiar with the sandy plain on which it lies. I got to know it from my brief days of employment (1978-79) as a laborer and truck driver for the Montague DPW.

I would not have known the sheriff’s shelter site had I not often visited the adjacent old town landfill during my dump-truck-driving days for road boss Charlie Richotte, back when Joe Janikus and Denny Choleva ran the office. A matter of convenience, my address was then just down the road. I was living in a two-bedroom apartment in the sprawling residence of widowed Irene Martineau on the end of South High Street in Montague City.

I took the temporary job while approaching marriage after a swashbuckling, here-today, gone-tomorrow life on the road. I had closed my last fundraising deal and moved in with my working wife-to-be. During this brief period of unemployed freedom, I was wearing out a path to Powertown barroom poolhalls.

When this malingering lifestyle lingered, my fiancée tired of the destructive routine and, as only a social worker could do, suggested I “find an effing job.” Soon I was a member of the Montague road crew.

My first job was extracting heavy, broken cement guardrail posts on Turners Falls Road and replacing them with heavier new posts. I enjoyed the strenuous labor, and it quickly whipped me into shape after four years of unhealthy living and sedentary office work. Let’s just stay that those smoky offices, motel lounges, and restaurants are no formula for staying fit and trim.

But we won’t go there… back to the proposed South Deerfield shelter site and, especially, to the old Montague landfill.

First, the reason for my interest in the supposed archaeological site – overgrown tillage and peasant cover I often hunted before the construction of the South Deerfield Emergency Veterinary Clinic. I wondered if maybe, just maybe, the supposed Native artifacts surface-collected there during a fairly recent walkover may have been gathered from the place called “Indian Plain” on a few 19th-century deeds I had read from the general neighborhood. Ever since stumbling across that forgotten place-name in a town I know well, I have tried unsuccessfully to pinpoint it, and this clue seemed like good evidence to chase.

I searched out the man holding the artifact assemblage. His home lot abuts the proposed shelter site on the opposite side of the dead-end East Plain Road. I remembered his home being built by town pharmacist Billy Rotkiewicz in the 1980s.

My source happened to be a vocal opponent – not unusual among neighbors of such development projects. We spoke on the phone and, with deadline looming and time running thin, I was unable to connect enough dots for that week’s column. Instead, I teased it as an outtake before ultimately deciding the story wasn’t for me.

Enter Reporter editor Mike Jackson, with whom I discussed the tease and from whom I learned that the shelter being replaced has a Turners Falls address. Its location immediately brought me back nearly a half-century to the adjacent, old Montague landfill, and to a fair-weather day I spent trucking sandy fill from its eastern perimeter to a construction site.

If memory serves me, to get there I’d travel a dirt road within view of Judd Wire, following a slim border of tall pines a few hundred yards before dropping down into a sandpit. There a bucket-loader awaited me. I’d swing the truck’s nose right and back into a spot against a steep 15- or 20-foot escarpment to accept bucket loads of fill.

On my second or third refill, I watched the loader blade tap into a vein of what appeared to be the morbid, dried-up remains of many buried dog carcasses. Boney body parts and chunks of furry pelts dangled out of the bucket as others tumbled down from the fresh cuts in the sandbank.

Not a pretty or expected sight – nor one that would be soon forgotten by anyone who, like me, had grown up with pets.

I never really made much of it, or put an honest effort into determining exactly what we had tapped into, but I never forgot it, either. So, now that nearly 50 years have passed, why not troll a bit? The statute of limitations passed long ago, and anyone directly involved has likely expired.

The problem is I that don’t know the whole story, only what I saw. The bucket-loader operator shared my cluelessness as to the reason why the carcasses were there, and so did everyone else I queried. Then I just let it slip away, until this recent reminder.

Remember, that scene unfolded before I was a reporter. I was young, untamed, and hadn’t yet figured out who I was. My job priority was facilitating the fastest track back to the office for 4 p.m. punch-out time.

Who knows? Perhaps our mass-grave discovery that day was an old veterinary burial pit for euthanized pets; maybe a hidden roadkill dump on an out-of-the-way, town-owned, sandy outwash plain. I don’t believe the sheriff’s dog shelter was there yet, but isn’t it interesting that it ended up there?

Now that I’ve finally shed light on the incident, maybe a reader or two has insight. If so, don’t hesitate to contact me at the email address below. Maybe community memory will finally provide answers.

I guess by now it’s now old enough to qualify as history, no?

posted in Columns, Indians, Local history, South Deerfield | No Comments

Mar
01
2025

Memory Valley

by Gary Sanderson

Monday morning. Eagles’ Super Bowl LIX rout in the rearview. Cold and calm. Skies icy gray. Intermittent flurries flying. Fresh snowbanks framing roads.

Splendid day for a road trip.

No sun. Classic bluegrass spinning. Loud. Stimulating. Stringed instruments trading the lead, helping to ricochet spontaneous thoughts through the rocky, vegetated canyons of my mind.

What random thoughts entertain a solo, septuagenarian traveling man on such a ride? Bear with me. That’s precisely why I’m here. I’ll try recapture snippets from that heavy-footed journey up the slice of our Connecticut Valley I call home.

Call the mission pickup and delivery. Destination: Plainfield, New Hampshire. Awaiting me there at an auction house less than 90 minutes’ north was an Oriental rug I bought from the comforts of home during the second half of the runaway Super Bowl. I had found it in an online 600-plus-lot listing, registered for the sale, and suggested to my wife that a distracted Super Bowl marketplace could be the perfect place to buy it as a replacement for a threadbare Oriental that didn’t us a dime.

We both liked the rug, particularly its large, solid, light-blue central field surrounding a small medallion. The design was remarkably different from any of our Persian rugs, and the first of its style I remember laying eyes on. Why not go for it?

I can’t say we stole it. There were 26 bids – two of them mine. Still, when the hammer fell, I felt confident we had done well. Had we purchased it at one of those pricey retail shops advertised on TV, it would have cost at least five times what we paid. That’s what I love about auctions; that and the action, the banter. Social entertainment.

Soon after my 9:45 a.m. departure from our upper Greenfield Meadows home, my thoughts began to swirl. Across the Pumping Station’s covered bridge on the back road to Interstate 91 in Bernardston, the sight of the Eunice Williams Monument was the impetus. All it took was a quick glance at the steep hill behind it, climbing north from the riverside flat where an Indian tomahawk had abruptly mercy-killed Deerfield Reverend John Williams’ struggling wife.

Weakened by recent childbirth, the unfortunate 1704 captive displayed obvious signs that she wasn’t capable of walking to Canada with her French and Indian captors. Shivering, swooning, and ready to fall after a frigid Green River crossing, she was struck down.

I figured the weather for that tragic event some 321 years ago would not have been much different than what greeted me to the site. The northward trail looked cold and daunting indeed – likely about how it must have felt that fateful March 1 morning.

As I drove past the monument to the top of a gentle slope heading to Leyden Road, my thoughts traipsed to a place called Larabee’s Grove. Definitely a well-known Greenfield placename back in the day, it appears in accounts of the 1884 monument-dedication ceremony as the place where participants gathered before walking a short distance to the engraved stone marker. I have often wondered where exactly that small patch of open woods or orchard stood.

Then I ponder whether those Larabees were from the same bolt of cloth as Sixties slugger Len Larabee, of Greenfield baseball lore. I can’t imagine he isn’t connected to that “Country Farms” neighborhood. Had I been raised where I currently reside, community memory would have answered that question long ago. But I’m a Meadows transplant – South Deerfield was my playground.

Not long after filling my tank in Bernardston, at a rare gas station where self-service is prohibited, I was heading north on the Interstate. Soon, heading down the hill to the first Brattleboro exit, I passed the “Fort Dummer” sign, which always stirs my historic juices. The French and Indian War fort was built in 1724 and survived about 50 years.

My first thoughts went to Major John Arms, a distant Deerfield relative and one of Fort Dummer and Brattleboro’s first settlers. His tavern was “Bratt’s” first, located a bit upriver from the fort on the river terrace that today holds Brattleboro Retreat. Arms Tavern was known as a favorite watering hole of Ethan Allen his Green Mountain Boys.

From there my thoughts jumped like an ovipositing mayfly to Ebenezer Hinsdale (1707-1763), the intemperate, Harvard-trained Deerfield chaplain and Indian missionary born in captivity at sea – his parents had been 1704 captives – and stationed by 1731 at Fort Dummer. He eventually built an estate that still stands as a museum across the river in his namesake Hinsdale, New Hampshire.

Though I have no direct genealogical links to the Hinsdale family, it sure seems like I do. For nearly 30 years I have called a historic Hinsdale dwelling my home, resting on the 1770 homesite of Ebenezer’s slightly younger brother Samuel. So, I guess I have blood in the game.

The ride from Bratt to Bellows Falls, Vermont and Charlestown, New Hampshire was unusually uninspiring under low, gray skies. That customary first glimpse of Mount Ascutney’s peak from a Route 91 highpoint outside of Putney was invisible, totally hidden behind cloud cover that day. Its absence was disorienting.

With that temporary issue in the rearview I was on my way to 91’s Black River crossing, just west and in view of Charlestown’s reconstructed French and Indian War Fort at No. 4. It’s a place where my roots lie deep through sixth-great-grandfather Lieutenant Isaac Parker, a Massachusetts soldier from Groton. I have regularly visited the museum for reenactments and other activities, especially when my grandsons were young, but also to catch up on new scholarship.

Unfortunately, historic Charlestown is a black hole of New England genealogy due to a mid-19th-century fire that destroyed the earliest vital records. Many a professional genealogist has met his or her match there. Though the aggravating void doesn’t affect my Parker family much, the same cannot be said for the many families they married into. These vexing gaps reach into my Whately Sanderson family – not to mention those of Deerfield miller Adonijah Taylor and his brother-in-law, brief East Whately resident Nathaniel Sartwell, both of whom share Fort No. 4 legacies.

I never pass No. 4 without thinking about its first blacksmith, Mayflower descendant Micah Fuller. I am certain his daughter Lois Fuller married a great-uncle of mine named Joseph Sanderson but, much to the chagrin of Joseph’s descendants trying to establish Mayflower roots, it has not been proven and may never be. Birth records for Micah Fuller’s children vanished in Charlestown flames.

Which brings us to the last part of my journey thought train I’ll share. It involves a peculiar house painter named John MacAulay, who dropped into my life for five years at the starts of our current millennium. He lived in his GMC van that was often parked in my backyard overnight when the weather was right for painting. He dropped dead from heart failure about 20 years ago at a Greenfield laundry mat. He was 66.

John’s spirit always visits when I climb Springfield Mountain, just up the Interstate from Charlestown exit. He grew up in Springfield, Vermont and is buried there. Someday I intend to find his grave.

I paid John by the day, cash, and often fed him as a gratuity. When my wife and kids were away I’d grill something over which to chat in the carriage-shed seating area. A HAM radio operator, John introduced me to the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones before he became well-known, and also spoke often about the Rothschilds, diabolical bankers, and the Illuminati. Alive today, John would be a card-carrying Trump-cult member.

One day our carriage-shed discussion turned to hunting, and he told me a hair-raising tale about his late father’s Vermont bear-trapping exploits on Springfield Mountain. When a scouting mission revealed evidence of a monster bruin feeding regularly through an upland nut grove, he set a trap anchored with a towing chain to a heavy log he believed only a bulldozer could move.

When he returned the next day, the trap and anchor were gone, leaving a trail John claimed “could have been followed by Helen Keller.” Supremely cautious and alone, John’s dad followed the trail much farther than he would have imagined in his wildest dreams and killed the beast with his 30.06 rifle.

John was a boy at the time. He didn’t remember the bear’s weight. Just the massive carcass. A crowd pleaser, he said.

A good place to end. With a classic North Country hunting yarn that just keeps on giving every time I climb the central Vermont mountain on which it unfolded, likely before I was born.

Meanwhile, our new rug lies on the dining-room floor. A perfect fit.

Chalk it up as another worthwhile trip up a valley stained deeply with my DNA. That said, I don’t ignore the humble people who were here to greet us. They left indelible reminders of their ancient presence with petroglyphs pecked into Bellows Falls bedrock.

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

Feb
11
2025

Vacant Archaeological Salmon Evidence Explained

by Gary Sanderson

Venerable, retired, Connecticut Valley archaeologist Peter Thomas has chimed in on a perplexing regional Atlantic salmon puzzle that keeps on giving and won’t go away.

The question is: Given that we know spring salmon-spawning runs once populated New England rivers, and that salmon was a valued food resource for indigenous and colonial inhabitants alike, why is there virtually no archaeological evidence?

Thomas, responding by email to my last Montague Reporter column (January 23), doesn’t think it’s rocket science. But first, a little refresher on previous discussion in this space.

Even though salmon evidence is rare in New England’s archaeological record, we can recite a long list of regional salmon falls and rivers – including some right here in the Connecticut Valley – which strongly suggest salmon presence. Yet still, no archaeological remains, according to UMass anthropologist Catherine Carroll Carlson, who reviewed reports of 75 known fishing sites for her 1992 UMass doctoral dissertation, The Atlantic Salmon in New England History and Prehistory: Social and Environmental Implications.

Carlson’s findings were not welcomed by altruistic fisheries biologists working furiously at the time to restore Connecticut River salmon. Instead, her conclusions were greeted by catcalls, boos, and hisses, and publicly dismissed as invalid by critics with jobs and blind crusades to protect.

Loud and clear, these critics could hear the death knell sounding on their struggling federal and state Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Restoration Program, which was finally abandoned in 2013 following a failed 46-year effort.

My most recent foray into this issue wondered aloud why a certain ubiquitous Connecticut River conservation gadfly was so threatened by new research aimed at tweaking Carlson’s conclusion that, because New England salmon remains are almost non-existent in the archaeological record, so, too, were salmon.

She even went so far as to opine that New England salmon populations were intentionally overstated by colonial promoters attempting to entice restless European emigrants to a new and faraway land of unimaginable abundance. So deceptive were these promoters that they named the previously unknown American shad “white salmon” as a disingenuous drawing card. Those smaller, plebian shad, she said, were the staple of New England’s annual anadromous fish runs; not Atlantic salmon – king of North Atlantic gamefish and table fare of royalty.

She was right. Shad runs did indeed dwarf accompanying salmon runs here. But when you toss in peripheral perspective from personal accounts like The Diary of Matthew Patten of Bedford, New Hampshire, 1754-1788, it’s quite apparent that salmon were not, as Carlson claims, “insignificant,” but a valuable food-resource worth targeting for the larder.

So, why are their remains so scarce in New England’s archaeological record?

Thomas – with digs at Riverside/Gill and the Sokoki Fort in Vernon, Vermont to his credit – says there are two good reasons, both relating to “a lack of evidence of specific activities surviving in the ground for archaeologists to excavate and interpret.”

During his two “very limited” Riverside excavations adjacent to the well-know fishing falls on the Connecticut, Thomas encountered three to four feet of black, organically-rich soils containing high levels of mercury and iodine derived from marine fish species.

“Based on the numerous stone tools we found,” he wrote, “Native occupants had fished at the falls for some 9,000 years each spring.”

Yet, while no one has ever challenged the fact that massive runs of shad and alewives (and lesser numbers of salmon) ran the river each year, there’s a lack of identifiable remains. The reason, according to Thomas, is that “no unburned bone of any animal – fish, mammal, reptile or bird – has survived in these acidic soils. Tiny fragments of heavily burned fish bone are present, but species identification is not possible, with one exception. Two small, football-shaped bones, called prootic bulla, are found in the head of each shad, of which 72 were recovered. In short, lack of identifiable salmon bones does not mean they were not caught and eaten along with other species.”

Archaeologists rely on the stone tools they recover to identify or surmise site activities. Thomas says literally thousands of stone points have been recovered over the years around Riverside, confirming that occupants were heavily engaged in hunting.

“However, with the exception of stone net sinkers,” he says, “all fishing gear consisted of bone, antler, wood or plant fibers – none of which survived in the ground. This absence has also led to a gross underestimation of the significance of Native fishing.”

In recent months, Thomas and fellow retired archaeologist Stuart Fiedel have combed through many additional riverside site reports. They have found that these reports are consistent in revealing an abundance of stone hunting tools but few fishing tools, except for the aforementioned net sinkers.

So, chalk up these recent Thomas/Fiedel findings as food for an addendum to Carlson’s dated dissertation – likely with more to come.

Stay tuned.

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

Feb
03
2025

Why Not Dig Deeper Into Salmon Mystery?

by Gary Sanderson

Wedged inconspicuously into a slim, dim, and dusty space between a wall-length book cabinet and the northeast corner in my study hangs a framed, matted, five-by-seven-inch pen-and-ink sketch of a younger me signed by late Manchester Union Leader illustrator John Noga.

Despite ultraviolet-protective glass, the paper has taken on a warm sepia tone that speaks to its age. It was drawn more than 40 years ago for the “sig” accompanying my monthly Connecticut Valley column in Massachusetts/New Hampshire Out of Doors. Owned and operated by publisher/editor Bryant “Red” Chaplin, the popular regional publication was known to readers as MOOD.

I was pushing 30 at the time of the sketch. I wore a full head of curly hair and a trim beard and mustache, with a glint of the devil in my eye.

When I catch a glimpse on my daily rounds, it often evokes memories dating back to my early freelance-writing days, when I dared to question the viability of our ambitious state and federal Connecticut River Atlantic salmon-restoration program, ultimately derailed 13 years ago due to poor results.

Back in the 1980s I was the only mainstream media voice – or New England Outdoor Writers Association (NEOWA) member – openly questioning a salmon comeback. I presume older members preferred to believe misleading press releases and promotional words of wisdom from hopeful fish and wildlife agencies and salmon organizations. Veteran outdoor scribes in the cocktail lounge might’ve admitted it was pie in the sky, but figured why not be supportive and give it a chance?

Chaplin and I forged a great working relationship during the 10 or 11 years we shared before his 1992 cancer death at 65. We often chatted on the phone and always took full advantage of our social interactions at the annual three-day NEOWA meeting and banquet at the Sheraton-Boxborough. Born with deep Yankee roots in 1926, he was two years older than my father.

One time during a typically spirited phone call, I worked up the nerve to ask Red what he did with his columnist sketches. When he generously offered to send me mine if I wanted it, my answer was yes, sure, if he didn’t mind. He promptly made a copy for his files and dropped the carefully packaged original in the mail.

It is the best gift I ever received as a journalist, working long, erratic and thankless hours for meager pay.

I immediately took my treasure a mile down the road to Andy’s Frame Shop, across the road from the South Deerfield cemetery where my ashes and those of my wife and sons will eventually lie in the Sanderson plot of my grandfather, his parents and two sisters.

A glance at my youthful portrait stirs memories from the late 1980s, when Chaplin defended me in a dispute precipitated by a fellow MOOD columnist. My foe, a police captain from Northampton and a loyal Atlantic Salmon Federation member, was longer-tenured than me and fed up with my salmon-restoration skepticism. When he threatened to resign if I wasn’t canned, or at the very least silenced, Red assured him he’d hate to lose his taxidermy column yet would not satisfy his demand. He was in the business of selling papers, he informed him, not refereeing political dustups between his freelancer staff.

Which brings us to the present day, and a January 9 Reporter op-ed in which ubiquitous Connecticut River activist-gadfly Karl Meyer took exception to my continuously evolving opinions about the status of our prehistoric salmon runs. He is apparently unaware of new research by two retired, respected archaeologists with impressive chops who are studying old records to reassess and further clarify our prehistoric New England salmon runs.

The impetus was their doubts about the accuracy of former UMass anthropologist Catherine Carroll Carlson’s 40-year-old characterization of ancient New England salmon runs as “insignificant.” This conclusion became the unchallenged backbone of her 1992 doctoral dissertation, The Atlantic Salmon in New England History and Prehistory: Social and Environmental Implications, which sounded our salmon-restoration death knell. Her assessment was based primarily on the rarity of salmon evidence in the archaeological record she reviewed in reports from 75 known prehistoric Northeastern fishing sites.

The question now entertaining erudite Ph.D.s Peter Thomas and Stuart Fiedel is: why so few New England salmon remains, and quantifiable reports? We know from credible colonials that salmon were not only here but plentiful enough to be viewed as a valuable food resource to transplanted Europeans and indigenous natives alike. So, why the scarcity of archaeological evidence? They speculate there’s a good reason that we’re all missing.

Who can blame them for their dogged determination to answer this vexing mystery?

Let us not forget that Carlson’s thesis, and other academic reports like it, are never to be viewed as the final word, but rather as a starting point for future discovery. She was at the time a young doctoral student trying to earn an advanced degree, not a venerable archaeologist with mountains of experience behind her. On the other hand, Thomas and Fiedel are grizzled veterans at the twilight of their careers. They’re not trying to invalidate or undermine her work, just fine-tune accuracy.

Look at it this way: Carlson planted the flag, they’re advancing it. Why is that so threatening to Meyer and his self-professed “Connecticut River hero, who grew up in the Great Northwest of legendary salmon runs she knew well?” Is it possible that comparisons could have clouded her perspective with preconceived, provincial opinions? Maybe. No shame in that.

The last time I looked at the Thomas/Fiedel work in progress, it was surprised to discover it had grown to more than 200 pages. I knew it underway because I am always poking around for new information, and have contributed occasional insight. No doubt, Carlson was on the right track when her findings were radioactive to tunnel-visioned Connecticut River salmon-restoration officials and the “high-cotton” choir singing praise of their altruistic program. But they need to be tweaked.

Although I can’t prove it without exerting more effort than it’s worth – and doubt Meyer would ever admit it – I’m quite confident he learned of Carlson’s bombshell scholarship from my old Greenfield Recorder column, “On The Trail.” At least I know that’s how we first met, when he reached out to me by email. That would have been around 1988, long before he embarked on his busy freelance-writing tour about 25 years ago. By that time salmon restoration was on its last leg, and I had moved onto other topics.

Don’t forget, the 1980s and early ’90s were the glory days – if there was such a thing – of the failed Connecticut River salmon-restoration effort. Critical voices were then rare indeed – and frowned upon by the many true-believers offering blind support. A record 529 salmon were counted migrating upriver during the 1981 spawning run. Then came the second-best run of 490 11 years later, in 1992, the year Carlson’s Molotov cocktail hit the street.

Other than those two record runs, success was thin, with one string of three consecutive counts of 300 or better between 1985 and 1987. There were only two others, for a total of seven over a 46-year experiment ending in 2013. The total salmon count during that entire 46-year effort was 6,098, a number that wouldn’t have been sufficient annually to justify ending their endangered status and opening a sport-fishing season.

Truth be told, our Connecticut River restoration program never had a chance. But it wasn’t because salmon weren’t here to greet European explorers. Greatly complicating matters were factors like industrial dams and pollution, climate change, regional water temperatures, and gluttonous colonial overharvest that stacked the deck against sustainability. Many biologists knew this, but were reluctant to say it out loud. I believe one of them was Meyer’s trusted source and friend Boyd Kynard – a top-shelf fisheries biologists and, incidentally, one of three advisors who approved Carlson’s dissertation.

As far as I can tell, Kynard was never a loud, confrontational critic. Just a calm, diplomatic voice of reason who didn’t hesitate to warn his scientific brethren that Connecticut River salmon restoration might not work.

Why Meyer insists on accepting Carlson’s findings as the final word on regional salmon research is beyond my comprehension. The program’s demise is old news. That horse left the barn long ago. Why not explore something new?

Wouldn’t it be interesting to figure out why – even though salmon absolutely did seasonally populate many New England rivers – their remains are virtually nonexistent in the archaeological record?

Wouldn’t Mr. Meyer be better served by focusing on his loud shortnosed-sturgeon crusade and leaving ample space for new scholarship aimed at solving a confusing salmon mystery?

 

posted in Columns, Indians, Local history, Salmon, Shad | Comments (1)

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 | Comments (1)

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

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