Dennis Cooley was likely South Deerfield’s first native-born physician – one who, had he stayed put and practiced locally, may have never lived down a dark, macabre stain on his reputation. Like so many others of his time, he started over on what was then the Wild West of the Great Lakes or Northwest Territory, becoming a leading citizen of Washington Township, Macomb County, Michigan, where he died in 1860.

Cooley’s February 18, 1789 birth date presents him as the oldest of 14 children born to Eli and Chloe (Allen) Cooley, whose home stood on the east side of the so-called “county road from Deerfield to Hatfield” in what was then Bloody Brook, now North Main Street, South Deerfield. His grandparents, Azariah and Eleanor (Warriner) Cooley, were among Bloody Brook’s founding families.

Growing up in Deerfield and educated in its schools, Cooley established lasting friendships with upper-crust contemporaries like Dr. Stephen W. Williams – a well-known Old Deerfield physician and med-school classmate – and author/educator Edward Hitchcock – an early Deerfield Academy headmaster, Conway minister, and Amherst College president. The three friends maintained lively correspondence throughout their lives, no matter where their travels took them.

According to Cooley’s online Find A Grave profile, he moved to Georgia and practiced medicine for five years after graduating in August 1822 from Berkshire Medical College in Pittsfield and soon being approved for medical practice by the Massachusetts Medical Society. Despite his move to the sunny South, however, he found time to return to Franklin County at least briefly in the fall of 1824. That’s when he made a regrettable decision that would stick with him locally for the rest of his life.

In those days, just as today, medical researchers were always on the lookout for cadavers to dissect and study. For just such a specimen Cooley, sometime after November 15, 1824, fixated on the corpse of a Greenfield man who had taken his own life in bloody fashion. The problem was that he secretly exhumed the corpse from its grave in the dark of night, leaving behind an empty casket – which was soon discovered.

Six years later, on a trip home to marry childhood neighbor Elizabeth Anderson, he was arrested, jailed, tried, and convicted by the state Supreme Court. Well, sort of. Because, you see, Cooley escaped serious consequences when the court ruled that by the time of his 1830 arrest and prosecution, the two-year statute of limitations had passed.

Who knows what Cooley’s philosophical, grave-robbing justification was, or what exactly he intended to do with a pre-embalming-fluid cadaver more than 1,000 difficult miles away from his Georgia home and practice? Did he intend to carve up his pungent prize in an old friend’s barn? On a kitchen table? Were there accomplices with shared human-anatomy fascinations? Did he believe the suicide victim was a mortal sinner destined for the fires of hell, and thus free for the taking? At this point, nearly 200 years later, we’ll never know the answers.

Medical research on cadavers at the time was common at medical schools and hospitals. Friend Peter Thomas, former director of the University of Vermont archaeology department, recalls the time he was called to investigate many bones unearthed by construction crews making improvements to the basement of the college’s old Pomeroy Hall medical school. Related burial sites were also discovered under an athletic field and on private property owned by a college trustee in nearby Williston, Vermont. Those buried remains were undoubtedly mostly paupers, many of them immigrants who had lived and died on the streets of New York City, or maybe even Burlington, without the means for a proper burial. With the state or city stuck with burial costs, such people apparently became much-needed medical-research specimens.

Such cadavers were also common in the elite, Ivy League medical schools of the time, including Harvard, Dartmouth, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Penn. In the name of scientific research, this gruesome practice was deemed philosophically justifiable from a utilitarian perspective aimed at understanding human anatomy and saving lives.

As for the Greenfield man who unwittingly “donated” his body to medicine, Mr. Pierce Chase (1775-1824), he is an interesting character in his own right. Relying on Greenfield newspaper reports, the spelling of his first name is inconsistent, varying between Pierce and Peirce. From this point forward, I’ll use the traditional spelling P-i-e-r-c-e, which appears in his online Find A Grave profile and on wife Abigail (Mott) Chase’s (1784-1832) High Street Cemetery gravestone in Greenfield. Though the suicide victim’s own gravesite is unknown, it is assumed that he too was buried at High Street, within walking distance of his Factory Hollow home near the mouth of Fall River.

Although Chase, a miller and property owner with a home and family, was far from a have-not, he seems to have fallen on hard times by his November 13, 1824 suicide at age 47. He ended his life by slashing his neck with a razor, leaving a 40-year-old wife and three young sons ages 16, 9, and 7.

When Abigail died eight years later, in 1832, Chester Bascom was appointed guardian of minor brothers James, 17, and Lyman, 15. Bascom (1786-1841) came from a long line of Factory Hollow clothiers and fulling millers, and had sold Chase property in Greenfield’s industrial northeast corner in 1811.

Soon after Chase’s burial, there was evidence his grave had been tampered with and further investigation revealed an empty casket. The community was stunned. The corpse had been stolen. A notice in the Greenfield Gazette and Franklin Herald speculated that the dirty deed had been done “between the 15^th and 25^th day of the month.” Soon to follow was a notice in the same paper that Greenfield selectmen and 51 subscribers had put up a $200 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrator(s). That was a lot of money back then, representing about a year’s pay for an unskilled laborer or farm hand.

How and when Dr. Dennis Cooley was outed as the grave robber is unclear from newspaper and Thompson’s History of Greenfield accounts. Wouldn’t it be interesting to read the transcript, if extant, of the two-day state Supreme Court trial presided over by Greenfield Justice Elijah Alvord, Esq.? Perhaps a project for another day.

In the meantime, there you have the forgotten tale of Bloody Brook’s Dr. Dennis Cooley. What an unwelcome surprise awaited the doctor upon returning home from the Michigan wilds for the joyous occasion of marrying an old hometown sweetheart. Likely, by the time legal wrangling were over some seven or eight months later, and he was free to return with new wife to his Washington Township home, his neighbors never heard a peep about any faraway grave-robbing scandal. Dr. Cooley was thus able to live out the final 30 years of his life as an unblemished pioneer physician and postmaster.

Such men living on the edge were able to hide their sordid pasts, and dismiss any and all hideous rumors as small-town gossip perpetrated by hateful rivals. There was then no Internet or 24/7 cable news to uncover that type of dishonesty and shame. That was the beauty of life on the old frontier, especially those with skeletons in their closet, no pun intended.

One never knows what interesting little tidbits of local lore will appear in 19^th-century newspapers, be they little blurbs of town gossip, full-length news stories, obituaries, articles of interest lifted and “localized” from faraway publications, and even advertisements.

To briefly digress, I can’t help but recall aspiring young reporters who joined the newsroom from fancy collegiate J-schools and were immediately confronted with the dreaded assignment of “localizing” a wire story that had been all over the TV news. The ploy was to bring the national story home by channeling it through local people and places.

I can still hear the instructions no one wanted directed their way – instructions that produced rolling eyes behind the assignment editors’ backs. “You know the drill,” the editor would say. “Put a local spin on it. Get quotes from this person or that.”

Pee-yew! It reeks of John Q. Average, lazy, unimaginative newspaper editor manufacturing “local” news for small dailies, a stench any cub reporters worth their salt immediately recognize. Idealistic and eager to roll up their reporting sleeves, they’d prefer probing a complicated investigative piece exposing crime, corruption, or professional misconduct, something new and exciting that creates a community buzz.

Of course, my experience is from late 20^th and early 21^st century newsrooms removed more than 170 years from the story we will examine here. Wire news came to us electronically, 24/7 through cyberspace, a far cry from the pre-radio and television era of newspaper publishing. Our oldest newspapers relied on post riders, stagecoaches, and railroads to deliver “wire” news from faraway cities like Boston, New York and Philadelphia, nearer still, Hartford, Albany and Worcester.

Back then, most of the local news came from community correspondents living within their paper’s circulation, be they full-time “stringers” trolling their towns for news on their daily travels or venerable guest contributors commenting on current events within their area of expertise. Plus, of course, editors that put the paper together would also consistently chime in on important issues.

The interesting front-page story I recently stumbled across in the weekly Greenfield Gazette and Courier dated Tuesday, January 25, 1848 touched on a familiar topic that immediately seized my attention. Written by guest contributor Dr. Stephen W. Williams (1790-1855) – a Deerfield physician from the same “royal” family that produced the so-called “Redeemed Captive,” Rev. John Williams – the understated headline read Rattlesnakes – Crotalus Horridus (which is Latin for timber rattlesnake). A lengthy newspaper story for its time and place, it was reprinted from the scholarly Boston Medical and Surgical Journal.

Williams’ narrative was written in reaction to a tragic snake-bite that had six weeks earlier (December 10, 1847) killed a New York City physician named Arnold Francis Wainwright. Because Williams identified the victim only as Dr. Wainwright with no hint of a first name, we can assume the writer knew that readers were well aware of a story that had gone viral. That likelihood is buttressed by the fact that Williams also failed to provide details about the crazy snakebite itself. His objective was obviously to give local readers a follow-up on the latest rattlesnake science, where they were found, the potency and medicinal value of their venom, and the newest medical treatment for those bitten by them.

Plus, of course, he wanted to present his narrative through a Franklin County lens. He accomplished that objective right up front by informing readers that rattlesnakes “were formerly found in great abundance in our sandstone and greenstone ranges of mountains in Deerfield and Greenfield, but few are found there now. Occasionally we hear of their being killed upon Mount Toby and the range of mountains east of the Connecticut River in this county.”

Then came the intriguing kicker that really sunk in its hooks – it an interesting bit of Deerfield folklore attributed to the December 8, 1835 Franklin Mercury and pulled by Williams from Massachusetts Historical Society archives. Below (in italics) is my lightly edited version of this local anecdote.

A Mr. Jonathan Hawks was ploughing not far from the mountain called Sugar Loaf that lies near the ferry leading to Sunderland, when he noticed a number of turkeys coming into the field and got his gun to kill them. Before he was ready the turkeys made off toward the mounting and, as he was advancing up the same, he was surrounded by a number of rattlesnakes. Being of a heroic spirit, and manlike, loathe to turn and run, though surrounded by such spiteful and malignant serpents (as those serpents are the most spiteful of any serpents that crawl upon the ground), he set down his gun, (as they had none,) and took a stick that lay handy. He stood his ground and fought them, killing 34 serpents on the spot. The rest were so frightened at the valor and activity of the man, that they were glad to quit the field of battle and hide themselves in the holes under the rocks and leave the hero in the possession of the field. He took 33 eggs out of the snakes he killed, thus destroying in all 67 serpents.

I find it interesting that Williams – himself the descendant of an iconic, early Deerfield family – did not attempt to further identify protagonist Hawks by connecting him to a Franklin County Hawks household of the day. Also, perhaps due to time limitations, he was willfully vague about when the incident unfolded, willing only to speculate that it “must have occurred nearly 100 years ago.” Obviously, the 1835 Herald story was published decades and perhaps even generations after the incident, thus the original correspondent didn’t know the date either.

Further research in George Sheldon’s History of Deerfield genealogies indicates that Williams’ knee-jerk prefaced estimate probably should have read “more than 50 (instead of 100) years ago.” The only Jonathan Hawks (1762-1792) I could find living in Deerfield in the late 18^th century appears to have been the son of Asa (1732-1801) and Elizabeth Smead Hawks (1732-1816) of South Deerfield’s western farm village of Mill River. That Jonathan Hawks married Mary French of Greenfield and, according to Deerfield vital statistics, died as head of a town household.

As for the story itself, well, let’s just surmise that it had over time been “slightly” exaggerated, embellished, or in news-critic parlance “sensationalized.” Nonetheless, can there really be any question that rattlesnakes were once common in parts Franklin County, and especially along Mount Sugarloaf’s sunbaked talus slopes? After all, such rocky terrain is classic snake habitat. In fact, I believe it’s safe to assume that an expert snake-hunter or daring hiker could still today stir up a rattler there on a hot summer day. Rattlesnakes and copperheads are not uncommon a short distance south of Sugarloaf, in the Mount Tom Range between Interstate 91 and the Westfield River in Woronoco.

That’s quite enough about Mr. Hawks, though. Let’s move on to unfortunate Dr. Wainwright who, incidentally, probably got exactly what he deserved. And, no, this snakebite did not occur in the wild, but rather in an oil-lamp-lit city tavern.

Although Williams spared Gazette and Courier readers all the gory details of Wainwright’s tragic final hours, eyewitness D.B. Taylor – on the scene from snakebite to death – laid it all out in a New York Globe piece picked up by the upstate Albany Evening News on December 13, 1847. In italics below is my slightly edited version of the front-page story that shook New York, New England and eventually the nation.

Most Horrible Death from the Bite of a Rattlesnake

… On (the afternoon of Dec. 9, 1847), Dr. W. received from a brother-in-law in Alabama, through the mail, a number of rare plants, etc. from that state. Also, probably for the purpose of furnishing a subject for scientific experiments, a six-foot-long rattlesnake was included in the package.

The reptile was securely boxed, but it seems that Dr. W. for the purpose of exhibiting it to some friends in the evening, took the box to the Broadway House on the corner of Grand and Broadway. There, knocking off the top, the snake was let loose upon the barroom floor. Throwing itself into a coil, the dangerous creature immediately commenced that low hum, or species of ringing (not a rattle), that is peculiar to the species, and seemed inclined to remain quiet. Probably the change of climate produced a sort of torpor, and it was repeatedly teased with a stick. Without betraying much viciousness, indeed, one gentleman ventured so far as to raise it with the toe of his boot, no less, escaping unscathed.

After being exposed some twenty minutes to the gaze of those present, Dr. Wainwright attempted to return the snake to the box, and for that purpose, foolishly seized the venomous viper with his naked hand. In an instant, with only the slightest premonitory rattle, the reptile raised his head, threw back his upper jaw, and struck. The fangs entered Mr. W’s fingers, fastening on the inside of the ring-finger of the right hand!

The rest is dreadful history.

Although in the neighborhood of one of the nation’s best medical colleges and hospitals, with many top doctors available, Wainwright could not be saved. As his swelling and pain migrated, he begged for emergency amputation of his entire arm as a desperate life-saving measure. When sophisticated medical consultation deemed amputation inadvisable, the emergency measure was nixed and the victim was soon sinking into his death throes.

Wainwright, 36, a Brit, left a wife and two children. His careless behavior was likely buoyed by alcohol in a raucous tavern scene. He poked the proverbial hornets’ nest and got stung with a lethal dose of venom. Frankly, the astute professor of medicine and chemistry should have known better.

A moral to the story? Maybe to handle with care any and all packages from in-laws.

Just curious, do kids still play stickball?

Probably not. They say it’s bad for the arm to fire a light tennis ball day after day at a strike zone drawn in chalk on a brick wall.

Hmmmm? Maybe so. But playing stickball is what we did whenever we couldn’t round up enough players for a diamond game, and never did I experience significant arm trouble. Early-season tendonitis? Yeah, of course. I think we all battled a touch of that at some point. But nothing serious. That’s what those pungent tubs of greasy Red Hot and liquid Bengay were for. Just rub it liberally into the affected area, work out the kinks warming up and let her rip. The tenderness would linger for a few days, then vanish.

So here I sit, closing in on 70, away from the game I loved for 30 years, pain free and still capable of throwing. No, not like I once could; and, yes, it takes longer to loosen up the cranky old right wing. Plus, my balky left knee complicates matters, altering my landing and follow-through. But once loose, I’m confident I could still sink the carnival dink on a cool autumn night.

Our favorite stickball court was up against the shop-classroom wall in the parking lot behind the high school. The hitter faced the high-school diamond from deep left field. All we needed was three players – pitcher, batter, outfielder – for daylong, round-robin competition. One strike zone fit all, and trust me, it was much bigger than the one you see in hi-def on flat-screen TV these days. That was a negative. It’s always best for a hitter to narrow his or her strike zone. The positive was that a tennis ball is smaller than a baseball and tougher to hit sweet.

I wish I knew that tiny major-league strike zone we see on TV, and, more important, was disciplined enough to make the pitcher hit it during my years as a free-swinging, free-wheeling ballplayer. So, yes, that big stickball strike zone did give us bad habits. Either that or we developed into decent bad-ball hitters. I always thought the strike zone extended higher than the one we see on TV.

The three-man rotation in those old, round-robin stickball contests went from batter to outfielder to pitcher, and we each kept our individual tally of runs. Outs were recorded by strikeouts, anything caught in the air, and ground balls fielded on the pavement by the pitcher. We used salvaged, cracked, wooden bats with taped handles, saving good bats for real games. Impoverished city players were said to use broomsticks, which I never saw.

Our batters were protected from rainy weather under the flat-roofed building’s deep overhang. Far behind the pitcher loomed the high-school diamond’s backstop, way out of reach for us. To the left stood a basketball hoop with a galvanized backboard and metal net. To the right was the “aggie building,” and behind it the garage, where tractors and other grounds-maintenance equipment were stored. We’d drop a marker in short left field to establish a foul line. The right-field line was marked by a lilac bush two-thirds of the way down the aggie building’s west wall.

The ground rules were simple: groundballs past the pitcher were singles; to the lilac bush in the air was a double; past the aggie building was a triple, and to the garage was a home run. Walks and errors also put imaginary runners on base.

Round and round we went, games lasting all day. On nights of Little League games, we’d rush home around 4, get a quick bite, dress in our white, woolen, South Deerfield uniforms with red trim, and head to the little league field at the base of Sugarloaf for a game against Sunderland, Hatfield, Whately, Conway, or Old Deerfield.

Our seasons didn’t end with the school year, just after the summer solstice, as they do today. We played all summer, savoring hot, sticky weather made for baseball.

I never could understand it when, working on the Recorder sports desk, scribes were taking youth-baseball scores for league-championship series before the Fourth of July. Why, I thought out loud, would anyone complete a youth-league season before the best baseball weather arrived?

The answer was that parents didn’t want the season to interfere with their summer-vacation plans. Sad. Who’s youth baseball for, kids or parents? My answer is likely a minority opinion nowadays.

Although playing stickball hour after hour kept us out of mischief for the most part, we weren’t what you’d call perfect little angels. We stretched the rules a little, and practiced individual sovereignty to gather stray tennis balls off the roofs above. Tennis balls broke down when thrown against brick walls and clubbed with bats. Once their fabric cover started to split, balls did little tricks when thrown, and it was only a matter of time before the ball itself split in half. But we had the perfect remedy for maintaining an ample supply.

You see, stickball wasn’t the only summer activity practiced against the high school’s back wall. Tennis players practiced their stroke against the tall gym wall that met our stickball court on the left, and somehow wild mishits put many a brand-new ball atop the 40-foot roof. To collect them when no one was looking, we’d shimmy up the drain spout onto the lower roof on the other side of the gym and climb a sturdy, stationary, metal ladder anchored into the gym roof. We’d gather the balls and throw them down before descending the ladder and circling around the front to gather stray balls from the shop-building roof directly above the stickball court.

Someone could have been hurt badly or killed by a fall from that tall roof, or even that of the lower shop building. But we were careful and no one ever got hurt, not even when we had to run and jump off a lower roof to avoid authorities passing through. In fact, the only roof-related injury I recall occurred after we were in high school, and it had nothing to do with being on the roof. The victim was late friend Franny Redmond.

I can’t remember exactly what we were doing, probably just horsing around after school. Franny had jumped up to hang from his hands on a cross beam out front by the eight doors leading into the gym area. When he released his grip to fall down, his class ring got caught on the crimped lower edge of protective copper sheathing and left him dangling in pain. With his full weight on the ring finger, the skin peeled back into an ugly, bloody mess. We helped lift him up as he used his free arm to pull up and release the snag. Once free, he dropped to his feet, wrapped the wound in a t-shirt, and went to the hospital for repair. I think doctors had to cut off the ring before stitching the wound.

Other than that, never a serious problem we couldn’t escape with aplomb. Small-town devils we were. We knew the routine, not to mention every dark corner in the neighborhood, and stayed on high-alert for “heat” whenever bending the rules.

It was kids’ stuff, not crime. At least that’s how it was viewed when I was young. I’m not sure cops know the difference anymore. Sad indeed. I sincerely doubt we would have “benefited” from being run through the system and punished.