Looking for a hook to hang my hat on, so to speak, spun me into reminiscence leading up to my May 7 “Deerfield 350^th Founders’ Day” talk.

The topic was the earliest settlement of Bloody Brook, or Muddy Brook – names that were interchangeable between the 1750s and 1840s for a village now called South Deerfield. My problem was that so very little is known about its groundbreaking days. I wanted to pull the audience in with something light before launching into a long-overdue look at the history of a place that has been ignored by historians in a town where history is important.

Rather than imagining what it was like to roam the mile-and-a-half-long path that connected the first handful of forgotten dwellings along what is today Main Street, I decided instead to start with the South Deerfield I knew. That is my childhood town, where spinster great-aunt Gladys annually flowered family graves in the village’s oldest burial ground, Sugarloaf Street Cemetery – that of the founders.

My talk would be delivered from the auditorium lectern at Frontier Regional School, which wasn’t my comfort zone. My legacy in that place was that I couldn’t pass senior English. Oh well. What does it mean a half-century later?

I would have been far more comfortable pointing out interesting features from the driver’s seat of a country drive, or attaching surnames to stone-clad cellar holes lining a wooded walk along some discontinued road, or leading a group up a tidy stone wall to a high, lonesome hardwood spine with oaks, beeches and royal shagbark hickories. I’d be out of my element in an academic auditorium, would try not to bore anyone.

It was worth mentioning that I would be standing on a site that once represented the center of my tiny universe. It was my childhood neighborhood and that of my ancestors dating back to the village’s birth.

In the days leading up to the event, with soft spring pastels stirring my imagination, reminiscence sometimes flowed like surging stormwater. I pondered the approaching presentation for Deerfield’s 350^th birthday realizing that I, as an untamed 20-year-old, had attended the 1973 Tercentenary a half century ago. Better still, my ancestors had been there for the 100^th and 200^th celebrations as well. Many great-grandparents, great-aunts and uncles, cousins, and in-laws had attended the 1835 gala dedication ceremony for a new Bloody Brook Monument, and yes, kinfolk were also on hand in 1875 for the 200-year memorial remembrance of those slain during the infamous September 18, 1675 Indian ambush.

Nine of my great-grandparents and scores of relatives rest downtown in the village’s aforementioned oldest burial ground. I am proud that my DNA indelibly stains that hallowed ground and can never be taken from me. There seem to be few people left in the village with ancestors in that ancient graveyard.

I wanted to share swirling memories that sped back to my wayward youth, when South Deerfield was a rowdy, two-cop town – one by day, the other by night. We had three downtown barber shops, two service stations, a car dealership, five village markets, a bakery with hard-crusted Polish rye, two package stores, and four bars, including one called “Mucker’s.” We even had a cobbler, the village’s last, who fixed our shoes and resoled hardy Chippewa boots.

Oh my, what a cast of characters we had, starting with devilish pharmacist Billy Rotkiewicz. All town news and gossip rolled through his drugstore and soda jerk – first at Professional Pharmacy west of the common, then Frontier Pharmacy south of it. Teenage lover boys and even “liberated” hippie chicks with bold resolve would approach the counter to sheepishly purchase condoms.

“Nope,” Billy would snap like only he could, “Sold out. Spring fever. Try Boron’s Market.”

Stymied on their daring initial attempt, they’d trudge diagonally across Elm Street, where Evelyn Boron worked the till near the front door. When asked for condoms, she’d curl a wry grin and with a faint twinkle inquire, “Let me guess – Billy Rotkiewicz?”

South Deerfield was a hell-raising, fun-loving town back then, with Billy beating the drum to which many of us marched. Seems we were always up to something – cruising the streets after dark and creating all sorts of smalltown mischief, especially around Halloween, which for us started with the first hint of fall foliage. How could we possibly wait till the end of October?

On rare occasions when night cop Pistol Pete Kuchieski caught up with us, he’d wave a stern finger and, in the most intimidating voice he could muster, sternly say, “I know you’re good kids, but this is gonna be your last warning. Next time I’ll have to write you up.”

For most of us it never happened. He was bluffing. Only the most serious offenses would require legal action. Praise the heavens for Pistol Pete. He had a heart, recognized the difference between kids’ stuff and crime, and would tell us straight up that the last thing he wanted to do was to give any of us a record. We sat in the classroom with his own kids.

A colorful character named Robert “Hawk” Wilson was a common attraction on the downtown streets. A small, wiry man, The Hawk staggered around wearing a light-colored cowboy hat and bolo tie with a turquoise slider. He trudged a path between the bars and the drugstore all day, every day. Billy, his most merciless needler, harangued him day and night, and kept him nourished: on the house. Say what you will about Billy; he was, at his core, a big-hearted, mischievous man.

When Hawk approached us on the street, he’d stop to face us down in his best gunfighter pose, arms bowed out to the side like Gary Cooper or Alan Ladd in the old Westerns. We’d take the same posture and draw on him for our daily giggles. “Too late!” he’d bark with a faux snarl. It was great, lighthearted, smalltown fun. Poor Hawk. The end was not kind to him.

I asked the audience to bear with me for one more short digression. I wanted to describe an example of the type or harmless downtown mischief that occupied our time on sticky summer days. I chose a game we played with an elderly target we knew as Yakims. He spoke broken English and, if memory serves me, lived on the corner of Braeburn Road.

Most everyone smoked back then, and Yakims toured the busiest downtown sidewalks salvaging leftover tobacco from large, discarded cigarette butts. When he found a good candidate, he’d pick it up and, between thumb and forefinger, manipulate the tobacco out into a pocket-sized tin. It became the stash from which he rolled his own cigarettes – not the same kind we later rolled in the shadows.

Well, we used to humor ourselves with a playful little game at Yakim’s expense.

We’d lay out sidewalk bait by threading 2- or 4-pound-test monofilament fishing line through long, tempting cigarette butts and hiding around the corner or behind the telephone booth with the other end of the invisible line in hand. When Yakims stooped down to pluck our bait from the sidewalk, we’d give it a little tug and watch a profanity-laced chase ensue. He must have thought a soft summer breeze was depriving him of his treasure. Fun while it lasted – he soon got wise to us, and our downtown sportfishing ceased.

So, that was my intro, followed by brief acknowledgments of those who have helped me most, and a quick list of essential sources I’ve used to understand the mid-18^th-century building trades. Then it was off to a 70-minute PowerPoint journey, up one side of North Main Street and down the other. I focused on nine early properties I had researched.

I think it went as well as could be expected, despite never looking at the nine-page, single-spaced narrative I had prepared after finishing the intro. I decided on the fly that it was more important to look at and interact with the folks in the audience. I hope it worked.

I viewed the 90-minute presentation as a starting place, a work in progress that’ll outlive me. I only scratched the surface and stirred up a little dust from the tangled web known as Bloody Brook history, which has thus far been largely ignored.

I have in recent years often wondered: Why is so little known about the old Hawks Tavern in South Deerfield’s North Mill River District?

Now, after finding two previously unidentified shots of the building among a collection of digitized Howes Brothers photos in friend Peter Thomas’ Deerfield’s 350th archive, the question looms even larger. The photos do not depict some backwoods watering hole. No, instead it was a classic, sprawling public house, ballroom and all, supported by neighbors and wayward travelers alike.

They say a picture’s worth a thousand words. Well, this one has even greater value. I took one look at the first black and white photo of a large, worn building, felt a gush of joyful excitement and thought, “Wow! What a building.” Then another B&W appeared. They’re both local treasures. Praise the heavens for the Howes Brothers. Though still a work in progress, the story must be told.

Hawks Tavern stood along the lower eastern Conway line where the old county road parted into two county roads. Both legs headed west-northwest from the crotch to Ashfield and beyond. One ascended Fields Hill and dropped down through Pumpkin Hollow, once Conway’s center with a long common. The other, north of it, crossed the South and Bear rivers before heading to Ashfield and Buckland.

Nestled into a comfortable setting east of that old fork, the tavern had a long presence that likely evolved over three generations of Hawks ownership. An expansive ell doesn’t show in the frontal shots.

The building appears to have been the brainchild of Asa Hawks (1732-1801), who bought some 250 acres in 1788 and opened for business in the 1790s. Son Asa, Jr. and his brother Zeeb entered the picture after their father’s death, and Asa, Jr.’s son Jonathan (1794-1853) and some siblings rode it into the mid-19^th century. By then, Hawks dwellings occupied both sides of the road, and the evidence suggests there may have been a third nearby.

Tavernkeeper Jonathan Hawks’ 1853 death signaled the end of family ownership, initiating a series of land transactions concluded by Conway farmer Collister S. May’s 1854 purchase of the tavern stand and 59 acres. He maintained the building’s tradition in reduced form with May’s Tavern – also called May’s Hotel and Mill River Hotel – until his 1886 death. Like other roadside public houses from the tavern-and-turnpike days, the proud old business faded to oblivion with the arrival of the railroad, which transitioned the mode of transit and travel to the steel rail.

Son William May (1869-1944), known to friends and neighbors as Wil, took over the property after his father’s death and shared the home with two sisters in a post-tavern, extended-family arrangement. Older, grocer-meat dealer brother George (1859-1930) was not far away, living on North Main Street, where noises from his slaughterhouse drew his neighbors’ ire.

May heirs started selling off land in 1945, and finally sold the last tavern-associated parcel in 1987.

Few people today seem to be aware that the historic tavern still stands, separated into two neighboring homes along the Mathews Road intersection with Conway Road (Route 116). One half is the dwelling at 300 Conway Road in its original setting, the other a tidy home up the road at 312 Conway Road. The latter was moved in 1911 by Wil May to create an income-generating, two-apartment “tenement,” according to a May 19, 1926 Greenfield Recorder story about a fire that destroyed the upper story. The brief newspaper article reports that the building had once housed the old, upstairs Hawks Tavern “Dance Hall,” or ballroom.

It’s quite possible, if not probable, that the ballroom had a springfloor, if the carriage-shed wing housing it was added after 1830. Such tavern buildings typically evolved over time as profits grew and new generations wanted to add their thumbprint. Documentation of such Hawks Tavern “improvements” seems, unfortunately, to be out of reach today. Very little was ever recorded about the old tavern despite its existence in a history-conscious community with a rich local-history repository.

Surprisingly, preeminent Deerfield historian George Sheldon says nothing about the tavern in his History of Deerfield. The omission makes no sense. Maybe he had a falling out with the Hawks. Sheldon not only lived in Deerfield during the establishment’s heyday, his genealogies profile every associated Hawks without one word about their tavern.

Curious indeed. It’s not like the building was out of sight, out of mind. Located on a busy road to booming Conway and just a hop, skip and a jump from Old Deerfield, the tavern stood on hallowed ground. Across the road, Deerfield’s first mill was built on the Mill River as early as 1689 and in was full operation as a gristmill in the 1690s. Another important historical site rests a half-mile or less up the hill. There Cyrus Rice built Conway’s first dwelling in 1762. Plus, a booming sawmill was in full operation there for most if not all of Sheldon’s life.

Chalk it up as one more glaring example of Sheldon’s snooty Old Deerfield-centric ways, which are blatantly obvious to anyone researching the town’s surrounding villages.

Though I myself was born of South Deerfield roots that reach as deep as Anglo roots there lie, and though I fished through the old mill site many times as a boy, it’s unlikely I would have known of the tavern had not venerable Conway historian and friend Deane Lee told me about it. I used to visit his stately Cricket Hill home, with a beautiful view of Mount Monadnock, to discuss history, genealogy and the surrounding forest.

Because Mr. Lee descended from the North Mill River Lee family (thus Lee Road), he knew of the tavern and, during an impromptu country ride on which he accompanied me, pointed out the two adjacent buildings that were once joined. “It was a busy place in its day,” he said with an engaging twinkle, and I didn’t for a millisecond doubt it.

Many years later, retired Franklin County Engineer and former Greenfield selectman Bill Allen was at the wheel of his full-sized SUV showing me the old Conway-Ashfield county-road layouts. When we passed the Hawks Tavern site he, too, mentioned the two buildings that had once been joined as a single large tavern. “An ideal tavern site because of its location at the fork of two country roads,” he said. “You can bet it was a roaring establishment.”

Despite pointing it out to me, I don’t recall either man using the name Hawks when identifying the tavern site. Thus, I didn’t associate that surname with it. I only knew there had been a public house there.

Then came my recent investigation of ancient South Deerfield deeds, which brought me through the Mill River District, settled in the 1760s and maybe a tad earlier. Months ago, I took Thomas on a little field trip to the old mill site of my trout-fishing days and discovered much had changed. A waterfall I remembered well from fishing its plunge pool was gone, and so was the narrow millpond above. Both features were swept away by a 21^st-century flood.

Prior to that, while examining Mill River deeds in my still-unresolved search for the Elijah Arms’ Tavern site in early 19^th-century Bloody Brook, I largely ignored several Hawks Tavern references. My focus at the time was elsewhere. Then, after a circuitous route back to Hawks Tavern through a round of Jewett-family research, everything fell into place. I then realized Hawks Tavern was the one Lee and Allen had showed me.

Wanting to investigate further, I revisited the deeds and made contact with a lifelong North Mill River neighbor now living across the road. Octogenarian John Pekarski told me his father knew Wil May and that he himself remembered the old man’s descendants that succeeded him on the property. In fact, Pekarski’s parents had once been tenants of the “Old Dance Hall” apartments.

Then came the Howes Brothers photos. So, fancy that. Hawks Tavern mystery in the rearview.

In the meantime, family-history researchers chasing Hawks leads have queried Historic Deerfield’s Facebook page for information about the tavern, and are told it no longer exists. Long gone, they say.

If you doubt me, look for yourself. The misinformation is there for all to read.

Let’s correct the record. Shout from the Sugarloaf summit that Hawks Tavern is alive and well, hidden in plain sight in two pieces in the only neighborhood it has known.

End of story.

I finally bought and read a biography of John Brown (1800-1859) which has been on my radar for a few years.

Why the delay? Not due to a shortage of biographies about the radical Connecticut-born abolitionist who attacked the Harpers Ferry, Virginia armory and was hanged for insurrection leading up to the Civil War. In fact, many options became the problem. I wanted the “definitive” work – but how would I find it? Procrastination led to impasse, but nothing to lose sleep over.

Having chased many leads over time, I was reluctant to pull the trigger before a recent Amazon suggestion piqued my interest. Likely all about timing, it just caught me at the right moment. Further investigation convinced me I had finally found the right source. So, I bought a “very good” hardcover and dust jacket in a mylar cover.

The unmarked book came from the library of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Herbert Donald (1920-2009), the biographer of other Civil War-era figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Charles Sumner. That validated him for me. Plus, dig this: the book I bought, To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown, was authored in 1970 by a UMass history professor named Stephen B. Oates, who died at 85 a couple of years ago in Amherst.

Had I been interested in Old John Brown as a UMass undergraduate in the early 1970s, I’m sure Oates would have been offering a course. Isn’t that what college professors do – offer classes that explore their books? But the timing was wrong: I was young and more focused on nighttime rambles, hitting baseballs, and tracking fly balls deep into the right-center gap against low, blinding late-afternoon sun. I found my way to Oates’ Brown biography a half-century later.

My interest in Brown wasn’t new, first sparked decades ago by Henry David Thoreau’s famous essay A Plea for Captain John Brown, written by the transcendentalist of Walden fame as the condemned man awaited execution in a Charlestown, Virginia jail cell. Thoreau differed with the mainstream press depiction of Brown as a dangerous madman, and wanted to correct the record in defense of a principled and defiant man willing to die for his belief that slavery was immoral and must end.

The Oates book taught me that Brown: 1) was a Mayflower descendant from a founding family of Windsor, Connecticut; 2) had many connections from a Torrington, Connecticut, upbringing to the town of my own Woodruff family’s New Hartford; 3) enrolled briefly in 1816 as a teen at Moses Hallock’s school in nearby Plainfield; and 4) became a radicalized abolitionist in the 1840s as a citizen of activist Springfield.

Situated along the Underground Railroad pipeline to Canada, Western Massachusetts’s largest city was then the home of aggressive antislavery organizations, with a strong following of rabid abolitionists who had free and open access to The Liberator, the antislavery newspaper published in Boston by William Lloyd Garrison.

I wanted to link this strong antislavery Connecticut Valley sentiment to contemporaneous “Free Soil Party” support in South Deerfield, some of it running through my Arms family lineage. So committed to the Free-Soil cause were some of these South Deerfield citizens who emigrated to Kansas Territory in the mid-1850s for the sole purpose of ruling the ballot box to establish a new slave-free state.

Off to the western frontier these local antislavery crusaders flocked by train, boat, and horse-drawn carriage. The move west was buoyed by funds from Worcester abolitionist Eli Thayer’s Emigrant Aid Societies – first of Massachusetts, then New England. Once there, these local folks and other political allies founded Lawrence, Kansas, today the liberal home of the University of Kansas.

These “northern rabblerousers” were not welcomed with open arms by slave owners and their militant allies from the bordering slave state of Missouri, many of whom rated progressive Massachusetts No. 1 on their enemy list.

From this collision of two strong-willed forces arose what has come to be known in American history as “Bleeding Kansas,” where the blood did indeed flow from both sides. There, on that slice of the Midwestern prairie, guerilla and open warfare broke out between Free-Staters and pro-slavery Border Ruffians on what is now recognized as the Civil War’s staging ground.

Although Old John Brown never lived in Lawrence, he wasn’t far away, settling in Osawatomie after his 1855 arrival from New York’s Adirondacks. It didn’t take long for him to build strong Lawrence alliances. He and his sons drank the antislavery Kool-Aid Lawrence was serving, and all were determined to defeat slavery in the new territory by any means possible, including violence.

Brown is most remembered in Kansas and Missouri for the vengeful, overnight, Pottawatomie Creek Massacre he led on May 24, 1856, a few days after a Missouri sheriff and his redneck vigilantes sacked Lawrence with fire and fury. Brown’s retaliatory raid left five pro-slavery farmers viciously hacked to death by anti-slavery sabers.

Nobody in Lawrence took a bigger hit during the 1856 annihilation than three Connecticut Valley brothers named Eldridge, all of them claiming strong mid-19^th century ties to South Deerfield. As business partners, the Eldridge brothers Shalor W., Thomas B., and James M. built, owned, and operated the opulent Free-State Hotel – hailed as the finest hotel west of St. Louis, and hated by pro-slavery forces as a shining anti-slavery beacon.

All three Eldridge brothers had lived in South Deerfield at some point after 1845 and were well-known in Franklin County before moving to Kansas between 1854 and 1856. Their branch of the Eldridge family was from Southampton by way of West Springfield. Shalor was a railroad contractor, James married Mary Augusta Arms of South Deerfield, and Thomas owned a shoe and dry-goods store on East Main Street in Greenfield where the Garden Theater now stands.

Plus, sister Frances Ann Eldridge married “Augusta” Arms Eldridge’s stepbrother and cousin Leonard B. Arms, a US Deputy Marshal famously gunned down in 1860 by Free-Soiler John Ritchie in Topeka.

Something I have thus far been unable to confirm is my suspicion that political differences regarding the slavery issue, which came to the fore in the 1830s and lingered for two decades, were a factor involved in the contentious 1848 split in South Deerfield’s Congregational Church. A scholarly friend, who is far more interested in churches than I am and who has studied the church’s history, is not convinced. On the other hand, he admits that information concerning the dispute is vague, and likely intentionally so.

I was hoping Oates would help me track the pre-Civil War abolition movement and, more importantly, that of our slice of the Connecticut Valley. Though helpful, his information and that of South Deerfield church records leaves many unanswered questions that may never be resolved.

Slavery became a church issue throughout the North beginning in the 1830s, creating fissures and disagreement among parishioners. Few back then supported total freedom and citizenship for freed slaves. Some supported “colonization,” which meant freeing enslaved people and shipping them back to Africa, while others favored citizenship without the right to vote. Still others, even in Thoreau and Emerson’s progressive Massachusetts, were unapologetic white supremacists who preferred to ignore the slavery issue.

The hot moral issue of slavery clearly cast sparks that could, and did, according to Oates, split communities and churches – especially on the Western frontier of Ohio and Illinois, but also in New England and New York. This political undercurrent obviously existed in South Deerfield as well, and may have been a contributing factor that split its church.

Then again, maybe it was pure coincidence that outspoken abolitionist ministers Rev. Samuel Ware and Rev. Theophilus Packard, Jr. settled in the community. Ware (1781-1866) was approaching 60 and semi-retired when he came to town in 1837, plunking down a tidy $4,600 for the old, 90-acre Arms/Whitney farm on the east side of North Main Street, south of the Bloody Brook Monument. An avowed abolitionist, Ware was admitted to the church in 1838.

Maybe it was also a coincidence that in 1848 Ware sold to Shalor Eldridge the half-acre lot on which the Monument Church was built. Eldridge immediately flipped the lot for no profit to the Monument Church’s building committee.

Hmmmm?

According to the deeds, Eldridge was at the time residing in Northfield. So, he was out of sight, out of mind for the rapid-fire sales, and no stranger to Ware. Like Eldridge, the minister’s wife, Lucy Strong Parsons, grew up in Southampton, a small Hampshire County town where she would have known the Eldridges since childhood. Six years after conveying the Monument Church lot, Eldridge and family moved to the Kansas Territory for political reasons aimed directly at the emancipation of slaves.

I have to wonder if Monument Church pastor David A. Strong of Connecticut was also an abolitionist? Although I have thus far been unable to answer this question, it wouldn’t surprise me.