Apr
23
2026

G.W. Mark Comes Back at Me

by Gary Sanderson

Quirky 19th-century Greenfield folk artist George Washington Mark came skipping back into my view recently, foot-free, like a flat stone skipped across a glassy summer pond.

Mark first appeared in an email message accompanied by a photo of one of his paintings, titled Sunrise. Then, a coincidental week later, an unrelated snail-mail package arrived at my doorstep from a Keene, New Hampshire return address that immediately caught my attention. The name on it was Terence Mark, pushing 90 at 87 years old.

At first, reading that return address in the upper lefthand corner of the large, padded envelope, I incorrectly associated it with the emailer, whose name I couldn’t remember. Curious about this cyberspace stranger, where he lived, and how he had found my December 2023 Reporter column about the peculiar G.W. Mark, I had responded promptly with a few questions that to this day remain unanswered.

Perhaps, I surmised, this package was his response to my email queries.

I sliced open the envelope with a knife, sat down with it in my comfy leather recliner and immediately dug in, quickly reading through the neat, four-page, handwritten letter inside. As it turned out, Terence Mark, a genealogy hobbyist with the same surname as the Greenfield folk artist, had for decades unsuccessfully attempted to connect to the artist. Perhaps I could help, he hoped, concluding his letter with a telephone number written below his signature.

At about 10 a.m., after breezing through all the material he had sent, mostly copies of personal genealogical information he had assembled over the years, I called his phone number. The call went to his answering machine, but he answered as I was leaving a short message.

What followed was an entertaining hour-long chat, during which I ascertained that he was not the sender of the week-old email query. There were simply two different, rapid-fire respondents to my same months-old local column. After sharing that reality with him, he was curious who the other fella was. So, I went to my email, found the message, and shared the sender’s name, which I will not print, before resuming our captivating discussion.

(Why my hesitancy to out the emailer? Simple etiquette. I didn’t want to even tiptoe past confidentiality issues.)

Speaking to Terence Mark, I discovered that he had submitted a copy of the first of my two Reporter columns about G.W. Mark to the monthly McCurdy Family Association Newsletter, printed in Canada. He thought it might be of interest to the membership because of numerous, recorded genealogical links between the New Hampshire McCurdy and Marks families over the years.

The McCurdy newsletter printed the column in full in its September 2025 issue. Given that fact, Terence Mark opined that it may have been the impetus for the email I received. Perhaps, he speculated, the email respondent was a subscriber, or knew one who had alerted him to the piece. Because the emailer had an obvious French surname, it sounded possible to me. Plus, the timing was right, not to mention the secretive sender’s decision to leave my answers unanswered.

I can understand the man’s secrecy. His Mark-attributed allegorical painting of a lonely peak penetrating fluffy white clouds was purchased at the sale of an important folk-art aficionado’s collection, and likely fetched a steep price. For obvious reasons, private art collectors choose not to publicize the location of their artworks. Hey, if priceless masterworks can be pilfered in the light of day from a famous Paris museum, how safe is valuable art on display in private homes and offices?

Upon reading my mystery man’s email and Googling his name, including his middle initial, to see if he was local, my quick online search proved fruitless. No one by his name lived within 50 miles of Montague, suggesting that he likely didn’t find my column on a local newsstand.

His email and color photos immediately spun my cranial wheels back to threads left dangling from my previous G.W. Mark research, which had been unleashed by my discovery of a whimsical oil-on-canvas painting of a spirited hound dog with direct connections to my own upper Greenfield Meadows property.

Salient among my lingering threads of discovery was the unknown burial place of Mark and his 700-pound metal coffin, known to many patrons of his Greenfield shop. He had explained that he didn’t want to encumber anyone with burial expenses. What he didn’t tell them was that he had no desire to publicize his final resting place, either.

Many mysteries about the Greenfield folk artist will likely never be solved – prominent among them his date of birth and his father’s gravesite. It is accepted that G.W. was born in Charlestown, New Hampshire to John and Hannah (Thomas) Mark in 1795, despite conflicting online reports of birth years 1798 and 1799 in neighboring communities. A major stumbling block is that Charlestown is a well-known genealogical “black hole,” as an 1840s Town Hall fire destroyed the town’s vital records dating back a century to the historically important Fort at No. 4.

It now seems possible that G.W. Mark’s mysterious burial place could be within reach with a little detective work. What we know for sure is that, according to his 1879 Greenfield Gazette and Courier obituary, he and his cumbersome casket were shipped to Charlestown, presumably, given its weight, by rail.

When I did a little poking around a couple of years ago, I found clues that strongly suggested a certain Springfield, Vermont cemetery as his final resting place. Some 13 years before his death, Mark had purchased gravestones there for his long-dead mother and younger brother, both of whom he had lost in early childhood.

I had planned to dig deeper – no pun intended – for G.W.’s mysterious gravesite, but had procrastinated. The recent email in my inbox was the impetus that nudged me to finally, for the first time, reach out to the Springfield town clerk, who encouraged me to explore her Town Hall burial records at my convenience. Though not certain, she suspected that current policy mandating records for all Vermont burials was in effect in the late 19th century, too. Thus, she speculated that Mark’s unmarked grave would be listed if he is buried there, and there would be no need for a metal detector to sniff out his distinctive coffin.

In no rush, I figured I’d wait till the weather warms and coordinate my probe with a trip to a nearby New Hampshire auction house. However, recent developments may speed the visit if I want to get there before Terence Mark does. He closed his four-page, cursive letter with the possibility of he himself exploring the Mark plot in Springfield’s oldest burial ground, which is much closer to him than me.

One never knows: maybe we’ll go together. I’d like to meet the man.

posted in Columns, Genealogy, Local history, Tavern Tidbits | No Comments

Apr
14
2026

A Salient Deerfield River Memory

by Gary Sanderson

The ghost of Mike Globetti wandered back into my sphere recently. A blast from the past. One triggered by my soon-to-be 97-year-old mother, still going strong.

So, you ask, who’s Mike Globetti? Good question. Though I knew who he was, Google had to tell me who he is 40-some years later. Discovered was that the man I long ago knew as the Boston Herald’s outdoor columnist is now media relations manager for the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control. Also, get this: He authored a humorous 1991 book that’s still in print, titled God Save the Quarterback!: American Football Goes to England.

So, why did this faraway media-relations man suddenly reappear to me? Well, bear with me.

When I met Globetti in the early 1980s, he had recently taken the Herald reins from retired outdoor writer and my late friend Dix White. A tad older than my father, “Dixie” was the Williams College man and Wayland Orvis store owner who sponsored my New England Outdoor Writers Association membership in 1981. A couple of years later, he backed me for inclusion in the Outdoor Writers Association of America. I remain a dues-paying, active member of both organizations to this day.

When I met the fun-loving Dixie in the spring of 1980, I was a cub sportswriter and outdoor columnist at the Greenfield Recorder, and he was in Charlemont as guest speaker for a sportsmen’s banquet – probably Trout Unlimited – held at Herm Prilipp’s Oxbow Motor Lodge and Restaurant.

Those were the earliest days of my Thursday “On The Trail” column that for 38 consecutive years arrived on Franklin County doorsteps each Thursday. I was then nearing 30 and mired between uncertain part-time and stable full-time employment under then-sports editor Bob York. Meanwhile, I was supplementing my meager income with a weekly two-hour sports talk show, The Sunday Sports Page, partnered with old friend and partner in crime Chip Ainsworth. The 10 a.m. till noon show was aired for more than five years by Greenfield’s WPOE, AM-1520, which promoted itself, if memory serves me, as “15,000 watts for western New England.”

But enough background. Let’s return to Globetti and what it was that pulled him back into the picture.

My mother was “going though stuff” at her South Deerfield home across from the Bloody Brook Monument and had uncovered a few things she thought I may want. Nothing extraordinary. Just a plastic, ring-bound, 2003 softcover booklet of historical essays, Come Home Again: As Greenfield Celebrates 250 Years, published for the city’s bicenquinquagenary, and three newspaper clippings documenting accomplishments from my own sporting past.

Two of the sports clips memorialized youthful exploits on the diamond. The third was Globetti’s July 2, 1984 Herald column about a productive flyfishing outing I guided on the lower Deerfield River between Bardwells Ferry and Stillwater. My mother thought that the Herald column especially might someday, if not now, be of interest to my grandsons, so she didn’t want to discard it.

After retrieving and reading through everything, what immediately struck me was that my salient memory from the Globetti adventure wasn’t mentioned in his praiseful column. What I most remembered was the female friend he brought along for the ride, flyrod and waders in tow. I remembered her as “coordinator” of the state’s Urban Angler Program – established in 1979 to introduce city folks to fishing – but couldn’t for the life of me recall her name.

Enter the AI Genie, who informed me she was Debbie Chamberlain, which immediately rang a bell I accepted.

As planned, Chamberlain and Globetti arrived well before dawn. I think we met at the Whately diner off Route 91, where we loaded their gear into my Jeep Cherokee and drove Conway backroads to one of my favorite Deerfield River access points at South Station.

We drove to the cul-de-sac looking down at the South River gorge at the end of the dirt road and took a right onto an old trolley bed soon blocked by a barway. There we pulled on our waders, gathered our equipment, and journeyed down a steep game trail to the river’s western edge. Though we caught a few trout and some smallmouth bass, I wasn’t thrilled with the action and suggested we pack up and circle back to Johnson’s Hole, another of my favorite spots about three miles downstream.

“You never know,” I told them. “The fishing might be better there. If the flow stays the same, it should be perfect.”

So, off we went, eventually taking Conway’s Hoosac Road to the southern end of the same trolley bed on the other side of South River to my customary parking place on a power line high above the Deerfield’s west bank. From there, we descended another, even steeper, game trail following the edge of a potentially perilous ravine.

At river’s edge we crossed the shallow, narrowed head of the rapids flowing into Johnson’s Hole. Then we spread out, wading waist-deep into angling position along a curling riffle that emptied into a long, deep channel. The plan was to cast 45 degrees upstream into the passing current, mend line to eliminate drag, and dead-drift our weighted nymphs for the final 90-degree swing through the trout-feeding zone.

I was fishing a Montana nymph on sink-tip line, the fly colored like a bumble bee and simulating a variety of aquatic insects trout eat. My guests, too, were fishing sink-tip line and nymphs I can’t remember. Because their offerings were most likely selected by me from my own fly box, they were likely casting such trusty patterns as Hare’s Ears, Grey or Olive Nymphs, Revised Muskrats, March Browns, or Dark Hendricksons, all proven producers in my experience.

The problem for my inexperienced guests was that they couldn’t execute the necessary precision casts, presentation, drag-free drift, and the right depth required for success. Plus, they didn’t know the water like I did. As I caught one nice rainbow after another, they couldn’t buy a strike if their lives depended on it. When helpful instruction and demonstration failed to improve their success, I ultimately stood them by my side to play fish hooked by me. By morning’s end, they became happy campers as I started thinking about the looming worknight of taking calls on the Recorder sports desk.

On our drive back to their car at the diner, we had a spirited conversation about what had unfolded: the beautiful surroundings, the rattling river and its many trout-rich tributaries. That’s when Ms. Chamberlain suggested I would be the perfect candidate to write an informative Deerfield River fishing guidebook for anglers unfamiliar with the ecosystem and clueless about hidden accesses like the two I had traveled that day. It would be nice, she said, for outsiders to have a pocket-sized resource with maps pinpointing the best holes and runs, not to mention long-forgotten trolley beds, game trails, and other access routes.

I chuckled at what was, to me, an absurd suggestion. I didn’t hesitate to tell her that, for selfish reasons, I was not interested in any such job. I felt absolutely no inclination to share my waters with transitory anglers. I preferred nature’s solitude – peaceful tranquility backed by the percussion of the river’s rattle. Heaven on earth.

As it turned out, my requested promotional services weren’t needed. Within 10 years, the book Ms. Chamberlain desired hit the market, perhaps written by a willing author she convinced to do the job I refused. Close on its heels came the whitewater community, their rambunctious presence violating the quiet sought by wilderness anglers.

These days a destination for hit-and-run recreational users, the Deerfield River ain’t what it used to be. Far too chaotic for anglers like me.

The river I knew and loved was a wilder place, minus occasional disruptions of passing trains on the opposite bank – sights and sounds I learned to tolerate, night or day, but could have lived without.

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

Apr
01
2026

Remembering Robert Paul Wolff

by Gary Sanderson

Recent visitors to my upper Greenfield Meadows home got my wheels spinning back to my wayward early-college days, when liberty, freedom, and autonomy drenched each refreshing breath of rebellious Amherst air during the 1971-72 school year.

The visitors were my widowed sister-in-law Jan, four years my senior, from Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, and her brother-in-law Bud, a retired international litigator from Croton-on-Hudson, New York, four years her senior. It just so happens that my home is a convenient midpoint relay station for Jan’s visits to his scenic lower Hudson Valley home near West Point.

Both guests brought to my doorstep vivid memories from that turbulent era of protest and cultural upheaval – he a Sixties Holy Cross grad and Vietnam veteran, she a contemporaneous college dropout with a child who settled in a secluded, mountaintop, back-to-the-Earth alternative community in a place called Lost Nation.

Having participated in many similar interactions over 47 years of marriage, I always look forward to such discussions, which arise like steam from a teapot – some tapping into my soul’s deepest juices, which flood my consciousness through veins of youthful memories that love to bleed.

Bud, a reader, often shares suggested readings – as though I need them – sometimes with a gift book in hand. This visit was such a case. He thought I might enjoy late French historian Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, which he handed me on his way out the door.

“No pressure,” he said. “You can read it, discard it or pass it on. Your choice.”

Well, I gave it a shot and blew through it in a couple of days. Bloch was critical of his French countrymen for what he perceived as passive resistance to their German conquerors. The problem with the topic was that I’m no European or World War II historian and thus didn’t connect with many historical references that would be familiar to any French reader.

Long ago I chose to focus on my own place, our verdant slice of the Connecticut Valley, along with my genealogical connections to it and how it all relates to the larger American narrative. That, in and of itself, presents a lifetime of work, with little time for diversions and distractions.

Bloch’s wartime observations reminded me of those expressed by his fellow countryman and World War I veteran Jean Giono in his Refusal to Obey. His criticism of wrongheaded orders from feckless military commanders also brought me back to the writings of the bitter, prolific 19th-century American journalist, author, and Civil War veteran Ambrose Bierce.

But enough of that. The best development from our conversation unfolded after my guests’ departure, coming to me like sweet, inspiring lilac scent through a muggy May window. For some reason, thoughts of American philosopher Robert Paul Wolff came to mind. Must have been the Sixties vibes that carried me there.

I knew Wolff from my earliest days at UMass Amherst, when he was a new professor and I took a couple of his classes focused on books he had written. The first examined individual sovereignty and other political-philosophical concepts in his best-known book, In Defense of Anarchism (1970). Then came his philosophy of higher education itself in The Ideal of the University (1969).

Both were fascinating classes that captured my fancy during an otherwise distracted, uneventful first round of college.

Though as a working adult I had discovered and sometimes visited Wolff’s blog, The Philosopher’s Stone, I had lost track of it since the COVID crisis and was curious about his thoughts on today’s political climate. I knew he’d have something to say about ICE and unconstitutional acts, but soon discovered he had died a little more than a year ago, on January 6, 2025, age 91, at Duke Hospital in Durham, North Carolina.

Readers curious about Wolff will find no shortage of online biographical information about him. He was a giant in the American philosophical community, with prestigious teaching credits at the University of Chicago, Columbia, and Harvard, as well as UMass and others.

It was at Columbia, in 1968, that he gained fame for his controversial support of Vietnam War protestors occupying the university’s Low Library. His daring differences with the Columbia administration soon landed him in Amherst, where I became a beneficiary. I think my journalism mentor Howard Ziff alerted me to Wolff and encouraged me to check him out. Both professors arrived at UMass when I did, and I feel fortunate to have found and learned from them.

The timing was right in 1971 for Wolff’s UMass arrival. I have over the years told many people in casual conversation that such a lightning-rod academic would never, in my mind, be hired by our state university today. Had he been writing books like In Defense of Anarchism today or during right-wing TV personality Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News reign, the “news” entertainer would have been calling for his ouster and sending annoying lackey Jesse Watters to Amherst to harass him and school administrators with bright lights, cameras, and microphones.

I am grateful to have been there for year one of Robert Paul Wolff’s 37-year UMass tenure. A stroke of good luck placed me at the right place, right time to meet one of my two most influential profs, all the while enchanted by the scent of liberty and autonomy in the Amherst air.

May he rest in peace… and forever challenge authority wherever he may be.

posted in Columns, Local history | No Comments

Mar
26
2026

Media World’s Passing Me By

by Gary Sanderson

A brilliant early-March day. Tuesday afternoon. Hot sun. Thermometer near 70 in the shade. Grandsons Jordan, 20, and Arie, 16, in town for a quick visit from their Williamstown, Vermont home.

Oh my! How time flies. Seems like yesterday when my wife and I were meeting their mother or her parents at a midpoint rendezvous site in a McDonald’s parking lot within earshot of the Interstate 91/Interstate 89 interchange in White River Junction. Now Jordan is driving his own compact SUV to us, his brother, soon to be a licensed driver himself, riding shotgun.

The boys were in town for a little visit after a long, cold winter. Figuring a Big Y takeout meal would work, we ordered a family-size fish and chips, an order of sea scallops, and a party pizza. A perfect pregame buffet for the nationally televised Celtics road loss to the San Antonio Spurs and budding superstar Victor Wembanyama – an agile 7-foot-5 freak of nature with otherworldly hardcourt skills. A close contest throughout, the Celtics may have prevailed had not Jaylen Brown been ejected for arguing a second-quarter non-call of what he thought was a pushing foul driving him out of bounds.

My salient memory from the boys’ visit is the way they tracked up-to-the-minute sports news on their iPhones while glued to the NBA game. Observing them thumbing their way from one online site to another and reporting what they were learning reminded me once again of how fast the world is passing me by as I age out in retirement.

Hey, get this: I don’t even carry a cell phone, if you can imagine that. I’ve owned a total of one, which plugged into a cradle on my car’s console for a brief period of my working life. That lasted maybe a year before I gave it, along with my wife’s car, to my younger son. Stubborn, I guess. Locked in my old ways. Still, to this day, I have never sent or received a text. I’m just not OK with carrying a 24/7 tracking device. What can I say? Just me. Some would call it ridiculous.

But let us not forget that I’m an old news junkie who once bought two Boston newspapers a day, and often a NYC tabloid to boot when the time was right. That was during the first two-thirds of a 40-year newspaper career with direct access to national and international newswires, not to mention the best Franklin County news feed in the valley.

From my desk at the front end of the newsroom I took calls, supervised staff, edited and formatted copy, and laid out the daily sports package. During idle moments awaiting late games and box scores, I’d wade through the Associated Press and Washington Post/Los Angeles Times newswires and preview the local news and obits for the next day’s newspaper.

These days, people don’t need to wait for the morning paper to get their news. It comes to them even quicker than I used to get it on the wire, arriving on devices resting in the palm of their hand while waiting in the supermarket checkout line or, heaven forbid, bobbing their thumbs, heads down, crossing city streets.

No wonder the modern world is phasing out print media. I could see it coming when my kids were blossoming into young men and had no desire, or need, to gather news from hardcopy. They preferred to chase it down on phones and tablets, desk and laptops, while absorbing books on Kindle. To them, even cable TV news was a secondary source.

My grandsons are even more advanced. I watched them track Miami Heat power forward Bam Adebayo’s fraudulent 83-point game on their phones, beginning with the news he’d finished the first quarter with 31 points. As they followed courtside tweets from Miami, they simultaneously followed news from the World Baseball Classic, the Vermont schoolboy basketball tournament – and who knows what else that they didn’t want to share. They were totally immersed in the modern-day news cycle.

Watching them navigate from site to site told me I’m passé, maybe even Neanderthal, for preferring print media, be it books, magazines, or documents. That pigeonholes me into the endangered-species category – a late-Pleistocene dinosaur watching the ice melt and my relevance vanish like a blacktop puddle after a summer rainstorm.

There’s no denying or preventing it: print media is following the path of the horse and buggy. I’d guess that for every five longtime newspaper subscribers listed in the daily obituaries, there may be one new subscription to replace them. And that unsustainable ratio is doomed only to get worse. At least that’s the way I see it, and I’ve been observing it for many years – first as a career newspaperman at a 200-year-old local paper hemorrhaging readers and advertising revenues at an alarming rate during the new millennium, and now as a retired freelancer on the outside looking in.

This reality really hit home for me two years ago, when, in May of 2024, I received a snail-mail notification from Rolling Stone magazine informing me that the June issue would be my last as a lifetime subscriber. I had purchased the lifetime deal nearly a half century earlier, decades before the New Journalism magazine’s narcissistic publisher/founder Jann Wenner survived grave health concerns and sold out.

If memory serves me, the new sheriff in town offered “lifetime” subscribers like me a few options: we could either accept a free, trimmed-down online edition, or pay an annual fee for the full publication online or in print. Resistant to the annoying options and in a protest mood, I immediately became a former Rolling Stone reader – a status that still holds but may soon change. Truth told, I do miss the magazine.

The magazines now delivered to my doorstep are the weekly New Yorker, which I previously viewed as a snooty Big Apple publication, and the cultish Sun, published in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I’ve read the Sun for many years and was, after discontinuing my Rolling Stone subscription, gifted the New Yorker by a neighbor with access to a promotional reduced rate for friends.

Meanwhile, I’ve already decided not to renew my Orion magazine subscription when it expires. It’s been taken over by a new editorial staff that doesn’t fit my tastes since editor-in-chief Chip Blake left in 2020. Under Blake, Orion’s subtitle read Nature, Culture, Place. Now, new editors have removed the Place and gone to a more international focus that doesn’t float my birchbark canoe. I’m a place-based reader and writer, focused on this place and on our Western Hemisphere.

As hard as it may be to swallow, my Baby-Boomer generation of print-media consumers is being rudely phased out. That realization was delivered loud and clear by my Generation Z grandsons, who unknowingly slapped me upside the head with it.

posted in Columns, Grandkids | No Comments

Mar
01
2026

Historic/Prehistoric Connecticut River Fisheries: A new Spin

by Gary Sanderson

As local trout streams eagerly await the rush and roar of spring and emit gurgling winter whispers through icy cracks and crevices, it’s time to revisit a topic I’ve addressed often over five decades of outdoor writing. Call it an evolving discussion about Connecticut Valley’s historic and prehistoric anadromous fisheries, with occasional diversions into the neighboring Merrimack Valley.

The impetus is an article in the most recent New Hampshire Archeologist, co-authored by my South Deerfield friend Peter Thomas and his Amherst research partner Stuart Fiedel. The two respected, retired, Ph.D. archeologists share careers of rich field experience. Their 30-page piece, “Casting Our Nets Wide: Exploring Native Fisheries in Interior Southern New England,” is the condensed Reader’s Digest version of a comprehensive, 429-page online book on which they collaborated: Fishing and Hunting at the Falls: New Perspectives on Connecticut River Valley Archaeology and Ethnology.

The book awards a third author credit to well-known Northampton avocational archaeologist David “Bud” Driver, who offered enthusiastic assistance, encouragement, and access to private collections along the long, winding road of inquiry.

This in-depth scholarly undertaking began years ago with informal conversations about the dynamics of the annual spring spawning runs of American shad and Atlantic salmon, as well as the accompanying herring, alewife, sturgeon and lamprey eels. Their probe then explored the importance of these migratory fish to indigenous and colonial inhabitants.

Last year I reported that the book was underway and promised to share it upon completion. So, true to my word, here it is, fresh off the press, so to say. It first came to light online in November at www.researchgate.net, and can still be read there, as well as at www.peterthomashistory.com. Driver promises to have a hardcopy privately printed between two covers for his personal library.

Though unstated, this new work is a necessary addendum to West Coast anthropologist Catherine Carroll Carlson’s 1992 UMass Amherst doctoral dissertation, The Atlantic Salmon in New England History and Prehistory: Social and Environmental Implications. Viewed at the time as a groundbreaking study by an aspiring archaeologist from the opposite side of the continent, her thesis sounded the death knell for a struggling Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Restoration Project by identifying a curious absence of salmon remains in New England’s archaeological record.

Carlson concluded that this lack of salmon remains proved that New England salmon migration had been insignificant and could not have approached the great numbers ballyhooed in fishing lore. All the fanciful tales of abundant New England salmon runs, she surmised, were grossly exaggerated – even intentionally so – by 17th- and 18th-century colonial leaders attempting to increase the flow of European emigrants to the New World. In her scholarly opinion, it was a clever ruse in a new world where salmon presence was, in fact, nothing to write home about.

Thomas and Fiedel propose that advanced technology might be able to get new answers from the acidic riverside New England soils in which preservation of fish remains and perishable fishing tackle is poor. Though they don’t mention Carlson, they obviously differ with her assessment of historic and prehistoric salmon runs.

Their opinion rises from a nuanced look at the deceivingly sparse archaeological salmon record, including a careful review of thin documentary evidence by such chroniclers as 18th-century diarist Matthew Patten (1719-1795) of Bedford, New Hampshire. Patten painted the picture of a viable Merrimack River salmon run during the second half of the 18th century, and Thomas and Fiedel believe this would have been analogous to what was contemporaneously occurring at Connecticut River falls in Enfield, Connecticut; Holyoke and Montague, Massachusetts; and Vernon and Bellows Falls, Vermont.

Precolonial- and colonial-era salmon runs, they say, were consistent, plentiful, and highly valued by those who harvested them with nets, traps, spears, and arrows. So, put that in your Catlinite pipe and smoke it.

Thomas, who crossed archaeological paths with Carlson back in the day, has a leg up on her regarding the local scene, having led archaeological excavations and produced site reports at Riverside/Gill and the so-called Sokoki Fort near the site of Vermont’s Vernon Dam. Carlson had no hands-on digging experience at any of the 75 Northeastern indigenous sites on which she based her study, arriving at her conclusions by analyzing the work of others.

Based on his own Gill and Sokoki Fort excavations, private artifact collections, archaeological discoveries made by others at Merrimack River sites, and a sparse but revealing historical record, Thomas concludes that salmon runs were significant enough to attract annual, organized, sophisticated fish-gathering operations. Yes, shad was the annual staple, but salmon were a sought-after delicacy, whether taken coincidentally in spring shad seines or speared in their fall spawning lairs on small, cold, clear, gravel-bedded tributaries.

Thomas and Fiedel put a welcome new twist our understanding of the multi-seasonal, multi-component fishing camps maintained around waterfalls, which offered the best opportunities for plentiful harvests in clogged settling pools and highly effective manmade weirs and traps. They believe that the artifact assemblages, midden contents, and fish and faunal remains prove that well-known indigenous “fishing camps” hosted a mix of many three-season hunter-gatherer activities.

The new monograph presents far too much information – including photos and illustrations, maps, tables, and diagrams – to adequately summarize here. The authors needed 30 pages to whittle it down for the Archeologist. My suggestion is to visit Thomas’s website and start by reading the 30-pager, noting special points of personal interest that are expanded upon in Fishing and Hunting at the Falls.

Though it may take time to get comfortable with archaeological lingo, your diligence will be rewarded with cutting-edge historical scholarship about anadromous fisheries, not to mention the vexing Atlantic salmon question.

This new look at our inland anadromous fisheries, and what they meant to indigenous people before us, is sure to be acknowledged as the definitive work on the fascinating topic.

The way I look at it, Carlson got the ball rolling, and Thomas and Fiedel booted it into the back of the net.

The final word? Unlikely.

New questions always arise.

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

Feb
12
2026

Sunderland Heirloom Blanket Mystery

by Gary Sanderson

A midnight glance at February’s cold Snow Moon high in the sky unleashed thoughts of an old family treasure, held by five generations of female heirs from my Sunderland/South Deerfield ancestry before vanishing in the Wild West.

Thoughts of the relic entered my consciousness due to recent email correspondence about it and related topics with an old Greenfield Recorder colleague now residing near Lawrence, Kansas, where some of my peripheral genealogical tendrils lead.

I don’t expect ever to see or touch this once-worshipped family relic, which Sunderland historian John Montague Smith describes as a “bed blanket” in a genealogical footnote on Page 549 of his 1899 History of the Town of Sunderland, Massachusetts (1673-1899), Which Originally Embraced Within Its Limits the Present Towns of Montague and Leverett.

What follows may get confusing. I’ll give it my best shot.

Smith says the homespun blanket came to my family with Mary Maghill, a colonial dame of unknown parentage who in 1736 married the Deerfield-born Fort Dummer soldier Joseph Alexander (1705-1761). They settled and eventually died in Hadley. From Maghill/Alexander, he said, it descended through four consecutive daughters named Mary, ending with the twice-married Mary (Augusta Arms Eldridge) Torbert (1826-1913) – a so-called “Free-Stater” or “Free-Soiler,” who moved to Bloody Kansas in 1856 and was widowed two years later.

Sharing her mother’s first name, this Mary – the younger sister of Eliza Arms Woodruff (1824-1898), my great-great-grandmother – went by Augusta, and was responsible for removing the blanket from a community where it was meaningful. At some point just before, or more likely after, her mother’s Christmas 1887 passing in South Deerfield, it went to the aforementioned Lawrence, where its faraway importance diminished and it has since vanished.

Typewritten family records from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and today in my possession mirror Smith regarding the blanket’s Mary Maghill Alexander genesis, but then my records take the provenance a step further. I’m guessing my unnamed source was Eliza, with important 20th-century additions and corrections by her daughter Fannie Woodruff Sanderson (1865-1947), my great-grandmother.

Between the first and last blanket heirs – Mary Maghill/Alexander and Mary Augusta Arms Eldridge/Torbert – Smith names the heirs as Mary Alexander Smith, who married David Smith of Montague; Mary Smith Graham, who married tanner and shoemaker Benjamin Graham of Sunderland; and Mary Graham Arms, who married South Deerfield shoemaker Erastus Arms.

The blanket first tickled my curiosity nearly 40 years ago, soon after the passing of my 93-year-old spinster great-aunt Gladys Hayes Sanderson (1895-1989). Known to my immediate family as “Antie,” she was Fannie’s daughter and our unofficial family historian, and steward of records and photographs. “Antie” and I lived under the same roof twice: first when I was a boy, and again after I bought the South Deerfield home to which she was born and granted life-estate.

The blanket first crossed my path in the History of Sunderland. I then chased down confirmation along with some crucial additional information in the private records squirreled away by “Antie” in an old, black, trifold, plastic insurance packet. A comparison of the two sources revealed one troubling inconsistency involving the identity of Augusta Eldridge’s second husband. His given name was Dr. John B. (a/k/a J.B.) Torbert, a Humboldt, Kansas physician who tied the knot in 1871 and died 14 years later, leaving Augusta widowed for a second time.

We can excuse Smith’s History for incorrectly reporting her new married name as “Talbot.” My private records originally shared the mistake before it was crossed out and corrected to “Torbert” in permanent black ink. I have also found his last name inaccurately spelled “Tolbert.” Online today, however, it is easy to verify that the right name was Dr. J.B. Torbert.

Though still anyone’s guess, our blanket probably resided in South Deerfield for the duration of Mary Arms’s (1794-1887) long life. Some readers may remember that I featured her in this space a few months ago, accompanied by her circa-1855 ambrotype photo, expertly restored by Chris Clawson.

Had her daughter Mary Augusta taken it with her on her maiden voyage to Kansas, it undoubtedly would have soon vanished during Bloody Kansas guerrilla skirmishing between New England anti-slavery Free-Staters and Southern pro-slavery Border Ruffians from Missouri.

In the spring of 1856, Mary Augusta accompanied her first husband James Monroe Eldridge to Kansas City. There he and his brothers briefly owned and operated a hotel that served as a staging area for newcomers from the New England Emigrant Aid Company.

The Eldridge gang soon moved to Lawrence, where the brothers built two hotels – the Free State and the Eldridge – both of which were destroyed by Border Ruffians. The Eldridge Hotel was the target of the famous August 21, 1863 Quantrill Raid of Civil War lore. Had the blanket been there, its probability of survival would have been minimal.

Luckily, Mary Augusta was out of town for Quantrill’s blood-lust attack. As the frontier town burned and residents were murdered in the street, she was back home visiting her South Deerfield family, with young biological son Edwin in tow.

The teenage stepson she left behind in Lawrence was not so fortunate. Store clerk James Eldridge – born in South Deerfield to her husband’s deceased first wife – was shot down by Quantrill’s gunmen after opening the store’s safe for them.

I suppose our heirloom blanket might have accompanied mother Augusta on the passenger train back to Kansas, but it’s doubtful she would have risked it with the state so vulnerable.

Augusta was back in South Deerfield again during the summer of 1884 to celebrate her mother’s 90th birthday. Perhaps by then her mother thought it was time to part with her sentimental blanket. If not, Augusta returned to her old hometown for the last time in 1909, accompanied by adult son Edwin. By then, her mother had been dead more than 20 years. It was time for a move to Kansas.

Had she neglected to claim her inherited prize, it would likely have wound up in the family home where I spent my first 12 years. There, in the sunny front parlor that waked a few family members over the years, a red-stained 18th-century blanket chest with bootjack ends was cherished by “Antie.” It contained old, neatly folded blankets and quilts, an 1827 Bardwell sampler, and bagsful of fabric shards stored for patchwork quilt-making.

I believe that piece of furniture came across the river to South Deerfield whenever possession of the blanket was transferred from Sunderland’s Mary Smith Graham to her daughter Mary Graham Arms. Today the blanket chest stands against the east wall of my mother’s bedroom.

Although the History of Sunderland follows the bed blanket only as far as Mary Augusta, my private records take it a step further. An ink note concluding the genealogical records says that the “Blanket made by Mary Alexander [is] now (Aug. 21, 1913) held by Nellie Augusta Rickerson Colorado Springs, Colo, granddaughter of Mary Augusta Torbert.”

It’s worth noting that this note was entered into the record only three days before Mary Augusta’s death. As she lay dying, her family considered the blanket important enough to ask about its whereabouts. Thankfully, the response was promptly recorded for posterity.

Some 20 years ago I followed this lead, chasing down Nellie Rickerson’s Colorado grandson, Kurt Laidlaw, and querying him by email. He knew nothing about any heirloom blanket.

Now, an interesting little caveat.

In recent years of researching Bloody Kansas, I uncovered a tasty little tidbit I’m not yet finished exploring. I found it near the end of Mary Augusta Torbert’s lengthy Lawrence obituary in the July 30, 1913 Jeffersonian Gazette.

The bright, shiny object was that, to gain favor with Lawrence’s Plymouth Congregational Church – not to mention acceptance into its cemetery – Mary Augusta donated to the church “the gift of a valuable keepsake.”

The family blanket, perhaps? Did she prefer not to share that destination with family?

I reached out to the church in recent years and never received the courtesy of a response.

Who knows? The chase may someday justify a road trip.

So, stay tuned. I’d love to reunite that old heirloom blanket with its red-stained blanket chest with bootjack ends.

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

Jan
30
2026

Fall Hill’s in Gill, But Where’s Fort No. 10?

by Gary Sanderson

An email that arrived in my inbox last week pulled me back to Gill before it was so named, and nudged me into a stream-of-consciousness realm. I guess I was ripe for it, given the elusive subjects I’ve been exploring in recent weeks and months.

The email query came from transplanted Vermonter Andrea Varney, who grew up in Greenfield as Andrea Liebenow. Her mother, who died at 88 in 2015, was Sylvia Gallagher, born to her Smead family’s Greenfield Meadows dairy farm. A dedicated schoolteacher and longtime Greenfield historical commissioner, Sylvia was a proud member of a founding Connecticut Valley family, with deep roots in Deerfield and the surrounding Franklin County communities that peeled off from it.

The retired Ms. Gallagher had a dream. In her golden years, she was tunnel-visioned on publishing a book chronicling her Smead genealogy and the family’s extensive land holdings. Admirably focused and organized, she assembled quite a collection of data aimed at accomplishing her goal.

Problem was that she finally ran out of time. Now daughter Andrea is lugging her mother’s baton to the finish line. In the process over the past few years, we have met and talked often, mostly collaborating to unravel confusing land records. The book is expected to hit the street no later than June.

Andrea’s latest question came to me during her final fact-checking round. The subject immediately tickled my curiosity, because in many ways it reminded me of problems I have been encountering regarding a Revolutionary War powder horn, which I mentioned in my last column. Like me, she was trying to identify the site of a place name that has become obsolete and hasn’t been recognized for ages. This is not unusual in the lexicon of old place names, even among those once used in everyday conversation.

Ms. Varney’s mystery site was “Fall Hill,” mentioned in 1730s Deerfield proprietors’ records associated with Ebenezer Smead’s land in what is now Gill, but was then the northeast corner of Deerfield. Gill was originally divvied up into irregularly-shaped “pitch lots” assigned to proprietors within a vast parcel referred to in documents as “east of the Green River and north of Cheapside.”

My own mystery site is “Ft. No. 10,” inscribed on an illustrated powder horn I believe was carried by Greenfield Revolutionary militiaman Tubel Nash (1754-1813). Nash served on the so-called “Northern Campaign,” located between Albany and the forts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point.

Ms. Varney’s mystery place name and mine both appear to have vanished from collective memory, which makes fact-checking a daunting task indeed when trying to interpret old deeds, proprietors’ records, probate documents and, yes, powder-horn inscriptions.

So, at the time of her query we were both chasing similar types of information.

Enter the newfangled research tool called “artificial intelligence,” acronym AI, feared by many as a future job-killer. At the insistence of a friend with genealogical focus, I started dabbling in Free ChatGPT a few months ago with remarkable success in some areas of inquiry. Though the AI Genie hasn’t been much help in my pursuit of “Ft. No. 10,” it did strike gold regarding Ms. Varney’s “Fall Hill,” agreeing with my own previous interpretation, based on deed research, as the hill overlooking Great Falls from the north.

Here’s what the AI Genie found in less than five seconds about Gill’s “Fall Hill,” located within the 1736 boundary of the Deerfield land grants on acreage east of the Green River and north of Cheapside:

“Fall Hill (sometimes referred to as the Hill at the Falls) is a prominent topographical landmark located in what is now Gill, Massachusetts;

“It is specifically located near the Great Falls, now Turners Falls, on the Connecticut River;

“The hill served as a reference point for laying out lots;

“Records from the proprietors often used Fall Hill as a boundary marker for the ‘Falls Woods’ or ‘Falls Field’ divisions.”

So, there you have it: Fall Hill, rising north across the road from what is now the Turners Falls-Gill Bridge, bordered south by Route 2, west by Factory Hollow, and east by Main Road. It was up this steep slope from Fall River that Captain William Turner, after tethering horses in the hollow, led his militiamen to their infamous predawn Falls Fight on May 19, 1676.

Thus far, I’ve had no such luck with the AI Genie on several attempts to learn more about “Fort No. 10.” I’ve asked basically the same question many different ways and have come up empty. No promising leads have arisen from direct inquiries, accompanied by powder-horn photos, to historians, museums, historical societies, and even fine-tuned Facebook groups.

One recent path of inquiry led me to Fort Massachusetts – at North Adams, dismantled before the Revolution – and the so-called “line of forts” that hugged the northern border of Massachusetts between the Connecticut and Hudson valleys during the French and Indian War (FIW). Could there have been a numbered sequence of forts known to earlier soldiers like Greenfield’s Agrippa Wells, who served in both the FIW and Revolution? Wells was Nash’s captain and would have served with his father, miller Daniel Nash, in the earlier war.

Maybe Wells’ Revolutionary troopers from the Deerfield area marched to their own drummer, accompanied by a private map that numbering a sequence of dismantled FIW fort sites potentially available as staging sites.

In his 1904 Origins of Williamstown: A History, author Arthur Latham Perry puts Captain Ephrain Williams “in unbroken command of the line of forts, twelve in all, including Deerfield, from Dec. 10, 1745 to Dec. 10, 1746.” Problem is, he fails to name these forts.

Nonetheless, we know the list included Fort Shirley in Heath and Fort Pelham in Rowe, plus some of the other 21 forts that stood between Fort Massachusetts and Northfield and are named in Yale archaeologist Michael D. Coe’s 2006 book The Line of Forts: Historical Archaeology on the Colonial Frontier of Massachusetts.

Hmmm? Lots of questions. Few answers.

Oh well. At least we got Ms. Varney squared away.

posted in Columns, Local history | No Comments

Jan
17
2026

Readin’, Writin’ and ‘Rithmetic

by Gary Sanderson

With the new year upon us, our deer can breathe a sigh of relief after surviving the hunting season, my previously bloated woodshed is rapidly hollowing out, and right here within reach of my favorite recliner stands a slim stack of three recently purchased books to read.

The books represent the last of the itemized 2025 purchases that’ll accompany my annual income-tax package to the accountant in a few weeks. As much as I dread this annual bookkeeping chore, I have often told my wife that the hourly wage dwarfs anything I ever made as a newspaperman. So, I force myself to do it, and have learned to total each month on the fly to simplify the last step.

The task is not nearly as arduous as the old QuickBooks income-and-expense report I once annually compiled for our bed-and-breakfast statement.

My three new books cover an eclectic mix of topics that may help me solve lingering questions I’ve been exploring in recent months and years. One book focuses on the extinct passenger pigeon, long a personal fascination of mine. Another digs into the ancient, mysterious, Stonehenge-like standing stones on Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The third examines well-known historic-archaeological sites of French and Indian and Revolutionary War fame up and down the bloody, war-scarred, 18th-century Lake George-Lake Champlain corridor.

A.W. Schorger’s The Passenger Pigeon: Its Natural History and Extinction was published in 1955 and is generally accepted as the definitive scholarly work on the subject. I marked and bought it from a monthly snail-mail catalog I receive from a Peterborough, New Hampshire dealer whose offerings focus on sporting topics. It surprises me that anyone can still make a living in that genre, but he and his wife seem to be doing just fine, thank you.

I salute them, and have picked off some great stuff from their catalog, which, for sporting bibliophiles, always includes rare, antiquarian books about fly fishing, Tonkin-cane rods, fine European shotguns, wing-shooting, and related topics.

I bought the passenger-pigeon book as a useful library reference. To get a feel for it, I blew through the first 100 pages and learned about the spring and fall flocks that once darkened bright sunlit skies for scores of miles and left the forest floor beneath their clogged, chirping roosting sites covered with a foot-deep layer of dung that suffocated young understory.

Though Schorger’s is not the type of book the average reader would tackle cover to cover, if one is looking for scientific passenger-pigeon data, it’s all there between two cloth hard covers.

The other two new books awaiting me are written by archaeologists whose topics just so happen to send enticing tendrils into our verdant slice of the Connecticut Valley: Mark Edmond’s Orcadia: Land, Sea and Stone in Neolithic Orkney (2019), and David R. Starbuck’s The Great Warpath: British Military Sites from Albany to Crown Point (1999).

Though I have not yet read a word of Edmond’s book on Orkney’s megaliths, I did read Alex Ross’s griping December 1 New Yorker piece about the British archaeologist’s cutting-edge observations and interpretation of the mythical Scottish landscape. Ross’s article, titled “Written in Stone: In Scotland’s Orkney Islands, the Neolithic Age Dominates the Landscape,” brought me straight to a high, lonesome, thought-provoking, commercial wild-blueberry field crowning a special spot in the Heath highlands. There an ancient assemblage of mysterious standing stones, similar but smaller than those at Orkney and Stonehenge, point to the heavens.

I have been transfixed on every Heath visit by the stunning, panoramic view from a spot that drops off at about the same angle in all directions, suggesting a prehistorically special place.

Experiencing that local site sends me into deep reflection about its spiritual possibilities, and it stays with me for days. I keep revisiting the same thoughts, pondering the spiritual/ritualistic possibilities. Fascinating questions linger. Such as why were the vertical stones erected thousands of years ago? What did they mean? What was their function?

Talk about thick esotericism. Up there in the refreshing air of that natural hilltop chapel, it’s suffocating. When you consider that such stone monuments appear to celebrate the same beliefs on at least two continents, it suggests a worldwide spiritual cosmos uniting ancient man millennia before Columbus ever thought of the New World.

As for Starbuck’s book, it pulled me in due to its relationship to a fascinating, Revolutionary War powder horn a friend bought at auction a couple years ago. Illustrated with an interesting array of hand-carved images, not only was this horn buried deep in an otherwise uninspiring general-merchandise sale, it came with an unsettling written caveat admitting that the auctioneer couldn’t vouch for it 18th-century beginnings.

In other words, it could have been a Centennial phony, created a century after the Revolution, at a time when engraved powder horns were gaining popularity among collectors and pursued by some with deep pockets.

My friend was curious if I had seen the listing? No, I told him. I hadn’t. Though I had indeed opened the online preview, I had closed out of it before reaching the powder horn. Nothing for me, I thought. Nonetheless, he asked if I minded returning to the site for a quick evaluation as we spoke on the phone. He just wanted to know if it looked right to me.

I took a peek and, though no expert, believed it had everything a collector desired. Better still, upon spotting the name “T. Nash” inscribed in large letters across the center of a cartouche, I thought I knew who carried it. It may have been the combat accoutrement of Greenfield Meadows blacksmith and Revolutionary militiaman Tubel Nash (often spelled Tubal), with whom I was familiar after studying his old deeds from my neighborhood.

Upon a quick inspection of Nash’s Revolutionary War service record, I found that his deployments on the so-called Northern Campaign mirrored the years and sites on the horn. That, in and of itself, indicated to me that the horn was no fake. Think of it: what’s the chance that a counterfeiter 100 years down the road would research an obscure backcountry soldier’s military record to create a phony powder horn?

By chance, several weeks later at an antiques show, I happened to bump into a local expert. I asked if he’d mind evaluating photos? Sure, he said, email some to him. When I did so, he suspected mischief. I took his evaluation under advisement and decided to reserve judgment. Though I didn’t share his expertise level, in my mind it was real.

Tubel Nash (1754-1816) was an interesting Greenfield Meadows character and skilled craftsman. The son of Greenfield miller Daniel Nash (1715-90) of Nash’s Mills fame, Tubel apparently got restless after his father’s death. By 1801, he had moved to Conway. Then, nine years later, he sold his Conway property and took his family to Canton/St. Lawrence County, New York, where he died and was buried in 1816.

It seems to me most likely that the relic never left the Greenfield area with Nash. It probably remained here in the possession of family or friend and was passed down until recently hitting a dead end and going to auction.

I was hoping Starbuck’s Great Warpath would provide insight into the mysterious “Ft. No. 10” carved into the Nash horn; however, Starbuck offers not a clue about the location of what is most likely an obscure, vernacular fort reference understood by Connecticut Valley soldiers at the time. So, the search continues.

Stay tuned. I don’t give up easy.

posted in Columns, Local history | No Comments

Jan
06
2026

Trophy 10-Pointer

by Gary Sanderson

Some stories just fall into your lap and write themselves – like this bowhunting tale from an old Powertown pal.

The object, squeezed into a large, rectangular, coffin-like wooden box on the bed of Rick Kostanski’s pickup truck, rolled up my upper Greenfield Meadows driveway on the morning after Thanksgiving. It was a beautiful, 10-point, whitetail buck. Bagged as the woods lightened at 7 a.m. on November 25, the carcass was headed to the Corliss butcher shop in Ashfield.

This 5½-year-old, 195-pound, grey-faced bruiser with a rut-swelled neck was a classic Franklin County buck – king of the hill, his typical antler configuration spread wide, brow tines broken from battling fall competitors for receptive females. For my friend, it was the buck of a lifetime. And, even more important from my perspective, its domain had been my neighborhood.

Though I had not seen this deer myself in recent travels, I may have crossed its path as a wobbly, spotted fawn following its mother out of its 2020 nest. I suspect that’s nearly certain. If not, I likely had several sightings of him as an inauspicious, small buck working his way up the neighborhood pecking order, with and without antlers.

I’m going to call Kostanski’s beautiful “racker” a “Sunken Meadow buck” because of where he harvested it with a precision heart-shot from his crossbow. The kill site sits atop a steep ravine overlooking the Green River from high above its east bank, directly across from Sunken Meadow, the floodplain dog-walking grounds I named and often wrote about in my Greenfield Recorder column. There I bumped into many deer and a few bears, along with various other wildlife and wonders of nature during my daily romps with my springer spaniel gundogs.

Aware of my intimate connections to his new hunting territory, which he was exploring in response to a homeowner’s complaints about deer damage to ornamental landscaping and gardens, Kostanski had reached out to me for insight several times this fall. His queries were sometimes accompanied by photos of new bucks that had passed his trail camera. Did they look familiar, he’d ask, to any deer I was seeing on my daybreak walks directly across the river?

One of these trail-cam photos showed a fork-horn I had not seen. Another displayed a five- or six-pointer I had probably seen several times in dim dawn light. The third was a trophy racker I knew I had not encountered. A day or two later, the big bruiser’s carcass was hanging in Kostanski’s Deerfield garage.

I did not know Kostanski from my South Deerfield youth. He grew up in Turners Falls and moved to my old hometown as a married adult. I was friends with his father, a well-known Powertown character I affectionately called the Honorable Walter T. Kostanski. A member of my father’s Greatest Generation, Walt was a key member of Coach Earl Worden’s fabled 1942 state-championship Turners Falls High School baseball team before serving in the Navy during World War II. In adulthood, he became an elected official, first as a state rep, then as the longtime Franklin County Registrar of Deeds.

I got to know his son Richard, six or seven years younger than me, on the softball diamond, at ice-fishing outings, and as a companion on open-water fishing trips to Maine’s Rangeley Lakes and Lake Ontario at Sodus Point, New York. I also recall an entertaining and quite productive shad-fishing outing in a bass-boat – I can’t recall whose – anchored along the edge of a migration channel under Sunderland Bridge,

But let us not digress. Back to the present, and the fateful day of Rick’s recent deer kill.

Our successful bowhunter arrived before daybreak and securely positioned himself upon his ladder-stand’s shooting platform to wait for the woods to awaken. The stand was a short distance inside a wood line bordering an open field where whitetails feed. As darkness faded, he spotted movement and recognized a few does passing through. Moments later the buck, obviously pursuing the does, appeared from a different angle.

When Kostanski burped out a couple of buck grunts from the grunt call hanging around his neck, the buck stopped and changed course. Now it was looping toward the bowstand to investigate what it thought was an antlered competitor for the does.

When the animal stopped within range, Kostanski’s crossbow was raised and ready. He aimed behind the deer’s shoulder, gently squeezed the trigger, and let fly. Miraculously, his arrow found its way through twigs and branches undiscernible to the human eye in the grey dawn light.

The deer flinched, moved a few strides, and laid down to die a few paces from where it was hit. The old battler soon expired peacefully. A quick, merciful kill.

Luckily, the final resting place was a mere 60 yards from Kostanski’s truck. After all, dragging 195 pounds of dead weight through the woods is a difficult chore for even a young man. Kostanski, in his mid-60s, was maneuvering on two replaced knees and a foot recovering from recent surgery that had put him in a walking-boot for a month. Despite his physical complications, he field-dressed the deer and dragged its heavy carcass to his truck, where lifting it onto the bed was a challenge.

When he got home, he sent me a cellphone photo of his trophy lying dead on the forest floor. He would have stopped at my house with it, he wrote, but was exhausted and wanted to return home, where more work awaited him. Three days later, buck onboard, he pulled into my yard on the way to the butcher shop.

How can you beat that? Column looming, a subject comes to my doorstep by special delivery.

Better still, the hunter is well known to many Gill-Montague readers, and the big buck lived and died in my neighborhood. The impressive 10-pointer without a doubt knew my old “Sunken Meadow” stomping grounds well, and lurked for years within clear sight of my home.

posted in Columns | No Comments

Nov
26
2025

Wing-Shooting Reflections

by Gary Sanderson

Sunday morning. Gray, soggy and still. A bit foggy. Somber daybreak ramble in the rearview.

I’m seated in the everyday parlor. Reclining. Feet up. Laptop on my thighs. Autumnal thoughts spinning, swirling, gusting – drifting off to my old pheasant-, grouse- and woodcock-hunting coverts.

What unleashed this train of thought? Probably the damp, raw, overcast weather. None better for following eager, agile, tail-wagging flush-and-retrieve gundogs through thick, mucky coverts – an impenetrable alder row here, a swampside poplar grove there, windborne cattail fuzz, ragweed and goldenrod dust tickling your nostrils through bloodletting, briar-laced tangles.

We’re now more than halfway through the six-week upland bird-hunting season and I haven’t dug out my tattered Filson oilcloth bibs, laced up my 16-inch Bean Hunting Shoes, shouldered my side-by-side – or even bought a license. At this point, it’s looking like it’s not gonna happen, for the second straight year. Old friends would find that shocking. But here I sit, halfway into my eighth year of retirement, with no regrets or laments.

I had my day.

For many decades I hunted hard, wearing myself ragged before arriving at work to battle deadline. I savored the exercise and challenges in brisk fresh air, always fine-tuning my wing-shooting and dog-handling skills.

Now battered and bruised from years of punishment, my eyesight not what it used to be, and many of my best hunting buddies dead, I just don’t need it and have nothing to prove.

My transition out of a valued physical activity reminds me of my last years on the softball diamond. At 41, I was losing my edge. My legs were shot, my speed gone, my arm and desire to continue weakening. I abruptly called it quits, and never looked back. Haven’t swung a bat since, or even entertained the thought of doing so. Not once.

I probably should have walked away after blowing out my knee on the baseball diamond in May of 1976. But I discovered softball and had to swallow my pride, robbed of my speed and agility. Fifteen years later, I learned that life could be enjoyable without the Grande Ole Game and its dugout camaraderie.

I now realize the same thing about upland bird hunting and owning gundog companions. I don’t need it, thank you.

That’s not to say I’ve lost my hunting instinct. Quite the contrary, the pull is strong when digging for information about various topics related to nature and place. Seems there’s always something new on the agenda to satisfy my hunting needs.

Toward the end of this past summer, a dear workaholic friend expressed to a mutual friend his concern about my decision to stop hunting. He didn’t understand how a man who enjoyed wing-shooting like I did could just walk away, cold turkey. Had something gone awry? The torn Achilles tendon five or more years back? Something else he was unaware of?

“No,” our mutual friend responded. “I think he just moved on to other interests.”

The questioner wasn’t convinced. He was about to have a litter of fine, top-pedigree English Springer Spaniel puppies on the ground, and wanted to give me one of my choosing. A generous offer, indeed, but one I politely declined. I didn’t need new dog responsibilities. Problem was that, after losing my last gundog to a dreadful poisoning, I had discovered the freedom of not having to care for a dog year-round for the pleasures of a six-week hunting season.

Meanwhile, the man the breeder had conferred with, and with whom I have hunted many miles of dense cover over the past three and a half decades, has reached out a few times about teaming up for a hunt. “Get your license,” he implored on the first attempt. “They’re stocking out in back of Bob Thayer’s again. You’d love it.”

It’s true. I did love hunting that Hopewell Swamp covert on the Hatfield-Whately line, not to mention chatting with Thayer and enjoying his Yankee twang. He had attended many a square dance with my grandfather, Waldo Willis Sanderson, and his girlfriend Isabelle, and thus took a shine to me.

Thayer was the gamekeeper and one of the stockers of pheasants raised in the Hatfield Fish and Game Club pen near his home. He used to call me on the phone with tips about his stocking routine. So, I knew every inch of his property and that of the abutters, and shot many a cackling cock pheasant, whistling woodcock, and startling partridge there before he died and his farm was sold.

But why return to this challenging covert physically compromised by slower reflexes, unsteady knees and, most importantly, diminished eyesight? The eye doctor tells me my eyesight isn’t that bad, but I know it ain’t what it used to be.

To describe my eyesight woes to doctors and their nurses, I like to explain to them that, “I used to be able to sit at the base of a tree and count the ants walking along a branch 10 feet overhead. Now, without my glasses on, I squeeze toothpaste on the wrong side of the brush.”

Such realizations negatively impact a shooter’s confidence, and regardless of the game, confidence is the key to success. The confident competitor tackles difficult challenges with aplomb, consistently outperforming timid companions.

How can I win? Whether looking through newfangled progressive lenses or my trusty old non-prescription shooting glasses purchased when my eyesight was superior, my vision isn’t sharp and true. So how can I possibly shoulder a shotgun with my same old confidence? And without it, how can I possibly maintain a tolerable success rate?

That said, who knows? Maybe one of my buddies will catch me in the right mood and succeed in coaxing me back into the field before the season ends in a couple weeks. It’s not out of the realm of possibility.

Even though I’d enter the field harboring doubt, I believe that if everything lined up just right, I could still execute a quick, accurate shot on a cackling cock pheasant or fluttering grey ghost screened by brushy obstructions.

Having experienced the routine thousands of times, there’s always a chance, despite my balky knees and diminished eyesight, that my flying target will fold up and lifelessly drop into the soggy tangles.

Wishful thinking?

Likely not.

posted in Columns, Musings | No Comments

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