Category Archives: Indians

Connecticut River and New England Natives, ritualistic landscapes, sacred stones, old trails, you name it.

Colonial Diary Offers Clues About Scandinavian Cupboard

An impromptu weekend trip to a friend’s Lake George summer home, the fascinating mid-18th-century journal of a scholarly foreign traveler, and an interestingly carved and painted 1789 Scandinavian tabernacle or bonnet-top cupboard that had previously stirred my inquisitive juices. That’s what’s on my plate today, and what I’ll serve in soothing soapstone warmth wafting from […]

Lake George Oozes WMass Links

Midweek, early evening, front-yard burning bushes displaying a light, peaceful autumn crimson that’s brightening by the day. My wife Joey is watching local news in the west parlor when she hears the familiar audible alert for an incoming text. It’s longtime friend Debbie, from Cohasset. Debbie wonders if we’d like to join her for the […]

Fourth-Grade Photo Stirs Childhood Memories

A 60-year-old photo posted recently on Facebook by a former classmate really got my wheels spinning. Shot on the final day of school in June 1963, the black-and-white image appeared on Deerfield Now. It showed my fourth-grade class standing on the front granite stairs leading into the two-story, brick South Deerfield Elementary School that then […]

Hinsdale Houses Tell a Story

Seeking brief respite from a tangled maze of early South Deerfield deeds, I scheduled a short trip to the Granite State last week. There, on a summerlike spring morning, we found warm, welcoming guide Sharron Holmes Smith awaiting our visit at the historic Col. Ebenezer Hinsdale House in Hinsdale, New Hampshire. Friend and neighbor Richard […]

A Friend’s Passing

The day before Valentine’s Day was funeral day for old friend Michael Pasiecnik. The evening service was held in my native town, hosted by a mortician I have known for years. Michael grew up a couple of miles down the road in East Whately, where his family farmed rich river meadows first tilled by Indigenous […]

Cheapside Uplands and the Hoit Place

I took a recent walk around the Cheapside uplands with old buddy Billy Wardwell, a Bingville native I trusted would know all the little nooks and crannies. You’d have to know affable “Wardy.” He grew up there. Highland Park was his playground. We’ve known each other since high school, both from the Class of 1971: […]

Beaver Stone, Billings Place

Under the microscope today is a peculiar carved stone and a forgotten colonial home that met the wrecking ball many years ago, both from Deerfield. First, the stone. Round in form and about the size of a human hand, it surfaced recently in parched Fuller Swamp Brook, where it was picked up by a curious […]

Punch Brook

We meet as neighbors each morning, soon after subtle chips and chirps have burst into a joyous symphony of birdsong to greet the new day. By then I have strapped on my left-knee brace, and my robust, two-mile, daybreak ramble is underway. Our paths cross about a quarter mile east and a hair north of […]

Deerfield’s First Mill Site Lives On

I recently visited an old South Deerfield mill site I discovered some 60 years ago as a young lad trout-fishing on the Mill River. The field trip with historian friend Peter Thomas ignited a research adventure, beginning at the dam and steep ravine below and ending at the expansive old farm today owned by the […]

Men, Mastodons and Maybe Even Sled Burials

Perhaps the best-kept secret in the world of late-Pleistocene archaeology today is the work of independent researcher Dr. Richard Michael Gramly of North Andover, a 75-year-old Harvard Ph.D. hopelessly mired in old ways learned from masters of their field during the late Sixties and Seventies. What “Mike” Gramly does best is excavate and interpret sites. […]

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