Looking for a hook to hang my hat on, so to speak, spun me into reminiscence leading up to my May 7 “Deerfield 350th 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

What does it mean to be connected to a place, to have a sense of a place… and how does it change over time? I pondered that question during a recent daybreak walk along the shoulder of a lonely, gray, Upper Meadows road in Greenfield. Since then the thought has reappeared, darting through my consciousness […]

Unexpected diversions and distractions can sometimes strike historical gold… like the one I stumbled across last week. Most often these unexpected discoveries come to light as what I refer to as “peripherals” – that is, random findings unveiled entirely by dumb luck while reading, researching, or engaged in informal conversation. Nowhere do such bits of […]

It occurred two years before I was born: a Saturday-morning plane crash that exploded on impact in bucolic Mason, New Hampshire, instantly killing four prominent South Deerfield townsmen and shaking the village to its core. The date was July 28, 1951, the time about 9:30 a.m., visibility poor in foggy rain. The crash made the […]