As English speakers, we all know that “best laid plans” saying aimed at “mice and men.” Lifted from 18^th-century Scotsman Robert Burns’ poem To a Mouse, it reminds us that intentions can and “often” do “go awry.”

Chalk this up as one of those. Not unusual among history sleuths who, in the process of researching one topic, always keep their antennae sharp for “peripherals.” It’s akin to starting down one forest trail and swerving on a whim down another.

During a recent read of Charles E. Clark’s The Eastern Frontier: Settlement of Northern New England 1610-1763, published in 1970, I investigated an interesting footnote introducing a primary source previously unknown to me. It was The Diary of Matthew Patten of Bedford, N.H., 1754-1788 – opening a rare window into the daily travels of a colonial Scots-Irish pioneer of New Hampshire’s Merrimack River valley around today’s Granite State city of Manchester.

Miraculously, this journal detailing 34 years of an important man about town’s life survived to the modern day. Protected for more than a century in the Patten family and the care of a local doctor, it finally came to light at the turn of the 20^th century. The Bedford, New Hampshire Historical Society received it as an assemblage of fastened loose pages and published it in 1903. Still in print, it is today valued by scholars and local historians alike exploring New Hampshire’s earliest inland settlements.

Patten wore many hats in the community – including but not limited to justice of the peace, carpenter and surveyor. What interested me most were his descriptions of the many shad- and Atlantic salmon-fishing activities at Manchester’s famed Amoskeag Falls on the Merrimack River and smaller neighborhood tributaries. Clark’s Eastern Frontier book gave me snippets. I wanted more.

So, I purchased a recent printing to discover what else it had to offer about fishing and did not come away disappointed. Well, except for the fact that my mission was complicated greatly by the absence of an index. Undeterred, I laboriously skimmed through 545 pages in search of anything related to fishing. Three days later, I had assembled my very own eight-page index for future reference.

The information Patten provides about fishing practices of his times would have mirrored 18^th-century Connecticut River activity at the Great Falls between Turners Falls and Gill. The spring weeks during which it occurred would also have been in the same ballpark. The problem is that I know of no 18^th-century diary detailing fishing activity at Turners’ or South Hadley’s falls. All we have is potentially unreliable second- and third-hand reports published by local historians who never participated in the annual fish-harvesting routine.

My original plan was to condense here what I had learned about Amoskeag Falls fishing and speculate what it meant to Turners Falls. Then, I hit a bump in road that threw me off course. I fell victim to a dangling peripheral thread of curiosity relating to our town of Shelburne. I tugged at it and a whole new story line unraveled.

I should have known better but couldn’t resist. So, here we sit, my intended topic tucked away for the near future.

At least our new subject is local. Far closer to home than Bedford, N.H. Our focus is the so-called Patten District resting in the northwest corner of Shelburne, some six miles west of my upper Greenfield Meadows homestead.

The voluminous Patten diary got me wondering if maybe there was a genealogical link between the Scots-Irish diarist of Londonderry, then Bedford, N.H., and our own Patten District on Patten Hill in Shelburne?

The likelihood seemed strong. The Patten, as it is known to locals, borders north with Colrain, which was settled by hardy Scots-Irish emigrants from the Londonderry area before 1740 – remarkably early for upland settlement here. Perhaps, I pondered, there were Pattens in the Chandler Hill Cemetery, the town’s oldest burial ground. A quick peek at Lois McClellan Patrie’s History of Colrain, however, proved fruitless. Nope. Not a whisper about any Colrain Pattens.

Undaunted, I went to Leila Stone Bardwell’s Vanished Pioneer Homes and Families of Shelburne, Massachusetts and found no mention of a Patten family and nothing explaining how the name Patten came to the town’s district or hill.

Hmmmm? Now, presuming easy answers, I had to dig deeper.

Enter energetic, worker-bee friend and always-accommodating Greenfield Historical Society President Carol Aleman, who grew up on her Wheeler parents’ East Shelburne farm along the Patten rim. If anyone would know how the name Patten came to the isolated northeast corner of Shelburne, I suspected she would. So, I dropped her an email.

Although Aleman had no immediate answer, she was certain her sister Joanne and husband John Herron would know. She’d query them and get back to me. The Herrons own an expansive dairy farm on Hawks Road in the southeast corner of town, and share a lively interest in Shelburne history.

Indeed, they had the answer. The name Patten had no connection to any family of that surname. The place was instead initially known as the “Pattern District,” which over time became Patten in the old, obsolete, hilltown Yankee dialect. Fancy that. A simple case of colloquial mispronunciation.

But why Pattern District? Well, there appears to be no simple answer, just varying interpretations based on the meaning of the word pattern: That is a description of a neighborhood built on a social, moral or physical template worth emulating; one, in fact, superior to the rest of town.

Little did I know that I could have found my answer at home with a little digging. With the new information in hand, I took a deeper dive into my own sources tucked into bookcases and cupboards and, sure enough, found it.

The first supportive source was Ellsworth Barnard’s A Hill Farm Boyhood, Volume 1 of his four-volume memoir Sunshine and Shadows: A Teacher’s Odyssey, published between 1983-91. Barnard (1907-2003) was a Patten Hill native and college English professor. I met him and his wife Mary many years ago at their rustic High Ledges cabin situated on family property left by the Barnards to The Audubon Society. He was then over 90. I wanted to see and discuss the small grove of immature, 10-foot American chestnut trees featured in his 1998 collection of essays In a Wild Place: A Natural History of High Ledges.

Intrigued by this gentle naturalist and gentleman, I promptly bought his memoirs but didn’t place him and the Patten District in the same mental bundle when first pondering sources that might explain how it was named. When I finally pulled A Hill Farm Boyhood out of my bookcase, there on the first page of Chapter 1 was his suggestion that Patten District was so named “perhaps because, as legend has it (supported by local pronunciation habits), the dwellers in that area provided an exemplary pattern for their less righteous fellow townsmen.”

Barnard would have known. He was born and raised in the Patten Hill farmhouse built by his ancestors in 1790.

Soon, I discovered in my collection of sources yet another written by a deep-rooted Shelburne author who confirmed the Aleman-Herron-Barnard explanation. Buried beneath rubble in a bottom bookcase cupboard was Elmer F. Davenport’s 1968 booklet As You Were Shelburne. There, the last three lines of “Chapter 7 – The Patten District,” he informs us that its residents “were so strict in their conduct that others called it the Pattern, later shortened to Patten, in a spirit of jealousy.”

Not surprisingly, just another tendril off the pattern concept.