Category Archives: Local history

Historical posts about the Connecticut Valley, most likely the Pioneer Valley.

Elusive Deerfield River Browns Worth Chasing

Sunday morning, Memorial Day Weekend, approaching 5:30. Day has broken – half-sun peeking over the eastern horizon, squeezing warm yellow rays through the tulip magnolia shielding my upstairs bedroom windows on each side of my headboard. From the tree comes the joyous song of an amorous cardinal, likely celebrating the high blue sky, small white […]

Squaretail Chronicles

A record Maine Eastern brook trout weighing nearly eight pounds darted through my Facebook feed last week. The photo and story posted by a fellow New England Outdoor Writers Association member told the story. Both were pulled from a recent issue of the Bangor Daily News, which had lifted them from the smaller biweekly Moosehead […]

Montague Reader Offers Plain Truth

Spring is in the air and I’m a bit on overload. Thinking. Always thinking. Reading. Absorbing a 24/7 news feed that can be frightening these days. Exhausting, too. I tried to ignore cable news after the election, which is next to impossible without a change of address to some secluded ramshackle shack along a cold, […]

The Beat Goes On

When you’ve worked a beat for nearly a half-century as I have, and enjoy deep roots therein, upturned stones of investigation can trigger vivid memories. This is such a circumstance. It started with word of a supposed archaeological site in South Deerfield, about to be disturbed by the construction of a new dog shelter. When […]

Memory Valley

Monday morning. Eagles’ Super Bowl LIX rout in the rearview. Cold and calm. Skies icy gray. Intermittent flurries flying. Fresh snowbanks framing roads. Splendid day for a road trip. No sun. Classic bluegrass spinning. Loud. Stimulating. Stringed instruments trading the lead, helping to ricochet spontaneous thoughts through the rocky, vegetated canyons of my mind. What […]

Vacant Archaeological Salmon Evidence Explained

Venerable, retired, Connecticut Valley archaeologist Peter Thomas has chimed in on a perplexing regional Atlantic salmon puzzle that keeps on giving and won’t go away. The question is: Given that we know spring salmon-spawning runs once populated New England rivers, and that salmon was a valued food resource for indigenous and colonial inhabitants alike, why […]

Why Not Dig Deeper Into Salmon Mystery?

Wedged inconspicuously into a slim, dim, and dusty space between a wall-length book cabinet and the northeast corner in my study hangs a framed, matted, five-by-seven-inch pen-and-ink sketch of a younger me signed by late Manchester Union Leader illustrator John Noga. Despite ultraviolet-protective glass, the paper has taken on a warm sepia tone that speaks […]

Reevaluating New England Salmon

OK, at long last, time to revisit and reassess, as I promised many weeks ago, the uncertain topic of New England’s prehistoric and early-historic Atlantic salmon runs. This subject was a staple of my weekly Greenfield Recorder outdoor column “On the Trail” in the 1980s and 1990s, when an aggressive, ultimately unsuccessful Connecticut River Atlantic […]

Wadsworth Mayhew’s Signature Fishtail

Antique collecting can trigger the wildest, most unpredictable and fulfilling adventures – some hot and fruitful, others cold and barren. When an enticing, dangling thread of inquiry gets tugged and just keeps on giving, the eager anticipation of important discovery can be truly exhilarating. Case in point: a pair of 18th-century banister-back chairs I recently […]

Nope. Not a Patten Family in Patten District

As English speakers, we all know that “best laid plans” saying aimed at “mice and men.” Lifted from 18th-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 […]

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