Category Archives: South Deerfield

Noteworthy happenings in my old hometown.

Jun
08
2021

Trust Temple On Swamp-Fite Site

by Gary Sanderson

In recent years an intense spotlight has focused its beam on the Falls Fight of May 19, 1676 – the bloodiest day in the history of our splendid slice of the Connecticut Valley. Much federal money has been and will continue to be spent trying to pin down exactly what happened before, during, and after […]

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May
27
2021

Swamp-Fight Revelation

by Gary Sanderson

For months now, I’ve been jumping back and forth from old Greenfield newspapers, Registry of Deeds land records and various other sources and field trips in a concerted effort to fine-tune my understanding of the land I traveled as a boy and young man, and which I still explore. I would describe my focus area […]

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May
17
2021

Stickball Memories

by Gary Sanderson

Just curious, do kids still play stickball? Probably not. They say it’s bad for the arm to fire a light tennis ball day after day at a strike zone drawn in chalk on a brick wall. Hmmmm? Maybe so. But playing stickball is what we did whenever we couldn’t round up enough players for a […]

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Apr
26
2021

Where Was Bloody Brook’s First Tavern

by Gary Sanderson

The question has lingered for nearly a century. That is, where did the first tavern in Bloody Brook, now South Deerfield, stand? Everyone knows the building’s location in 1932, when South Deerfield building contractor William Gass moved it to its current setting behind Old Deerfield’s Indian House. Today, there it stands as Bloody Brook Tavern […]

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Apr
11
2021

South Deerfield Memories

by Gary Sanderson

Although I’ve been a Greenfield taxpayer for nearly a quarter-century, I will always consider South Deerfield as home. It’s where I learned to read and write, bike and skate, hunt and fish, explore swamps and ridges, pick nightcrawlers, build forts and play ball. It’s also where my kids grew up through elementary school, and where […]

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Mar
01
2021

Bill Russell: Winner In A League Of One

by Gary Sanderson

Sunday, February 9, 1969, a cold, threatening nor’easter brewing in gray winter skies. I was 15, a Frontier Regional School sophomore, no driver’s license, hoping the storm would not derail a much-anticipated road trip to Boston Garden. The plan was to attend ABC’s 1 p.m., nationally-televised, NBA game-of-the-week matinee between the defending-champion Boston Celtics and […]

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Feb
03
2021

Sugarloaf Site Update

by Gary Sanderson

Septuagenarian archaeologist Richard Michael Gramly Ph.D. never allows the so-called Sugarloaf Site – a Paleoindian caribou-hunting encampment dating back nearly 12,500 calendar years – to wander far from his fertile imagination. The site, a vast, sandy, outwash plain deposited during the deep time of peri-glacial Lake Hitchcock drainage, sits on the southwestern skirt of Mount […]

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Jan
19
2021

Childhood Winters Ain’t What They used To Be

by Gary Sanderson

Winters were busy during my South Deerfield childhood, in the days before smartphones, smart TVs, PlayStation, Xbox and 24/7 cable television. Frankly, we did just fine, thank you, without the modern devices that today keep kids sedentary indoors. The village itself was much different, too, with much more of a small-town atmosphere, Billy Rotkiewicz’s Frontier […]

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Sep
11
2020

Great Beaver Tale Evolves

by Gary Sanderson

The ancient, indigenous Great Beaver Tale about the origin of Deerfield’s Pocumtuck Range has changed dramatically since 1890, when East Charlemont antiquarian Phinehas Field’s 105-word, 1871 description was published in Volume 1 of History and Proceedings of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (1870-79). Soon after that bare-bones account by a white Christian man of deep Puritan […]

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Aug
10
2020

Sugarloaf Beaver Tale All Began In 1871 With Phinehas Field And The PVMA

by Gary Sanderson

A venerable, solemn Phinehas Field is displayed in the formal, sketched portrait accompanying his online Find A Grave profile. A man who volunteered for Civil War service after his 60th birthday, Field had, by the time of this formal portrait, served many years as deacon of the Charlemont Congregational Church and lived a distinguished, pious life. Phinehas […]

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