With daybreak near, the tall clock will soon strike six, accompanied by freezing rain drumming on the kitchen roof. I just returned from there with a cup of black, unsweetened coffee in hand, now steaming to my left on a desktop coaster.

To me, early morning is the best time for introspection and creative thought, the perfect setting from which to set imaginative wheels awhirl, be it on a secluded forest stand, wading a river or at the desk where I now sit.

I awoke not long ago from a whimsical little dream, about which I remember little, except that it was me and a boyhood pal we called The Count fishing a posted North Sunderland trout pond called Whitmore’s before spring-morning fog had lifted. About all I can recall is him struggling in thick gray light to tie a blood-knot and asking for assistance. After completing the chore for my appreciative friend, I opened my eyes for the new day, wishing I could close them and ride it out longer. Too late. The dream was over.

As daring teens, The Count and I infrequently snuck into that forbidden pond along the Connecticut River in the extreme northwest corner of Sunderland. Our goal was to be on the water’s edge before the birds sang, and home with big, beautiful, tasty Eastern brook trout before our South Deerfield neighbors had risen for breakfast.

Passersby know Whitmore’s Pond by its picturesque waterfall, which rambles down a slim ledge before underflowing Falls Road into the Connecticut below the old Whitmore Tavern. Long ago drained, this tidy impoundment had an east-west orientation with a swampy neck at the rear, curling south toward the feeder stream. We liked to fish at the point protruding from the inner elbow, casting into an open, C-shaped spring hole bordered by cattails on three sides. The cold-water outflow surging to the surface and attracting trout was only about 15 yards from shore, easily within range of soft-landing roll-casts.

Though it was not the type of sparkling water where you’d expect to find trout, we learned they were there to feed by hearing, then seeing, them break the surface for Mayflies. When we first gave it a try with the treble-hooked Thomas buoyant lures that worked well on open water, they got snagged in submerged vegetation on every retrieve, telegraphing our presence. Thus, we opted for plan two – dry-fly fishing with The Count’s late father’s fly rods and dainty artificials organized in silver-colored fly boxes from his fishing vest hanging in the garage.

Like catching fish from a 10-foot-diameter barrel, the spring hole’s wide mouth invited us in, and we recognized the invitation as an ideal training ground for a couple of veteran spincasters seeking to improve their fly-fishing skills. It worked to perfection.

Count was proud to say that for such endeavors his dad swore by the tiniest midges in his fly box, advice we found helpful despite simultaneously discovering that old-standard White Wulffs, Royal Coachmen, Light Cahills and Hendricksons worked as well. We’d focus on the insects coming off the water and try to find flies duplicating their size and color in a process known as “matching the hatch,” which brings rewards.

To keep the delicate dry flies afloat we’d dress them in silicon, or whatever that floatation salve in his dad’s vest was, and we’d catch beautiful trout one after another. In the process, we perfected our casting, presentation and hook-setting skills, all of which were transferable to the stream fishing we both preferred. Great fun for impish teens willing to roll the dice on posted waters, and capable of daring escape when caught in the act.

Not long after we got older and stopped fishing the place due to fear of the consequences, I guess the dam broke. By now the pond has been drained for decades. I can’t say what the basin looks like today because I haven’t viewed it. Most likely all that remains is a thin spring-stream, slicing through a grassy, weedy meadow to the waterfall.

I’m sure the impetus for my dream was a recent round of deed research that brought me back to Whitmore’s Pond and its early 18^th-century beginnings. But there was also a symbolic aging theme involved, harkening back to the good old days of youth, when I walked without a limp, ran fast, hit sizzling line drives and could, using the thinnest tippets, tie all the difficult fishermen’s knots in the dimmest light withmybare eyes. Magnification unnecessary.

Although I long ago accepted that those days are long gone, it does no harm to reminisce. No need for envy or a sense of depressing loss. Joie de vivre doesn’t end with youth; it evolves with age and experience.

As a teenaged Whitmore’s poacher on high alert for neighborhood enforcers, I knew nothing of its history as a millpond, or the place’s history as a mill village with a busy ferry between Deerfield and Sunderland. I only knew that the pond held some of the nicest “squaretails” in my domain. The bold, black posters tacked to tree only added to the allure for boys who had grown up reading about rascals like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Plus, the squaretails were worth the risk, comparable in every way to those chased far and wide by gentlemen of high status and haughty tastes. Does it get any better than Eastern brookies and ruffed grouse? Not in my world.

What I have learned in adulthood is that the North Sunderland neighborhood surrounding the pond had acquired its own placename by 1800. On the North Sunderland site stood a cluster of fancy dwellings, a busy river tavern and associated ferry, and industry as well, with Slatestone or Mill Brook over time supporting two gristmills, a sawmill, and a fulling mill.

The first sawmill there was “erected (by Manoah Bodman, Daniel Russell and Nathaniel Gunn) and in operation in 1726,” according to John Montague Smith’s History of Sunderland, which credits brothers Joseph and Jonathan Field for building the first gristmill 12 years later.

John Oaks came to Sunderland from Petersham before 1750, buying and likely making improvements to the mills before dying in 1767 and leaving his properties to son Jonathan, who retained a one-third interest in the sawmill upon conveying a year later it to Elijah Billings of Montague.

Billings moved to Conway, and in 1773 sold it to Daniel Whitmore from Middletown, Connecticut, retaining half-interest in the mills. Whitmore heirs still own the 50-acre parcel and the colonial dwelling, once a tavern, nestled along the falls on the east side of the road.

The Oaks occupancy is what led me to my old Sunderland fishing haunt. Researching the mills at what would become “Mill Village at Stebbins Meadow” at the Bars in Deerfield’s South Meadows, I found the 1770 sale of the mill site by Nathan Oaks of Deerfield to Capt. Jonas Locke of Shutesbury. The purchase price was 150 pounds, more than 10 times what Oaks had paid for it three years earlier. Hmmmm?

I knew of Locke, a millwright and housewright who in about 1790 built the old Fuller Homestead, now occupied by widowed Fuller descendant Mary Marsh. Known today as the Bars Farm, it’s abutted north by Melnik’s Barway Farm.

So, who was this dude, Nathan Oaks?

Well, as it turns out, Nathan was the younger brother of Sunderland miller Jonathan Oaks. Both men were carpenters, perhaps millwrights as well, and both were members of master-builder Locke’s Deerfield carpentry crew that built The Manse, the Joseph Stebbins house, and the church steeple in Deerfield before the Revolution. Short-lived Deerfield residents, the Oaks brothers likely had a hand in a lot of the building that took place in town between 1765 and 1775.

From a distinguished Lexington/Woburn family, Locke built the gristmill at Locke’s Pond (now Lake Wyola) in 1754, and probably contributed to other structures in the surrounding Locke’s Village on the Wendell/Shutesbury line. By 1770, he had been in Deerfield for about six years and was running the gristmill at Stebbins Meadow, likely also tuning up the buildings and apparatuses that provided the burgeoning community with meal and flour for the larder.

Locke’s crowning achievement, around 1790, was building the distinctive, Federal, hip-roofed Bars dwelling he called home, known today on the National Register of Historic Places as the “Locke-Fuller House.”

Who knows? Perhaps Locke the millwright helped old John Oaks and his boys bring their North Sunderland mills up to snuff. Back then – before Roadtown became Shutesbury in 1761, and before Leverett separated from Sunderland in 1774 – Oaks’ Mills would have been short piece from the Roadtown-Sunderland line.

Something else you can take to the bank is the fact that the beautiful brookies available to me as a young, mischievous angler were there when the millpond we know as Whitmore’s was born.