DEERFIELD HISTORY

I grew up in the Town of Deerfield during the 1950s and 1960s and went off to UMass-Amherst in 1962, majored in American history, minored in anthropology, and graduated in 1966 at a time when the Vietnam War was hardly in anyone's mind.  Although I knew that Deerfield had sprung up in the early days of English colonial settlement in the Connecticut Valley, the town was not of particular historical interest to me.  I certainly never wrote about it.

Jumping ahead nearly 40 years, during which I spent 22 years as the Director of the Consulting Archaeology Program at the University of Vermont and 17 years as an Environmental and Historic Preservation Advisor for FEMA at more than sixty Disaster Recovery operations located from Maine to Alaska and from Wisconsin to the Gulf Coast, I was temporarily stationed at Portsmouth when my father took a wicked fall.  At that point, I decided to retire and go to live with him in Deerfield.  Now, with some time on my hands, I began to delve into Deerfield's amazing and complicated history -- from the point of its founding, to the arrival and settling in of numerous immigrant families from Eastern Europe, Ireland, Germany and elsewhere, to being the chair of the Steering Committee for Deerfield's year-long 350th anniversary.  Since 2017, much of my writing has been focused on this town. 

The Engagement at Bloody Brook (September 19, 1675) and Bloody Brook Monument

insert : “Turpentine Extraction & the Metamorphosis of the Local Woodlands, 1689-1713.”  Forthcoming in The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings, 2024, Into the Woods: New England Forests in Fact and Fiction.

Primary and Secondary Source Materials about Deerfield History

   As I initiated my dabblings into Deerfield's history, I decided to focus on the first two centuries.  George Sheldon's two volume A History of Deerfield (published in 1895-96 and republished as part of Deerfield's tricentennial in 1972) was a fine place to start.  As I began to explore various topics, I wanted to review the early town documents -- the minutes kept by the proprietors, of town meetings, and by the selectmen.  When I asked the town clerk where I might find such documents, I was told that they were probably in a safe in the basement of what was then the senior center.  If I had a specific request, I should fill out a request form and she would try to find what I wanted when time permitted.

   I finally got permission some six months later to check out the basement safe and found the most complete set of town records that any historian could ever wish for -- shelves and shelves of them.  The original proprietors' and early town meeting records had actually been archivally stabilized sometime about 2007, but everything else was in its original bound volume.  These records begin in the 1670s as intermittent entries, then start in earnest after resettlement of the town in 1682, after King Philip's War (1675-76), and are continuous from that time to the present.

No transcriptions of these records had ever been made.  Access to such documents in the basement of a partially-heated building would be extremely difficult.  In 2017, with encouragement from the Deerfield Historical Commission, the Town Clerk and permission from the Selectboard, I began to photograph core documents, digitally rectify the photos, insert these photographs into Word documents so that they replicated each of the bound volumes that I wished to explore.  Some 9,000 photographs later, I have managed to digitizes many of the town's early records dating from the seventeenth into the mid-nineteenth century.  

   There are still innumerable town records that remain, but these are now well archived in either the large safe in the Town Clerk's office in South Deerfield and have been moved from the basement to a climate-controlled, archival storage facility at the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association building in old Deerfield.

So that local residents and scholars can review the vast collection of town records, three inventory listings are provided below.  

• The first is an inventory of the documents housed in the safe in the Town Clerk's office.  Many of the primary documents located here have been digitized (see below).  The Town Clerk and her staff are often very pressed for time.  If anyone wishes to explore such listed files, please contact Peter Thomas for transfer of digital copies. 

• The second is an inventory of those documents that have been transferred to the archival facility at PVMA.  Most of these, with the exception of some of the early assessor's records, have not been digitized.  Specific requests for viewing (based on the attached inventory) can be made to library staff at Memorial Library, located adjacent to the PVMA museum in old Deerfield.

• To make the search easier, the third list provides an inventory of digitized records only.

INVENTORY OF RECORDS OF THE TOWN OF DEERFIELD:  (1) THOSE HOUSED IN THE TOWN CLERK'S OFFICE AND (2) THOSE ARCHIVED AT PVMA.  Both inventories are attached in this single document.

INTRODUCTION AND INVENTORY OF DIGITIZED RECORDS OF THE TOWN OF DEERFIELD

LISTINGS OF OTHER SOURCE MATERIALS