Hi Barry, I have lots of these lovely plants, they are very easy to divide: tip your one out of the pot, shake off the soil, and look around the base for "pups", ie small offsets.
These pups can gently pulled away from the parent plant, then potted up individually.
Re-pot the parent plant, and away you go!
Don't worry if some of the pups don't appear to have much in the way of roots, just pot them up anyway, and leave them to root themselves.
I'll check my notes and leave another comment tomorrow as to how long they are likely to take to root: quite some time, from memory, but I haven't lost a single one yet - they seem to be very amenable.
I brought a facicularia bicolor back from Scilly last year. It's growing well in a pot, in fact I'm going to try splitting it, as it growing too big. However it hasn't flowered this year. I've just noticed some in flower near the seafront where I live in East Sussex- so is there something I should be doing to encourage mine to flower!
None of mine have ever flowered so far - the best I've had so far is to get some of the leaves turning red, but mine are living in my cold, east-facing front yard, so they don't get a lot of sun.
They do seem to flourish in poor, well-drained soil: they don't need a good rich deep bed at all. I suspect that drainage is a large part of this - they don't need much water, being tough and leathery.
So I'd suggest that potting them on into free-draining soil/compost, and keeping them in the sunniest possible spot, might be the way to go?
Think you are right about putting in a hot spot. Mine is in a big pot so that i can move it in winter, as I am not sure how frost hardy they are. All those flowering on the seafront near me are in walled gardens, but must get blasted by the wind in winter.
Mine certainly thrive here in South Oxfordshire, in the aforementioned cold, east-facing yard: but then we haven't had a bitterly cold long winter for a while now.
On the seafront, it's often windy, but they wouldn't mind that, being low-growing and solid to the ground, with leathery leaves that don't get shredded by the wind and which don't lose moisture. And on the coast, it's rarely frosty - walled gardens are often very sheltered indeed, so it's not surprising that they like it down there!
I have had one of these plants for quite a few years and been wondering how to divide it. The inner leaf part of the rosettes turn a bright red and the central flowers a beautiful blue in the autumn, but the whole plant looks pot bound in a 18" wide pot, some rosettes looking a bit crushed in. It has about eight or nine large separate rosettes. There are quite a few side shoots, but removing those would not make much more room. Would like to "thin it out" a bit but scared of harming it. Am in north Argyll, 100 miles north of Glasgow, but very mild area and plant put into cold greenhouse in winter. Anyone ever tried to remove whole sections from this plant? Would appreciate any advice.
I have to say, Jess, some of mine were pretty "crushed in" looking, and they didn't seem to mind! If you don't like the crushed look, I'd suggest gently removing some of the "pups" at the sides, potting them up, and then when they are of the right size, replacing the crushed one. You could either sell the over-large one, or find it a bigger pot!


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Punch Brook
by Gary Sanderson
We meet as neighbors each morning, soon after subtle chips and chirps have burst into a joyous symphony of birdsong to greet the new day. By then I have strapped on my left-knee brace, and my robust, two-mile, daybreak ramble is underway.
Our paths cross about a quarter mile east and a hair north of my upper Greenfield Meadows home. There, as the neighborhood sleeps, she discretely trickles under Green River Road. Some passersby who cross her on their daily travels – even walkers – probably don't even realize she's there; she's that inconspicuous, especially when hidden under seasonable foliage. Her name is Punch Brook.
With leafy undergrowth hiding her narrow, clogged channel from view for about half of the year, the only visible clue marking her presence is a sturdy, knee-high, five-post wooden fence tucked neatly under the cover of low branches on the south side of the road. There the road opens a thin break in the mature treeline that accompanies her through the modern Mary Potter/Plumtree Lane development, inauspiciously crossing Plumtree on the way to her confluence with the Hinsdale Brook some 1,700 feet downstream.
These two streams didn't always connect. According to Greenfield historian Francis M. Thompson – whose insight was sharpened by deep family connections in Colrain and Greenfield Meadows – an 1843 flood surge dramatically changed the course of Hinsdale Brook and joined the two previously adjacent streams.
Before that violent act of nature, Hinsdale Brook took a sharp southward turn downstream from my home, traversing the upper Meadows. It pulled in Allen Brook along the way, and joined Green River just above today's Greenfield swimming pool. The sudden torrent rising from the East Shelburne hills blew through the elbow at the sharp turn, cut a short new eastern path to Punch Brook, and claimed the smaller brook's hollowed path to the Green River a short distance below today's Brookside Animal Hospital on Plain Road.
In one fell swoop, that mid-19th-century event had united the two streams, shortening Punch Brook by nearly 1,000 feet and establishing a new Hinsdale Brook-Green River confluence just less than a mile upstream from the old one. In the process, a section of upper Meadows pasture between Colrain and Plain roads was deprived of a major water source for livestock.
David Allen's Early Maps of Greenfield Massachusetts 1717-1918: With a Narrative History clearly displays the pre-flood streams, and topo maps still show the relict channel of the stream that existed before 1843.
Today, Punch Brook rises from an upland spring-hole basin along the East Colrain/East Shelburne line at Shearer Road and snakes its way to Hinsdale Brook, about two straight-line miles away. The original stream bed would have meandered maybe a total of three miles, making several twists and turns as it pulled in small, cold springs bubbling from the lower lips of the upland base, it curling north and east to the covered Pumping Station Bridge.
Thompson had the confluence of the Hinsdale and Punch brooks pegged as the likely first campsite of the captives marched away from Deerfield following the famous February 29, 1704 French and Indian attack on Old Deerfield, because an early metal broad-axe head was found nearby by a 19th-century farmer sometime after the brooks joined. Although that's flimsy evidence, it could well be so. The site would have been right off the old Indian trail that led through the Meadows to an infamous Green River fording place, below today's Pumping Station bridge.
That ancient Green River crossing was the site where captive Reverend John Williams' wife, Eunice, weakened by recent childbirth and failing in frigid water, was dispatched by her Native captor with a coup de grâce from a tomahawk. A stone monument today marks the spot where her corpse was recovered.
From there, the ancient trail led through the uplands of Leyden and Guilford, Vermont to the Connecticut River near a crossing site later occupied by Fort Dummer.
Before the axe head was found, just west of today's Plain Road, the site of the Deerfield captives' first overnight encampment was believed to be a swamp about a mile south. Which swamp is anyone's guess, forever open to debate. First, Deerfield historian George Sheldon's 1895 History of Deerfield placed it "east of the old Nims house." Then, nine years later, Thompson's History of Greenfield placed it west of "the old Nims farm," today known as Butynski farm.
The old Nims house stood on what is now the site of Anne Butynski's yellow ranch, next to her family's popular produce stand and barn on the west side of Colrain Road.
The question of which historian had the location right is irrelevant if the first campsite was, in fact, at the axe-head site a mile further up the trail. But, for the sake of argument, there are swamps on both sides of the old Nims place, and Thompson had good insight: his wife, Mary Nims, was born and raised on the farm, built by her grandfather Hull Nims and inherited by her father Lucius.
Sheldon, however, was also an insider with great local sources, tradition, and historical insight. The Deerfield historian's favored swamp to the east seems to make more sense for a couple of reasons: it was directly attached to the well-known trail, and it was sheltered under a steep escarpment forming the raised western and southern perimeter of the Greenfield-pool floodplain, today located across from Harper's Store. Such natural alcoves protected winter camps from harsh winds, and were thus sought for overnight refuge by Native travelers.
Returning to Punch Brook, in 1904 Thompson saluted it as "50 years ago, a splendid trout stream" whose clear waters were "alive with sparkling beauties" – that is, the native Eastern brook trout that populated local waters before sporting clubs imported brown and rainbow trout. Thompson reported that the brook's fishing glories had faded in his day due to drainage ditches dug by farmers to lower the water table on level portions of land through which it flowed. Nonetheless, the stream still offered trout into the mid-20th century, and they likely still populate its upper and even overgrown lower reaches, where today it would be nearly impossible to drop a line without a tangle.
A septuagenarian neighbor and friend of mine, who owns his boyhood home on the south end of Green River Road in the upper Meadows, remembers catching a beautiful, foot-long brown trout from the stream less than 70 years ago. That fish had likely migrated to cold, shaded, summer refuge by swimming up Hinsdale Brook from the Green River. Such fish would have been there for anglers, especially during summer rainstorms that increased flow and activated feed in muddy-brown water, concealing them in their midstream feeding stations.
I am most familiar with Punch Brook's upper reaches. I often hunted deer and turkeys up there, and thus know it better than the lower end closer to home. Recent inspection of its path through the upper Meadows revealed a narrow, loamy, barely discernable trickle of a stream obscured by a mix of tall, mature trees, including large, messy weeping willows and dense brush.
Although it appears to be nearly unfishable for much of the stretch between Green River Road and its Hinsdale Brook confluence, the little brook could still be fished through lush, marshy, private meadowland north of the road and up through the deep Smead Hill gorge to its upland headwaters. Likewise, the 250-yard run from the Hinsdale Brook confluence to Green River is easily fishable.
The state stocked Hinsdale Brook with trout before I moved to Greenfield 25 years ago. Although it is stocked no longer, Green River itself receives a heavy dose of big trout annually, and some of them do find their way into Hinsdale Brook. The stream's upper Shelburne reaches, where it known as Fiske Mill Brook, also holds brookies, and even an occasional rainy-day brown.
In a recent conversation with another neighbor who's lived her entire life across Hinsdale Brook from me, she seemed to know little about Punch Brook, and nothing at all about the 1843 flood that changed the course of Hinsdale Brook. As she pondered the topic on the side of the road, a spontaneous thought about Punch Brook suddenly came to her mind. She opined that its water must contain a special mineral because, though small, that little trickle of a spring brook never stops flowing, even on the coldest winter days.
Hmmmmm?
Fancy that, I thought, as my introspective wheels started spinning later that day.
Do you suppose the Pocumtuck warriors known to have accompanied French and Abenaki companions back to their old homeland for the 1704 attack knew the trail-crossing spring that never froze and thus targeted it for their first-night encampment? Though the answer will never be known, how could anyone doubt it?
posted in Columns, Indians, Local history | No Comments
Fawning Season
As seasons change, so, as we age, do our seasonal patterns and observations.
With hayfields chest high, pink weigela in full bloom, white mock-orange buds popping, strawberry scent sweetening humid air and the shad run trickling down, that reality smacked me upside the head on Memorial Day Weekend, when an unexpected daybreak encounter with a nesting doe unfolded in a finger of woods following Hinsdale Brook through my upper Greenfield Meadows neighborhood.
Headed south in gray light across the Plain Road bridge north of the old Polish Picnic grounds, I heard rustling movement to my left. I glanced up and immediately spotted a telltale white flash, followed by a ghost-like four-legged profile fleeing. A good-sized doe, she stopped and, angling away from me broadside, froze on a knoll less than 50 yards away, her head turned to face me.
"Whfooo!"
Her loud danger signal broke the morning silence. Soon she uttered another, then many more as I walked away. By the time I turned right onto Meadow Lane and walked out of earshot, she had sounded several emphatic warnings, uncharacteristic compared to many other recent deer encounters. Obviously, in my mind, she had fresh fawns nearby, perhaps birthed overnight, and was communicating with them.
Feeding or maybe returning from drinking brook water, she was communicating with her nest, not me. What I likely didn't hear were low, guttural, burp-like sounds aimed at her nest. She was cautioning her nestlings to sit still. Potential danger at hand.
Had I searched for that nest, I think I could have found it. But why disturb a nest? Frankly, did I not know that the fawn or fawns welcomed to the world there would be up and running by the time this column hit the street, I wouldn't have described their location. Birthing sites are to be protected, not publicized.
Simple deductive reasoning told me that doe was talking to her nest, not me. For months now, I have been bumping into daybreak deer who had not once previously been vocal. I had regularly encountered groups of three and five, and twice just one larger solitary deer I suspect was a buck. In all cases, they'd notice me approaching, freeze on high alert, and allow me to advance within 30 yards or so before retreating without a peep. Sometimes they'd just dip back into the woods, let me pass and, confident I was no threat, circle across the open hayfield some 50 to 100 yards behind me.
This most recent nesting doe had without doubt broken off from one of those groups I had been seeing. Her behavior was clearly that of a doe protecting her nest. Honestly, deer sightings had been conspicuously absent for a week or two and I knew they were establishing fawning nests. That time of year.
By August, does will reunite and I'll start seeing pairs of them accompanied by their fawns. Most often there seems for some reason to be two adults and three fawns, sometimes just two fawns, rarely four in my experience. Fawn mortality may be a factor. Nature's way. Some never make it out of their nest, others are eaten by predators or hit in the road or chopped to bits by first-cut hay mowers. It happens. An ugly scene that didn't play out when fields were cut old-fashioned way, with scythes.
A few days after our first encounter, at the same early hour, that nesting doe and I met again from afar. Not 50 yards from where I had last seen her, there she was, head down, snuggled close to the wood line munching clover and rye. She raised her head, perked up her ears, and stared. Classic nesting doe behavior. Always alert. Never far from the nest unless, intentionally trying to distract danger away from it. Does perform that protective ritual, similar to broken-wing displays feigned by ground-nesting birds, to lure predators or human intruders away from their nests in playful, catch-me-if-you-can acts of deception.
Since moving from my hometown of South Deerfield to Greenfield 25 years ago, I have many times witnessed such acts performed to lead danger away from a nest. I can't, however, claim to have always recognized the routine for what it was. Roaming the fields in the company of springer spaniel gun dogs, I just figured the deer were fleeing the dogs, and never gave it much additional thought.
The same held true for previous encounters dating back to childhood, with and without dogs. The deer would run and I'd watch them gracefully bound away without trying to analyze what was unfolding before my eyes. Now, walking alone without the distraction of rambunctious pets running wide quarters through fields and bordering woods, I typically get closer to wildlife, and can better understand dynamics.
Learning never ends for careful wildlife observers, whose perspective evolves over time. Whether you're a wildlife biologist, a hunter, a photographer, or just a plain pedestrian naturalist, what begins as simple childhood curiosity and fascination can become insightful analysis aimed at predicting movement patterns. It is a strategy that dates back to the earliest hunter/gatherers. The goal is to be at the right place at the right time. It's how earliest man fed and clothed himself, and today how bowhunters and wildlife photographers today fill their freezers and portfolios.
I'm sure I have not seen the last of this nesting doe who crossed my path. I had seen her before and will see her again, likely many times. I will not be able to distinguish her from others, though. I wonder if she dropped one fawn or two? Male or female? Mixed-gender twins, perhaps? Because I didn't catch them out as a unit before they vacated their birthplace along the southern bank of Hinsdale Brook and northern perimeter of the old Polish Picnic grounds, I will never know the answer.
Nonetheless, I will see those deer many times before shotgun blasts echo from the ridges and snow covers the forest floor. I'll bump into them on my walks, and pass them feeding along the road. I may even happen upon one of their nesting places next year. Such possibilities keep daybreak walks interesting and entice insightful observers to continue placing one foot in front of the other on their daily-exercise rounds.
Never boring. Beneficial, too.
posted in Columns | Comments (2)
Deerfield's First Mill Site Lives On
I recently visited an old South Deerfield mill site I discovered some 60 years ago as a young lad trout-fishing on the Mill River.
The field trip with historian friend Peter Thomas ignited a research adventure, beginning at the dam and steep ravine below and ending at the expansive old farm today owned by the granddaughter of the man who took me on my first deer hunt in his woodland acreage.
Honestly, as a boy, I never gave much thought to the tidy stonework and streamside ruins of a collapsed wood-frame building that had deposited a decaying pile of revelatory rubble on a small platform of land at the head of a deep gorge. Large, rusty sprocket wheels told me it had been a mill. I left it at that.
What mattered most to me then was the site's sporting, not historical, value. Frisky brook trout were always available in the deep, silty channel above the dam and, better still, in the splash pool below the 10-foot waterfall dropping over a tight dam-top constriction. I have always remembered the place as soul-soothing – the sound of the waterfall hitting bedrock calming, the steep, wooded downstream perspective peaceful indeed.
Before I was licensed to drive, my mother would drop me off mornings below the Mill River bridge at the intersection of Route 116 and Mathews Road. Equipped with spinning tackle, a bait can full of lively nightcrawlers, an aluminum-framed nylon net, and a wicker creel, I'd fish the pools and runs downstream a mile or so to a wooden farm-bridge in the middle of Settright's back pasture.
There I'd drop a worm or two into the deep, silty pool below before walking up a short, steep escarpment to a small orchard, where I'd squeeze through barbed-wire fencing at the end of a dirt driveway. I'd walk to the back door, past where the ell met the carriage sheds, knock hard enough to be detected, and go inside to rotary-dial my mother for a ride home.
Back then, widow Nellie Settright was still going strong, approaching if not exceeding 90 and sharing her home with daughter Marge and son-in-law Bill Van Petersilge, a Marine World War II hero who had miraculously survived many perilous island landings on the Pacific theater. Old Nellie, the great-grandmother of current farm owner Carrie Chickering Sears, seemed ancient to me.
The Settright farm came into being not long before the Revolution, when Moses Nims (1718-1791) of Old Deerfield broke ground. Moses left it to son Elisha, who, not long before his death, sold it to his son Rufus in 1809. Seven months later, Rufus sold it to Erastus Clapp, a Pine Nook farmer who moved across town to South Mill River.
Precisely when the extant 18th-century Federal farmhouse was built is unclear. A Greenfield newspaper story about Mr. and Mrs. Francis Clapp's surprise 40th-anniversary party held there on May 8, 1900 said the home was then 110 years old and had been in the Clapp family for 91 years. This would bring us back to 1790, which seems right. Or maybe that was the year the main block was built, transforming the smaller original dwelling into an ell, typical architectural evolution for historic valley farmhouses.
The Settright family came to Deerfield from Greenfield in the years leading up to the Civil War, buying a North Mill River farm on Dublin Plain before adding the south Mill River Clapp farm to its holdings in 1884. Although the northern farm was sold to Mathews Road and Stillwater Road developers in the 1960s, the family maintains ownership of the old Nims/Clapp farm.
Today the sign over the barn's milk-room door reads "Indian Acres," a name adopted in the mid-20th century because of the many Native American artifacts found in tillage east of Route 116.
Getting back to the upstream mill site where we began, though, my interest in it grew with my newfound genealogy and local-history interests, which blossomed after the 1989 death of my spinster great-aunt Gladys. My Grandfather Sanderson's older sister, "Antie" was our family-history steward, carefully curating old records and photos. When she died weeks short of her 94th birthday under life tenancy in the home I owned, her dresser-drawer collection of family history data immediately captured my fascination.
I was soon led to George Sheldon's History of Deerfield, where I found my waterfall fishing place identified on Page 269 as the town's first mill site, dating back to no later than 1689. Amazing. That's 15 years before the infamous 1704 Queen Anne's War raid on Old Deerfield.
Sheldon believed, but could not prove, there was an on-site sawmill there in 1689 when the town contracted Hatfield millwright Capt. John Allis to build the town's first grist mill on the stream, which rises in Conway and runs through Deerfield and Whately before entering the Connecticut River in Hatfield.
When Allis died in 1691, the town reached out to Northampton merchant/fur trader Joseph Parsons Sr. to complete the mill construction. Sheldon thinks the millstone on display in Memorial Hall's front yard today was spun into action by late December 1692. By 1699, however, the mill had vanished, most likely destroyed by Native warriors.
By the time Deerfield hostilities had calmed down enough for the construction of a new grist mill, millwrights favored closer sites on the Deerfield and Green rivers, which doesn't mean the Mill River site grew obsolete. To the contrary, Sheldon identified a Phelps sawmill standing there in his day, 200 years later.
That Sheldon assertion is supported by the November 2020 obituary of a man who bought the old mill site in 1971, soon building a home on the west bank and a bridge to it. The obit identifies the deceased's property as the site of three sawmills, which is an understatement: Three different owners operated sawmills there during the last third of the 19th century alone.
Since learning of the 1692 Allis/Parsons corn mill, I had many times entered into historical discussion about the site, describing my memories of its layout, with a dam going across the stream to a pile of mill rubble on the opposite bank. Although an informed abutter I have known for many years told me the ruins disappeared long ago, I never bothered to investigate. Thus, I was not prepared for what I recently discovered.
After more than a half-century, I found that the stream and scene had changed dramatically. There was no dam, no waterfall, no deep channel above or pool below.
Hmmmm?
Could it be that after so many years, my memory was confusing the site with old mill sites on other trout streams from my fishing past? I wasn't impossible, but I didn't think so. Nonetheless, it remained a vexing issue.
Because the site is well-hidden from Route 116 travelers, I had never caught a glimpse of the home resting on a secluded terrace across the stream, or the bridge leading to it. Those features, for starters, stuck out most during my recent return. Then, upon closer inspection from the bridge, it was immediately obvious that much else had changed as well. I impulsively mentioned the perceived changes to Thomas but was not totally certain. Maybe I was misremembering.
Still perplexed a few days later, I finally placed a phone call to the aforementioned informed abutter. I knew he could set me straight. Yes, he confirmed, there once was a dam and narrow 10-foot waterfall, with a deep channel above and a splash-pool below. He too had caught many nice squaretails and rainy-day brownies above and below the dam.
"Don't worry," he assured me, "you're right on point."
He then elaborated, explaining that a flood washed out the dam, some stonework, and the first bridge built there. It wasn't during Hurricanes Irene or Katrina. Before that. The first bridge was poorly designed, he said. It sat upon culverts that rested atop deep, unstable loam that had for centuries accumulated above the dam. The bridge itself was too low. Finally, floodwater overwhelmed it and blew out everything, including the old dam.
How about the rubble? Did he recall the wooden remains, the decaying roof truss and rusty sprocket wheels strewn on the opposite bank? No. That was before his time. His father would probably remember it.
Unfortunately, the man who built the home and bridge is dead and gone, thus unavailable for comment. Maybe the destructive flood swept away the mill rubble. Then again, maybe the deceased obit subject tidied it up before Mother Nature intervened.
Does it really matter? Probably not. Can't we just say it disappeared and leave it at that.
So, there you have it – the tale of the old Allis/Parsons mill and a neighboring farm below. The Mill River runs through both. Today, the mill is gone but not forgotten. After 330 years, stable, stone, streamside remnants mark the spot, and the legend lives on.
posted in Columns, Genealogy, Indians, Local history, South Deerfield | No Comments
Mourning Memories
My daily morning walk covers more than a mile, less than two. It begins by exiting the inset porch and crossing the front yard, passing a tall pink weigela and splitting a pair of tall Japanese maples to the triangular common on the crotch of Colrain and Green River roads that forms the southern tip of my property.
The neighborhood is sleeping as I walk toward Meadow Lane, where I take a left toward a looming sunrise and walk a couple hundred yards to a farm right-of-way between two nice, circa-1970, colonial-revival homes. There, I follow a nearly invisible double-rutted trail between tall, tidy residential fences and ornamental trees. The access allows manuring and harvesting of vast hayfields. Folks unfamiliar with the place probably pass the lane without notice.
Past the fences, I go left off the trail and, alone with my thoughts, follow the backyard perimeter of a couple of homes toward a small wood line. There, it's not unusual to see a deer, especially this time of year when fresh, sweet, salubrious clover and rye stubble sprout. Never is it richer in nutrients than during that first spring growth, thus the higher price for "first-cut" hay.
On a recent morning, recrossing the common on my way home, I stopped to chat with a local farmer slowing for the stop sign in his white pickup. In the course of our brief, neighborly conversation, he told me about the deer he had just spotted grazing the field behind his barn. Sighting them through dim dawn light, he first feared his cattle were loose, then realized it was deer. Many of them. So many, in fact, that he took a count: 15, coming off an easy winter.
In this season of budding and mating, nesting and birthing, growth, renewal and blissful morning birdsong, thoughts of a solo, sentient walking man can romp and ramble to the most peculiar places. It's difficult to predict where such ponderings will lead. I guess it depends on the elements – wind, rain, fog, or perhaps that first pink twinkle peeking through budding trees low on the eastern horizon, illuminating spring pastels to a soft glow.
Turkey gobbles from the ridge recently entered the mix as lustful mating toms assemble their springtime harems. This week marked the opening of the annual, four-week spring hunt, when hunters use an assortment of mouth and friction calls to mimic the sounds of eager hens and entice dominant gobblers to tightly choked shotguns. I've been there, done that. Enjoyed it while it lasted. Loved it, in fact. But how many turkeys must a man kill to be considered a good hunter?
If ever I am hungry and destitute, I know I can call in a turkey. That's good enough for me. Hunting in my world is not competitive. It's leisure activity. Though killing is a necessary component, to me it's the most distasteful element of the game. One way around it, of course, is photography, with its benign type of shooting. That alternative satisfied my late Uncle Bob later in life. But it's not for me. I don't need it.
On a recent, clear morning, as light crept in, a tom sounded off from the ridge just before I hit Meadow Lane. By the time I reached the open meadow, I had heard two additional gobbles, then another as I circled back on the homestretch toward Meadow Lane. I can't say why, but that garrulous gobbler spun my wheels into death and dying in the season of life and living. The die cast, I let it ramble as I put one foot in front of the other.
The chain of thought started with my late son Rynie, who had died eight years ago to the day, a day shy of his 29th birthday. Less than three years earlier, his 28-year-old brother had died a similar death, both confined to hospital beds and succumbing to dreaded post-operative infections. I didn't dwell long on Rynie and Gary. Other deaths have entered my life recently. Isn't it inevitable as we age? I must admit by now I am hardened to death.
Just in the past year my wife lost a brother and sister, both younger, as well as a slightly older brother-in-law. All of them died at home far too young – one of a hideous cancer fought with dreadful hospital poisons, the other two related to lives lived in the fast lane. Although it's true that all three made choices that contributed to their demise, that's life. Get over it. We're all going to die someday.
Which reminds me, since the death of my sons, I have read the obits of at least four or five of their friends, all of them good kids who enjoyed many happy hours under my roof – blowing out my woofers with high-volume hip-hop and rap, and tearing my tweeters with ear-tickling newgrass and bluegrass selections from my CD collection. If you haven't noticed, young overdose death before the age of 40 is now a national epidemic. Very sad. Heroin, fentanyl, and crack cocaine are the primary villains. Up and down these young people travel to tragic young demise.
All those thoughts were bouncing and whirling through my inner consciousness on that robust daybreak ramble through short, frosty grass and crisp air – touching on this topic and that like a hummingbird
feeding through morning glories. No, not mourning glories.
Although my inner ramblings began with my dead sons, their aunt and uncles, thoughts of them didn't linger long. I quickly moved on to my late boyhood friend, Big Stosh, with whom in younger days I played ball, hunted, fished and caroused regularly. He was here today, gone tomorrow – discovered dead at home, likely a heart attack victim. Big Stosh and I had many good days on the Deerfield River and its surrounding hardwood ridges; that, and taking in the sights and sounds while riding on larks around secondary hilltown roads, preferably dirt.
I missed the Big Boy's funeral, and would have offered my pallbearer services had I not been away at a national outdoor-writers convention. I regret that I couldn't pay my last respects by lugging him to his grave. It wasn't meant to be, I guess. Bad timing.
I also thought of friends Fast Eddie and Blue Sky, two men cut from similar, independent fabric. I loved both of them like brothers, warts and all, but have held off mentioning them in print. I suppose enough time has now elapsed to disclose that they both took their own lives. Their choice by different methods.
I hope no one will now object to me making such an acknowledgment in print.
So, there it is, my salute to friends who decided they had had enough. One suffered from multiple health problems that finally wore him down and out. The other had run afoul of the tax man. They chose not to stick around to pay the consequences. Churchgoers would call them cowards. I don't go there. I'm not wired that way. Genuflecting to crucifixions, dropping to my knees to pray, and feeding the log-handled basket for salvation is for others. A believer I am not.
Looking back, that train of thought that briefly brought the dead to life in my imagination lasted maybe three or four minutes. It was all triggered by that rambunctious tom turkey establishing territory with throaty gobbles. As can happen to receptive beings when the conditions are right, my consciousness welcomed in wafting spirits riding soft, undetectable currents through still morning air. I enjoyed the brief visitations. Then, like the darkness, they disappeared.
I was back at home before the tall clock's 6:30 gong sounded. I poured a hot cup of coffee, passed the dining-room woodstove into the parlor, maneuvered my power recliner to a comfortable position, propped up the headrest and opened a book about ancient Eurasian/Siberian rock art. Written by art-historian/anthropologist Esther Jacobson-Tepfer, it's titled The Hunter, the Stag, and the Mother of Animals: Image, Monument, and Landscape in Ancient North Asia.
Now there's a long-handled basket into which I willfully throw contributions – supporting beliefs grounded in the ancient hunter-gatherer realm condemned by "civilized" religions as pagan and ultimately reduced to ashes, some tied to a wooden stake surrounded by dry, brittle fagots.
Robed Inquisition monsters called it progress. Today it's a hot mess.
posted in Columns, South Deerfield | No Comments
Men, Mastodons and Maybe Even Sled Burials
Perhaps the best-kept secret in the world of late-Pleistocene archaeology today is the work of independent researcher Dr. Richard Michael Gramly of North Andover, a 75-year-old Harvard Ph.D. hopelessly mired in old ways learned from masters of their field during the late Sixties and Seventies.
What "Mike" Gramly does best is excavate and interpret sites. More importantly, he then promptly publishes his findings in the public domain. He identifies all of the above as lost arts in the field to which he has dedicated his life's work.
With Gramly, there are no secrets, no dark-shadow whispers. He believes he was placed on this planet and educated by some of the best to make and share discoveries. That's what separates him from the cultural-resource managers he criticizes for their secretive postures. Gramly does not share their fear that published work will pinpoint important sites and promote "looting" by collectors who hawk their goods in an active marketplace dominated by three-day-weekend shows and eBay.
Take a look someday at the Native American artifacts for sale in cyberspace. Many of Gramly's scholarly friends routinely peruse these offerings and are upset to find well-known stone tools and weapons culled from important, deaccessioned museum collections for sale to the highest bidder.
But that's a discussion for another day, one that has absolutely nothing to do with Gramly's current passion. These days, he's focused on North American human interactions with ancient proboscideans (mastodons and mammoths), a topic that's captured worldwide attention from scholars probing the peopling of our planet.
What Gramly has uncovered right here in the Northeast and Great Lakes country is astounding, yet hidden in plain sight and unrecognized. He has put the hands of Clovis hunters all over curated remains of extinct mastodons believed to have died of "natural" causes. Experts have for decades believed that these early elephants died by getting trapped in mucky graves while seeking water during the Ice Age melt some 13,000 calendar years ago.
A Familiar Crew
Gramly's current fascination began in 2014, when he caught wind of an auction that stirred his inquisitive juices. After a Middletown, New York farmer had exposed skeletal mastodon remains while digging a bog with a backhoe on his property, the in situ excavation rights were placed on the auction block. The resourceful Gramly decided to go for it, reaching out to a couple of friends who ponied up just under $25,000 for the winning bid. With it, they secured for Gramly exclusive rights to a site now known in archaeological circles as Bowser Road.
A few months later, in the fall of 2014, Gramly and a familiar crew, comprised mostly of members from the American Society for Amateur Archaeology he founded some 30 years ago, were on-site recovering the remarkably preserved bones of a 13,000-year-old beast.
It takes not only field experience but an open and creative mind as well to manage and accurately interpret what is unearthed at such a site. Gramly meets all the standards with aplomb. Plus, when he forms a new hypothesis that he knows traditional, knee-jerk professionals will challenge, he only grows more determined to prove his point.
The reason Paleolithic researchers have found it difficult to associate ancient proboscidean graveyards with human predation is that stone artifacts are rarely found at the sites. and even when a random stone tool or weapon does come to light, they cannot rule out the possibility that it's an unrelated, coincidental drop. Thus, human hunting has been routinely doubted.
Gramly was never sure about such conclusions. Was it not a fool's errand to attribute bone fields containing the remains of many mastodons to the stupidity of ancient beasts that needed water getting stuck in the mud while seeking it? For real? An intelligent animal that needed great volumes of water to survive, dying in the mud? Huh? It made little sense to Gramly.
Furthermore, Gramly couldn't comprehend the narrow-minded view that absence of stone artifacts precluded human involvement. Did not ancient man also create bone, antler, and ivory tools, which appear in the archaeological record, and also wooden tools that do not? To Gramly, the mired-in-the-mud verdict bordered on preposterous. Old World hunters for millennia killed proboscideans with primitive tools. So, why would New World hunters be any different. After all, did they not come from the same bolt of cloth?
Reopening Cabinets
During the Bowser Road dig, Gramly's curiosity was stirred by clustered broken rib bones to which he at first paid little attention. Bones lying in a marsh for 13,000 years do, after all, decompose and break over time. But then it occurred to him that there seemed to be too many, and none were intact. Upon closer inspection, he could see evidence that the rib bones had been worked, indicating to him that they were artifacts crafted by human hands. He then put on his thinking cap and came up with a theory related to hunter-gatherers paying ceremonial homage to their fallen prey.
Gramly was soon convinced that what he was dealing with were spear-throwers (atlatls) fashioned by Clovis hunters and ritually broken into many pieces during the butchering process. Old weapons were being had sacrificed in respect to the fallen beast whose fresh ribs could be fashioned into new replacements.
Then Gramly started finding evidence of larger bones that had been used for tool handles and shafts, and who knew what else? He was convinced that these bone artifacts explained the absence of stone tools in mastodon bone fields. How so? Because Clovis hunters were using other suitable or even superior materials from which to craft important tools, weapons, and other useful objects.
To support his argument, Gramly knew he must examine existing evidence in mastodon collections long ago recovered, unrecognized and curated in North American museums. He knew of more than 20 repositories nationwide, and suspected he'd discover other previously unidentified rib-bone atlatl relics among the collections.
His first stop was the Museum of Science in Buffalo, New York, which housed an extensive mastodon collection from the iconic Hiscock Site located along the shores of Lake Ontario in upstate New York. Having been a curator there in the 1980s, he knew both the collection and the site, where he had hands-on digging experience in a drained pond basin.
It didn't take long for Gramly to strike gold in Buffalo, where he spent nearly a month examining a the vast, out-of-sight, out-of-mind collection stored in protective metal Lane cabinets. He was not surprised to find identical broken rib-bone atlatls, not to mention other interesting discoveries, including antler Y-sticks with effigy carvings, bone tools and objects, tooth ornaments and even a tooth tool, along with tusk ivory and, yes, human remains of two individuals that have to this day not been radiocarbon-dated.
Also in the mix, all within spitting distance of human remains, were the skeletal remains of a dog. Wow! Could it have been the grave of a Clovis hunter – maybe even a shaman killed on the hunt?
Gramly first thought the Y-sticks were the remains of a shaman's headdress. Now he's leaning more toward the top and bottom ends of a ceremonial staff. Yes, perhaps that of a shaman, but not necessarily so, and very difficult to positively decipher.
Another key discovery involved the ivory components of the Hiscock collection: some large, some medium, some small; some intact, others fragmentary. After examining several examples in the same couple of drawers, Gramly concluded that they had been collected from the same adjacent features. Then, on top of the cabinet, he discovered the largest example of them all, an ivory tusk too long to fit in a drawer.
This long object immediately captured his attention. He could see it had been worked, somehow cut in half lengthwise, a challenging task indeed with primitive Clovis cutting tools. Although another researcher had already loosely identified the object as some sort of digging tool, the more Gramly studied it, the more it screamed "sled runner" to him. Could he be dealing with a previously undetected Clovis sled burial, complete with a sacrificed sled dog to transport the corpse's soul on a complicated journey through the Underworld to the Milky Way?
If so, it would be the world's earliest sled burial on record, and perhaps the earliest evidence ever found of domesticated dogs being used as beast of burden. Not even in the Old World has such a burial dating back to Paleoindians been uncovered.
Then, among the bone assemblage Gramly found what he suspected to be crossbeams and other components of an ancient sled, again a cutting-edge discovery, one that he is now even more certain is accurate.
The story gets better. This past autumn a friend of Gramly's from Kentucky was visiting the Blue Licks Battlefield Museum only to find a mastodon tusk collected from the Ohio River-side site in 1897. Upon closer inspection he could see that, like the Hiscock ivory he had seen in photos, it had been cut in half lengthwise to create a flat surface – very likely another tusk sled runner, maybe associated with a Clovis burial.
Given the extreme difficulty and danger involved in bringing down large, powerful mastodons with primitive weapons, human mortality would have been no stranger to such Clovis kill sites.
Gramly traveled to the Kentucky museum and confirmed that, indeed, the Blue Licks specimen is another ivory sled runner crafted from mastodon tusk. Now that researchers know what to look for, future sled runners will almost certainly be discovered, perhaps even by Gramly reviewing additional curated mastodon remains.
Plus, there's another important hat in the ring. Gramly long ago pulled in respected world-religion guru James B. Harrod, who jumped into the project when Gramly was examining the Hiscock collection. Never can there be enough trained eyes examining such collections, and the venerable Harrod did indeed identify portable stone rock art and make other valuable observations about materials in the Hiscock collection.
In the meantime, Harrod has also documented seven Old World sled burials from Siberia and East Asia and three others from the New World, all from the (current) Holocene epoch. The North American examples come from indigenous Inuit and Algonquian cultures in Newfoundland and Labrador as well as the upper Great Lakes.
Ancient customs and spiritual practices die hard. So, if people were burying hunters with their sleds and sled dogs 3,000 to 7,000 years ago, isn't there reason to believe that the mortuary practice may have been carried down from a much earlier day? Anthropologists agree that a worldwide population of the world's earliest hunter-gatherers shared remarkably similar cosmos that differ little from those of rare, indigenous jungle cultures that survive today in the threatened Amazonian rain forest and places like it.
Gramly put the world on notice about his exciting new paradigm last year by publishing Late Pleistocene proboscidean ivory artifacts from the Hiscock Site, N.Y., in the prestigious French journal L'Anthropologie. Wait until his new book expanding upon his hypothesis hits the street in the coming months. Yes, Gramly and Harrod are now finishing a work about North American human interaction with proboscideans that promises to rock to anthropological world. As the climate warms and the Arctic permafrost melts, this new book will open the gates for exciting new research.
Dr. Richard Michael Gramly should be proud of what has transpired since the Bowser Road auction, because this is now his baby. A confident archaeologist and unapologetic iconoclast, he has never feared swimming against the current and never will. In fact, he welcomes the challenge.
posted in Columns, Indians | Comments (2)
Bloody Brook's Old Wright Place is Long Gone
I was on the road around 7:30 a.m. for an hour's drive up Interstate 91 to Claremont, New Hampshire, a Connecticut River mill town south of Cornish and Windsor, Vermont – Mount Ascutney looming large on the northwestern horizon.
There I would for the first time meet Avis Dodge Rogers, a dignified 92-year-old bundle of historical curiosity and youthful South Deerfield memories, and maybe even a glint of girlish mischief in her light-blue Yankee eyes.
I know them, the eyes of my late father.
A wife, mother, and librarian who dabbled in local history and genealogy in her spare time, Ms. Rogers was born in 1929 to Charles Mason and Dora May (Clark) Dodge. Hers was a youth of cows and horses in the barn, chickens in the coop, and jumping up and down on the hay-wagon to compress loads for transit at her family's 50-acre farm on the corner of North Main Street and Jackson Road, formerly the road to Whitmore's Ferry.
When her grandfather lived there during the first half of the 20th century, the farm encompassed about 130 acres split by North Hillside Road, with 80 wooded acres extending all the way to Clapp's Pond on the upland east side.
I know the acreage on both sides of the road. I often hunted there and knew Ms. Rogers' father, Charlie Dodge, a well-known South Deerfield character and Oliver Smith Will elector who died in 1980. He was slightly younger than my grandfather, and I can't imagine they didn't know each other in passing. It was a small town in their day, and part of mine.
Ms. Rogers graduated Deerfield High School in 1947 and stuck around for a couple of years before marrying Albert H. Rogers, a friend of Deerfield veterinarian Charles Belford, and moving to Claremont, where he and a partner purchased Claremont Paper Mill. The couple remained there long enough to celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary in 2019, two months before Mr. Rogers' December death. He had been retired for 25 years, having sold his factory to Ashuelot Paper Company in 1994.
Avis weathered the loss and is still going strong, her memory, mobility, and communication skills remarkable.
I learned of Ms. Rogers last summer from a friend who bought her South Deerfield property about 20 years ago. He provided her phone number and encouraged me to contact her, promising I'd tap into a wealth of South Deerfield knowledge. I called promptly and have been picking her brain ever since, trying my best not to be a pest.
Always engaging and enthusiastic during our discussions, she had on many occasions encouraged me to visit. So, with winter fading into joyous spring – notwithstanding three inches of inconvenient snow that had fallen the previous day – the time was finally right.
I arrived at Ms. Rogers' secluded, tidy ranch on a peaceful hill before 9 a.m. The gracious hostess was neatly yet comfortably dressed and ready to share information, with photos and records stacked on her dining-room table for the visit.
Tracing the Links
For me, the most pressing topic was the 18th-century gambrel-roofed dwelling that came with the farm bought by her family long ago. Not sure who bought it or precisely when, she knew it was either her grandfather or great-grandfather around the dawning of the 20th century.
The circa-1780 homestead that stood there at the time was identified by George Sheldon, author of the History of Deerfield (1895), as "the old Wright place." By the time the Dodges bought it, the building was getting old and worn. "I don't think people painted their homes as often back then," she explained.
Ms. Rogers believes that in about 1905 her grandfather, Edward Mason Dodge, was faced with the decision of either replacing or repairing the deteriorating building and chose the latter. Why not? He was a carpenter, and likely had a hand in disassembling the old structure and building a new home that's still standing there.
My primary interest was in the 18th-century building that was removed, a dwelling that would, if extant, be one of South Deerfield's oldest. In fact, it was probably one of the first dozen or so homes built in Bloody Brook village.
My curiosity had been piqued over the winter after examining two circa-1900 photos of the old building – one from the Pioneer Valley Memorial Association's Howes Brothers collection and another a lithographic, pre-1909 postcard. My interest only intensified after learning that the farmstead's first occupant had been the Joseph Wright family, literally giving me skin in the game.
Although I knew that cooper Joseph Wright and his daughter Miriam Wright Arms were great-grandparents of mine, I knew little else about them, and had no idea where they lived. I knew much more about my Asahel Wright line through Deerfield's Wapping village. More than likely, the two men were from the same bolt of early Springfield cloth.
There is good reason for my lack of knowledge about Joseph Wright, considered by Sheldon as a "late comer" to town. The Deerfield historian tells us he had resided in Ware and Hadley before arriving in Bloody Brook around 1779, the patriarch then nearing 60. It doesn't help that Sheldon chose to introduce the "old Wright place" not in his Joseph Wright profile, but rather in that of a Baldwin family I had no previous impetus to examine. But Avis Dodge led me to the Baldwins, and they led me to Sheldon's mention of the Wright place, which I was able to pinpoint.
Chasing the Goose
I then had ample reason to probe deeper into the Wrights and their farm, and was soon snagged in vexing complications created by what would turn out to be a misidentification on the aforementioned color postcard depicting an historic South Deerfield house. Chalk it up as a classic example illustrating how a published mistake can wreak havoc on a research mission.
This one set me off on a wild goose chase that was difficult to resolve. I found the vertical postcard of the antique, gambrel-roofed structure on eBay. Identified across the bottom left as the "Old Bartlett House in South Deerfield," it sure looked like the same building my friend Peter Thomas had shown me on the black-and-white Howes Brothers photo with an elderly woman standing in front. Both photos showed the same front and side doors, same center chimney, same front and gable-side windows, and even what appeared to be the same mature trees standing between the home and the street.
Thomas was of the opinion, but not certain, that the photos depicted the same building – specifically the one removed by the Dodge family at the corner of North Main Street and Jackson Road.
I was immediately interested in the Howes Brothers photo for two reasons. First, maybe someone could identify the elderly woman standing in front. Second, the structure closely resembled a distinctive Deerfield homestead known in National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) records as the Locke/Fuller House at The Bars, now the home of octogenarian widow Mary Arms Marsh. The NRHP profile describes that home's architectural style as unique among Deerfield structures. Although that may well have been the case when it was accepted as a Register building, it would not have been so before the old Dodge place, just three miles south, was demolished.
Despite having different chimneys – central in South Deerfield, dual at The Bars – the two contemporaneous buildings otherwise displayed remarkably similar, gambrel-roofed architecture styles, suggesting that master builder Jonas Locke, owner of The Bars place, could well have had a hand in both. Locke built his home around 1790 and would have known – and possibly even worked with – Joseph Wright's oldest son Westwood Cook Wright, a joiner who was hired in 1787 to build a new Old Deerfield schoolhouse where Hall Tavern now stands.
Most confusing about the postcard showing what appeared to be the same decaying building as the Howes Brothers photo was seeing the Bartlett name attached. The 1858 Walling and 1971 Beers maps of South Deerfield both show "F. Bartlett" residing on the east side of North Main Street, about a quarter-mile south of the Wright-Baldwin-Dodge place.
Though my deed research has produced no evidence that the property on the corner of Jackson Road ever belonged to a Bartlett, there was a caveat: Avis Dodge Roger's great-grandfather and great-uncle, Hawley brothers Mason and Alonzo Dodge, moved to South Deerfield in the mid-19th century and married Franklin Bartlett's daughters.
Nonetheless, when shown the Howes photo, Ms. Rogers could not identify the elderly standing woman. She was certain the woman was not from her Jackson Road gene pool.
Perhaps the mystery could be solved in probate records, because by that point, I had still been unable to document a Dodge purchase of the Jackson Road property. My wheels were spinning. Could there have been two nearly identical homes – one belonging to a Bartlett, the other to a Baldwin – in the same North Main Street neighborhood? Was there a hidden Dodge-Baldwin connection that would appear in probate? Though if so, wouldn't Ms. Rogers know of it?
Perplexed, I fired off a detailed email explaining my dilemma to Thomas, a sophisticated researcher and friend with whom I often share such snags. Maybe he would offer helpful suggestions.
Well, not quite – but he did take a short trip in cyberspace that ultimately solved my mystery. Using Google Street View, he went to the Dodge place now owned by Robert Decker, viewed it from the same perspective as the postcard, and noticed an identical barn in the background. Bingo! Same site, different homestead.
To illustrate the point, he took a screen shot and emailed it to me overnight while I slept. There to greet me in my inbox early the next morning, I realized that my first impression had been correct: the postcard depicted the old Wright-Baldwin-Dodge place.
In dim morning light, I reached for a notepad within reach on my desk. I remembered jotting down notes for future reference on a list of Franklin County Registry of Deeds plans. Noted was a 1968 plan mapping a couple of Dodge building lots to be sold on Jackson Road; on the face was a list of deeds I hadn't cross-referenced with others I had reviewed.
The first one of these I opened documented a 1901 transfer of the Baldwin property to Edward Mason Dodge, through court-appointed estate administrator Pharcellus Bridges.
The transaction occurred about two years after the death of Joseph A. Baldwin, and two years before the death of his elderly widow and sole survivor, Mary Porter Baldwin.
Joseph A. was the third-generation Baldwin to own the farm. His grandfather John Baldwin was the first, buying the property and moving to Bloody Brook village from Connecticut in 1804. John's son and Joseph's father, Augustus Baldwin, was next, followed by Joseph, whose son James G. Baldwin lived next door and likely helped with the farm.
That elderly standing woman displayed in the Howes Brothers photo was widow Mary. Likely starting to fail in old age, the administration of her estate had been transferred to Bridges. She died in 1903 at 81.
So, there you have it – a splendid outcome to a chaotic, helter-skelter chase. Not only had I unraveled an annoying historical rats' nest tangled in an unfortunate published transcription error but, in the process, I had uncovered a direct genealogical link to the place.
It had been the home of Joseph Wright, whose daughter Miriam in 1779 married my fourth great-grandfather, Eliphaz Arms. That couple had nine children, and lived on the same Bloody Brook Corner lot my widowed, 92-year-old mother calls home to this day.
Yes, a small world, that that of old Bloody Brook village.
posted in Columns, Genealogy, Local history, South Deerfield | No Comments
Family Matter in Montagnais-Naskapi Land
My overstuffed December woodshed has been hollowed out by now, leaving a tall, thin reminder along the back edges that the happy sound of spring birdsong is near.
"Don't let the frigid mornings fool you," I have many times told myself in recent days, looking up at what's left. "It'll soon be over."
That's obvious, with daylight lengthening and the sun creeping higher in the southern sky. Before long the backyard brook will roar to the accompaniment of lusty daybreak gobbles from the nearby ridge as eager shad migrate up valley to their June spawning beds.
Keeping a good fire is a primitive skill. I pride myself in being a good firekeeper, tending the soapstone woodstove around the clock during the cold months. To me, there's none better than wood heat. Nonetheless, I can't say I don't look forward to the last flame reduced to cold, powdery, dead ash.
Likewise, I can't lie. No, I don't eagerly await the sound of the fall dump truck dropping next year's fuel supply in front of the woodshed door. Yeah, yeah, I know it's good exercise for a battered old man trying to remain relevant. But still, it's an annual chore that only masochists welcome. Why? Because it's hard friggin work, no matter how you view it.
Plus, one must be cautious. Working a woodpile has been the final act for many an unfortunate man trying to do his part, and that includes a few personal friends.
But why fret it? I can think of many worse endings, some of which I have witnessed. There are worse ways to meet one's maker than by experiencing a sudden onset of weakness or dizziness, a peculiar twinge in the chest, shortness of breath and a sweaty face-first swoon to the next kingdom. We should all be so fortunate. My sons weren't. They died in hospitals – no place I want to exhale my final breath.
Sorry. Didn't intentionally drift off to that place. Sometimes it just happens.
What's nicest to me about spring's approach is increasingly longer days and earlier daybreaks. Now that I'm retired, I rise daily to the first grey twinkle of morning light. Such early starts provide several uninterrupted hours of blissful silence. I can read, write, research or fire off emails seeking answers to vexing mysteries of the moment. It seems I'm always chasing for answers to something. It's just another form of hunting and gathering – another primal chore, like fire-keeping, for which I'm wired.
A man on such a mission can accomplish a lot before the midday distractions of television, phone calls, and surprise visits, even those that are welcomed, not to mention unforeseen household problems that demand immediate attention. I savor early-morning stillness, in my world better than that of late night, when I may be tired but can usually rally for engrossing topics.
In recent days, my reading has taken me on an adventure to the north coast of Canada's St. Lawrence Seaway. I was taken there by iconic, early-20th-century American anthropologist and University of Pennsylvania academic Frank Gouldsmith Speck (1881-1950). An expert in Eastern Algonquian and Iroquoian culture in northeastern North America, Speck preferred to study native people who were still practicing their old ways when governments and missionaries were committed to expunging them. The chic term activists today use for that cultural cleansing is "erasure."
By reading Speck classics like Penobscot Man or Naskapi, about Eastern Algonquian people of the Northwoods, we get a glimpse into the lifeways of the indigenous Connecticut Valley people here before they were driven north and west by 17th– and early 18th-century colonizers lusting for their best land and forcing heartless diaspora upon them.
Even after native people here were forced onto reservations or fled to the hinterlands, the goal of their foreign oppressors was to erase their culture, religion, and language, a task instituted and enforced by uniformed officials of church and state.
By exploring the old ways by which Eastern Algonquians of the Northland were still living when he observed them, anthropologist Speck opens a window into the way of life of the indigenous people who lived here long ago.
Many years ago, I bought and read Penobscot Man: The Life History of a Forest Tribe in Maine (1940), and I still often pull it from my library as a fact-checking reference. The book focuses on Maine's Eastern Abenaki Penobscot people, coastal cousins of the Western Abenaki of northern New Hampshire and Vermont, and also related by marriage and Eastern Algonquian custom to central Massachusetts' Nipmucks and the native people from our neck of the woods referred to as the "Pocumtuck Confederation" by Deerfield historian George Sheldon.
My latest Speck read, Naskapi: The Savage Hunters of the Labrador Peninsula (1935), came to me by way of the University of Oklahoma Press' annual Christmas sale. Because Naskapi were Eastern Algonquian, their cosmos was closely related to that of genetically and linguistically related people from our lower Connecticut Valley. We're talking about shared customs like ceremonial hunting, butchering, and feasting of bears, fishing for and preparing salmon, trout and sturgeon, and even their nomadic seasonal hunter/gatherer travels and villages.
A peculiar new paradigm shift wants to designate as Abenaki the indigenous people native to this place. The Confederation that Sheldon described was comprised of Pocumtuck, Norwottuck, Waranoke, Agawam, and maybe even Nipmuck people, with longstanding marriage ties to the Abenaki and Pennacook to their north as well as the Mohicans who lived west to the Hudson River.
Not until very recent years has anyone tried to designate them as Abenaki. In fact, experts like Eastern Algonquian linguist extraordinaire Ives Goddard hold that based on language, they represented distinctive groups whose dialects would have bordered on unintelligible.
The current confusion may originate with a band of Abenakis known as Sokoki, who showed up to populate the area of present-day Vernon, Vermont and Northfield before 1640. They are believed by most experts to have come here from southern Maine to flee European plagues brought by sailing ships, though others hypothesize that the Sokoki were from the Wabenaki north.
Is this recent shift being used to buttress a thus-far-unsuccessful effort by Wabenakis from Champlain Country to gain federal recognition as a "tribe," by linking Abenakis to Historic Deerfield? It's a hot and divisive topic.
Nevertheless, the Native people who lived here and their cousins from the distant north may have eaten different diets, worn slightly different skins and furs, and built different dwellings dictated by climate, but at their spiritual and ritualistic core they were similar, and thus worthy of comparison.
Something else that caught my attention appeared in a bibliographic Speck footnote naming Life and Sport on the North Shore by Canadian naturalist N.A. Comeau as a source of information about Naskapi custom. Published in 1909 and reprinted in 1923 and 1954, the book is still in print.
What interested me most was the author's surname Comeau, my maternal grandmother's Acadian French family from Nova Scotia. When cursory online investigation found a direct link, as I suspected it would, I had skin in the game, always an added enticement.
My grandmother Adele Marie Comeau, was born and raised in Comeauville/Clare County/St. Mary's Bay, Nova Scotia, at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy. Her people were fishermen, mariners, merchant marines, farmers, seamstresses, actors and who knows what else. She and the author were indeed from the same Bay of Fundy roots and neighborhood.
I'm confident that, had I discovered author N.A. Comeau before my grandmother died many years ago, she probably would have recognized him as kin. She was still a young girl living in Comeauville, N.S., when Life and Sport on the North Shore was published.
Napoléon-Alexandre Comeau (1848-1923) was the son of a Hudson Bay Company employee. As a result, he grew familiar with Native villages and customs, eventually living with native hunters in hunting and fishing camps. He was also fluent in five languages, three of them Native languages of the Northland, including Montagnais-Naskapi. French was his native tongue, and he learned English as a teen sent by his father to a school in Trois-Rivières, Quebec. His Comeauville grandfather had moved his family across to the Bay of Fundy's western shore in Trois-Rivières during the final quarter of the 18th century.
The author Comeau bore witness to and participated in hunting and fishing customs that few white men capable of coherently writing about it have experienced. He knew the ins and out of setting ingenious snares and dead falls to capture furbearers as well as the trapping, spearing, cleaning, preparing and storing fish reserves.
What he wrote more than 100 years ago is still an important window into Naskapi culture, which, when reduced to the lowest denominator, is not much different than that of the Connecticut Valley's Pocumtucks.
So, there you have it – another day, another log on the fire, another winter reading adventure – all to the faint trickle of sugarbush sap-lines dripping toward another glorious budding of spring.
posted in Columns, Genealogy, Indians, Local history | No Comments
Photo Stirs South Deerfield Memories
We've all heard the old adage proclaiming a picture's worth 1,000 words – in some cases, an understatement, like, for instance, the example I'm about to share.
A quick glance at an online postcard depicting a streetscape with old jalopies in mid-1950s downtown South Deerfield was all it took to unleash in me a flood of fond childhood memories. The black-and-white image appeared on one of my daily spins through eBay. It showed a brand spanking new Professional Pharmacy standing on the corner of North Main and Elm. Built in 1952 by downtown landlord Paul Georgiole, it was a low-budget replacement for the stately Bloody Brook Inn, destroyed by an overnight fire on March 14, 1951.
The sight of that intimately familiar building and the bulbous old cars harkening back to my mother's green 1953 Chevy sedan really stirred my imaginative juices, sweeping me back to a childhood of bicycles, skates and skis, snow forts, mountain hideouts, nickel packs of Topps baseball cards, and double-scoop ice cream cones for a dime. We enjoyed a brand of smalltown freedom that's unfortunately unavailable to children today. Sad but true. I'm thankful to have been there to experience it before parental paranoia clenched its stifling grip on foot-free childhood freedom.
The photo postcard was shot from the mouth of South Main Street across the downtown four-corners, looking north toward Conway Road on the left. The corner pharmacy luncheonette door is open for business. Route 116 was soon to be rerouted around the outskirts of town as Routes 5 & 10 had been five or six years earlier.
Back then, the main highway from Amherst to Conway still went right through the center of town, passing the east side of the common to a right-angle turn past the Grammar School and over the railroad bridge spanning Bloody Brook. That bridge has been closed for some 50 years, the school demolished about 30 years ago.
For some reason, the internal image that first came to mind looking at that streetscape was a fun-loving downtown character named Mike Rura standing at the corner politicking as a 1960 candidate for State Representative. I will never forget the summer day my father decided to have some fun with Rura, a teammate from the Greenfield Lions semi-pro football team. Our Chevy station wagon's windows were rolled down as we approached the four-corners stop sign from the north. When my dad spotted the candidate working the sidewalk, shaking hands and passing out political pamphlets and bumper stickers to passersby, he deepened his voice and yelled a hearty "Boorah for Rura."
My brother and I thought it a hoot, and of course the catchy phrase was immediately imprinted. Rura just looked up, immediately recognized the source, flashed a warm smile and waved with a mittful of political paraphernalia. Little did he know that he had acquired new young fans from whom he could expect to be needled with that playful Bronx cheer for the rest of his downtown campaign. From that point forward, every time we caught him politicking downtown, we'd give him an enthusiastic "Boorah for Rura," which he took in stride.
Only 7 at the time, I had not yet gained untethered freedom to ride my bike around town, but my friends, brother, and I had pedaled through downtown often enough to have pasted Rura bumper stickers on our bikes. We'd speed noisily past Rura, baseball cards of hated New York Yankees like Micky Mantle, Roger Maris, Whitey Ford, Bobby Richardson and Elston Howard clothes-pinned through our spokes for a motor-like sound effect, and holler "Boorah for Rura." The faster we pumped, the louder the sound from our spokes.
Rura lost the election but remained part of the downtown fabric for more than two decades, by which time we all had driver's licenses and free-run downtown spirit. As a good friend of devilish pharmacist Billy Rotkiewicz, who ended up across the street at his own Frontier Pharmacy, Rura often found his way to that establishment's small, hidden room behind the drugstore counter and shelves watching a ballgame or preparing for a Saturday dump run in the pharmacy's old truck secreted out back.
Rura's final act in town turned out to be an act of open defiance of a selectmen's order to clean up his North Main Street property out past the Dry Bridge. Most but not all found it comical. But let's return to that later, after I'm done discussing boyhood memories stirred by that postcard, Rura's campaign only the first of many.
Brought to light in that photo were the old downtown homes nestled between Conway Road and the corner of Elm. I remember two homes there, both torn down to make room for the South Deerfield branch of Greenfield Savings Bank. One was the old Leary place, snuggled up to the pharmacy building parking lot north of the attached Suzatek's Market, then the larger Artemas Williams place on the corner of Conway Road.
Was there in my lifetime a third dwelling standing there, as shown on 1858 Walling and 1871 Beers maps? It doesn't seem so. Not in my recollection, anyway. But I wouldn't rule it out. Such insignificant details wouldn't have been important to a wayward smalltown boy following the Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn tradition.
The eBay postcard photo background isn't clear, even when enlarged, but it sure does appear to squeeze in three buildings with their gabled ends facing the road. Maybe not. I'd have to see a contemporaneous photo from across the street. That would solve the vexing mystery, which must for now remain unsolved. Does it really matter?
The postcard unveils my hometown embarking upon a new era, one leading faraway travelers around downtown instead of through the heart. As a result, bustling hotels like the Bloody Brook Inn that burned in 1951 and the Lathrop Hotel, which met the same fate in 1875, could no longer cash in at the downtown intersection of southern Franklin County's two busiest highways.
Perhaps that's why Georgiole didn't construct another large hotel at a profitable site, dating back at least to an old-time tavern known as the "Russell Place" in the 1830s. The site became even more lucrative for innkeeping after the railroad came through town in 1846, igniting the glory years of downtown South Deerfield. By the 1950s, it was time to reinvent the downtown business district under a more local paradigm that was mined for gold by Rotkiewicz for decades.
Which brings us back to Mike Rura's much-publicized spat with the Town of Deerfield. The bone of contention was his family home and unkempt yard at the north end of North Main. I think it all started when selectmen ordered him to "spruce up" his property around the time of the 1973 Tricentennial Celebration.
Feeling unjustly targeted and singled out, Rura responded with open defiance by inviting friends and neighbors to dispose of their Christmas trees on his property. As the blue-spruce mess piled deeper and the selectmen grew angrier, the dispute found its way into the newspapers, and Rura became even more stubborn. It was his property, he argued, and he'd do with it as he pleased. Then he claimed to be creating a wildlife refuge in the spirit of conservation.
The dispute remained active and unresolved for years, turning uglier as it endured. Eventually, perhaps to the selectmen's delight, the house went up in flames during the wee hours, burning beyond repair. If I can trust my memory, in the days before homelessness became common Rura met his accelerated end as a Deerfield resident living out of his car.
Today, the old Rura lot stands vacant, and few who pass it on their daily rounds likely know the story, or even that a home stood there not that long ago. I think the town ultimately seized the property and removed what was left of the buildings.
So, in the end, affable old Mike Rura of large and eccentric stature didn't fare any better in his high-profile dispute with the town than he had in his lone political foray. Simply stated, he lost both battles – now just water over the dam, the memories washed to a distant sea. Not yet totally forgotten, I thought I'd briefly resurrect the man who absorbed our childhood "Boorah for Rura" chants with warm aplomb and a friendly smile in the hell-raising town that buried him.
posted in Columns, Local history, South Deerfield | Comments (2)
Whitmore's Pond Poachers
With daybreak near, the tall clock will soon strike six in accompaniment to freezing rain drumming on the kitchen roof. I just returned from there with a cup of black, unsweetened coffee in hand, now steaming on a desktop coaster to my left.
To me, early morning is the best time for introspection and creative thought, the perfect setting from which to set the imaginative wheels awhirl, be it on a secluded forest stand 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 Count fishing a posted North Sunderland trout pond called Whitmore's before the spring-morning fog had lifted. About all I can recall is him struggling in thick gray light to tie a blood-knot and asking me for help. I completed the chore for my appreciative friend and I opened my eyes for the new day, wishing I could ride it out a little longer. No such luck. 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 a few 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 slips through a slim ledge gap and tumbles some 15 feet 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 our soft, snappy 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 rise for aquatic insects. 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. We thus opted for plan two – dry-fly fishing with the Count's late father's fly rods and flies – the flies contained and organized in fancy silver-colored boxes taken from his fishing vest hanging in the garage.
Like catching fish from a 10-foot-diameter barrel, its wide mouth inviting us in, we recognized this 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 his dad swore by the tiniest midges in his flybox for such endeavors, advice we found helpful despite simultaneously discovering that old standards like White Wulffs, Royal Coachmen, and 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 hand over fist. In the process, we perfected our casting, presentation and hook-setting skills, all of which were transferable to the stream fishing we both preferred.
It was 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 stopped fishing the place due to fear of the consequences, the dam broke, and 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 basin-turned-meadow toward 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 18th-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 the ball hard and could, using the thinnest tippets, tie all the difficult fishermen's knots in the dimmest light without the aid of glasses.
Even though I long ago accepted that those days are far in my rearview, it does no harm to reminisce. No need for envy or a sense of depressing loss. Joie de vivre doesn't end with youth.
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 the valley. The bold, black posters 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 sporting tastes. Can it get any better and tastier 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 when he sold it to Elijah Billings of Montague a year later.
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 up to the falls along the east side of the road.
The Oaks connection is what led me to my old Sunderland fishing haunt. Researching the mills at what would become "Mill Village at Stebbins Meadow" 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 beautiful brook trout were there for the taking from the millpond that became Whitmore's.
posted in Columns, Local history, South Deerfield | No Comments
Wendell Lad Rides Rails to Fame & Fortune
I have happened upon another interesting historical character – one who passed through South Deerfield on his way to railroad immortality. His name was Jonas Brown Wilder II (1813-1906).
I discovered Wilder during Greenfield-newspaper research on my Arms family. Searching for information on Dennis Arms, credited as the founder of South Deerfield's 19th-century pocketbook-manufacturing industry, I saw the byline "J. Wilder" appear atop an 1894 Gazette and Courier guest column titled "Ten Years in the South."
The dateline read "Bristol, Tenn., and Va." So, which was it? Was he from Virginia or Tennessee? Come to find out, the state line runs right down Main Street of these "Twin Cities," with Bristol, Virginia on the east side and Bristol, Tennessee on the west. Though Wilder lived in Virginia, it's not unlikely that his expansive landholdings crossed into Tennessee.
It was not easy to find J. Wilder's first name. The search took me on fruitless genealogical journeys through Conway and Sunderland Wilders before finally discovering my man was from Millers River country.
Jonas Brown Wilder II was the youngest of his namesake father and Rebecca Leach's four children, all sons born in Wendell. His father was a farmer who dabbled in shoemaking and coopering, the son of Nathaniel Wilder, who was born in 1751 in Princeton, grew up in Belchertown and settled as a young adult shoemaker in Ware, according to Wendell, Massachusetts: Settlers and Citizenry, 1752-1900 by Pamela A. Richardson. Before the Revolution, Nathaniel moved to Wendell, where he is buried.
The Jonas Wilder farm was located snuggled up to Shutesbury in the southwest corner of town, according to Jonas II, about a mile north of "Locks Pond" and "Locks Village." Those two places show up on modern maps as Lake Wyola and Lockes Village. (Regarding the proper spelling of the surname Lock, well, flip a coin. There seems to be no consistency when reading through genealogical records, which use Lock and Locke for the same people, the latter presumably gaining traction in Wendell and Shutesbury in modern days.)
The elusive Jonas Wilder identification came by way of a Gazette and Courier column published some 10 years after the first one I first discovered. Wilder, quite proud of his accomplishments, seems to have been a prolific newspaper contributor. His 1904 column titled "A Typical Yankee Career: Former Wendell Boy Tells his Life History" was penned two years before his death. The long narrative ended with a boldfaced shirttail identifying the author as Jonas Wilder.
At the time of the column, Wilder was living out his final years with a son in Woodstock, Vermont. He hadn't in fact submitted the piece to the newspaper. He sent it to the Wendell postmaster desperately seeking any information about potential survivors from his old Wendell/Shutesbury neighborhood. Impressed by the letter's local-history content, the postmaster must have shared it with the Gazette and Courier editor, who in turn published it as a guest column.
So, nearly 120 years later, I had my man – a fascinating local subject worth sharing with readers.
Our Jonas Wilder story begins in South Deerfield, his first stop as a wage earner. The Deerfield village was known as Bloody Brook upon his arrival as a 13-year-old, trees budding and blooming in the spring of 1827. He wouldn't turn 14 until leaves were wearing their fall colors on October 2.
Bloody Brook was then known for its shoemakers and leather craftsmen, most notable among them Dennis Arms (1790-1854), who enjoyed a shoemaking partnership with older brother Erastus (1785-1930), my third great-grandfather. Because Erastus died young at 45, he is forgotten in history, but not in land records. From what I've seen, without exception Erastus is the first named on several joint deeds with Dennis, whose name would have appeared first if they were listed alphabetically.
Wilder chose the well-known and respected Arms shoe shop as the place to refine shoemaking skills he had picked up from his father. He names Dennis Arms as the shop owner, and never mentions the last name of another man working at the shop, which employed 15 journeymen cordwainers.
The shop didn't offer apprenticeships, per se, but did take in Wilder as a 25-cents-per-day boarder and assigned him an instructor. His job – an early example of assembly-line shoemaking when most country shoemakers were likely still crafting entire shoes one at a time – was attaching leather soles to "ladies prunella shoes" made of strong silk or worsted fabric.
Interesting anecdotal information supplied by Wilder in his 1894 newspaper narrative speaks to what he believed to be alcoholic abuse by his fellow Bloody Brook workers. He could see that, minus drink, the workers would have been far more productive. Chalk it up an early life lesson that helped shape a successful, teetotaling businessman and likely temperance supporter. Politically, Wilder was an outspoken abolitionist and fervent Lincolnian Republican who was not bashful to express his views.
Wilder's depiction of the Arms shoe shop employees as heavy drinkers begs the question of whether old Erastus Arms had a drinking problem, which might have contributed not only to his early death, but also to the financial difficulties revealed in his and brother-partner Dennis's public record.
Jonas Wilder didn't stick around South Deerfield long. His goal was to pay off his father's debt of some $900 on the family's 172-acre Wendell farm that extended into Shutesbury. After three years, at age 16, he decided that the shoemaking assembly line was harmful to his health and well-being. He remedied the problem by taking a job as a teenage peddler, starting on foot with a tin suitcase in each hand before working up to a team of horses and wagon that supplied merchants and his own four-man crew of foot-peddlers.
The traveling-salesman work generated enough income to pay off his father's debt by his 21st birthday, at which time he took a job clerking at Ivory Howe's store at Whitmore's Mills in North Sunderland, almost halfway home to his family's Wendell farm from South Deerfield.
Wilder had known Howe as a Wendell storekeeper, and ended up managing the store briefly while Howe was away. As a gratuity, Howe then set him up at a friend's Athol store before Wilder moved on to clerkships at stores in Jaffrey, then New Ipswich, New Hampshire, where he again went into peddling before selling out in 1843. That's when he embarked on a distinguished, 40-year railroad career, moving from dusty roads to the steel rails of a burgeoning transportation industry that promised riches.
Wilder built an impressive list of accomplishments while serving in many roles on many different rail lines. Perhaps most notable was his invention of the refrigerator car, designed for the "butter trains" transporting the best butter money could buy from northern New York State farms across Lake Champlain and on to the Boston market.
Unfortunately, Wilder never "cashed in" with a patent on his invention, or others noted by author Pamela Richardson for train buckboards and self-inking stamps. Apparently, he couldn't be bothered to apply for patents – he had work to do. Instead, Western meat-packers such as the Swift Meat Co. became the impetus for the lucrative refrigerator-car patent secured in later years by W.A. Chandler of Union Star Lines.
The modest one-and-a-half-story farmhouse in the south of Wendell where Jonas and his father were born was still standing, minus the barn, when he wrote to the postmaster in 1904. According to Richardson, contacted by phone at her winter Florida residence, only the cellar hole survives today. When I told her I had discovered her book after completing the first draft of this piece, and feared that Jonas Wider might be old news in Wendell, she assured me that was not the case. She had only mentioned him in passing.
So, there you have bits and pieces of the story of Jonas Brown Wilder II, a Franklin County man worth memorializing. Newspapers at the time of his July 7, 1906 death, a couple months before his 93rd birthday, treated him with dignity and respect. His obituary graced the front page of the Gazette and Courier in Greenfield, the Daily Saratogian in Saratoga Springs, New York, the Bennington Banner in Vermont, and likely many other papers of the day. Although he didn't make the front page of New York City papers, they spared no ink in lengthy obits for a great railroad man from the rolling hills of Wendell and Shutesbury.
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It had been a busy couple of days and last night, I only got back home around 10 pm. It was nice to meet up with colleagues after a while, catching up on the gossips and all. As for today, few complications in the ward needing sorting out.
Last night, I was at a meeting discussing the upcoming society meeting in Penang late April. This was followed by a lecture given by a Professor from Athens, giving up updates on latest treatment for myeloma. Something I heard when I was in Atlanta in December, but the opportunity to ask question was priceless.