Jan
17
2026

Readin’, Writin’ and ‘Rithmetic

by Gary Sanderson

With the new year upon us, our deer can breathe a sigh of relief after surviving the hunting season, my previously bloated woodshed is rapidly hollowing out, and right here within reach of my favorite recliner stands a slim stack of three recently purchased books to read.

The books represent the last of the itemized 2025 purchases that’ll accompany my annual income-tax package to the accountant in a few weeks. As much as I dread this annual bookkeeping chore, I have often told my wife that the hourly wage dwarfs anything I ever made as a newspaperman. So, I force myself to do it, and have learned to total each month on the fly to simplify the last step.

The task is not nearly as arduous as the old QuickBooks income-and-expense report I once annually compiled for our bed-and-breakfast statement.

My three new books cover an eclectic mix of topics that may help me solve lingering questions I’ve been exploring in recent months and years. One book focuses on the extinct passenger pigeon, long a personal fascination of mine. Another digs into the ancient, mysterious, Stonehenge-like standing stones on Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The third examines well-known historic-archaeological sites of French and Indian and Revolutionary War fame up and down the bloody, war-scarred, 18th-century Lake George-Lake Champlain corridor.

A.W. Schorger’s The Passenger Pigeon: Its Natural History and Extinction was published in 1955 and is generally accepted as the definitive scholarly work on the subject. I marked and bought it from a monthly snail-mail catalog I receive from a Peterborough, New Hampshire dealer whose offerings focus on sporting topics. It surprises me that anyone can still make a living in that genre, but he and his wife seem to be doing just fine, thank you.

I salute them, and have picked off some great stuff from their catalog, which, for sporting bibliophiles, always includes rare, antiquarian books about fly fishing, Tonkin-cane rods, fine European shotguns, wing-shooting, and related topics.

I bought the passenger-pigeon book as a useful library reference. To get a feel for it, I blew through the first 100 pages and learned about the spring and fall flocks that once darkened bright sunlit skies for scores of miles and left the forest floor beneath their clogged, chirping roosting sites covered with a foot-deep layer of dung that suffocated young understory.

Though Schorger’s is not the type of book the average reader would tackle cover to cover, if one is looking for scientific passenger-pigeon data, it’s all there between two cloth hard covers.

The other two new books awaiting me are written by archaeologists whose topics just so happen to send enticing tendrils into our verdant slice of the Connecticut Valley: Mark Edmond’s Orcadia: Land, Sea and Stone in Neolithic Orkney (2019), and David R. Starbuck’s The Great Warpath: British Military Sites from Albany to Crown Point (1999).

Though I have not yet read a word of Edmond’s book on Orkney’s megaliths, I did read Alex Ross’s griping December 1 New Yorker piece about the British archaeologist’s cutting-edge observations and interpretation of the mythical Scottish landscape. Ross’s article, titled “Written in Stone: In Scotland’s Orkney Islands, the Neolithic Age Dominates the Landscape,” brought me straight to a high, lonesome, thought-provoking, commercial wild-blueberry field crowning a special spot in the Heath highlands. There an ancient assemblage of mysterious standing stones, similar but smaller than those at Orkney and Stonehenge, point to the heavens.

I have been transfixed on every Heath visit by the stunning, panoramic view from a spot that drops off at about the same angle in all directions, suggesting a prehistorically special place.

Experiencing that local site sends me into deep reflection about its spiritual possibilities, and it stays with me for days. I keep revisiting the same thoughts, pondering the spiritual/ritualistic possibilities. Fascinating questions linger. Such as why were the vertical stones erected thousands of years ago? What did they mean? What was their function?

Talk about thick esotericism. Up there in the refreshing air of that natural hilltop chapel, it’s suffocating. When you consider that such stone monuments appear to celebrate the same beliefs on at least two continents, it suggests a worldwide spiritual cosmos uniting ancient man millennia before Columbus ever thought of the New World.

As for Starbuck’s book, it pulled me in due to its relationship to a fascinating, Revolutionary War powder horn a friend bought at auction a couple years ago. Illustrated with an interesting array of hand-carved images, not only was this horn buried deep in an otherwise uninspiring general-merchandise sale, it came with an unsettling written caveat admitting that the auctioneer couldn’t vouch for it 18th-century beginnings.

In other words, it could have been a Centennial phony, created a century after the Revolution, at a time when engraved powder horns were gaining popularity among collectors and pursued by some with deep pockets.

My friend was curious if I had seen the listing? No, I told him. I hadn’t. Though I had indeed opened the online preview, I had closed out of it before reaching the powder horn. Nothing for me, I thought. Nonetheless, he asked if I minded returning to the site for a quick evaluation as we spoke on the phone. He just wanted to know if it looked right to me.

I took a peek and, though no expert, believed it had everything a collector desired. Better still, upon spotting the name “T. Nash” inscribed in large letters across the center of a cartouche, I thought I knew who carried it. It may have been the combat accoutrement of Greenfield Meadows blacksmith and Revolutionary militiaman Tubel Nash (often spelled Tubal), with whom I was familiar after studying his old deeds from my neighborhood.

Upon a quick inspection of Nash’s Revolutionary War service record, I found that his deployments on the so-called Northern Campaign mirrored the years and sites on the horn. That, in and of itself, indicated to me that the horn was no fake. Think of it: what’s the chance that a counterfeiter 100 years down the road would research an obscure backcountry soldier’s military record to create a phony powder horn?

By chance, several weeks later at an antiques show, I happened to bump into a local expert. I asked if he’d mind evaluating photos? Sure, he said, email some to him. When I did so, he suspected mischief. I took his evaluation under advisement and decided to reserve judgment. Though I didn’t share his expertise level, in my mind it was real.

Tubel Nash (1754-1816) was an interesting Greenfield Meadows character and skilled craftsman. The son of Greenfield miller Daniel Nash (1715-90) of Nash’s Mills fame, Tubel apparently got restless after his father’s death. By 1801, he had moved to Conway. Then, nine years later, he sold his Conway property and took his family to Canton/St. Lawrence County, New York, where he died and was buried in 1816.

It seems to me most likely that the relic never left the Greenfield area with Nash. It probably remained here in the possession of family or friend and was passed down until recently hitting a dead end and going to auction.

I was hoping Starbuck’s Great Warpath would provide insight into the mysterious “Ft. No. 10” carved into the Nash horn; however, Starbuck offers not a clue about the location of what is most likely an obscure, vernacular fort reference understood by Connecticut Valley soldiers at the time. So, the search continues.

Stay tuned. I don’t give up easy.

posted in Columns, Local history | No Comments

Jan
06
2026

Trophy 10-Pointer

by Gary Sanderson

Some stories just fall into your lap and write themselves – like this bowhunting tale from an old Powertown pal.

The object, squeezed into a large, rectangular, coffin-like wooden box on the bed of Rick Kostanski’s pickup truck, rolled up my upper Greenfield Meadows driveway on the morning after Thanksgiving. It was a beautiful, 10-point, whitetail buck. Bagged as the woods lightened at 7 a.m. on November 25, the carcass was headed to the Corliss butcher shop in Ashfield.

This 5½-year-old, 195-pound, grey-faced bruiser with a rut-swelled neck was a classic Franklin County buck – king of the hill, his typical antler configuration spread wide, brow tines broken from battling fall competitors for receptive females. For my friend, it was the buck of a lifetime. And, even more important from my perspective, its domain had been my neighborhood.

Though I had not seen this deer myself in recent travels, I may have crossed its path as a wobbly, spotted fawn following its mother out of its 2020 nest. I suspect that’s nearly certain. If not, I likely had several sightings of him as an inauspicious, small buck working his way up the neighborhood pecking order, with and without antlers.

I’m going to call Kostanski’s beautiful “racker” a “Sunken Meadow buck” because of where he harvested it with a precision heart-shot from his crossbow. The kill site sits atop a steep ravine overlooking the Green River from high above its east bank, directly across from Sunken Meadow, the floodplain dog-walking grounds I named and often wrote about in my Greenfield Recorder column. There I bumped into many deer and a few bears, along with various other wildlife and wonders of nature during my daily romps with my springer spaniel gundogs.

Aware of my intimate connections to his new hunting territory, which he was exploring in response to a homeowner’s complaints about deer damage to ornamental landscaping and gardens, Kostanski had reached out to me for insight several times this fall. His queries were sometimes accompanied by photos of new bucks that had passed his trail camera. Did they look familiar, he’d ask, to any deer I was seeing on my daybreak walks directly across the river?

One of these trail-cam photos showed a fork-horn I had not seen. Another displayed a five- or six-pointer I had probably seen several times in dim dawn light. The third was a trophy racker I knew I had not encountered. A day or two later, the big bruiser’s carcass was hanging in Kostanski’s Deerfield garage.

I did not know Kostanski from my South Deerfield youth. He grew up in Turners Falls and moved to my old hometown as a married adult. I was friends with his father, a well-known Powertown character I affectionately called the Honorable Walter T. Kostanski. A member of my father’s Greatest Generation, Walt was a key member of Coach Earl Worden’s fabled 1942 state-championship Turners Falls High School baseball team before serving in the Navy during World War II. In adulthood, he became an elected official, first as a state rep, then as the longtime Franklin County Registrar of Deeds.

I got to know his son Richard, six or seven years younger than me, on the softball diamond, at ice-fishing outings, and as a companion on open-water fishing trips to Maine’s Rangeley Lakes and Lake Ontario at Sodus Point, New York. I also recall an entertaining and quite productive shad-fishing outing in a bass-boat – I can’t recall whose – anchored along the edge of a migration channel under Sunderland Bridge,

But let us not digress. Back to the present, and the fateful day of Rick’s recent deer kill.

Our successful bowhunter arrived before daybreak and securely positioned himself upon his ladder-stand’s shooting platform to wait for the woods to awaken. The stand was a short distance inside a wood line bordering an open field where whitetails feed. As darkness faded, he spotted movement and recognized a few does passing through. Moments later the buck, obviously pursuing the does, appeared from a different angle.

When Kostanski burped out a couple of buck grunts from the grunt call hanging around his neck, the buck stopped and changed course. Now it was looping toward the bowstand to investigate what it thought was an antlered competitor for the does.

When the animal stopped within range, Kostanski’s crossbow was raised and ready. He aimed behind the deer’s shoulder, gently squeezed the trigger, and let fly. Miraculously, his arrow found its way through twigs and branches undiscernible to the human eye in the grey dawn light.

The deer flinched, moved a few strides, and laid down to die a few paces from where it was hit. The old battler soon expired peacefully. A quick, merciful kill.

Luckily, the final resting place was a mere 60 yards from Kostanski’s truck. After all, dragging 195 pounds of dead weight through the woods is a difficult chore for even a young man. Kostanski, in his mid-60s, was maneuvering on two replaced knees and a foot recovering from recent surgery that had put him in a walking-boot for a month. Despite his physical complications, he field-dressed the deer and dragged its heavy carcass to his truck, where lifting it onto the bed was a challenge.

When he got home, he sent me a cellphone photo of his trophy lying dead on the forest floor. He would have stopped at my house with it, he wrote, but was exhausted and wanted to return home, where more work awaited him. Three days later, buck onboard, he pulled into my yard on the way to the butcher shop.

How can you beat that? Column looming, a subject comes to my doorstep by special delivery.

Better still, the hunter is well known to many Gill-Montague readers, and the big buck lived and died in my neighborhood. The impressive 10-pointer without a doubt knew my old “Sunken Meadow” stomping grounds well, and lurked for years within clear sight of my home.

posted in Columns | No Comments

Nov
26
2025

Wing-Shooting Reflections

by Gary Sanderson

Sunday morning. Gray, soggy and still. A bit foggy. Somber daybreak ramble in the rearview.

I’m seated in the everyday parlor. Reclining. Feet up. Laptop on my thighs. Autumnal thoughts spinning, swirling, gusting – drifting off to my old pheasant-, grouse- and woodcock-hunting coverts.

What unleashed this train of thought? Probably the damp, raw, overcast weather. None better for following eager, agile, tail-wagging flush-and-retrieve gundogs through thick, mucky coverts – an impenetrable alder row here, a swampside poplar grove there, windborne cattail fuzz, ragweed and goldenrod dust tickling your nostrils through bloodletting, briar-laced tangles.

We’re now more than halfway through the six-week upland bird-hunting season and I haven’t dug out my tattered Filson oilcloth bibs, laced up my 16-inch Bean Hunting Shoes, shouldered my side-by-side – or even bought a license. At this point, it’s looking like it’s not gonna happen, for the second straight year. Old friends would find that shocking. But here I sit, halfway into my eighth year of retirement, with no regrets or laments.

I had my day.

For many decades I hunted hard, wearing myself ragged before arriving at work to battle deadline. I savored the exercise and challenges in brisk fresh air, always fine-tuning my wing-shooting and dog-handling skills.

Now battered and bruised from years of punishment, my eyesight not what it used to be, and many of my best hunting buddies dead, I just don’t need it and have nothing to prove.

My transition out of a valued physical activity reminds me of my last years on the softball diamond. At 41, I was losing my edge. My legs were shot, my speed gone, my arm and desire to continue weakening. I abruptly called it quits, and never looked back. Haven’t swung a bat since, or even entertained the thought of doing so. Not once.

I probably should have walked away after blowing out my knee on the baseball diamond in May of 1976. But I discovered softball and had to swallow my pride, robbed of my speed and agility. Fifteen years later, I learned that life could be enjoyable without the Grande Ole Game and its dugout camaraderie.

I now realize the same thing about upland bird hunting and owning gundog companions. I don’t need it, thank you.

That’s not to say I’ve lost my hunting instinct. Quite the contrary, the pull is strong when digging for information about various topics related to nature and place. Seems there’s always something new on the agenda to satisfy my hunting needs.

Toward the end of this past summer, a dear workaholic friend expressed to a mutual friend his concern about my decision to stop hunting. He didn’t understand how a man who enjoyed wing-shooting like I did could just walk away, cold turkey. Had something gone awry? The torn Achilles tendon five or more years back? Something else he was unaware of?

“No,” our mutual friend responded. “I think he just moved on to other interests.”

The questioner wasn’t convinced. He was about to have a litter of fine, top-pedigree English Springer Spaniel puppies on the ground, and wanted to give me one of my choosing. A generous offer, indeed, but one I politely declined. I didn’t need new dog responsibilities. Problem was that, after losing my last gundog to a dreadful poisoning, I had discovered the freedom of not having to care for a dog year-round for the pleasures of a six-week hunting season.

Meanwhile, the man the breeder had conferred with, and with whom I have hunted many miles of dense cover over the past three and a half decades, has reached out a few times about teaming up for a hunt. “Get your license,” he implored on the first attempt. “They’re stocking out in back of Bob Thayer’s again. You’d love it.”

It’s true. I did love hunting that Hopewell Swamp covert on the Hatfield-Whately line, not to mention chatting with Thayer and enjoying his Yankee twang. He had attended many a square dance with my grandfather, Waldo Willis Sanderson, and his girlfriend Isabelle, and thus took a shine to me.

Thayer was the gamekeeper and one of the stockers of pheasants raised in the Hatfield Fish and Game Club pen near his home. He used to call me on the phone with tips about his stocking routine. So, I knew every inch of his property and that of the abutters, and shot many a cackling cock pheasant, whistling woodcock, and startling partridge there before he died and his farm was sold.

But why return to this challenging covert physically compromised by slower reflexes, unsteady knees and, most importantly, diminished eyesight? The eye doctor tells me my eyesight isn’t that bad, but I know it ain’t what it used to be.

To describe my eyesight woes to doctors and their nurses, I like to explain to them that, “I used to be able to sit at the base of a tree and count the ants walking along a branch 10 feet overhead. Now, without my glasses on, I squeeze toothpaste on the wrong side of the brush.”

Such realizations negatively impact a shooter’s confidence, and regardless of the game, confidence is the key to success. The confident competitor tackles difficult challenges with aplomb, consistently outperforming timid companions.

How can I win? Whether looking through newfangled progressive lenses or my trusty old non-prescription shooting glasses purchased when my eyesight was superior, my vision isn’t sharp and true. So how can I possibly shoulder a shotgun with my same old confidence? And without it, how can I possibly maintain a tolerable success rate?

That said, who knows? Maybe one of my buddies will catch me in the right mood and succeed in coaxing me back into the field before the season ends in a couple weeks. It’s not out of the realm of possibility.

Even though I’d enter the field harboring doubt, I believe that if everything lined up just right, I could still execute a quick, accurate shot on a cackling cock pheasant or fluttering grey ghost screened by brushy obstructions.

Having experienced the routine thousands of times, there’s always a chance, despite my balky knees and diminished eyesight, that my flying target will fold up and lifelessly drop into the soggy tangles.

Wishful thinking?

Likely not.

posted in Columns, Musings | No Comments

Nov
23
2025

Mission Accomplished: Cupola Restored

by Gary Sanderson

Hallelujah. Job complete. Finally.

Just the sight of it, as I approach the driveway leading to my carriage-shed stall, has lowered my anxiety-elevated blood pressure 10 points.

I’m talking about our 19th-century Old Tavern Farm cupola, long a vexing concern for me. For more than 10 years I had tried unsuccessfully to get it roofed. Yeah, yeah, there was lots of talk, and soft commitments. But no follow-through until recently, when a roofing company from faraway Barre, Vermont finally stepped to the plate and completed a first-class job last week.

My sincerest thanks to Roofing Vermont for metal-roofing and painting a cupola worth saving, and for removing a high-priority home-improvement project from my checklist.

As stewards of an historic upper Greenfield Meadows home, my wife and I did not want to be associated with our dignified cupola’s demise. A stylish example, I’m sure the neighborhood would have objected if we just let it rot and tumble to oblivion as so many seem to be doing these days. Now it’s preserved until it becomes someone else’s headache, long after my last card has been played. The roof keeping it high and dry is rated for at least 50 years, which is a comforting, maybe even euphoric, thought for this 72-year-old man. My cupola worries are over.

Any observer who regularly travels rural New England roads must realize that old barns and their crowning cupolas – some sporting leaning copper weathervanes with Verde patinas – are in varying sad states of preservation. In recent years I’ve pointed out many crumbling examples in my travels, always accompanied by the sympathetic disclaimer that I understand why they’ve fallen into disrepair.

Problem is, it’s next to impossible to find someone willing to roof one for a reasonable fee, if at all.

It’s become a modern-day cycle for old family farms. First, the folks living in them stop farming. Then their outbuildings disintegrate and collapse as the dwellings start showing signs of neglect. It’s a sad state of affairs from a historic-preservation perspective. These proud monuments to an old way of life seem to be evaporating from the landscape faster than a Fourth of July puddle.

Why? Because today’s families go to the store for meat, eggs, fruit, vegetables and dairy products, which they don’t even associate with farms, and old folks on fixed retirement incomes can’t afford to keep up old properties, including the cupola-ed barns that give the local landscape character. And, frankly, even middle-class working families residing on old farms are up against it when trying to maintain their properties.

Stately cupolas seem to be the first architectural elements things to go. They started to appear on new and improved local barns in the mid-19th century, when families were expanding their farming operations. During the post-Civil War era of the mid-1860s and 1870s they really started to multiply.

Because postwar barns were constructed of lumber from improved sawmills, the structures were more airtight than earlier, looser, draftier barns. Thus, they needed better venting systems to remove moisture from their hot, humid interiors, where hay cured and livestock emitted noxious fumes. A louvered cupola created a chimney effect, pulling out moisture to minimize mold and mildew, and help prevent spontaneous-combustion hayloft fires.

Different designs of cupolas and their weathervanes became marks of status and distinction personalizing family farms. Attractive cupolas drew the eyes of travelers upward during the slower horse-and-carriage days; they, thus became the focal points of roadside farm profiles.

Family tradition ties my cupola to the Lincoln assassination of April 15, 1865. I was told by descendants of previous owner Elijah Worthington Smith (1830-1901) that carpenters adding the front section of my 70-foot barn and joining it to the house with carriage sheds learned of Honest Abe’s murder from passersby. The cupola displays a traditional, simple, early Victorian style, which likely came down to the personal taste of either the builder, the owner, or both.

I personally prefer the simple elegance of early-Victorian template over the more ornate later styles, some with windows instead of shutter-like louvers. But that’s just me. I’m sure others prefer the asymmetrical later look.

E.W. Smith bought my property in 1858, when its days as a stagecoach tavern were in peril due to the railroad’s arrival. His 1865 expansion doubled the length of the barn, while extending the rear east wall some 16 feet for a saltbox section to house a few dairy cows. The new front addition contained horse stables topped by a haymow, along with a scale house to weigh cartloads of apples and other products being transported by wagon to the freight yard.

The front section was then connected to the house with a three-bent carriage shed that kept buggies, carriages and family members walking from house to barn out of the weather.

The expansion also brought in the cupola, and the name “Old Tavern Farm” painted across the new carriage sheds. The painter was likely famed Greenfield house/sign/furniture painter and folk artist George Washington Mark, who had previously grain-painted the tavern’s interior doors and feather-painted the wide pine floors.

Although I can only speculate about Mark’s creation of the name Old Tavern Farm across my carriage sheds, I can positively identify the last man to carefully repaint it. That would be the late John McAulay, an interesting man in his own right, who, over the five-year period between 2004 and 2008 – living in his Chevy van with an interior decorated as a ship-captain’s quarters – hand-scraped every inch of my home and outbuildings, then hand-painted it three times with a brush.

Less than a year after he was finished, in July of 2009, my wayward friend John was dead, stricken by a fatal heart attack at the laundromat on the west end of Main Street in Greenfield.

Though John didn’t list roofing as one of his many skills, I’m sure he would have found a way to paint my cupola had I asked – and, I might add, paint it right. Sadly, he never got the chance. Here today, gone tomorrow, John was a good man, a great painter/handyman and an interesting New England character worth studying.

What’s interesting is that the painters McAulay and Mark came from the same neighborhood on opposite sides of the Connecticut River – McAulay from Springfield, Vermont and G.W. Mark from Charlestown, New Hampshire.

Coincidence?

I doubt it.

posted in Columns, Local history, Tavern Tidbits | No Comments

Oct
31
2025

Mary Graham Arms Photo Restored for Posterity

by Gary Sanderson

I found a great spot for the restored, circa-1855 ambrotype photo of my third great-grandmother, Mary Graham Arms, who was born in Sunderland on June 28, 1794 and died in South Deerfield on Christmas Day 1887.

As I sit here writing about her, her framed portrait is looking out at me from a bottom pigeonhole shelf of a Chippendale secretary she would have probably known as a desk and bookcase. From her cherry perch, she appears to be peering directly at me, with photos of her daughter and son-in-law behind me on each side of the front door.

Though there is some online disagreement about her birth date, I’ll accept the Greenfield Gazette and Courier’s death notice that gave her age as 93 years, five months, and 27 days. Those numbers square with the birth date above, published in John Montague Smith’s 1899 History of Sunderland.

The third of 10 children born to shoemaker Benjamin and Mary (Smith) Graham, Mary wed Erastus Arms (1785-1830) on January 12, 1814, but would become known as a South Deerfield village widow. She survived her husband by 57 years and resided in different family homes situated within a stone’s throw of the Bloody Brook Monument, erected while she lived there in 1838.

Known as Bloody Brook Corner to residents and motor vehicle operators who learned to negotiate the sharp curve in the road, the neighborhood surrounding the obelisk monument could just as well have been dubbed Arms Corner. At least seven homes clustered along that section of North Main Street, and three additional dwellings abutting on the west, began as properties of the same Arms family in one form or another.

These homesteads surrounded the Arms Manufacturing Company, which stood in my youth as a plastic factory but was still known to older generations as the Arms Pocketbook Shop. Mary Arms had skin in that manufactory as well – it was founded in 1845 by Dennis Arms (1790-1854), the younger brother and former shoemaking partner of her late husband.

Mary’s formal, seated, ambrotype image came to me from a remarkable family collection of old photos protected for decades by her spinster great-granddaughter, my great-aunt Gladys Hayes Sanderson (1895-1989), who never left her five-generation family home on Pleasant Street. The encased photo printed on ruby glass must have been dropped or crushed at some point, and was broken into several vertical pie wedges running through Mary’s face and torso.

Though it is unknown when it was broken, I’m glad it wasn’t discarded with the trash. Nowadays, modern technology makes it possible to salvage such damaged photos.

When I learned that my friend Chris Clawson of Turners Falls had the restoration tools, I allowed him to give it a go. Meticulous and careful, he didn’t disappoint – removing the sherds piece by piece from their case and carefully reassembling and scanning them before going to work on a cloning restoration. The result is a restored, printable photo that is probably the only surviving image of Mary Graham Arms, a member of historically important Sunderland and South Deerfield families, besides being an ancestor of mine.

Mary Graham Arms’s life wasn’t easy. Far from it, in fact. Just 36 at the time of her 45-year-old husband’s untimely death on December 17, 1830, she was left to care for eight children ranging in age from 16 to 1. Included among them was her 12-year-old daughter Angeline, identified by Deerfield historian George Sheldon and some Deerfield records as “simple.” Precisely what that means is unclear. Most likely the child suffered from birthing brain damage or Down syndrome.

I knew little to nothing about my third great-grandmother before researching deeds as a member of the Deerfield 350th Anniversary history committee. I discovered her during a deep dive into the town’s 1688 Long Hill Division, which had established the original proprietary lots that became Muddy Brook, Bloody Brook, and eventually South Deerfield.

Mary Arms spent her entire married and widowed life residing on the eastern border of “Lot 22 West,” dominated by Arms dwellings and located roughly between today’s high school and Pleasant Street.

It appears that husband Erastus died before the completion of his new home, which still stands at 111 North Main Street. Today known as the Yellow Gabled House, it was the creation of South Deerfield joiner Pliny Mann, whose account book survives at Deerfield’s Memorial Libraries. His records place him on the job in 1830, the year Erastus died. Mary probably never got to enjoy a day in her new home before widowhood.

Deeds reveal that her community took care of her after her husband’s passing, and she never remarried. When financial times got tough, family and friends pitched in to keep her afloat with what is today known as refinance mortgages.

Then, as she got older and her youngest child – son David Brainard Arms (1829-1918) – came of age to start a family, he took ownership, likely initially keeping his mother under his roof.

At the time of her death, she resided across Bloody Brook in a family home that still stands on 101 North Main Street. The front end of that building began as a post office, run by mid-19th century stagecoach express agent and nephew William D. Bates, whose mother, Miriam, was Erastus’s sister.

That lot is bordered north by the old W.D. Bates home lot, historically occupied by his grandfather Eliphas Arms, uncle Josiah Arms, and eventually cousin D.B. Arms, who lived across the brook in the Yellow Gabled House and temporarily transformed the so-called “Old Arms Place” into a pocketbook shop in the 1890s.

Today, the home on that lot is occupied by my 96-year-old mother – not an Arms descendant, but the spouse of one.

So, Mary Graham Arms lives on, stoically watching me peck at my keyboard from her cozy perch. Thanks to Chris Clawson’s extraordinary efforts and modern miracles, the South Deerfield grande dame’s portrait and legend are preserved for posterity.

 

posted in Columns, Local history, South Deerfield | No Comments

Sep
18
2025

New Lower Blue Licks Treasure

by Gary Sanderson

My archaeologist / anthropologist friend Mike Gramly placed the call a week into his latest dig at Lower Blue Licks in northeastern Kentucky – a 13,000-year-old mastodon boneyard located along an ancient saline spring bed on a Licking River floodplain.

I could feel the man’s enthusiasm. It was infectious, and told him so.

“I’m always happy when learning,” he said. “Hopefully, I’ll continue learning till my dying day.”

A noble wish, indeed. Don’t bet against it. Though rapidly approaching octogenarian status, the man is driven.

Overseeing his second organized excavation of this Ohio Valley treasure-trove site, purchased for $100,000 by a friend and benefactor, Gramly sees no reason to hide his excitement. What he’s bringing to light is groundbreaking in the realm of North American and world archaeology and anthropology, yet largely unknown and uncelebrated.

Gramly believes the key to mastodon research is finding the saline springs they sought for sustenance. It was at these important sites that Clovis hunters killed them and left behind artifacts for posterity. Thus far, he has apparently discovered the world’s earliest shaman sled burials – first at the Hiscock Site in upstate New York, now at Lower Blue Licks.

His theory is that such ritualistic burials – fancy ivory sled runners and all – staked the claims of competing hunting bands at important saline-spring haunts.

Gramly calculates that his latest 11-day mission, which ended on September 5, consumed 120 man-days of volunteer work, all of it performed by a trusted crew from his own brainchild American Society for Amateur Archaeology. Their mission? To establish the site’s southern perimeter and, in so doing, define the extent of a Paleoindian mastodon-hunting midden littered with bone and ivory fragments. In the process, of course, many fascinating artifacts came to light and spun the crew’s creative anthropological wheels to a shrill scream.

Exciting stuff.

Now, with the expansive midden defined, Gramly and his crew can return next year with a game plan for their final dig. In the meantime, he’ll organize, clean, and reassemble the broken artifacts he has collected before publishing his discoveries and hypotheses between the covers of a book.

Thus far, he’s most excited about a couple of remarkable artifacts. One is a drilled bead crafted from a thick seashell that looks to him like that of a periwinkle. The other a five-inch-long mastodon chin tusk, worked into ancient decorative art.

Despite being buried for 13,000 years, Gramly says this cleverly carved tusk is so polished that he can see his reflection on its mirror-like surface. He believes it was created as an atlatl hook, secured to the spear-throwing weapon’s shaft. There it would have engaged the butt end of the javelin, akin to nocking an arrow on a bowstring. Gramly identifies it as a sculpted phallus, symbolizing the power and penetration of the hunt.

At the time of our telephone conversation, Gramly was still 1,000 miles away from his North Andover home workshop. His latest assemblage of artifacts, a work in progress, will receive intense scrutiny when he returns home.

As for the bead, Gramly suspects it was worn to the Kentucky site by a member of a Paleoindian hunting party following megafauna game trails from the West Coast. Just on a hunch, he thinks the shell came from the Pacific Ocean, though it certainly could have come from the East Coast as well. He expects expert analysis, probably at a Harvard University lab, will easily identify its genus and place of origin.

“There’s no question it’s a deliberately-made bead,” he said. “In fact, we also found the piece of another broken example. Both were clearly drilled in the Paleo style.”

The chin tusk is one of three thus far uncovered at Lower Blue Licks – two this year, one a year ago. Only one has been worked into an art object, which Gramly is eager to study further when he returns to the comforts of home. At first glance, he noticed interesting lines carved into the surface. He hopes to understand them better under closer inspection.

Gramly believes the tusk carving has the characteristics of European Upper Paleolithic Gravettian art, which goes back at least 30,000 years and, he believes, came to this continent across the Bering Strait with the earliest human migrations from northeastern Asia. The bead also screams Gravettian to him, he said; shell beads were common in that ancient culture.

So, Gramly now has two more esoteric artifacts to sink his anthropological teeth into. And that doesn’t even address what he may yet find among the other bits and pieces his team collected. Those items he’ll clean, organize, catalog, and ponder – taking time out to bounce his latest observations and hypotheses off his network of friends.

The most enticing specimens – like the bead and carved chin tusk – will go to his trusted artist friend Steve Wallmann, who’ll sketch them for posterity and future publication in print and digital media. Such visuals motivate thought and discussion into the esoteric Paleoindian spiritual realm. Nothing provides more valuable insight into ancient cultural beliefs and lifeways than artistic expression – be it petroglyphs, pictographs, or stone, bone and ivory carvings and adornments with hidden spiritual meaning.

Gramly has been mired deep in that rabbit hole ever since his first mastodon dig 11 years ago at Bowser Road in Middletown, New York. It seems like yesterday he was calling in to report his findings there.

Now, more than a decade later, his sights are set on Vienna, Austria, where he’ll share some of his recent findings during a 30-minute presentation for European scholars.

They’ll be eager listeners.

posted in Columns, Indians | No Comments

Sep
02
2025

Gramly Has Intellectual Energy to Spare

by Gary Sanderson

Late July. Eight-thirty. Bright morning sun. Neighbors’ tall sycamore across the road casting a long, broad, cool, front-yard shadow. Two-mile walk a couple hours in the rearview.

The phone on the table to the left of my chair rings. Caller ID reveals an unnamed “wireless caller,” with a 978 area code number I don’t immediately recognize.

Taking a gamble, I answer it.

It’s archaeologist friend Mike Gramly – a man closing in on 80, yet still a remarkable bundle of boundless energy and intellectual enthusiasm. He checks in at least once a week to chat about his latest focus and discoveries. This time, he’s calling from the New England Auctions parking lot outside of New Haven, Connecticut, some 155 miles from his North Andover home. He was the high bidder on a few strategic “left bids” for lots he was interested in – most notably a couple of miniature, 19th-century, ivory Inuit sled carvings – and he’s waiting for the doors to open at 9.

Nothing unusual. Just another day in the busy existence of scholarly Richard Michael Gramly – an endangered, some might say old-fashioned, breed of archaeologist, who still digs, sifts, analyzes, and documents his findings, hypotheses, and conclusions between two covers.

Having spent the weekend selling books and shooting the breeze with fellow travelers at a Pennsylvania Indian artifact show for collectors and dealers, he’d driven six or more hours home and had no time to relax; doubling halfway back to retrieve the auction house merchandise.

Despite a few health concerns that have cropped up in recent years, Gramly doesn’t seem to have slowed down a bit. In fact, for the past 10 years he’s been revved up exploring North American human-proboscidean interactions that occurred 13,000 and more years before present. While your average Joe can find such deep time disorienting, Gramly spends much of his time there, studying artifacts and pondering their meaning.

The early-morning auction journey is insignificant compared to his agenda in the coming weeks and months. This weekend, it’s off to New York’s Letchworth State Park for the Genesee Valley Flint Knappers Association’s 35th-anniversary Stone Tool Craftsman and Artisan Show.

Then he’ll motor west to Kentucky for two or three weeks of archaeological investigation at the so-called Lower Blue Licks Battlefield, where he’s been making groundbreaking discoveries at an ancient mastodon boneyard purchased by an old friend – a proud member of the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels, no less.

The Lower Blue Licks site has become Gramly’s latest treasure trove of cutting-edge discoveries relating to human predation and ritualistic treatment of mastodons they killed. He was drawn to the site by his buddy’s museum discovery of a previously unidentified ivory-tusk sled runner. His friend recognized a familiar form among a collection of skeletal mastodon remains unearthed long ago and squirreled away for posterity in a Kentucky museum,

The ivory artifact resembled 13,000-year-old sled runners Gramly had identified in recent years among mastodon remains stored for years at the Buffalo Museum of Science. The Buffalo collection Gramly studied was gathered at the Hiscock Site, a well-known proboscidean boneyard in upstate New York’s Lake Ontario region.

There Gramly also brought to light a 13,000-plus-year-old sled burial of a female shaman. That sled is the oldest yet discovered on the planet – though others may come to light as Siberian and other Arctic permafrost continues to melt and reveal archaeological treasures.

Assisted by a loyal group of volunteers from his own American Society for Amateur Archaeology, Gramly expects to be finished for the year at Lower Blue Licks in September. From there, he’ll drive home to enjoy a brief October respite before going international. In Vienna, Austria, he’ll deliver a 30-minute lecture in November at the Symposium of the International Study Group on Music Archaeology (ISGMA). His title is the Description and Absolute Age of a Late Upper Paleolithic Zoomorphic Drum Beater from the Hiscock Site, Genesee County, New York State.

Which brings us back to the presumed shaman burial at the Hiscock Site, which no one except Gramly seems willing to address. According to the report he will hand out for his November 20 presentation in Vienna, discovered along with the fragmentary skeletal remains of a female, aged 27 to 39, were the remains of a sled with tusk-ivory runners, “a dog associated with the sled, and many artifacts of ritual and practical nature.”

Among those artifacts, collected near the human remains and presumed by Gramly to be personal property of the buried shaman, was an “heirloom drum-beater” made of what he believes to be either caribou or extinct moose-elk antler. This drum-beater, which wears the zoomorphic carving of a moose or elk head in profile, and traces of ancient red-ochre paint, is the focus of Gramly’s ISGMA presentation.

Symposium officials are so eager to hear what Gramly has to say they have already taken it upon themselves to mail him a check to help cover his expenses. A generous outlay, indeed.

The salient questions in my mind are: Why must this venerable archaeologist, a Harvard PhD with mountains of Paleo-Indian knowledge under his hat, fly 4,000 miles to another continent to share his fascinating findings with experts in his field?

And, for that matter, why is it that his two comprehensive magazine articles chronicling recent mastodon findings have thus far been published abroad as well – in the prestigious French journal L’Anthropologie?

Is America not interested, or just giving the academic cold shoulder to an old-school archaeologist who’s bucked modern trends at every turn and chosen instead to do it his way?

In rigid academic circles and hierarchies, independence doesn’t always fly.

posted in Columns, Indians | No Comments

Aug
05
2025

Nove Salute; Correction; Bears

by Gary Sanderson

On the walls surrounding a small bookcase in the southeast corner of my study hang a trio of framed images – one a small oil painting of a spaniel retrieving a cock pheasant; another a sepia-toned, circa 1882, Lewis Kingsley photo of my great-grandfather Willis Chapman Sanderson’s East Whately family, restored by Chris Clawson; the third a numbered print (3/999) of an Indian squatting down to read tracks in the snow.

It’s the third that I wish to focus on today: a thoughtful, spur-of-the-moment gift from friend John Nove, a bookbinder I got to know and like in many arenas after he moved to my hometown of South Deerfield around 2010 and ran the Grey Seal Bindery from his Mountain Road home.

John died at 77 on July 1, the day after my 72nd birthday. I’m going to miss him.

I knew John’s home as that of Ray Bergiel, a town cop with a daughter Elaine in my graduating class. I used to stand talking to John on the deck leading into his kitchen, pointing out the old shade-tobacco plots to the immediate north and south, and, east, to the high, lonesome North Sugarloaf Indian cave I frequented as a kid. I promised to take him there some day if he wanted to see it. It never occurred. I would have liked to lead him up there, assuredly telling him childhood tales from the South Deerfield I knew, a fun place that ain’t what it used to be.

John, a career scientist, took up bookbinding after retirement, training for two years at Boston’s prestigious North Bennet Street School, which teaches old trades. He was a good man, soft-spoken and fair, active in the community as chairman of the Deerfield historical commission and as Deerfield’s representative on the Battlefield Grant Advisory Committee researching the historic “Falls Fight” (May 19, 1676) of King Philip’s War.

John read my column and knew of my interest in deep local history, thus the cherished gift of this print he gave me on a thoughtful whim. Though I don’t know this for a fact, it must have come to him from someone in Old Deerfield as a memento of the 300th-anniversary remembrance of the 1704 attack on Deerfield.

I promptly had it framed and hung it in my study for posterity – now a daily reminder of my late friend. Soft-spoken and kind, John always treated me fair and engaged in interesting conversation.

I know I’m not the only person who’ll miss him dearly. He was a good, honest man. A straight shooter. Ethical to the core.

—

I would be remiss, if not dishonest, to let an error from my last column pass without notice.

The inaccuracy had nothing to do with the mid-19th-century painting I recently bought and featured in the column, but rather with what turned out to be a bogus example of artistic license I attributed to 19th-century artist Charles Louis Heyde on his circa-1852 oil painting Deerfield Toll Bridge, acquired recently by Historic Deerfield.

It was an unfortunate case of misreading the Heyde painting’s perspective. Because of my bad fix on the site, I inaccurately claimed Heyde had conveniently moved Mount Toby a few miles north as a convenient framing device. I was wrong – Heyde’s painting is actually a realistic depiction of the landscape he saw backdropping the bridge at the site of today’s Montague City Bridge from a spot on Greenfield’s Rocky Mountain near where Poet’s Seat Tower stands today.

My incorrect fix on Heyde’s easel placement placed it west and slightly south of the bridge, which crossed the Connecticut River just above the Deerfield River confluence. I figured it for somewhere between Woolman Hill and the Cheapside Railroad Trestle, and I stuck to it, despite failing to find a likely spot on maps or drive-through searches.

Perhaps, I pondered, Heyde stood on a hill that no longer exists – possibly on a promontory now long gone and hollowed into a massive crater at Trew Corporation’s gravel pit off the south end of River Road in Deerfield. My problem was that the site is a wee bit out of my domain, which begins a couple miles south of it and extends south and west.

With my site interpretation far in the rearview, JoAnn M. Costa posted a late 19th-century engraving that caught my attention on her popular Facebook page, “Historical Franklin County Massachusetts Realm of Wonders.” There she displayed a sketch of the Heyde painting described as a view of the Deerfield Toll Bridge from Rocky Mountain.

Lesson learned. In the future, I’ll try to stick to intimately familiar landscapes. For me, Rocky Mountain and the last mile of the Deerfield River are not among them.

—

Speaking of Facebook posts, there seem to be a lot of backyard and downtown black-bear sightings around the state these days.

Viewing the recent photo of a big bear lounging and munching on someone’s downed birdfeeder in a heavily settled, flatland, Franklin County neighborhood, a thought immediately came to mind: How many people born after 1980 viewing the post understand that, prior to that, bear sightings here and throughout the Bay State were rare indeed?

In fact, I would venture a guess that most people in towns like Greenfield, Deerfield, Whately, Montague, Gill, Bernardston, and elsewhere had never seen a bear. Even in the upland towns, sightings were rare.

Now the big beasts are not uncommon on city streets, or treed in thickly-settled suburban neighborhoods of Boston, Lawrence, Lowell, Worcester, West Springfield, Pittsfield, and you name it.

For this development we can salute Jim Cardoza, a retired MassWildlife biologist I often spoke with during my days as a fulltime newspaper man and outdoor columnist. Cardoza’s highly-successful bear and wild turkey restoration programs made the struggling, contemporaneous Atlantic salmon restoration program look like an exercise in futility.

Some tough-guy, NRA, sportsmen’s club types criticized Cardoza as an eccentric egghead who ruled from a strong academic bent. Not me. I respected him, viewed him as a friend, and salute him as an exemplary wildlife biologist whose restoration efforts were more successful than anyone could have ever dreamed.

Today, with altruistic hopes of annual Connecticut River salmon runs unplugged forever, state officials aren’t quite sure what to do with all the turkeys and bears brought back to the Bay State by “quirky” Cardoza and the restoration teams he led with aplomb.

 

posted in Columns, Local history, South Deerfield | No Comments

Jul
11
2025

Unsigned Hudson River School Treasure?

by Gary Sanderson

Another auction purchase. Another wild ride aimed at discovery. Isn’t that the joy of collecting?

How better to keep a retired old man active, alert and engaged.

One of my latest acquisitions is a large, likely unsigned oil-on-canvas riverscape painting I believe to have great potential. I snagged it at auction a couple months ago. It was described in the catalog as “American School,” and my first impression narrowed it down further. I saw it as an early Hudson River or White Mountain School work, though at the time site was not my primary interest.

What immediately captivated me was the activity it pictured. Two men on opposite sides of a raging mountain stream were retrieving fishing nets from the water. The time of year is early autumn, the place our Northeast.

Because there is no evidence of fish or a fish-processing station, in my mind, they were likely picking up for winter storage and mending. Just a guess. But one would think such nets were most likely used during the spring for shad and salmon, or, I suppose, fall Eastern brook trout spawning runs, though I have never heard of those.

My main focus was on the seines or gillnets shown. I had only read about such nets in sources like The Diary of Matthew Patten of Bedford, N.H. from 1754 to 1788, which I featured here in recent months, along with town histories from the Connecticut and Merrimack valleys. All you get is words in those accounts. No illustrations. One has no choice but to rely on imagination. Now, finally, an artist’s depiction. Akin to a photograph. A step in the right direction.

The only previous illustrations I had seen of weirs, traps, nets, hooks, sinkers, and spears came from clear across the land, displayed in Hillary Stewart’s 1977 book Indian Fishing: Early Methods on the Northwest Coast. Then, more recently, similar online images. I was forced to assume, and still believe, that the fishing practices of indigenous fishers from faraway North American places differed little from those employed here, first by indigenous people, then by European copycats.

Illustrations of such fishing activity here in the Northeast are still rare, especially early representations, which are virtually nonexistent. So, when I spotted this circa 1840 canvas depicting a fishing scene at a roaring whitewater bottleneck on an unnamed upland stream, my curiosity blossomed.

Ah! At long last, an image to work with. Let the auction bidding begin.

I knew it might represent the only chance of my lifetime to obtain such a treasure to pick at and probe. I was thus compelled to take an honest run at it, welcoming the exhilarating research I knew it would trigger. That said, there was a limit to what I could spend, and I expected the hammer price would race out of range.

Not so. I lucked out.

Shockingly, as I put in a phone bid, only one bidder seated at the auction went against me, and he didn’t hang in there long. A stroke of luck, I guess.

The date of my purchase was April 30, which coincidentally would have been my late father’s 97th birthday. Who knows? Though he was never a fisherman or historian, he may have been watching over my shoulder for that adventure. Just a fleeting thought.

Two days later – delayed a day by a late, greasy, spring snowfall I decided not to challenge – I drove to the auction house, wedged the large painting into my double-cab Tacoma’s back seats, and left it with a conservator for minor inpainting and repair. Less than a week later, the 47- by 43-inch framed painting was hanging proudly in my west parlor. Not only had I finally found the illustration for which I had furiously searched for decades. I owned it. Could study it.

The chase was on, and is ongoing.

The journey thus far has meandered up and down the Merrimack and Hudson valleys, the White, Green, Adirondack, and Catskill mountains, the upper Lake George and lower Lake Champlain country, and even rivers in western Connecticut. Who knows? The artist’s impetus way have been born elsewhere, like, say, a lower Merrimack tributary where fish runs persisted long into the mid-19th century.

The biggest problem confronting such research is the weakness of documentary evidence detailing fishing activity before and after the Revolution.

I started my research by studying topo maps and online images of suspected rivers. I found many possibilities, but nothing conclusive. I then queried river guides, book dealers, town clerks, historical societies, and even museum curators who I thought might recognize the site. I sent them images that I hoped would stimulate interest or, better still, ring a bell. Uh-uh. No one could place it.

Though I was familiar with 19th-century artists like Hudson River School founder Thomas Cole and White Mountain School master Benjamin Champney, I knew little in depth about their “schools,” which overlap. I bought books, read them, and found nothing to discourage me from digging deeper.

I then took the YouTube route, watching several scholarly presentations. Similar to the reading, I found it validating. My painting does indeed display several Hudson School characteristics, including repetitive themes and symbolism, atmospheric effects, and contemplative allure.

Attribution to a specific artist is seldom easy, however – and this is no exception. Complicating matters, I soon learned that pinpointing sites of Hudson River School paintings is not easy due to the liberal employment of “artistic license” to romanticize compositions. These artists routinely enlarged and reshaped background mountain ranges, or even moved picturesque distant peaks to backdrop a river scene where it didn’t exist.

The early Hudson River School painters were not plein air artists who set up their easels onsite and painted precisely what they saw. The best of them were academic studio painters, who routinely embarked on weeks- and months-long sketching trips to scenic places and returned to their studios to add color, atmosphere and an imaginative touch.

I had recently seen this with my own eyes, in a Charles Louis Heyde landscape a friend of mine chased at a Labor Day auction. The 1850s painting – which I believe Historic Deerfield purchased – showed a sun-splashed view from the west of the old Deerfield Toll Bridge that once stood at the present site of the General Pierce Bridge connecting Greenfield to Montague City.

Framing an upper background of light blue sky and cumulus clouds on the right side of the canvas was the distinctive profile of Mount Toby. I immediately realized that Heyde had moved it a few miles north to improve the background of his composition.

So where does this leave me in my attempt to attribute this new painting to a known early Hudson River artist? Well, I know the work came to auction from a Washington County, New York estate in the shadows of Lake George and Fort Ticonderoga. The consigner inherited it many years ago from her father, described by the auctioneer as “a well-known collector from the Albany area,” who was an active buyer between 1940 and 1980. It was he who likely paid for a professional cleaning and fitted it with an expensive, 20th-century gilt frame that cost him more than twice my auction price.

That’s the beauty of auctions. It can happen.

The consigner came up empty in a search through her father’s stored files for information. Nonetheless, given where he was from, he, too, likely believed it was of the Hudson School. Getting an attribution to one of the masters – say Cole or Durand or Kensett – is a more difficult matter, one that could invite disagreement among experts unless there’s a signature or initials hidden on the canvas.

So, consider my search a work in progress – one I intend to continue pursuing. I believe I may have found an important artwork that got lost in the shuffle. Thus far, one “off-the-record” expert agrees with me.

All I can do is keep searching, turning over every stone of inquiry.

To me, it’s not drudgery. I love the hunt.

posted in Antiques, Columns, Salmon, Shad | No Comments

Jun
11
2025

Elusive Deerfield River Browns Worth Chasing

by Gary Sanderson

Sunday morning, Memorial Day Weekend, approaching 5:30. Day has broken – half-sun peeking over the eastern horizon, squeezing warm yellow rays through the tulip magnolia shielding my upstairs bedroom windows on each side of my headboard.

From the tree comes the joyous song of an amorous cardinal, likely celebrating the high blue sky, small white clouds, and inspiring sun after days of wet, gray, unseasonably cold May weather. I could relate to the bird’s cheerful disposition. Thank you, my blissful, scarlet friend, for sharing your sunrise joy.

As I walked toward the fan staircase descending to the new day – looking south over the lush green yard below – my thoughts traipsed back to Deerfield River fishing days past. “This,” I thought, “would have been too late for me back then,” when my rule of thumb was to execute my first cast before the birds sang.

To get rare opportunities at large, gluttonous, Deerfield River brown trout lingering a bit too long in their nocturnal feeding stations, that’s when you must arrive: before the birds sing; and even if you know the game, your chances of landing such a fish are slim indeed. Deerfield River browns do not grow large on stupidity.

Over the years, while catching many big, acrobatic, stocked rainbows, I was fortunate enough to land a few of those spectacular browns in the three- to five-pound range. All of them were caught on nightcrawlers dead-drifted just right. Never did I land one fly-fishing, although I suspect a few took a sparkling cream caddis emerger or Montana nymph and got away.

Being a South Deerfield lad, I know the section of the Deerfield I most often fished as Hoosac. It’s located on a small slice of paradise along the west bank between Johnson’s Hole, in Deerfield about a mile upstream from Stillwater Bridge, and the South River. Occasionally I’d wander a tad north to fish the stretch between the mouth of the South River and Bardwells Ferry, concentrating primarily on three productive sites offering the types of pools and runs I preferred.

Less often, I ventured farther upstream to the mouths of Dragon Brook and Bear River, on opposite sides of the river above Bardwells. Those were the days when you could drive the railroad service road following the tracks from West Deerfield to Buckland without fear of a fine.

Sometimes, I’d fish from my 14-foot, fiberglass, Old Town canoe, paddling upstream – black Lab gundog Sara seated astern – to Johnson’s Hole from the now-gated riverside launching spot and parking place below Stillwater Bridge. Other times I’d drive to my destination on the old trolley trestle following the west bank from Hoosac to Conway Station, parking on the power line and hiking steep game trails to my two favorite spots. That access, too, is now closed to vehicles and open only to hiking and biking, with a relatively new footbridge crossing the South River gorge to Conway Station. It’s irrelevant to me in my senior years. Those steep, slippery game trails to the river below are for young legs, not battered old warhorses.

To be honest, I’ve seen the footbridge from afar but never closely examined or crossed it. It doesn’t interest me. Frankly, I preferred it when 1.) the old trolley bed was open to the few locals who used it, 2.) the gorge had to be crossed to hard way, on foot, and 3) the Deerfield River was virtually unknown to whitewater enthusiasts, who’ve ruined it for anglers seeking solitude, tranquility and the soothing rattle of free-flowing waters.

Sadly, that peaceful place disappeared years ago on the lower Deerfield, beginning the day noisy whitewater yahoos arrived from all points of the compass with their canoes, kayaks, inner tubes, rafts, and, yes, coolers and litter – scraping, banging and yee-hawing their merry way downriver.

Yeah, yeah, I know adventurers of all stripes should have the freedom to enjoy the public resource. Which doesn’t mean I want to join them, or profess interactive compatibility between whitewater enthusiasts and trout fishermen. While it’s true that solitary trout anglers create no inconvenience for whitewater enthusiasts, the same cannot be said for the reverse.

Just one humble old man’s opinion – one that hasn’t changed a hoot dating back to the heated dam-relicensing battle between Trout Unlimited (TU) and the Charlemont whitewater companies some 35 years ago.

For a quick refresher, Zoar Outdoor, Crab Apple Whitewater, Appalachian Mountain Club and others fought for increased water discharges from Fife Brook Dam above the Hoosac Tunnel to accommodate whitewater adventurers on the upper Deerfield. TU favored lesser flows more favorable to trout, anglers and the freshwater ecosystem.

Go figure. The whitewater companies won.

posted in Columns, Local history | No Comments

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