Mount Sugarloaf rises above the farming community of South Deerfield, Massachusetts. The land around the mountain had been owned by the Jewett family for generations. They operated a ferry connecting South Deerfield with Sunderland, Massachusetts, a crucial east-west crossing of the Connecticut River spanned today by a bridge.  As early as 11,000 years ago, Indigenous people had settled here on the dunes left by the disappearance of Lake Hitchcock. The traces of their occupation were unknown until the 1970s.