Deerfield, Massachusetts, has become famous as a town that celebrates, even lives on, its past, but there were critics of the first steps the town took in memorializing this past. The column’s writer, a local, was no doubt a close neighbor of “S,” or George Sheldon, the leader of the memorial movement and later founder of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association. Sheldon’s push for a monument to the townspeople who were killed during the 1704 Raid on Deerfield ultimately would be successful, but as is typical in small towns, not without a fair amount of discussion and dissent. Here, Sheldon is criticized for working to duplicate what the town’s recently erected soldiers’ monument already memorialized. As perhaps this writer feared, Deerfield residents continued to memorialize other historical places in the area in and around the town.
Pratt, James C. “Deerfield.” Greenfield Gazette and Courier, October 11, 1869. Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, American Centuries. https://americancenturies.org/collection/l02-156/. Accessed on October 16, 2024.
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