Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts, opened on January 1, 1799, in a two-story brick building designed by American architect, Asher Benjamin. The newly chartered academy offered a classical education to young men and women of high school age both from Deerfield and from towns as distant as Charlestown, New Hampshire, and Springfield, Massachusetts. The Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association purchased the building in 1877, when the academy moved to new quarters on the main street in town. The association renovated the building and it opened in 1880, as Memorial Hall Museum. The building wing was built in 1916, after the death of George Sheldon, the founder of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association.