What was life like for the men, women, and children living on the edge of the English empire in the 17th century? The remarkable amount of surviving information from its earliest years of settlement makes Deerfield, Massachusetts, a valuable case study of an early New England town situated in contested territory.
Located in Western Massachusetts in the mid-Connecticut River Valley about 100 miles from Boston, Deerfield is with good reason considered the best documented community of early America. Beginning in the 19th century, two museums—the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, founded in 1870, and Historic Deerfield, founded in 1940—have been actively collecting material of all kinds owned and used by residents from its earliest settlement, including the objects they had in their homes as well as the books they read and the documents they produced during their daily lives. The landscape, buildings, possessions, and archival material of generations of Deerfielders across the centuries combine to create a unique opportunity to explore and better understand daily life in a Connecticut River Valley town over the centuries.
For most of its early history, Deerfield was a crossroads of international conflict. In common with all of North America, the territory that became the town included resources, sacred sites, homesites, and gathering places where Native peoples lived and where their ancestors had flourished for many thousands of years. The present-day mile-long village street was an ancient and well-traveled path in the Pocumtuck homeland. During the same period, England and its old rival France vied for control of the North American continent in a series of “French and Indian” wars.
New England’s lines of settlement, both west from Boston and north up the Connecticut River, reached the mid-Connecticut River Valley in 1670. Settlement virtually stopped there, making Deerfield the northwest English settlement for decades. Like other frontier settlements, the tiny community was an isolated outpost, lacking immediate English neighbors to the north, east, and west.
The edge of early New England settlement has been commonly referred to as the “frontier,” implying an identifiable barrier with English newcomers on one side and Native Americans on the other. In actuality, Deerfield and other contested regions were fluid zones of exchange and cultural interactions, both peaceful and violent, involving Indigenous, English, and French people throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries. Susannah Johnson, a woman taken captive in New Hampshire during the final French and Indian war explained that it was “such a mixture…that the state of society that cannot be described.”
Frequent hostilities and war disrupted fragile frontier relations between groups and inevitably affected individuals. Even seemingly stable economic, social, and legal interactions diminished or collapsed entirely. Deerfield residents endured 30 attacks in the first 50 years, two of them with particularly devastating results. Established in 1673, the early town, first called Pocumtuck and later Deerfield, would remain the northwesternmost English settlement well into the 18th century. As the Pocumtuck already knew, the intervale lands of the mid-Connecticut River Valley were among the most fertile in the world. The village of Deerfield was laid out at the heart of the Pocumtuck people’s homeland, situated on an alluvial plain at the confluence of two rivers, the confluence of the Pocumpetekw, or Deerfield River, and the Connecticut. Topsoil as deep as 20 feet enriched by periodic flooding by the Deerfield River, attracted Native peoples for millennia and then European settlement. Yet, this very location made the tiny English village vulnerable to attack. It could disappear, and indeed it did, in 1675 during King Philip’s, or Metacom’s War and almost again in 1704.
What kinds of people took the risk to settle in this area? Deerfield was, for the most part, a young person’s town when it was settled. With only a few exceptions, most of the original recipients of the Pocumtuck land grant never came here. They sold their claims to others for whom the potential rewards of founding a new town outweighed the hardship and inherent risks of living in contested territory. Deerfield households tended to be headed by younger men of limited means, many with less-than-conventional pasts, eager to accelerate their movement into positions of leadership, wealth and status. By 1675, Deerfield had 144 residents: 32 men, 44 women, and 88 children. Over three-quarters of the men were between 21 and 40; the average age of the women was 31.
These early settlers gained what would one day become valuable land holdings but lacked money or other resources to develop them. Loss of life and property from continual raids was a recipe for fiscal hardship. Early Deerfield was as poor as any village in Massachusetts — a condition confirmed in county and provincial tax rates and the many petitions for aid from its residents. The struggle to survive in the hostile environment took time and energy away from the task of making a living. Isolation from resources and markets for trade due to the town’s perilous location prevented early residents from realizing the benefits of fertile soil and access to trade routes.
Deerfield counters the assumption that those living on the frontier were rugged individualists by necessity, if not inclination. In fact, living on the edge of the British empire drove people together and actually inhibited individualism. In its governance, economics, religion, and social order, Deerfield was inwardly directed, closed, interdependent, and communal. They may have had a vision of what their village could be, but they were driven by what it had to be — and in a rough, rude, violent, and unpredictable world.
Deerfielders followed English patterns of settlement. The early town plan, which still survives, resembles a medieval English village. Planned nucleated villages like Deerfield and other Connecticut River Valley towns with their surrounding fields farmed in common and enclosed by a (very) long fence were a throwback to what was at the time already an archaic English pattern. This linear plan was a fairly common layout for the region, which promoted community and cohesion. Deerfield’s 17th century town plan, including the broad main street with 43 homelots on either side, remains more or less intact on today’s landscape.
As people of the 21st century, we cannot know how early Deerfielders viewed their lives, but it is hard to imagine that they did not know the risks they were taking by living there. English expansion came at a terrible cost; in King Philip’s, or Metacom’s War, Native people reacted violently to the loss of their homelands and threats to their lifeways and existence. That King Philip’s War lasted only a year in southern New England (1675-1676) but is considered one of the bloodiest wars in American history reminds us how terrible it was, and how there was little or no distinction on either side between combatants and non-combatants.
The decision by these young men to risk everything in their quest for economic and social mobility proved deadly for many of them and their families. An attempt to harvest and transport wheat from the abandoned village of Deerfield to feed refugees, garrison militia and townspeople crowding into the town of Hadley, 15 miles south, ended in disaster. The grain convoy was ambushed in present-day South Deerfield at a small, muddy brook where they had paused to pick wild grapes, which in the words of an early chronicler, “dear and deadly grapes they proved to them.” In this attack that became known as the Bloody Brook massacre, Pocumtuck, Nipmuc, and other warriors killed 17 Deerfield men and dozens of young militiamen from eastern Massachusetts. The following year, English militia led by Captain William Turner attacked a Native encampment of Peskeompskut, a fishing site and an important peaceful gathering place at was then a series of large falls on the Connecticut River in the present-day town of Gill, killing as many as 400 people, mainly elders, women, and children.
The consequences of Metacom’s War and its aftermath included exile and diaspora for many Native people as the New England colonies followed a policy of colonial expansion and settlement in this area, despite the continued presence of Indigenous peoples.
Following a resettlement attempt in 1677 that failed when the community was attacked by Indigenous warriors, the English reestablished Deerfield in 1682. The struggling community would remain the northwesternmost English settlement well into the 18th century as, despite the good land, it remained contested territory. The continued threat of violence and death from enemy attacks by displaced Pocumtuck in alliance with Abenaki, Mohawk, and French forces from New France (Canada) made Deerfield an extremely perilous place to live. A devastating raid on the town by French and their Native allies in 1704 killed dozens of residents, and 111 people were taken captive as many house and other buildings burned. Although Deerfield was not abandoned in 1704 as it had been in 1675, one-half of those who returned from captivity never lived in the town again. The final raid on Deerfield occurred in 1746, just south of the village at what is still called the Bars, referring to a place where there were wooden bars at the Common Fence to enable access to the common field.
The promise of agricultural prosperity, however, retained its allure despite the demonstrated perils of living on the edge of empire. During the 1730s, new English forts and settlements to the north buffered residents from the continual threat of destruction by French and Native raiding parties. Deerfield farmers were able to focus on extracting wealth from the soil. It was in this period that the town began acquiring a name for fattened cattle and grain production, a reputation it would retain into the 19th century.
Unlocking Deerfield’s economic promise depended in large part upon having available the intensive labor needed to clear land for pasture and bring more acreage under cultivation. It is no coincidence that the number of enslaved people, both African and Indigenous, living and working in Deerfield steadily increased after the 1740s in conjunction with the growing wealth of the town’s residents. Surviving account books reveal a consistent pattern of agricultural labor by the enslaved, including plowing, harvesting and processing grain in addition to cutting and hauling wood and other tasks. By the mid-18th century, there was a least one enslaved person in more than one third of households on the town’s mile-long street, person by the mid-18 century, including the minister’s. Numbering over two dozen, these enslaved men, women, and children formed part of the economic, political and social web that defined the character of the community. Surviving evidence, including financial and legal documents, and church records reveal that even residents not directly involved in the town’s slave economy frequented the same stores, worshipped at the same meetinghouse, and were tended by the same physicians.
A greater sense of security helped to stimulate economic growth and prosperity among the town’s farmers, funding in the process the purchase of additional labor, including enslaved people, to more profitably exploit Deerfield’s fertile meadows and arable fields. Britain’s victory in the final French and Indian War (1754-1763) ended the threat of attack from the north, and Deerfield’s reputation as a dangerous frontier outpost became associated with an increasingly distant past, remembered but no longer part of lived experience.
