eerfield is a beautiful ghost, haunted by the drama and violence of its earl history as well as by more recent spirits who have witnessed the joys and sorrows of life in a small New England town over 300 years.  Unlike other ghosts, Deerfield is no disembodied spirit eluding our sight and grasp.  The town remains material evidence of Native American habitations from several millennia, the 17th century English town plan of compact village and broad meadows, 18th and 19th century houses filled with relics of hearth and home that reveal to us so many intimate details of life in early New England.  Twenty-four of the houses along The Street in Deerfield were here when revolution broke out against England in 1775.  Another twenty-three buildings had been erected before 1850.  Their contents date from the time of Deerfield's first English settlement in 1669 to the flourishing of the Arts and Crafts movement in the early 20th century.

Deerfield is a place of continuity.  The meadows surrounding the village that were laid out by a surveyor in 1670 are still plowed and planted by Deerfield farmers in the 1990s.  Deerfield is among the best documented small communities in the United States.  Public and private records, diaries and account books, newspapers and books that are preserved in the Memorial Libraries tell the story of Deerfield's development over three centuries.  Antique furniture and equipment, cooking pots and drinking vessels, clothing and bedding have been saved by generations of townspeople to show us how their ancestors have lived in this village over ten generations. 
  
Deerfield is well-preserved and well-documented for many reasons, but primarily because its early history was so dramatic and traumatic that its inhabitants became determined never to forget their past.  The Bloody Brook Massacre of 1675, the Deerfield Massacre of 1704, and the other attacks by French and Indian foes persuaded the people to be preserved and revered. 

The English Americans who began to settle Deerfield in 1669 were hardly the first inhabitants of this beautiful valley.  Native Americans had lived in Deerfield for at least 8,000 years, as  recent excavations by the University of Massachusetts Summer field School in Archaeology have confirmed.  When English traders first saw Deerfield, in the 1640s, it was inhabited by the Pocumtucks, a small but prosperous powerful group of Indians who had lived, farmed, fished, and hunted in the area for several generations.  In 1600 there had been more than 10,000 Indians in New England, but the earliest English explorers had brought disease to which the Native Americans were not immune.  Their population was decimated in two waves of epidemic disease in the 1610s and the 1630s.  The Pocumtuck population was reduced as well and then finally destroyed and scattered, not by English disease or force of arms, but in a conflict with the Mohawk Indians in 1664.  By the time the first English settlers of Deerfield arrived in 1669, the old Indian village pf Pocumtuck had been deserted.  Evidence of millennia of Native American habitation in Deerfield is now seen in periodic archaeological  investigations and in exhibits in the Memorial Hall Museum.

English colonists came to Deerfield despite its remote location and frontier exposure to Indian and French attack because of the great promise for agriculture of its surrounding meadowlands, which had been tilled for generations by the Pocumtucks.  In the 1660's the proprietors of the Town of Dedham, near Boston, were granted 8,000 acres "in any Convenient place" in the Massachusetts Bay Colony to compensate them for Dedham land occupied by "Praying Indians" under the care of the missionary John Eliot.  The ensuing search for the best available land in the colony ended at Pocumtuck and the General Court of Massachusetts granted the future site of Deerfield to Dedham's proprietors.  The first settlers, Samuel Hinsdale and Samson Frary, arrived in Deerfield in 1669 and the village and surrounding meadows were divided among 43 proprietors according to a plan drawn in 1670-71. 

The natural topography of Deerfield, modified by the agricultural activity of the Pocumtucks, provided an ideal site for a New England town.  At the foot of the East Mountain, also called Mount Pocumtuck or "the Rock," stood a plateau of land about one mile long and one half mile wide.  Dedham's surveyor noted that it was out of the reach of the spring floods.  The little plateau was the perfect site for a compact village in which frontier settlers could live in close proximity to one another, worship together in their meetinghouse, cooperate economically, and defend one another in time of danger.  Surrounding the village site were vast acres of open meadowland that flooded each spring, renewing the already fertile soil.  Here, the familiar English open field village could be established to sustain the settlement economically, militarily, socially, and religiously.

The town plan was remarkably effective and remains well preserved.  Deerfield's fifth meetinghouse, the Brick Church of 1824, stands at the center of the village overlooking the original Town Common.  Houses line the original street, and the land drops sharply at the edge of the village to extensive open meadows that continue to be farmed and that still flood periodically.

Although the open meadows provided a degree of protection, Deerfield suffered from the fear and reality of Indian and French attack.  The settlement was abandoned during King Philip's War after a 1675 attack at Bloody Brook (now South Deerfield) in which over 60 English had been killed, including fourteen Deerfield settlers, more than one-third of the village's men.  Deerfield was resettled in 1682, but there were several attacks in the 1690s and finally the devastating raid of February 29, 1704, when 48 were killed, 111 marched off to captivity in Canada, and the village once again abandoned.

Deerfield was resettled in 1707 under the leadership of Reverend John Williams, the town's first minister.  Williams had survived the raid of 1704, the long march to Canada, and two years of captivity among the French, but he had lost his wife and two children, while a third, his daughter Eunice, chose to remain with the Indians and French until her death in 1785.  Williams' account of his experience, The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion, was printed in Boston in 1707 and is still a gripping account of the trauma that always threatened frontier settlers. 

Life in Deerfield remained tenuous for decades after Pastor Williams returned in 1707.  A stockade had been erected in the 1690s around the central part of the village in order to give further refuge in time of attack.  Recent research has revealed the location of this palisade fence that enclosed the Town Common, the meetinghouse, several dwellings, and storehouses that would enable the settlers to withstand attack and siege.  Unfortunately, on that fateful February night in 1704, the Indians and French were able to scale the palisade and penetrate the settlement before the alarm could be given.

A few houses within the stockade and several south of it survived the 1704 attack, although none of these still exists.  Everything north of the stockade and many buildings within it were burned by the French and Indians.  When the settlers returned in 1707, they began to replace their lost houses and build some more substantial dwellings.  A few of those houses survive, although much altered by later additions.  One of them, the Wells-Thorn House, built around 1720, has been restored and is open to visitors.  Its earliest rooms show life in Deerfield in the frontier period.

History provided by Historic Deerfield