A fanciful yet captivating tale was circulating around the upper Pioneer Valley and beyond earlier this month. I thought now was as good a time as any to put it out there in the public square for discussion and potential discovery. Who knows? Maybe this seed of inquiry will germinate and bear sweet, succulent fruit. Time will tell.
The story begins with a May 4 email from Jay Robbins of Springfield to Deerfield’s Memorial Libraries, where associate librarian Heather Harrington took the ball and ran with it. Robbins, who describes himself as “70 and too infirm to be wandering,” is getting desperate. He has, for many years, been trying to track down a lonely, inauspicious double-grave (most likely from the first half of the 18th century) that his late Deerfield uncle, George Drury, showed him between 1960 and 1967.
Drury moved to Deerfield in the 1920s, settling along Route 5 at the base of Woolman Hill, where he built a home and Texaco service station, both of which still stand. The Texaco station is a recently renovated antiques shop. The house sits just north of it with fruit trees on the lawn fronting an agricultural plot. Both properties border a slim marsh that follows Route 5 south before curling west at the northern outflow of the street and heading toward Broughams Pond Road, the North Meadows, Pine Hill and the Deerfield River.
Robbins’ query found its way to my inbox from Peter Thomas, who was alerted to it by Deerfield Historical Commission Chair John Nove, who had been contacted by Harrington. Thomas was intrigued by the idea of this interesting grave, but was totally unfamiliar with it. So, he passed it on to me and Historic Deerfield historian Barbara Matthews, his wild haymaker seeking further insight.
Thus far, no one seems to be know the location of this unique grave. Maybe a hunter or hiker or woodsman or landowner can identify the site and shed additional light on Robbins’ blast from the past. Then again, maybe the stone is long gone or flattened under logging refuse, the grave forevermore a mystery buried in obscurity. Either way, it’s interesting and worth sharing.
There may be a few survivors who knew Robbins’ Uncle George Drury; perhaps even an old hunting buddy is still kicking. Robbins said Drury used to find arrowheads in the fields behind his Deerfield home. He describes his uncle as a hunter, explorer and runner, who, in his wanderings, “found this tombstone on a low hill.” Unfortunately, he can’t recall the name of the road or whether the site was in Old Deerfield or South Deerfield. He does remember the stone’s setting “in a pine forest near a small white house with a small red barn and a typical white-fenced horse-riding ring.”
He doesn’t believe the walk to the site was long, “possibly 10 or 15 minutes, in a pine forest, I think on a gradually sloping rise among other low hills.”
So taken by this peculiar, nondescript stone was the man that he took the time to write down the fascinating epitaph. Unfortunately, his hand-written record was long ago misplaced and lost during a move. To best of his recollection, it said something to the effect of:
“Here lye ye
savage hethen and soljer
who kilt each other”
Robbins believes the gray gravestone, approximately a foot tall and 10 inches wide, was dated at the top. He regrets that he did not brush away the pine needles and soil at the base to see if there was more to the inscription. He recalls the epitaph as legible, but worn in some places. He has searched Google Earth looking for the site, focusing on corrals, but has come up empty thus far.
“I looked through archives in your library many years ago to no avail,” he wrote to Memorial Libraries. “If you are familiar with this tombstone, I would very much appreciate it if you could tell me the words carved into it and the town it is in.”
Could it be the grave I’ve heard about but never seen on the south end of Pine Hill, near the modern home standing there? Could it be somewhere on the low ridge between Eaglebrook School and Woolman Hill, or maybe even just over the hill from Eaglebrook, out behind the late Arthur Rogers’ Hilltop Farm overlooking Pine Nook? Then again, maybe it was out in the old sandbanks and pine barrens between South Deerfield’s West Street and the Whately line before the Route 116 bypass and the Gromacki Avenue and King Philip Avenue housing developments were built. At this point, it’s anyone’s guess as to where this site is.
“That is one hell of an inscription,” wrote Thomas in response to Nove’s forwarded email. “I have not encountered anything specific that I can relate to such an event of two combatants killing one another and being subsequently buried together. It sounds like something from the later French and Indian Wars. Rev. Stephen Williams recorded a string of raids and other events related to Deerfield for a pending history that he never wrote. It’s at the PVMA (Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association) library, in the appendix of John Williams Captivity Tail (sixth edition), or in my digital file, also at the library.”
If anyone out there has any insight into this intriguing gravestone, please chime in with an email to gsanderson@recorder.com. It’s worth finding, preserving and researching. The colonial man who fell that day likely has descendants living somewhere nearby.