This was the view from a shortish circular walk I did at Dummerston, near Brattleboro. It was like most of the other walks through woods to a viewpoint, but the view was not bad.

The most interesting part of the walk was on the way back when I encountered an active beaver pond.

In the right foreground you can see the stump of a small tree recently felled by beavers.

Running across the middle right of this photo is the actual dam, which must have been there for years as it is covered with moss and vegetation.

It is easier to see the construction when looking at the other side of the dam.

There will be an entrance to the lodge underwater on the pond side, from where a passage will lead upwards to the living area above water. That will have an air vent through the ‘sticks’ visible in the photo above. All an amazing engineering feat.

The end of the walk was on a very quiet road along the West River, a tributary of the Connecticut River.

On the Sunday I travelled about 25 miles south into Massachusetts to Old Deerfield Historic Village.

The Dwight House is not original to the village, having been built in 1754 in Springfield, Massachusetts and moved to Old Deerfield in 1950 when threatened with demolition. The outbuildings house an exhibition on old trades, which, unfortunately was closed when I was there.

The land was originally given in the mid 1600s to the colonists of Dedham, Massachusetts in return for land they had relinquished in Dedham to settle christianized Indians. It is in the valley of the Deerfield River, and in the wider Connecticut Valley area.

The village street is a mile long and follows the line of an old Indian trail. It was laid out initially with 47 narrow but long plots (shaped like medieval burgage plots) along the street, and each plot was allocated land in two fields outside the village. They were copying what they had known in England, as each field was the width of two ploughs. But unlike the English medieval strip system, the same field stayed with the same house, and there was no annual re-allocation of strips. They also each had land in a meadow area.

To understand the history it is essential to appreciate that this was a salient of the part of Massachusetts Bay Colony already settled, surrounded on most sides by Indian lands, with the French still occupying areas further north.

As the Massachusetts Bay Colony increased in size, the plots were sold to settlers. Initially there was a stockaded area in the centre of the village, though many properties were outside the stockade. There was a major raid by the French and Indians in February 1704, when some residents were killed and over 100 taken captive. The raiders had come down via Lake Champlain and then cross country, using snowshoes. At that time the settlers did not know of snowshoes and thought raids were impossible in the depth of winter. The Indians wanted children and young women to replace population they had lost in various skirmishes, and the French wanted the chief residents so they could ransom them. They brought extra snowshoes with them so the captives could walk back to Lake Champlain and on to what is now part of Canada. This was the largest such raid in New England by far.

The village grew and prospered after that as an agricultural community, but fell into disrepair in the early 20th century when the main road bypassed it. In 1797 Old Deerfield became home to Deerfield Academy which is now a very upmarket private boarding school. In 1936 Henry and Helen Flynt bought and restored one of the old houses when their son attended Deerfield Academy. Over a period they bought other houses as they became available, and restored and furnished them as a museum, which now owns 11 of the houses in the village. Most of the other houses are owned by Deerfield Academy and are lived in, but maintained in keeping with those owned by the Museum.

Some houses can be visited self guided and others have guided tours. How many are open on any day depends on the volunteers available.

I arrived about 9.30 am with the first tours starting at 10.00 am. Being early paid off, as I got guided tours of the first two houses at one end of the street entirely to myself. Normally they last 45 minutes, but mine lasted an hour each, until people arrived for the next tour. The older female guides were very knowledgeable and informative.

This is Ashley House, built in 1734 and home to the village’s first Minister. Once there were 50 residents in the village, they were supposed to employ a Minister and build a Meeting House. It was the first house built in the 1730s building boom when farmers were sufficiently prosperous to replace their original smaller houses. Note that all the early settlers were strict Puritans, who seem to have made Oliver Cromwell look like a bit of a softie. However by the next generation they were relaxing somewhat. There was a card table which the Minister’s son used. I am sure strict Puritans thought playing cards were the work of the Devil!

Of course little was left of the original house contents and the houses have been altered over the centuries, but, as far as possible they have been set up to reflect life at various different periods, with authentic furniture and ceramics.

This house is in a slightly later style.

This house was built in a style designed to represent a new America.

One house serves as the information centre and while I was there there was a volunteer dressed as an 18th century surgeon talking about the tools and medications available then. Outside was a demonstration of the processes needed to make early guns, also with costumed demonstrators.

This is the final version of the Puritan Meeting House, a very simple structure inside and out.

It was superseded by the current church.

There is a fairly hideous modern building behind one side of the road where the Flynt’s collections of artefacts are shown. The ground floor is well displayed with a focus on textuiles.

This is original, and a rare survivor.

Upstairs all the uncurated items (about 2500 of them) are displayed in cabinets without explanations. Huge numbers of chairs, tables, pottery etc, all in glass cases.

I had lunch at the Deerfield Inn (expensive as it mainly caters to the parents of Deerfield Academy pupils) and then went on the guided walking tour, again as the only customer. A very knowledgeable older gentleman this time.

I would never have guessed that this was a tobacco store as I thought tobacco needed a hotter climate, but apparently this part of the Connecticut Valley area has a microclimate that makes it ideal for the leaves used on the outside of cigars. Since then I have spotted many in the countryside around and many large fields where it is clear tobacco has been harvested. It is apparently a very lucrative crop still.

The next day was typical November (in late October). I decided I had better do something, so drove a round trip of over 100 miles to visit Worcester, an industrial town of over 200,000 people.

Every stream and river had mist hanging above it.

Visibility generally seemed less than this photo shows.

The suburbs of Worcester are very swish, then there is a poorer area before reaching Downtown. Downtown is somewhat mixed, with old buildings, empty sites where buildings have been and some modern skyscrapers.

Main Street

The light grey modern building in the background actually had its top in the cloud.

Looking the other way in the central square

Further along Main Street

Not very interesting, but with the potential to improve itself considerably by making better use of the old buildings.

Of note was the presence of significant numbers of non-white people, the first I have seen other than the very occasional person since Rhode Island. I guess Worcester must be prosperous enough to attract immigrants, but not so prohibitively expensive that there is nowhere for them to live.

I have now moved to West Suffield, Connecticut, just a few miles from the border with Massachusetts.

There is a multi use trail, over 80 miles long, from New Haven, Connecticut to Northampton in Massachusetts. It passes within 3 miles of where I am staying, so I have explored some shortish sections of it. I will not bore you with all of them, but it does have some very interesting history.

Most of it started life as a canal, authorized in 1822, started in 1825 (when the shovel used to turn the first sod broke) and partially opened in 1828. They were hoping to emulate the success of the Erie Canal. Most of the workers were Irish ‘diggers’ a.k.a. ‘navvies’. Unfortunately it was underfunded and badly built so it leaked, and was finally abandoned in 1848. The part in Connecticut is now called the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail (It follows the Farmington river). When railways arrived it was seen as an ideal, easy route to lay track, so it became a railway route, starting in 1846 in places, and finally closing in 1969.

It was agreed to make a leisure trail in 1987 and it has been progressively opened for walkers, bikes and horses since 1996.

There are many access points, most with car parks which are generally equipped with one of these bicycle repair stations, and also frequently with a porta loo. The trails are well used.

I walked one stretch to Southwick, just in Massachusetts, where there are three ponds. The largest is unimaginatively named ‘Big Pond’.

This is just one small arm of Big Pond. Southwick does good business repairing and storing boats.

I had seen advertisements elsewhere in New England offering to ‘shrink wrap’ boats for the winter, but this was the first time I had actually seen any. Every spare corner of Southwick anywhere near Big Pond was filled like this, there must be upwards of a hundred boats. I doubt they all sail on the three Congamond Lakes, as they are also known.

This is a view of about half of Big Pond. I could not find anyway to get it all in a photo.

This scruffy information board reveals that Big Pond was a source of ice for New York in the days before refrigerators. Every January to March large teams cut the ice on the lake into blocks. These were stored in wooden sheds, each covering about two acres, lined and covered with straw. Then in the summer months many train wagon loads were sent to New York every day. Big Pond water was highly regarded as being very pure. The business died virtually overnight in the 1930s when domestic refrigerators came into use.

On the way back to my car I added to my wildlife sightings, with these mallards on a stream running alongside the trail.

That more or less wraps up what I have found in Massachusetts to date, but no doubt I will add a lot more when I reach Boston next week.

So the next post will be about Connecticut, which is proving to have unsuspected aspects. It is a very much more well groomed state than most of New England that I have seen to date.