Deerfield, Massachusetts

Deerfield, Massachusetts has one of the more violent founding stories in New England. English settlers arrived in the sixteen seventies on land the Pocumtuck people had farmed for generations, and in sixteen seventy-five King Philip's War brought the first destruction of the settlement. Then, on a February morning in seventeen oh four, a French and Abenaki raiding party descended on the rebuilt village before dawn, killing roughly fifty residents and marching more than a hundred others north through the snow to Canada in what became known as the Deerfield Massacre.

Many captives never returned. The town was rebuilt again and endured. Today Historic Deerfield preserves a mile-long main street of colonial and federal-period houses, museums of early American material culture, and one of the most intact eighteenth-century streetscapes in the country, a town that literally rebuilt itself, repeatedly, on the same contested ground.