Historic Deerfield: The Night the French and Their Allies Raided a Sleeping Village
Massachusetts
Before dawn on February twenty-ninth, seventeen oh four, roughly three hundred French soldiers and Native allies crossed the frozen Connecticut River and broke through the palisade surrounding the English settlement of Deerfield.
Forty-eight villagers were killed in the hours that followed. One hundred twelve were taken captive and marched three hundred miles north to French Canada in the dead of winter. It was one of the deadliest attacks on a New England settlement during Queen Anne's War, the North American front of Europe's War of the Spanish Succession.
The street you see here preserves twelve original or period structures from that era. Historic Deerfield is now an outdoor museum, one of the oldest in New England, where the raid and the competing stories of the English, French, and Native peoples who shaped this valley are all told.
