Indian Door” constructed from double-thick panels of Massachusetts oak, and studded with hand-wrought iron nails to repel the tomahawk and hatchet blades of Native warriors — is the sole surviving artifact from one of the most dramatic episodes in colonial American history: when hundreds of Natives and their French allies swept down from Canada to attack an isolated frontier outpost, burn the town, slaughter its inhabitants, and capture the rest. 

One hundred and twelve survivors, including Deerfield’s fearless minister, Reverend John Williams, were captured and led on a 300-mile forced march through the frozen wilderness to enemy territory in Canada. Any captive who faltered on the way — including women and children — fell under the tomahawk or war club, leaving signposts of blood in the snow all the way to New France. The survivors willed themselves to live and endure the sufferings of their captivity, until a miraculous reversal of fortune brought them home to Deerfield. They rebuilt their town, began new lives, and told the incredible legend until their end of days. The Old Indian Door is more than an iconic, antiquarian touchstone that conjures ancient ghosts. It is a living portal that opens to reveal the blurry line dividing past from present, and it resonates with hidden meanings about the origins of the American experience.

The story unfolded in the vast, early America, long before there was a United States. In 1704, the American Revolution was still 72 years in the future. The idea that the English colonies might one day rebel against the British Empire and form an independent nation was unimaginable. George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson had not even been born. Three-quarters of a century later, by 1776, the Deerfield Massacre was a long-distant past in a place that the Founders would have found unfamiliar, strange, and even alien to them. This was a vanished New England possessed by fear, superstition, danger, and dread that would have been unrecognizable to the Revolutionary generation.

If you go there today, you will find little evidence of the massacre. Not a single home or structure from 1704 survives. The ghost of Old Deerfield is invisible. Any traces — charred-wood corner posts, burned-out cellars, rusted black-iron door locks and hinges, melted lead bullets, even splintered fragments of the palisade fort — lie buried deep down below another Deerfield: the pristine, present-day, beautifully restored Revolutionary War-era storybook town that sits atop the site of the massacre. 

On the surface, on the front lawn of the town common, huge boulders bearing bronze plaques mark the places where John Williams, John Sheldon, and Benoni Stebbins once lived. Nearby stands the only living witness to what happened that night: a colossal, majestic, 350-year-old sycamore tree of tremendous girth. Up the street, toward the north end of town, the original point of attack, you will find a faithful, century-old replica of Ensign Sheldon’s “Old Indian House.”

On Memorial Street, you will see the big, red brick Memorial Hall, headquarters of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, a

century-and-a-half-old museum of colonial New England life. There, you will find the principal relic of the Deerfield Massacre, the Old Indian Door, enshrined in a special chamber devoted to its veneration and preservation. If you run your hands along the deep cuts, grooves, and gouges made more than 300 years ago (which you must not do — centuries of thoughtless caresses have worn down the sharp edges of the cuts), you can imagine the thud of hatchets striking wood. The hole that the Indians chopped through the door still beckons curious eyes. This tomahawk-scarred door is a portal to the massacre.

At a recent commemoration of the raid on a cold February weekend, visitors watched costumed French and Indian warriors fire flintlock muskets at the English in a reenactment of the Meadows Fight that's within earshot of the resting place of John and Eunice Williams. The visitors also attended a comprehensive presentation by eight historical interpreters dressed, equipped, and armed as the raiders of 1704: Indian warriors, French Canadian militiamen, and French officers, one representing Jean-Baptiste Hertel de Rouville, the commander of the raid. Standing together on stage, these eight reenactors were formidable by themselves. 

But imagine them multiplied forty times, to their full strength of more than 300 on February 28, 1704, and you can see how the people of Deerfield did not stand a chance on the night of the raid. Throughout the day, more armed reenactors strolled up and down The Street, and chatted with tourists inside the replica of the Old Indian House — their quarters for the weekend.

A few hardy visitors stayed up past midnight to part the curtain between past and present and retrace the steps. It was February 29 now. They hiked the icy back roads between the town and the river. Moon shadows illuminated the silver and dark, frozen puddles that crackled beneath their feet as they followed a road to the North Meadows, where they held a vigil under the inky black starlit sky. They looked up at Orion and the Big Dipper in the heavens, and listened to the mournful sound of coyotes crying in the fields. It was the same sky, but on that night, it glowed bright orange once the town was aflame.

The French and Indians passed through here twice, once before dawn on their way to town to launch the raid, and then after sunrise on their retreat with the captives in tow, and ambushing the pursuing colonists. No monument marks the spot. On this night, the horizontal, robot-like steel arms of four huge, hundred-foot-tall industrial electrical towers loom over the ground of the Meadows Fight.

From here, the visitors walked back to The Street and followed the route of the raiders

south through town. They stopped at the Deerfield Inn to warm themselves and sit by the hearth in the cozy front parlor, where they stacked more logs on the roaring fire. They peered outside through a frosty windowpane at the empty street outside. From this vantage point, just through this window, they could have seen it all: the entire war party of several hundred French and Indians advancing en masse to breach the palisade. They left the inn and walked south to the town common until they arrived where they imagined it must have started, the place where the Indians scaled the snowdrift, dropped into the fort, and unlocked the north gate. They turned right on the common and paused to linger where three houses once stood close together — the John Sheldon House, the Asa Stebbins House, and the John Williams House. Tonight, the common was deserted.

The visitors moved on to their final destination, the Old Burying Ground. There, from a distance, they saw the grass-carpeted mound topped with a simple, rectangular stone carved with the date “1704” that marks the mass grave of those killed in the attack. Or does it? Recently, ground-penetrating radar revealed that no human remains lie beneath the mound. The bones of the dead of 1704 have vanished.

They searched for the two tall gravestones that they knew stood beside a large tree. These were easy to find in the light of day, but darkness had transformed the black ground into a minefield of hard-to-see and easy-to-trip-over markers. A flashlight beam pinpointed the spot. They made a pilgrimage to the resting places of John and Eunice Williams. They read the carved inscriptions. They lingered there a long time. Then, they reached out and touched the stones.

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Deerfield was not among the earliest settlements in New England. Even in the mid-1600s, the town did not yet exist. Pocumtuck Natives and their ancestors had lived on these lands for several thousand years, until 1664, when the Pocumtuck tribe was dispersed by Mohawks in a revenge attack. Their village was destroyed, and the few survivors scattered elsewhere. Long before the arrival of the white man, indigenous peopleshad warred with one another in blood feuds over the centuries. Violence on the land that became New England was nothing new. To the white English colonists, the vast and fertile landscape of what would soon become Deerfield appeared uninhabited.