Failing health obliged Mr. Taylor to resign; and in 1807 the Rev. Samuel Willard succeeded him in the ministry, when, in the separation of the Congregational churches, Deerfield led the van on the liberal side.

The political storms of the first two decades of the century raged here with strength and vigor. In the War of 1812 a “Professor of the Art of War” was added to the faculty of the Deerfield Academy, and a Peace Party circulated their protesting publications.

Deerfield was early at the front in the antislavery agitation, and in the war lost some of her best blood. The names of her dead in that righteous war are carved on a fitting monument pointing aloft from the midst of her ancient training-field.

One great attraction in the old town is the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, chartered in 1870. It owns and occupies the old academy building, which it secured when the new Free Dickinson Academy was established in 1878. Its museum occupies the entire structure, and contains an exhaustive, characteristic collection of the implements, utensils and general household belongings of the colonial days; and also of the original lords of the valley, the Pocumtuck Indians.

In the ante-railroad days, Cheapside, at the head of Pocumtuck River navigation, was a thriving business village, with large imports of foreign wet and dry goods, and large exports of lumber, woodenware and brooms; Deerfield was long famous for its stall-fed beef, as many a New York and Boston epicure did testify; but the advent of the iron horse soon brought about the departure of the fall boat, and the passing of the stall-fed ox. The old town is no longer a centre of political power, or of trade and manufactures. The generous additions of territory to her original Grant have been bestowed upon the children of her loins, now flourishing towns about her. The advent of factories has absorbed one by one her multifarious mechanical industries. Her young men and maidens are seeking elsewhere spheres of action in fields till now undreamed of.

But Old Deerfield still retains much of her best. Still, as of old, she is an intellectual centre. Still beautifully situated, she lies in the embrace of the broad green meadows, with here and there a gleam of silver from the sinuous Pocumtuck. Her ancient houses, shadowed by towering elms, hoary with age, her charm