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Ideas

Films and Pageants, Portraying Colonial Heritage

"Minister Leading the Puritans"

© Memorial Hall Museum, Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association

"Minister Leading the Puritans"

The scope of the Deerfield Pageants can be surmised from this photograph. A large audience watches a perhaps equally large group of re-enactors dressed as Puritans following behind their minister. A line of automobile roofs can be seen in the distance. Frances and Mary Allen, pageant photograph, 1913.

'a mecca for...lovers of history'

Three times, in the early twentieth century, tourists gathered in Deerfield to see reenacted scenes spanning the course of the town's early history, from the era in which the Pocumtucks had made the region their seasonal home, to the years of the town's European settlement and subsequent conflicts with Native Americans during the King Philip's and Queen Anne's wars. The pageant ended with events occurring in Deerfield at the outset of the American Revolution. By 1910, according to the pageant brochure, Deerfield considered itself, "a mecca for tourists and lovers of history." Funds raised with admission fees were donated to the Village Improvement Association, to support town restoration and maintenance projects. In 1910, the Society of Deerfield Industries held its annual exhibition during pageant days, and in 1913 and 1916, tourists could view Deerfield Arts and Crafts creations in the home/shops along The Street.