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"History and Proceedings of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association"

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This account of the founding of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA) describes how it grew out of the movement in the town of Deerfield, Massachusetts, to honor the town's soldiers who died during the Civil War. George Sheldon, one of the leading citizens of the town, was central to that project, and, as the procedings describes, found that experience so moving that he decided to create an association to memorialize the history of the town. In particular, one of the first aims of the association was to create a memorial to those who fell during the 1704 Raid on Deerfield. To help members understand their past, they began collecting and writing accounts of their town's history. By 1890, their collected essays had become large enough, and their ongoing output steady enough, that Sheldon and the other members of the PVMA decided to publish them in a journal, the "History and Proceedings." The association published nine volumes of the journal over the next fifty years; the last issue (volume 9, part 4) was published in 1942.

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