"If it is no exaggeration to say that Deerfield {Mass.} is not so much a town as the ghost of a town, its dimness transparent, its quiet almost a cessation, it is essential to add that it is probably quite the most beautiful ghost of its kind, and with the deepest poetic and historic significance to be found in America....It is, and will probably always remain, the perfect and beautiful statement of the tragic and creative moment when one civilization {Native American} is destroyed by another (white colonists}.''

-- WPA Guide to Massachusetts (1937)