The Bloody Brook monument, South Deerfield

The marble obelisk on a green at South Deerfield, finished in 1838 over the place where Capt. Thomas Lathrop’s company was ambushed. Its inscription begins: “On this Ground Capt. Thomas Lathrop and eighty four men under his command, including eighteen teamsters from Deerfield, conveying stores from that town to Hadley, were ambuscaded by about 700 Indians, and the Captain and seventy six men slain, September 18th 1675 (old style),” and calls the dead, after Hubbard, “a choice Company of young men, the very flower of the County of Essex.” Among them were Peter Woodbury of Beverly, son of Deacon Humphrey Woodbury and Elizabeth (Hunter) Woodbury and brother of Thomas Woodbury, and Josiah Dodge, brother of Thomas’s wife Hannah (Dodge) Woodbury. Fourteen years later Elizabeth Woodbury’s will left ten shillings each to two grandsons “because they beare ye name of my son Peter that was killed in ye war with Capt. Lartheope by the Indians.”