From that, the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association was born in 1870, and Sheldon would serve as its president until his death at his home in Deerfield on December 23, 1916.

Although he split his time between Deerfield and Boston, he remained an important voice in town issues and a dynamic leader of the Memorial Association.

[4] University of Pennsylvania professor Margaret Bruchac has argued that George Sheldon, amongst other Euro-American historians of the 1800s, sought to deliberately obscure the Indigenous history of Deerfield.

& "These installations depicted a divide between “the pioneers of this valley” as people of “courage and energy, faith and fortitude,” and “the savage” who had to be expelled before civilization could manifest itself."

As the historian Neal Salisbury observed, the random arrangement of indigenous objects made their cultural context irrelevant, since “the overall effect was to render Indians as merely one category of white experience, denying them a meaningful history and a humanity of their own.”[5]