When Humans Arrived in Suffield
I am often asked how I came to love history as much as I do. I believe a large share of that credit goes to my paternal grandfather who was a history major in college and later became a middle school science teacher in his native Holyoke. He nurtured my love of the past by taking me to the Amherst College Museum and showing me the fossils there. As a child, I used my imagination to create worlds where I was able to see those animals as they were when they were alive. Eventually, this desire to recreate the past led me to want to learn about both natural and human history. It is in that spirit that I want to take us back to what Suffield was like when the first people arrived here 12,800 years ago.
An AI generated image of what people might have seen when they first arrived in Suffield
It is likely that the first people to lay their eyes on what is Suffield would have approached from the west. As they first came into what would become Suffield, they would have encountered the familiar sight of the hills and mountains of West Suffield. Once the people reached the top of the ridge, they would have been greeted by a sight that would be alien to a modern Suffield resident: a giant lake that stretched the width and most of the length of the Connecticut River Valley.
This lake came to be known as glacial Lake Hitchcock, named for the Amherst College professor who discovered evidence of its existance and was formed when debris from a retreating glacier formed a dam that trapped the water from the glacier as it melted near modern day Rocky Hill, CT. This massive lake was filled with fish familiar to anglers today like lake trout and river trout. While the fish may have been similar, there was one strange creature that swam in these waters that would be extremely out of place today, the giant beaver (Castoroides ohioensis).
Giant Beaver Skeleton (Credit Wikipedia)
Giant beavers are believed to have grown as large as 7.2 feet and weighed as much as 276 pounds. It is assumed that it behaved in some ways like the modern beaver and possessed large lungs that enabled it to spend long periods of time underwater. In other ways it seems to have differed in behavior since its teeth differed greatly from the modern beaver making them insufficient for chopping down trees, leading scientists to doubt that it lived in dams and had a diet consisting of mostly aquatic plants instead of wood. Also, unlike the modern beaver, we are uncertain if humans hunted it for its fur or meat. While we are uncertain about the giant beaver’s status as human prey, there are other animals that used to inhabit Suffield that we know were on the menu for these first people.
One such animal was the caribou or reindeer. This migratory animal may have been the impetus for humans arriving in the Connecticut River Valley in the first place. Some scientists believe that hunter gatherers followed the reindeer herds during their seasonal migrations. As the glaciers retreated, caribou ventured further and further to the northeast to take advantage of newly exposed grasslands. While the first people to come to Suffield may have been following the caribou, there was much bigger prey that they may have been tracking.
Paleoindian Artifacts from Avon CT, the earliest evidence of human habitation so far. (Credit Avon Historical Society)
Today we take for granted that most wild animals that we interact with are smaller than we, excluding the rare moose and the frequent connoisseur of trash, the black bear. The first humans in Suffield would have had to deal with giants such as the mastodon and the wooly mammoth. Wooly mammoths were the taller of the two and grew to be over 11 feet tall in some cases while the mastodon was heavier, weighing in at over 11 tons. Like the caribou, humans may have followed mammoth and mastodon herds on their seasonal migrations. While we can never be certain, it may have been a herd of elephant relatives that brought the first people to Suffield.
Paleoindians hunting a Mastodon (Credit National Park Service)
The world that humans first found when they came to Suffield, with animals like giant beavers, mastodons, mammoths, wild horses, and camels all living around a massive lake, was relatively short-lived. Almost as soon as humans began to arrive, the large animals began to go extinct in the area. Some scientists theorize that humans were the driving force behind these sudden extinctions. Other experts believe that the timing is coincidental and the extinctions were underway before people came on the scene and instead they were due to the warming climate that led to the growth of woodlands that replaced the cold grassy plains that the large animals grazed upon. Humans shifted their diets to get protein from smaller game and fish, but this wasn’t even the biggest change humans would face.
Remains of the dam that held back the water of Lake Hitchcock in Rocky Hill CT (Credit Ethan Long Wikipedia)
Around 12,400 years ago, the natural dam that made the lake possible began to give way. In a relatively short period of time, the lake drained and the majority of what would eventually become Suffield was dry for the first time in 3,000 years. While the Connecticut River Valley became more recognizable, that did not mean that the impact of that time period is not felt today. If you live in a house with locally sourced brick, you are living in a structure made possible by the clay that was created by the sediments of the lake. It is in this way that we are reminded of our connection to a time when people first came to Suffield.
Bibliography
“Early History.” CT.gov. Accessed September 7, 2025. https://portal.ct.gov/about/early-history.
Lange, Ian M., and Dorothy S. Norton. Ice age mammals of North America: A guide to the big, the hairy, and the bizarre. 2nd ed. Missoula, MT: Mountain Press Publishing Company, 2017.
Meszaros, John. “Getting to Know Glacial Lake Hitchcock.” ctsciencecenter.org, December 7, 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20240625090943/https://ctsciencecenter.org/blog/getting-to-know-glacial-lake-hitchcock/.
