Thankful Field Graves was the first woman to live at 1 Old Amherst Road, wife of Benjamin Graves, who built the house in 1753. He died out in Pittsfield on his way home from the Revolutionary War, at age 41. They had 5 children. Thankful was a cousin of Erastus Salisbury Field, American artist, born in this area in 1805. His painting, "The Garden of Eden" has landscape features similar to his home in the Connecticut River Valley.Mishalisk was an old American Native woman, according to this 1714 document, who gave the Englishmen rights to the land where Swampfield/Sunderland was established. It says she was paying off her dead son's debts, and she got a blanket for her troubles. This hand written document is a copy, made in 1714, of a deed originally written in 1674. Sunderland was called Swampfield until 1714, when it was officially chartered as a town, and re-named Sunderland.

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